After talking to the Secret Service and being told that Emerson's records had redactions like everyone else's -- even Congress received redacted versions -- I challenged Emerson's account in letters to his editors, including one to CNN where he had been hired as an investigative reporter.
Emerson was subsequently dumped by CNN and I was promptly threatened by one of his law firms with a libel suit for having criticized him in letters to his editors. Apparently, I was supposed to apologize for saying that Emerson was lying when he claimed to have Bush's unredacted Secret Service records.
Faced with this legal threat, I had to dig into my children's college fund to hire a lawyer, who frankly seemed to doubt that the well-regarded Emerson could be in the wrong. My response was that if Emerson actually had the unredacted records, he could simply present them, but his lawyer said that would only be done in the midst of a costly trial.
As the abusive and threatening letters from Emerson's lawyers mounted, I decided to submit a FOIA to the Secret Service for Emerson's FOIA, i.e., I demanded exactly the same documents that the Secret Service had released to him.
When those records arrived, they showed that Emerson indeed had been lying. His copies of the Secret Service records were redacted, just like those released to me and other investigators.
Finally, the threatened lawsuit went away, and Emerson was forced to admit in an interview with the media watchdog group FAIR that he never had the records he claimed. He blamed a research assistant, but never apologized for the bullying legal strategy designed to financially bleed a journalist (myself) into confirming a lie as the truth. [For more details, see a report in FAIR's "Extra!" November-December 1993.]
Despite having blundered regarding Casey's Madrid alibi and having been caught in a fabrication over the Secret Service records, Emerson came out of the October Surprise case with a rising reputation as a star reporter.
Emerson had benefited from having a close friend inside the House task force, Michael Zeldin, the deputy chief counsel. And though the task force had to jettison Emerson's bogus Casey alibi, House investigators told me Emerson frequently visited the task force's offices and advised Zeldin and others how to read the October Surprise evidence.
Although more evidence of Republican guilt poured in to the House October Surprise task force in late 1992 -- so much so that chief counsel Lawrence Barcella later told me that he urged task force chairman Lee Hamilton to extend the probe for several months -- the task force instead simply decided to wrap up its business with a finding of Republican innocence.
To paper over all the holes in the findings, the task force deployed an array of absurd alibis -- such as one claiming that because Reagan's foreign policy adviser Richard Allen wrote down Casey's home phone number on one date, that meant Casey was at home -- even though Allen had no recollection of reaching Casey at his home. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Crazy October Surprise Debunking."]
Rising Reputation
It was a sign of the times in Washington -- and inside U.S. journalism -- that Emerson's reputation got a boost from his October Surprise "debunking" work.
After the House task force report was issued in 1993, the American Journalism Review invited Emerson to ridicule me and other journalists for getting the October Surprise story "wrong," under the odd assumption that a government report must always be right.
Emerson's critique left out the fact that he and Newsweek's Parker had botched a crucial Casey alibi, arguably the biggest single journalistic error in the entire case. Nor did Emerson mention how he falsely claimed to have unredacted copies of Bush's Secret Service records.
(When I later asked top AJR editors how they could ignore the Secret Service fabrication issue, they simply responded that Emerson had made his false claim in a different publication, i.e. The New Republic, not AJR.)
Before long, Emerson was amassing journalism awards for his work targeting American Muslims as a particularly dangerous lot -- and he was raising large sums of money to support his work from sources, such as right-wing mogul Richard Mellon Scaife. Emerson's documentary, "Jihad in America," was broadcast by PBS.
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