TPM
After claims from anonymous escorts and then their apparently sudden
retractions — plus mysterious websites, secret tipsters, and political
partisans — you’d think the Robert Menendez prostitution allegations
story couldn’t possibly get any weirder. And yet it just has.
A
Dominican lawyer who has been at the center of the story all along is
now saying that four media outlets, including conservative website The
Daily Caller, asked him to help find women to lie and say they had been
paid to have sex with the Democratic senator from New Jersey. This comes
just weeks after the same lawyer, Melanio Figueroa, denied
orchestrating the prostitution allegations.
According to Jose Antonio Polanco, the district attorney for the La
Romana region in the Dominican Republic, Figueroa told investigators
this week that Telemundo, Univision, CNN Espanol, and The Daily Caller
enlisted him to help make the video with the young women who made the
claims. Polanco’s remarks were broadcast in a Univision news segment put online early Friday.
Furthermore, Polanco said, Figueroa claimed a man named “Carlos,” who
said he worked for The Daily Caller, went to the Dominican Republic and
offered Figueroa $5,000 for his assistance. Figueroa then claimed to
have contacted a second lawyer, Miguel Galvan, who served as a middleman
between Figueroa and the women who appeared in the video interviews.
(Earlier this month, Galvan said in a affidavit that he had been deceived by Figueroa.) In its original story
about the allegations in November, The Daily Caller reported that
Figueroa was the women’s attorney, and that he was present during the
interviews with the young women.
Every outlet named by Figueroa has denied the accusations. Asked on
camera by Univision who from that network had contacted him, Figueroa
said he could not remember. The Daily Caller, for its part, published a story reporting Figueroa’s claims, and then refuting them.
“It seems clear to me Figueroa is under pressure to change his
story,” Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson said in a statement to his
own website. “What I know for certain is this claim is a lie. The Daily
Caller never paid anyone, was never asked to pay anyone and of course
never would pay anyone for this story.”
The Daily Caller said no one by the name “Carlos” ever went to the Dominican Republic on the website’s behalf.
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