Nolte: Reuters Reporter Covered Up Damaging Beto Info During Texas Senate Race
by JOHN NOLTE
BREITBART.COM
17 Mar 2019
A Reuters reporter admits he offered to hide damaging information about Beto O’Rourke during the Democrat’s tight Senate race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
On Friday morning, Reuters journalist Joseph Menn broke the news that, as a teen, O’Rourke, who is now a freshly-minted 2020 presidential candidate, was part of a secret hacking group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow.
Since publication, Reuters has also been forced to admit their reporter, who was on leave at the time, knew all about O’Rourke’s hacker past during the 2018 Texas Senate race but offered not to reveal it until after the race:
After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.
…
“While I was looking into the Cult of the Dead Cow, I found out that they had a member who was sitting in Congress. I didn’t know which one. But I knew that they had a member of Congress.
“And then I figured out which one it was. And the members of the group wouldn’t talk to me about who it was. They wouldn’t confirm that it was this person unless I promised that I wouldn’t write about it until after the November election. That’s because the member of Congress had decided to run for Senate. Beto O’Rourke is who it was.
“I met Beto O’Rourke. I said ‘I’m writing a book about Cult of the Dead Cow, I think it’s really interesting. I know you were in this group. This book is going to publish after November and your Senate race is over. And he said, ‘OK.’
The key sentence there is: “And then I figured out which one it was.”
So, even before he made a deal with O’Rourke to cover up his criminal past (stealing credit card numbers, etc.), Menn knew it was O’Rourke he was looking for. And all throughout the consequential Texas Senate campaign, Menn chose to hide that information from voters.
In other words, it was not as though Menn fingered O’Rourke after he agreed to hold off on publishing. It was not as though Menn had to make this agreement in order to be informed of O’Rourke’s participation in the group. Under those circumstances, Menn choosing to hide this information would still be a questionable journalistic decision when you consider the bigger moral world of a political race that might have decided which party held the U.S. Senate, but you can excuse Menn keeping his word to a source.
The Rest…HERE
