Thursday Open Comments

Behold the Smug, Arrogant Face of Stephen Engelberg, Founding Editor of Pro Publica

Matt Wolfson at The Federalist has done an outstanding job of exposing the fraudulent career of an unethical, sleazy player in The Swamp that is Washington DC.

This is a major elision. If Thomas’ career tells one kind of 30-year story, of a black conservative jurist in Washington, D.C., Engelberg’s tells another: a story in which, unlike Justice Thomas, his alleged transgressions are directly tied to his work. Since 1992, even in the judgment of some of his peers, Engelberg made his reputation by turning investigative reporting into an exercise in false insinuations and reputational slander at the expense of asking who’s abusing power and where power lies.

The two series that marked and failed to derail Engelberg’s pre-ProPublica career, Whitewater and the case of Wen Ho Lee, were early journalistic forays down this compromised path. Like the Thomas series, they were headline-grabbing investigations with outsized effects marred by questionable assertions that Washington players used for their own ends. They open a window not just into Engelberg but into the colleagues, editors, and reporters at the pinnacle of today’s establishment journalism, who aid and abet him.

and,

Instead, in the same year that Bill Clinton signed legislation allowing commercial banks to function as investment banks, expanding home mortgages’ investors and their risks and enriching people like future ProPublica benefactor and founder of America’s second-largest S&L Herb Sandler, The New York Times’ focus was largely elsewhere. It was defending its coverage of Whitewater and talking about the Lewinsky scandal and its effect on the 2000 election.  Worse, it was supporting Engelberg’s running of another story, this time working hand-in-glove with the government as it targeted an innocent civilian.

plus this,

Bill Keller ran and serves on the board of a respected nonprofit. Dean Baquet supervised the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of President Trump’s alleged Russia collusion, coverage that flowed, again, from FBI leaks later revealed as flawed. Jill Abramson and David Gergen are on ProPublica’s board of journalistic advisers. Jeff Gerth was a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2008 to 2016 and has two Pulitzer Prizes to boot. And ProPublica’s Engelberg is continuing his 30-year career of character assassination, helping Senate Democrats obliterate the federal government’s separation of powers in the process.

These people are nasty, unethical thugs.

PS.  Here is a nightcap for you.  Engelberg’s hit piece on Justice Samuel Alito here.