Don't miss my investigative piece published over at Raw Story: "Legal Experts Question US Attorney's Decision Not to Prosecute Obama 'Assassination Plot.'" Its central focus is on whether the claims made by Colorado US Attorney Troy Eid during his August press conference were legally sound. I interviewed some of the top legal experts in the country, in addition to the CO US Attorney's office, the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as leading narcotics experts and others. It also includes some pretty shocking and exclusive revelations about the main suspect in the assassination plot, Sean Robert Adolph, made by a Weld County CO investigator who had been in pursuit of Adolph for two years.
And here's some inside baseball exclusive to MediaBloodhound readers (I couldn't squeeze this info into the RS piece): Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for Newsweek, is the only mainstream journalist that I could find on record who questioned Eid’s handling of this case. Yet not in the pages of Newsweek, in which Hosenball wrote a lengthy piece covering the arrests and only vaguely hinted at Eid’s unorthodox playing down of the threat, but during an obscure August 28 radio appearance on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation."
Hosenball said at the time:
"Well, in fact, the way it was explained to me was that merely uttering a threat against such an official is a federal crime,” adding, “I think if these people were from a different persuasion, or were of a different color, it’s arguable as to whether this might not have already been a giant sort of terrorism story with the Attorney General and the Homeland Security secretary out there, uh, you know, banging for blood. So it’s a little bit puzzling to me that the government, the prosecutor anyway, have played it down as harshly as they can. These people were clearly drug-crazed but, you know, people who do these things are often crazy anyway and drugs just add an element to it. It might degrade their ability to actually carry something out but it doesn’t necessarily degrade their danger to either themselves or the people or to somebody like Obama.”
The mainstream press completely ignored Hosenball’s statement, as if it were uttered not by an esteemed national reporter but by a member of the "angry left" or, worse, someone from the "tinfoil crowd." So thorough was mainstream media's obliviousness to his very newsworthy comments, they received no attention in alternative media and the blogosphere either, revealing how and why, even with the rise in influence of alternative media circles, mainstream news retains an ability to punt certain stories into a black hole. (I just happened to stumble across Hosenball's appearance during my research. Not a single site had linked to it.) Nor did Hosenball ever write a follow-up article for Newsweek, addressing the deep skepticism of Eid’s actions that he expressed during his radio appearance.
I did not interview Hosenball for my article. But reading between the lines, my guess is that he wanted to reveal more in the pages of Newsweek regarding the reasons to be skeptical of Eid's actions and either knew his editors wouldn't go for it, or he tried and his editors overruled him. This might explain his appearance and extremely candid comments on "Talk of the Nation."
An interesting detail that speaks volumes about the importance of investigative journalism and maybe even more about how it demands editors who are beholden first and foremost to the facts.