The Washington Post reports this about the “scandal” that was reported by the Daily Caller:
An escort who appeared on a video claiming that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican authorities that she was instead paid to make up the claims and has never met or seen the senator, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.
The woman said a local lawyer had approached her and a fellow escort and asked them to help frame Menendez and a top donor, Salomon Melgen, according to affidavits obtained by The Washington Post.
[…] Daily Caller Editor Tucker Carlson did not reply to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment.
The Caller’s response is that the Post got the wrong prostitutes, and this:
WaPo might have saved itself the embarrassment if they’d bothered to call us before running their stupid piece.
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 5, 2013
The Caller’s piece was published a little after midnight this morning. The Post’s was out in yesterday’s edition, which means it was out sometime before midnight on Sunday. In other words, it took almost a full day for Tucker and his boys to gin up a new set of almost comically bad lies. By the middle of the Caller’s story, they’re drilling down into Orly Taitz-style bullshit like the batteries on the translator’s laptop dying.
As usual with these “scandals”, the thing lives on in the right-wing media long after the plot is lost. Since prostitution is legal in the Dominican Republic, the supposed scandal was that the prostitute Menendez hired was underage at the time. The latest Caller story doesn’t even make that allegation about the new hookers that they’ve found, so what’s the crime here? Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than willing to believe that Menendez did something wrong, but the Caller is so hung up on the supposed naughtiness of hiring prostitutes that they can’t even fabricate a real crime, much less provide credible evidence of one.