According to the Washington Post, an official in the Dominican Republic is claiming he was paid by The Daily Caller to get three prostitutes on the record claiming they were with Senator Robert Menendez.
The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as “Carlos,” had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.
The videotaped claims of two women, made with their faces obscured, were posted last fall on the Daily Caller. The site reported that “the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000-acre resort in the Dominican Republic. . . . They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”
The Daily Caller issued a statement Friday saying that the information allegedly provided by the Dominican lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, was false.
The Daily Caller said: “At no point did any money change hands between The Daily Caller and any sources or individuals connected with this investigation, nor did anyone named Carlos travel to the Dominican Republic on behalf of The Daily Caller. As recently as two weeks ago, Figueroa was on record with another news outlet as saying the women he represented were telling the truth about their initial allegations against Senator Mendendez.”
My first inclination would be to say there are too many liars on all sides to believe any of it. However, I point you to the video at the top, where David Martosko, then managing editor of The Daily Caller was spinning the story after one of the prostitutes said she was paid.
Subsequent to that video, news broke that Martosko was impersonating liberals to dig up dirt for Rick Berman, head hack for the conservative noise machine.
There were always clear ties back to The Daily Caller with this story. Despite the fact that it was shopped to mainstream outlets, the DC was the only "media outlet" to actually run it. It ran just days before the election and was such an obvious smear tactic that it backfired.
Ironically, Menendez is under investigation for real ethics violations, but for some strange reason the Daily Caller made an editorial call to go with hookers being underpaid.
The Daily Caller received its startup funding from Foster Friess. We know from emails released last year that Freiss was approached to fund James O'Keefe's "sting" on the SEIU and others to manufacture charges of voter fraud.
With those facts in place, it doesn't seem as implausible to imagine Tucker's outfit hatching a smear plot like this, either, denials notwithstanding. It seems Andrew Breitbart's ghost lives on in human form, via Tucker Carlson.
I'll update as more information becomes available.
