Wednesday, August 12th, 2009...7:32 am
Renzi Follow Up
Three years ago, you may remember that I wrote about something fishy going on around the US Attorney’s office investigation of Rick Renzi. My post got pooh-poohed even by some liberal bloggers and the talk of any investigation was dismissed out of hand by the Arizona Republic, but in the meantime, we’ve found out that there was something to it.
Just a little.
As it turns out, the dismissive nature of the Republic article was the result of an effort directed by the White House. Over at Talking Points Memo, they’ve been combing through e-mails and other documents related to the US Attorney’s scandal. Usually, questions about an ongoing investigation are supposed to be answered with a non-committal “neither confirm nor deny,” but in this case the White House was actively throwing water on the whole story, purposely making it look like the investigation was no big deal so as not to damage Renzi’s re-election that was then only weeks away.
I was very frustrated by the actions of the Republic at the time. I got tipped off to this story by someone close to the US Attorney’s office who gave me some details and a couple of names for follow up. This led to a call from the Washington Post. I’m not a journalist, or even someone that has the time or resources to do a lot of investigative leg work on his own. I’ll admit that I didn’t get the whole story right (I said that Paul Charlton was sitting on the indictment, which wasn’t the case), but how did I get this before the state’s paper of record? Over the next couple of weeks, the land deal was covered in the Sierra Vista Herald, Arizona Daily Sun and the New Times, but was absent in the Republic. In fact, the Republic endorsed Renzi soon after and even named the land deal as one of the reasons.
This story was so big that it not only ended Renzi’s career, but it may have poisoned the waters and made it difficult for the Republicans to recruit a quality candidate last year. I hope that in the intervening years, the Republic and our state’s other big media outlets (there are still a few, right?) have reexamined the way they cover such stories.
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