>>6528275
Elle Reeve fakin the news for over a decade
These fucking idiots sent the liar's wife to (((fact check))) her husband's stories and then had to retract the lies
https://web.archive.org/web/20080216043531/http://www.observer.com/2007/foer-s-foggy-new-republic-retraction-doesn-t-please-everyone
“Yeah, it’s a bummer, but it’s hard to shed any tears over Frank,” Elspeth Reeve was telling The Observer in a phone interview Friday, the day before her husband, U.S. Army Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, joined her at her mother’s house in Missouri for his 30-day leave.
Earlier that week, Ms. Reeve’s former boss, The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had published a 7000-word piece that concluded by formally retracting three first-person columns that the 24-year-old Mr. Beauchamp had written for the magazine over the summer. Soon after their publication, a chorus of conservative bloggers had raised questions about the veracity of the columns, in which Mr. Beauchamp offered first-person accounts of American troops in Iraq engaging in shocking behavior, such as running over dogs with their Bradleys, and mocking a woman whose face had been disfigured in an explosion. After carrying out a nearly five-month investigation, which involved attempts to corroborate Mr. Beauchamp’s claims with other members of his unit, Mr. Foer had concluded that the stories could not be verified.
It was (((Ms. Reeve))), 25, who, while working at TNR as a reporter-researcher, had recommended Mr. Beauchamp—not yet her husband at the time—to the magazine’s editors. Nevertheless, Ms. Reeve said, she wasn’t going to let the fact that Mr. Foer had publicly denounced Mr. Beauchamp’s work spoil her mood on the eve of her reunion with her husband.
Indeed, Mr. Foer’s piece was a classic Alford plea, which declared that even though the re-reporting effort had failed to turn up any discrepancies in Mr. Beauchamp’s stories—other than his placing a key scene in Iraq when in fact it took place in Kuwait, which Mr. Beauchamp has said was an honest mistake—the investigation had hit a dead end. TNR could no longer stand by the stories because too many of the facts were impossible to check, Mr. Foer wrote, and because Mr. Beauchamp, who continues to maintain that he did not fabricate anything, had consistently failed to help TNR in their attempts to vindicate him.
According to Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at TNR, the magazine received little cooperation from Mr. Beauchamp throughout the investigation process. “The basis [for the retraction] was just that Scott is maddening,” he said. “He’s just flaky, he’s irresponsible, he doesn’t do things that are in his own obvious interest to do. … Scott was the guy who lives in the group house and is supposed to pay the electric bill and just doesn’t, and the lights get shut off. Frank was the guy who had the lights shut out on him.” Mr. Beauchamp declined to comment for this story.