Keith Olbermann reports Sarah Palin's possible perjury in David Kernell's trial in Knoxville on "Countdown" - UPDATE

+++Read our original post about Sarah Palin's

possible perjury - click here+++

What a day!

Sarah Palin's possible perjury, as first exposed by Palingates on Sunday, 25 April 2010, starts to receive the attention of the MSM.

Keith Olbermann just a few hours ago reported the story and credited Palingates for it - here is the clip:

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But let's have a look at the background of this report.

Keith Olbermann had David Weigel, reporter at the Washington Post, as a guest to talk about the story.

A tweet that David Weigel sent out a few hours earlier today makes you wonder whether he is the "independent" expert which would have been necessary for a meaningful discussion:

In his column in the Washington Post called "Right Now - Inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party", David Weigel today had a very unflattering description for us:

"Palin haters want to believe she perjured herself in the hacked e-mail trial. (My reporting confirms that the questioning was narrowly focused and she didn't.)"

So are we "Palin haters"? It's true that the aim of our blog is to expose the many lies and deceptions of Sarah Palin. Do we hate her? I don't! She has never done anything bad to me personally. However, I do NOT wish her to be in any position of power, because we here at Palingates believe she is a dangerously unhinged and mentally unstable warmonger.

The label "hater" is usually used to describe us by our special friends from Conservatives4Palin or by similar pro-Palin blogs. It makes a very "unbalanced" impression to have this label used by a MSM journalist who is a guest on Keith Olbermann's show.

So David Weigel was "ready to debunk a liberal myth" on Olbermann? OK...!

Earlier today, I had a short email exchange with David Weigel.

He contacted me "out of the blue", and what he said was:

"Subject: Question about your perjury story

Call me stupid, but I don't understand it, especially the e-mail question. You guys think there is a real argument that she perjured herself with her description of the yahoo account?"

Screenshot:

So I answered David and said:

"Our argument here is relatively simple.

According to Jamie Satterfield from knoxnews, who specifically
confirmed this for me, Palin said in her testimony, in the words of
Jamie:

"What she said was the people at the governor's mansion sometimes sent her emails relative to issues regarding the mansion and her children. She denied specifically diverting gubernatorial issues to the
account."

We proved in our post that this statement by Palin is simply wrong.
She did use this account for her gubernatorial business many times. We also proved that she used her other TWO yahoo accounts extensively for her gubernatorial business. Our points are 100% factual. There are no assumptions, no conjecture etc."

I received no reply to this message.

In order to have the full background of what happened, let me also show you the correspondence I had with journalist Jamie Satterfield from www.knoxnews.com regarding this topic - a journalist who actually was in the courtroom during the testimony of Sarah Palin - unlike David Weigel, who got his report "second-hand"!

I wrote to her on Saturday:

"Dear Ms Satterfield,

my name is Patrick, I write for the blog "palingates"
(http://palingates.blogspot.com).

We published an article today about the fact that Sarah Palin possibly
committed perjury when she testified in Knoxville:

http://palingates.blogspot.com/2010/04/did-sarah-palin-commit-perjury-during.html

This might be interesting for you.

I have a question to you regarding this matter. In your article you wrote:

+++

She denied using the account to conduct gubernatorial business.

"We know there was an Attorney General's opinion one week prior and a lot of other opinions in the state that, of course, it was proper for
me to have a private account," she said.

+++

Do you remember what the exact words were that Palin used?

Because from the records of the yahoo account, it's pretty clear that
she extensively used it for her gubernatorial business. We have
explained this in our article in detail.

Thanks a lot,

Patrick"

At first, I received the following reply from Jamie Satterfield:

"What's in quote marks are her exact words."

This didn't fully answer my question, therefore I sent Jamie a follow-up question:

"Was the sentence

"She denied using the account to conduct gubernatorial business."

just an "interpretation" of the quote that follows in your article, or
did she say it like that?

Thanks!"

Jamie answered me:

"No what she said was the people at the governor's mansion sometimes sent her emails relative to issues regarding the mansion and her children. She denied specifically diverting gubernatorial issues to the account."

A few minutes later, she sent me an additional message and said:

"And to make it clear how journalists actually work, if it's not in quote marks then it is a paraphrase of what was said. Finally, you can create an account on pacer, where a transcript of her testimony will be made publics in the coming months."

From this correspondence, one thing is abundantly clear: Jamie Satterfield tried to report the remarks of Sarah Palin with high accuracy. It's obvious that she applied high journalistic standards to her own reporting.

David Weigel was not in the courtroom - but Jamie Satterfield was. Yet, David apparently did not take very seriously what Sarah Palin actually said in her testimony in Knoxville. I cannot see how he "debunked" the accusation that Sarah might have committed perjury.

I do hope that Keith Olbermann himself or others will follow-up this story - and will invite guests who were actually in the courtroom, like Jamie Satterfield from www.knoxnews.com and who don't appear on a TV show with a political agenda, but want to report the real facts.

+++

UPDATE:

After Countdown aired, David Weigel exchanged this friendly tweet with C4P-outlet "Palin TV" (run by Sheya, contributor at C4P):

PalinTV:



David Weigel:

I do wonder if David Weigel calls C4P "Obama haters".

My guess is: Probably not.

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UPDATE 2:

In a post called "I, Sarah Palin defender" David Weigel reacted on his blog at the Washington Post to the criticism he felt was directed against him in this post at Palingates and stated:

"Today, PalinGates published a lengthy attack on me, including a screenshot of a friendly email I sent them before I went on the show, after my own reporting had convinced me that their first post was mostly baseless. Here's their take.

David Weigel was not in the courtroom - but Jamie Satterfield was. Yet, David apparently did not take very seriously what Sarah Palin actually said in her testimony in Knoxville. I cannot see how he "debunked" the accusation that Sarah might have committed perjury.

And here's what I actually said.

We need to see the transcript, but it doesn't sound like she actually trapped herself in anything here. The defense attorney, Wade Davies, was prohibited from taking this much further than the questions about what -- the e-mails that were sent, that were asked about previously. She stuck to saying that it was political e-mails, e-mails about the governor`s mansion.
The e-mails that you were talking about didn't really come up. So the people I talked to inside the courtroom say maybe she could have fudged the words a little bit less, but this doesn`t seem to be a problem for her.

I think it's pretty clear which of us was looking for the facts and which of us is trafficking in innuendo. There is just no case for accusing Palin of perjury."

+++

His remarks prompted me to explain my position. I therefore tried to post the following comment on his blog at the Washington Post, but for unknown reasons, it didn't get through.

This is my comment:

David,

Thank you for reporting our story about Sarah Palin’s possible perjury in Knoxville.

It seems that you don’t understand why we disagree with the premise of your report and felt uneasy with the way you introduced us to your readers. There are several reasons. One of them is that you struck the “wrong tone” right from the start when you simply labelled us “Palin haters”. That’s not what we are. We don’t hate Sarah Palin, but we do NOT wish her to be in any position of power, because we believe she is a dangerously unhinged and mentally unstable warmonger.

Then you claimed to have “debunked” something, although in my view, you didn’t. One of the key arguments of our story was the fact that Sarah Palin, according to the journalist Jamie Satterfield, who listened to Sarah’s testimony in the courtroom, “denied specifically diverting gubernatorial issues to the (yahoo) account”. I contacted Jamie Satterfield in order to find out specifically what was said. One can read the complete correspondence with Jamie Satterfield in our follow-up post:

http://palingates.blogspot.com/2010/04/keith-olbermann-reports-sarah-palins.html

So do you believe that Jamie Satterfield reported the testimony incorrectly? Because that’s what would have been necessary in order to “debunk” our claim. But you didn’t say that, but instead offered a very vague explanation of what you were told by others, including “Palin-aides”, what Palin is reported to have said in her testimony. In doing so, you carefully avoided the essence of our claim which is that the emails of Palin’s administration, which were published by MSNBC.COM, show that she conducted gubernatorial business on her yahoo-account on a regular basis. As a sidenote, we also explained and documented that Sarah Palin extensively used her other TWO yahoo accounts for her gubernatorial affairs.

As it stands, we believe Palin lied in her testimony about using the yahoo account for her gubernatorial business, as we explained in detail, citing several examples of her emails in our first post:

http://palingates.blogspot.com/2010/04/did-sarah-palin-commit-perjury-during.html

If this lie technically is “perjury” in a legal sense, is another question, and can only be answered by a judge – and that’s why we framed this as a question in our first post on this issue.

We also believe that Palin was untruthful regarding the two other points we mentioned in our original post.

In what you call a “lengthy attack” on you, I simply quoted your “one-line” email to me, to which I responded with a detailed reply. If your email was as “friendly” as you now claim, why didn’t you send me a response? Why did you instead just twitter that you were about to “debunk a liberal myth on Olbermann”?

Apart from that, I mainly posted three twitter messages from you, and asked the question: Would you label C4P, with whom you exchange twitter messages frequently, simply as “Obama haters”? This question was absolutely justified - and you didn't answer it.

Palingates is not just about Sarah Palin’s faked pregnancy, as the Palinbot-commenters want your readers to believe. In fact, Palingates focuses on a wide variety of scandals in which Sarah Palin is involved. Troopergate, Dairygate, Todd Palin as Alaska’s “Shadow Governor”, and many more, you name it. That being said, I know that Sarah Palin’s faked pregnancy is a true fact:

http://palingates.blogspot.com/search/label/babygate

+++

In addition, Andrew Sullivan published another short post, linking to David Weigel's new post. Andrew Sullivan states that he now thinks that Sarah Palin didn't commit perjury, because he "trusts" Weigel. This followed Andrew Sullivan's first post on the Daily Dish about this matter in which he more critically analyzed Sarah Palin's testimony.

However, I am sure that we can all agree that a final assessment will only be made after the transcript of Palin's testimony in Knoxville has been published.

+++

UPDATE 3:

In a new article from April 29, 2010, David Weigel writes:

"One of the least-commented-on Palin facts of the week was her news conference outside the Knoxville, Tenn., courthouse where the man who hacked her e-mail was being tried. That's right: a news conference. The kind of thing she had not done since losing the 2008 election, the kind of thing she has skipped at every political speech in 2010. And you barely heard about it, because Palin survived it unscathed."

Just for the record - THIS is what David Weigel calls a "news conference":

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Websites which linked to this post:

www.memeorandum.com

www.mediaite.com

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