Political Scandals

Self-proclaimed "victims' rights advocate" and MSNBC contributor Michelle Bernard wasted no time on Thursday's edition of Hardball defending former White House volunteer Jonathan Dach -- now employed at the State Department in the Office on Global Women's Issues -- from charges that he patronized a prostitute while on official business as an Obama advance man in Cartagena, Colombia.   

On Thursday morning, the Washington Post reported that senior White House officials knew that an Obama volunteer hired a prostitute during the infamous Colombia prostitution scandal of 2012 but Team Obama tried to cover up such information during the official investigation. Despite the Post report, CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to acknowledge the story during its Thursday…

The Secret Service just can’t seem to catch a break these days. Following a disastrous couple of weeks in which the agency let a fence jumper enter the White House as well as revelations that the Secret Service failed to adequately protect the president, another stain for the agency has emerged. On Tuesday, CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to cover a Washington Examiner report…

On Sunday, Trip Gabriel at the New York Times had the thankless task of concocting a report which would somehow make Ohio Democrats feel positive about winning at least one statewide office in November instead of getting skunked, which appears pretty likely at this point. That's because the campaign of the Dems' gubernatorial candidate, affectionately known as the Wreck That Is Edward FitzGerald…

ABC's Jonathan Karl is on a tear — and his editorial bosses at ABC seem determined to ignore him. As Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters noted earlier today, Karl on Friday "grilled White House press secretary Josh Earnest ... about claims that al Qaeda had been 'decimated,'" mainly because it hasn't been. Instead, it seems like there are at least ten times as many versions. The network televised none…

Matt Bai, a columnist for Yahoo News, has written a “look-back book” entitled “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” and while the new release focuses on the 1987 incident that ended Gary Hart's quest for the presidency, it also lists John Kerry as one of the victims of the media's new motivation “to find character problems, hypocrisies that will drive web traffic and segments on…

Attorney General Eric Holder resigned this week after six years working for the Obama Administration and on Sunday morning's This Week w/ George Stephanopoulos ABC’s Matthew Dowd eagerly scolded Republicans for being “way too vociferous in their things about Eric Holder.” The so-called Republican dismissed the notion that Holder was  “the worst attorney general we’ve ever had” and proceeded to…

Mere hours before President Obama announced Attorney General Eric Holder's resignation, Sharyl Attkisson reported on Thursday that U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ordered the Justice Department to "turn over a list of withheld Fast and Furious documents by Oct. 22 [2014]." CBS Evening News mentioned Fast and Furious in their coverage of the Holder announcement that evening, but NBC Nightly…

USA Today, gave the equivalent of almost a full page to Eric Holder's resignation in Friday's print edition. The paper's primary story by Gregory Korte, at the top right of the front page, described him as having "championed gay, civil, voting rights." The item's continuation on Page 8A included a quote from Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself "America's…

Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Byron Tau filed a long Friday article moaning about how influential opposition research has become in the conduct of this year's political campaigns. My takeaway is that they really don't like it this time around — not because the money involved has increased, and not because supposedly lax campaign-finance laws have accommodated this increase. No, they're really…

On Friday morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski joined the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein in calling for equal news coverage if Christie is officially exonerated in numerous investigations into his involvement of the scandal known as Bridgegate to the non-stop coverage when it broke in January. During a discussion with their panel on Friday’s Morning Joe, they discussed news that a…

On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Friday, host Andrea Mitchell noted that "Chris Christie has been cleared by the federal investigators of any allegations" in the George Washington Bridge closing scandal. However, MSNBC political reporter Kasie Hunt quickly dismissed the development: "But, there's a lot of damage that's been done in the interim. And there's going to be a lot of questions still…

When the Bridgegate scandal engulfed Chris Christie in January, MSNBC's Chris Matthews went wild, repeatedly comparing the controversy to Watergate. On Thursday afternoon, federal officials revealed that the New Jersey governor had no prior knowledge of the planned traffic backup. Somehow, the Hardball anchor ignored the development. 

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice told NBC News that Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) was innocent of any wrong-doing relating to the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge. Despite Governor Christie’s reported innocence, ABC and CBS have yet to cover the NBC story, but when the story originally broke in January, all three networks eagerly jumped on it. So far NBC has devoted…