Brian R. Friedman to Wolf Blitzer
August 2 ·
WHERE IS MEREDITH MCIVER?
Donald Trump has invented employees out of thin air before.
He has pretended to be someone named John Miller or John Barron when speaking to the press, and those instances are documented. So when someone in the Trump Organization named Meredith McIver released a written statement claiming responsibility for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech from 2008 for Melania Trump, some, including myself, became suspicious that perhaps Trump had duped us again.
(The chaotic, odd attempts at explanation in the 36 hours between the speech and the release of McIver’s statement - including Sean Spicer, communications director for the RNC, bringing a My Little Pony ™ box onto a television interview and claiming that similar inspirational words could be found on it – added to a sense of real desperation in making this go away.)
Those suspicions about McIver have only grown.
Poorly photo-shopped pictures have appeared online; a bogus, occasionally Russian-speaking Twitter account has popped up after the speech, and no one seems to have physically seen this woman outside of the Trump Organization in the past ten years. It was enough for me – and others - to go digging.
The search for Meredith McIver continues, as there is still no concrete proof of her existence - only further doubt. Curious folks out there, on their own time, have tracked down the scant public records for her – despite a concerted online effort to stop those investigating - and found that her mother would have died a week before Melania’s convention speech. If that were accurate, wouldn’t that have been a completely understandable, rational, and even sympathetic reason for McIver to not be completely on the ball while writing it? But there was no mention of that in her statement.
These volunteer investigators out there have also reached out to McIver’s representatives, and were cut-off when asking for info about her.
All of the above could’ve been found by the pros if they were doing their job. And I’m not sure that they are.
When I called the Associated Press New York City bureau to ask if they’d interviewed McIver, their response was ‘oh, yeah, we tried once, but it didn’t work out,’ and then flippantly suggested that I find her. The New York Times wrote a story about her – apparently without sitting down and talking with her, and repeated calls to the law office of an ex-boyfriend quoted in the article have gone unanswered. I believe the Times – the ‘Paper of Record’ – was duped. Politico blew me off as well, sending me a link to that same flawed New York Times article. I could go on and on and on.
I don’t know why the media hasn’t done any real investigating here. Maybe they can only pay attention to anything within the past 24-hour news cycle. Maybe because someone saw a link to something somewhere, then it must be true. Maybe newsrooms are so decimated now that, whereas there once would have been a team of reporters fleshing out stories, there is now no one.
And maybe some in the media, like those in the public, don’t think it matters much whether or not Meredith McIver exists, and they are entitled to that opinion. But I can’t help but wonder what kind of field day the media would’ve had if, in the 2008 campaign, it came out that Barack Obama had invented someone out of thin air to take the blame for a plagiarism incident, or pretended to be someone else while dealing with the press, or simply said ‘no’ to the time-honored tradition of presidential candidates opening their tax returns to public scrutiny.
Why should Trump be treated any differently?
I keep hearing some in the media weakly explain that Trump is handled that way because he just isn’t your usual candidate, and this isn’t your normal election. Well, his opponent certainly has gotten the usual amount of scrutiny for a presidential candidate, and then some.
And while there’s no doubt Hillary Clinton has earned that high level of scrutiny due to her own questionable past actions, shouldn’t the press spend half as much time examining Trump’s paper trails as they do on Clinton’s e-mails?
If it turns out that in fact, Meredith McIver is a real person, I’ll proclaim from the highest mountaintop (which, in New Orleans, is admittedly not that high) that I was wrong, and I’ll apologize to her for any trouble I may have caused her. Then I’ll happily go back to other pursuits.
But until we know for sure, possibly even with a birth certificate (that seems to be Trump’s preferred burden of truth, I seem to recall), I’m not giving up the search.
And finally, for those who just think it’s too ridiculous to even conceive that a presidential candidate would fabricate an employee out of thin air to take the fall for plagiarizing a speech, well, I hear you. But I’ll just remind you of something you already know:
This isn’t your normal election.
Brian R. Friedman
https://www.facebook.com/WolfBlitzer/posts/1049943165091743
= new reply since forum marked as read