I have no intention or inclination to rehash the actual #CruzSexScandal at this time, not until something new is brought to light or some conclusive evidence is revealed either confirming or debunking the National Enquirer story. For those wishing to keep up on that aspect, yesterday's article and comment section is where to find the updates and readers can add whatever they find of interest in the comment section of this article.
There is another aspect that has revealed itself over the last day though which is that multiple news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Politico, and ABC News and Breitbart, were all aware of this alleged scandal and all chose not to run with it.
The truth behind the rumor-mongering, however, is a little more complex. A half-dozen GOP operatives and media figures tell The Daily Beast that Cruz’s opponents have been pushing charges of adultery for at least six months now—and that allies of former GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio were involved in spreading the smears.
For months and months, anti-Cruz operatives have pitched a variety of #CruzSexScandal stories to a host of prominent national publications, according to Republican operatives and media figures. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Politico, and ABC News—reporters at all those outlets heard some version of the Cruz-is-cheating story. None of them decided to run with rumors. Those publications’ representatives all declined to provide on-the-record comments when The Daily Beast reached out for this article.
Breitbart News, the notoriously Trump-friendly conservative outlet, was also pitched the story of Cruz’s extramarital affairs, according to a source close to the publication. That source said an operative allied with Marco Rubio—but not associated with his official campaign—showed the publication a compilation video of Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the outlet opted not to report on the video, which demonstrated no direct evidence of an affair.
“We got it from a Rubio ally,” said the source. “It was too thin, so [Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle] decided not to run it. There was no way to verify the claims.”
While the only mention of the compilation video, ofter referred to as "The Thing," was in the Brietbart example, reference to multiple outlets having it was made by an Anti-Trump, Rubio supporting operative on Twitter, which has since been deleted, but this is the internet, and screen shots were taken, so it does live on.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that the NYT, Wapo, Bloomberg, Politico and ABC News all made the same decision as Breitbart did for the same reeason, being the inability to verify an "affair" just because "Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays," so they decided to not run with the story, as Breitbart decided.
To many, that could be considered journalistic ethics... fair enough.
It does beg the question though of whether those news outlets would have made the same decision if the video compilation, which to date has still not been released publicly, had been of Donald Trump coming out of a restaurant and a hotel on set days of the week accompanied by a woman who was not his wife?
MEDIA - IT'S ALL ABOUT TRUMP
In 2008 when the National Enquirer exposed the John Edwards affair, Edwards did not publicly respond to those claims until they provided photos and proof he couldn't get around, and initially the Hell Stream Media aka MSM did not address those claims either because they came from a tabloid source, but the Cruz story is different because Ted Cruz very publicly addressed the NE story, then both he and Donald Trump, both GOP presidential candidates, issued statements via their Facebook accounts. Cruz Statement here and Trump statement here.
Cruz's public statement, via the video clip below, also accused Donald Trump of planting the National Enquirer story.
So... we have a alleged sex scandal involving Ted Cruz, a publicly acknowledgement of said scandal by two presidential candidates, and verification by multiple GOP operatives that these claims were all pushed by allies of Marco Rubio.
It was also brought up again on CNN in a very awkward interview where CNN's Amanda Carpenter is asked about her name cropping up as one of the women Cruz allegedly slept with.
Just a small example of how a Cruz alleged scandal, in the eyes of the media elite, is all about Trump. - Also note that if the Rubio connection is mentioned at all (which in most cases it is not), it is usually at the very bottom, given nothing more than a gratuitous mention.
While some conservative sites actually reported the Rubio connection, it pains me to say it was the liberal websites, for the most part, that exposed that connection to the initial pushing of the #CruzSexScandal.
Another point of interest indicating media lies and/or misrepresentation comes from the Washington Times. A columnist for the WT, Drew Johnson(now former) weighed in on the Cruz revelations by claiming "at least 2 of the women named as Cruz mistresses by the National Enquirer are accurate," and almost immediately the Washington Times started disassociating themselves with him, claiming he was never a columnist for them. Yesterday his profile on Twitter stated he was and today is states "Apparently not a columnist @WashTimes."
Then, perhaps forgetting they ended the relations as of "today," dated March 25, 2016, the very next day they tweeted "Drew Johnson parted from @WashTimes over a year ago. We take umbrage with him linking to an old bio page claiming to represent us."
Hmmmm..... really?
Starting with their first lie, which some might see I and others nailed them on Twitter over, we have the archived profile page for Drew Johnson from the Washington Times themselves, stating "Drew Johnson is a columnist, editorial writer and government waste expert at The Washington Times." (Screen shot below)
Johnson then posted a copy of a deposit made to him by Washington Times, posted on 2/16/2016
Needless to say, Twitter users are taking the Washington Times to task for lying, changing their story, attempting to misrepresent Johnson's association with them and some of those criticisms are even coming from those claiming to not be Trump supporters, saying they just want some honesty. (See here, here and here)
Kudos to MediIte for highlighting another example of the medias' "War on Trump" while giving ted Cruz a free pass:
I get that the media has gotten the memo that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to civilization since NBC’s “The Slap,” but the controversy surrounding the Trump v Ted Cruz wife-dissing battle has revealed a stunning bit of tunnel vision, particularly among liberals. While everyone piles on Trump for retweeting an unflattering photo comparison of Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump, they’re giving Cruz and his SuperPAC a complete pass for what amounts to a political sexual assault on Melania Trump. Both attacks were ugly; I would submit that the explicitly sexual nature of the attack on Mrs. Trump is worse, but for the sake of argument, let’s call them even.
Then they offer the ultimate kicker:
That’s right, folks, liberal Lawrence O’Donnell had on Rick Wilson, the guy whose SuperPAC put up the Melania Trump ad, to rant about Trump’s misogyny. That’s like having Hannibal Lecter on your show to critique Guy Fieri (save the hate mail; Lecter is too as bad as Fieri). Not only that, O’Donnell showed the ad during the segment, and when panelist Nancy Giles later tried to call Wilson out, O’Donnell just changed the subject.
Full Circle - Scroll all the way back up to the first Tweet screen shot shown in this article, of the person (Rick Wilson) pushing the the #CruzSexScandal and telling the media to have an intern post the video they had on Cruz to YouTube and then "discover" it.
Wilson is Florida Republican consultant and Rubio supporter, according to Politico. Wilson is anti-Trump, pro-Rubio, and was attempting to expose the alleged Cruz affairs before Rubio suspended his campaign in order to remove Cruz from the race so it would be Rubio against Trump, but deleted those Tweets after Rubio dropped out because exposing Cruz's alleged affairs at that point would have helped Donald Trump.
That seems to have backfired on him spectacularly.
As a side note, multiple people on Twitter are talking about how the #CruzSexScandal hashtag keeps disappearing from Twitter Trending, then when it reappears the numbers are tens of thousands lower than before they disappeared even though there are thousands of tweets coming in an hour using the hashtag.... what's up with that?
The REAL scandal is not about whether Cruz had sex with "those women," it is how the Hell Stream Media would rather ignore the whole story and make it all about Trump, because if they can hurt him enough to where he doesn't reach the magic number 1,237 delegates by the time he walks into the convention in July, they can plot and plan to take the nomination away from him in a brokered convention, annoint Cruz, then and only then will they seriously attempt to investigate the alleged Cruz affairs in order to disqualify him and "select" whatever Democratic candidate they choose to become president.
Sound like a conspiracy theory? Just look at how the news is being spun and how it is all about Donald Trump even when he has nothing to do with the current hot trending story of the day.
