A major Beltway scandal

While I’m very happy to see that Simon and Schuster take a massive bath on Olivia Nuzzi’s hilariously reviewed cross between Shattered Glass and Rite Aid brand Joan Didion, I continue to respectfully disagree with my colleague on the question of whether the scandal Nuzzi apparently barely mentions in her book is worthy of attention going forward. This is almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism. Judy Miller was bad, but she was merely the most prominent example of reporters uncritically passing along administration propaganda, which was more the rule than the exception in the lead up to the Iraq War. Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair also committed career-ending offenses, but the stories they manufactured were in themselves trivial and had no impact on American politics. What Nuzzi did was much worse, implicates a lot of people and was not in fact even career ending!

Lizza’s latest is free, which is good because it makes the magnitude of the scandal clear. We should start with the level of sheer delusion possessed by a woman who at the time was one of the most highly compesnated and most-lauded political reporters in America:

I told Olivia clearly and firmly that her editor would soon learn of her affair with Bobby and that she needed to disclose it to him immediately. I could not tell her why I knew this, but I assured her it would happen and that it would happen very soon. Olivia shut down the conversation. She insisted that nobody would ever find out. She insisted that there was no conflict anymore because Bobby wouldn’t be an important political figure going forward, which was, of course, absurd. She screamed at me to never bring it up again.

It’s remarkable that Nuzzi (according to multiple reviewers) seems to think even now that her having an affair with a subject she was covering and whose political goals she was working to advance without disclosure in subsequent profiles and who she was running ratfucking operations on behalf of represents merely “private” misconduct, like she had an affair with some random person she met on a dating app. It’s even more remarkable that she thought it was plausible that it would remain private. And her belief that Kennedy would just fade away would be the most remarkable and damning thing if she probably wasn’t lying about that.

Since this story involves a lot of people behaving very badly, we should praise Oliver Darcy, a reporter who could smell bullshit and wouldn’t be intimidated despite being vulnerable to the Trumpian threats of Nuzzi and her well-connected crisis team:

Olivia pulled together a small group that would serve as a sort of crisis communications war room for her as the scandal widened in the coming days. Rachel Adler, Olivia’s agent at Creative Artists Agency, would serve as her main representative to the media. Matt Dornic, then unemployed but formerly CNN’s corporate spokesman and best known for managing a magazine profile that led to the head of CNN losing his job, would help manage the press.

According to several people involved in the discussions, Olivia’s team initially batted around a few ideas to make Oliver go away. Status was tiny and just getting off the ground. They doubted Oliver had libel insurance and thought they could scare him into backing down with legal threats. “They decided to deny it because he’s small and can’t afford a lawsuit,” said a participant in these early discussions.

[…]

The problem was that Oliver didn’t buy it, and the more Olivia and Rachel lied to him, the more determined he became to break the news of her affair. He came back to them after a second source confirmed the story.

[…]

“Nuzzi’s RFK Relationship” was one of the biggest stories of Oliver’s career, and, in a very competitive space, it cemented Status as the reigning media newsletter.

On the other end of the spectrum we have America’s worst media reporter, Dylan Byers, seen yesterday asserting that Bari Weiss’s stated preference for white male news anchors was a repudiation of “identity politics”:

Ten publications declined to print Olivia’s lies: The New York Times, The New York Post, Semafor, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, People, Business Insider, and The U.S. Sun.

But Olivia’s plot to find a “sleazy reporter” who would print her claims without vetting was successful with one person at one outlet: Dylan Byers at Puck.

Sometimes it’s who you most expect.

The heart of this remains that Nuzzi’s goal was to suppress damaging information about RFK Jr. both to help Trump and to protect RFK Jr.s chances of becoming the Secretary of Child Murder, and she succeeded:

What Olivia understood is that Bobby needed her to protect him from any damaging information coming out about him before November 5.

“I just need until the election,” Bobby told Olivia, according to a passage in her book that unintentionally reveals how she worked to ensure that the Trump campaign would not be damaged by Bobby’s scandal.

The chance to once again collaborate as Bobby’s secret political operative, this time to help Trump get elected, so he could make Bobby a cabinet secretary, was exhilarating to Olivia.

[…]

Olivia had finally gotten Bobby on the phone. She told him about her FBI report, and he approved of it, according to a source familiar with the conversation. But Bobby was angry. Isabella’s impending story apparently did not go over well in the Kennedy household. The Journal article could cost him his relationship with Trump and Cheryl.

I just need until the election.

It’s true as far as it goes that it’s unfair that Nuzzi has (belatedly and after a fawning NYT profile literally written by Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s son and a windfall profit for a book with no audience she literally dictated into an iPhone) suffered consequences and Kennedy has not, but this makes the behavior of Nuzzi and her enablers even more damning! There is not in fact any viable way of getting rid of a cabinet secretary who has the support of the president once they’ve been confirmed, which makes doing anything possible to stop it from happening ex ante all the more important. And there are still way too many reporters unwilling to directly say what this means:

I tried to explain that Olivia watched a lot of Law and Order growing up and has an active imagination, especially when it comes to being killed. She feared that her mother would kill her. She had told me that she thought Keith might kill her, and now I have to assume she told Keith the same thing about me. Of course, she repeatedly told me that she feared Bobby would kill her, and now she was saying that I might kill her. (I never heard her say one way or the other about Mark Sanford’s level of interest in killing her.)

So many people were out to kill her, and yet here she was at 31, somehow very much alive and orchestrating an impressively complicated revenge plot to help bring back measles, whooping cough, and polio.

There needs to be much more intense and clear-eyed scrutiny of RFK Jr’s HHS tenure, but how he got into that position in the first place is also an important story, and it was one the Beltway media just wanted to go away for obvious reasons. Nuzzi wasn’t some random person with a substack — she was a huge star in that world, not least because while the reasons for her nihilist embrace of Trumpism were unusual the embrace itself was not.