Folks Hits Politico

From Ben Smith at Politico quoting a Columbia lawyer:

“I don’t know how many times I’ve been consulted about suing him [Folks] for defamation,” said one Columbia lawyer. “I ask, ‘Is it true?’ and the answer is ‘Yes,’ and then I say, ‘You can’t sue for defamation.’”

Hopefully, reporters are beginning to notice that despite the mud, there’s a story there. And as I’m sure other stories are on deck for later in the week, the scramble to “scoop” Will Folks becomes a priority.

My favorite Ben-ism find: “One big concern that I had was the fact that he was controlling the story,” said The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau chief, Yvonne Wenger, who filed a fruitless request with Haley’s office for correspondence with Folks in an attempt to pry the story away from the blogger.”

Pry the story away? What happened to news gathering? Instead, a bureau chief for a real newspaper doesn’t ask questions to Haley, about pertinent information about those late-night calls and texts, instead choosing to follow politicians’ words, and then print what they expect after a stonewalling.

It’s not rocket science, Mako out.

**Added muddy PR campaign here: The Daily Caller picked up Erick Erickson and quoted:

As for Folks’s motive, Red State’s Erick Erickson has backed away from his report last week boasting of proof that Folks had “been trying to sell this story for a year.” Erickson said then he knew “who paid Will Folks to push this story out there.”

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Erickson said he was concerned about being “definitive” about the report because his sources on the subject have stopped answering his phone calls. “I don’t know for sure,” Erickson now says. “I can’t prove it.”

But of course, he published. He was encouraged to. Why not? After all, this campaign is too big to fail now, cause Romney’s coming for no reason whatsoever other than 2012. Stay Tuned, Mako out.