Who Tipped BuzzFeed About Weiner’s Cyber-Girlfriend Sydney Leathers?

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My friend Donald Douglas this morning was rather shocked at how quickly I jumped onto the Sydney Leathers story, but I explained on Twitter what I said on the blog Tuesday night: Before I ever heard of Sydney Leathers, the BuzzFeed article was already a banner headline at Drudge, so there wasn’t really anything left to debate. Certainly I wasn’t “outing” her. Ezra Dulis at Big Journalism was all “[redacted] this” and “[redacted] that,” as if ignoring the news could make it less newsworthy, but the news business just doesn’t work that way.

What I added to the story — on the basis of tips from a keen-eyed Twitter buddy — was that (a) Sydney Leathers is a former Obama campaign worker and (b) Sydney Leathers authored a 2011 petition that condemned Sarah Palin for “inciting violence.” That’s news.

If anyone wants to criticize BuzzFeed, they ought to ask: Where did they get the ID of Sydney Leathers? Was this just  a case of clever “investigative journalism” or was it — as I strongly suspect — the result of a tip from a source allied with Team Weiner?

This is not to say, however, that BuzzFeed should not have run with the story once they got that tip. Once you know somebody is shopping around that kind of info, you’re confronted with a kind of devil’s dilemma: “If I don’t take this scoop, somebody else will.”

Such dilemmas occur all the time in political reporting, where people with obvious motives offer you oppo-research materials.

Do you really want to turn up your nose at the offered dossier, knowing that if you do, you’ll probably find it reported in all its tawdry glory somewhere else? Remember that in 2008, there were reporters for major news organizations who knew about the reports of John Edwards’ extramarital affair, but wrongly dismissed them as “tabloid gossip.”

I’ve got a particular interest in the question of who ID’d Sydney Leathers because, for months, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. has entertained the possibility that the harassment of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies was somehow being funded by supporters of Anthony Weiner.

Speculation isn’t my business, but when you observe extraordinary behavior, you can’t preemptively rule out extraordinary motives.

One of the bloggers who did the most damage to Anthony Weiner during the 2011 scandal was Patterico who — just coincidentally, FYI — was also a target of relentless harassment by the obscure alliance of forces that we call Team Kimberlin. Today, Patterico returns to the saga with a devastating timeline of how Weiner’s enablers made this latest scandal possible, and don’t miss this:

And, disturbingly for a guy who was talking about “cape and tights” to a high school girl in Delaware — a grooming line he had used with an adult woman with whom he had sexted — Weiner asks Sydney Leathers if her “pussy” is “smooth” . . .

Oh, my goodness. That seems rather weird, eh?

And while the New York Times sees a pattern, they apparently can’t be bothered to notice that pattern.

Do we know anyone else reputed to have a similar interest in young girls? Seems to ring a bell for some reason . . .

UPDATE: Linked at American Power — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers! Since this involves a mass readership who may be unfamiliar with the background to which I’ve alluded, let me briefly rehash what regular readers of this blog already know:

The seeming convergence of (a) Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List and (b) a number of bloggers — including Ace of Spades and Lee Stranahan — who had written about WeinerGate could be explained as entirely coincidental. But there were reports that Team Weiner, in planning his political comeback effort, had engaged the services of various lawyers, researchers and consultants. Those of us who know how politics works behind the scenes are well aware that money is fungible: If Politician W hires Consulting Firm X for $20,000, this firm may then hire Freelance Researcher Y for $5,000 and Internet Operative Z for $3,000 on a basis of confidentiality, so that the activities of Y and Z cannot be traced to X, and Politician W then has clean hands (and plausible deniability) if Y and Z get caught red-handed.

Also: Progressives into young girls? Probably just a coincidence.

 


116 comments

  3. Apparently a full wax (smooth) is nearly a mainstream “thing” these days so I’m not certain that it is pedophilic. (I’m taking this on hear-say or at least “it was on the internet.”)

  4. You might want to read the latest from Andrew McCarthy on Saint Huma. A highlight:

    What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/354351/huma-unmentionables-andrew-c-mccarthy

    Tip to Dan Collins:
    https://twitter.com/vermontaigne/status/360143662514044929

  8. I’ve got more for you Stacy – my co-blog and I puttered around digging up her tweets. I re-tweeted a lot of what I found; I’ll send them along.

    BTW, don’t you find it also strange TheDirty, a known gossip site that deals a lot in strip clubs and half nude selfies was the story breaker?
    Sydney Leathers? Sounds like a stage name no?

  9. I’d be more willing to accept this if it happened in person, and the cleaning lady caught him in the act.

    And if the possible mistress was something other than a political groupie.

  10. BTW, don’t you find it also strange TheDirty, a known gossip site that
    deals a lot in strip clubs and half nude selfies was the story breaker?

    Kind of like the National Enquirer and John Edwards, hmmmmm?

  11. AFAIC it always means one of two things:

    Either she’s underaged, or she’s a pro who boinks strangers for money.

    The Internet-is-for-p0rn generation has either a major hair-phobia, or an obsession with boinking underage partners.

  14. Someone on Team Obama does not want Weiner delivering NYC (and therefore NY) to Hillary in the coming primary. My guess is Leathers notified her boss, who ran it up the flagpole for future use.
    Folks who remember Hillary’s collection of FBI files should be terrified: she keeps grudges and has no compunction about using government resources far outside their legal boundaries to target her enemies.

  19. So I guess given “Carlos’s” predilections, “Sydney or the Bush!” will not be a campaign rallying cry?

  25. I’d have to agree. Maybe there was a time when such an affinity was associated with pedophilia. But I think that era ended sometime around 1985. Furry seems to be the new fetish.

  31. THAT WAS NOT MY FAULT! i BLAME THE CLIMATE OF MISTRUST ENGENDERED BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION!

  32. […] election campaign manager” and “a liberal activist.” Robert Stacy McCain also found that Ms. Leathers “authored a 2011 petition that condemned Sarah Palin for ‘inciting […]

  33. The question of motive, as I say, is what leads to down these winding trails of psychiatric exploration. Why would any sane person defend a creep like Anthony Weiner?

  35. All of you are literally insane. Coming up with a conspiracy theory of who outed her? Do you really think it would be that easy to identify blurred pictures of some random midwestern girl? Get your heads out of your a*ses!!! The only people who would be able identify her from blurred pictures would be 1. someone Sydney has admitted the Anthony thing to 2. someone who knows her well enough to see through the blur. Who could this be? Obviously a former friend turned enemy. Don’t be absurd. The truth is simple….stop trying to complicate things and make it something its not.

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