On Friday, former CNN boss Jeff Zucker was confronted by CNN host Michael Smerconish over media bias. Smerconish challenged Zucker for not covering the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Zucker and Smerconish were also joined by Phil Griffin, the former head of MSNBC.
Zucker said this: “Well, I mean, I think I think we, the question is, we did deal with it. But to the degree that, you know, you would have thought was appropriate, I think the answer is in the final two weeks, you know, it was looked at. We did not know enough about it.” Griffin similarly argued that MSNBC didn’t cover it because Hunter Biden “was never arrested. The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.”
That’s funny. Because in the fall of 2018, my entire life was turned upside down by the media. CNN and MSNBC were some of the worst offenders.
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I was not related to any politician, and I had never been arrested. Yet I was a focal point of hour upon hour upon hour of coverage and speculation when the media, politicians, and opposition researchers, fueled by an absurdly vague accusation of sexual assault against my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh, decided to destroy my life and Brett’s to prevent him from getting on the Supreme Court.
Ronan Farrow, the redoubtable smear artist from the New Yorker, called me in early September 2018 and told me I was in a letter along with Brett, a letter that accused us of taking part in “sexual misconduct” in “the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me the specific time, the place, or even who the accuser was. Then, on Sept. 16, 2018, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story: A woman named Christine Blasey Ford was accusing Brett of sexual assault. In her email to me that morning, Brown mentioned a woman named Leland Keyser, whom Ford claimed was at a party where Brett assaulted Ford.
However, in her final published story, Brown left Leland Keyser out. She did so because Keyser denied any such party ever took place — and would later tell the FBI that she had been threatened if she didn’t support Ford. Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal noticed the omission.
CNN was talking about me so much that even Jake Tapper had to ask, “Why are they so interested in Mark Judge?” On MSNBC, Phil Griffin’s network, Stephanie Ruhle and Ali Velshi both got the vapors pouring through my old writings — and me and Brett’s old high school yearbook from Georgetown Prep. NBC’s Kate Snow, who, like Emma Brown, withheld information that would have exonerated me and Brett, aired accusations about drugs and gang rapes from a woman whose story kept changing and ultimately fell apart. It was absolute wall-to-wall insanity.
John Heilemann, host of the DNC propaganda show The Circus and a pal of convicted felon Michael Avenatti, was all over MSNBC claiming that he knew me when I was a barfly in the 1980s. In October 2020, Heilemann tweeted this about the Hunter Biden story: “Whatever its origin, foreign or domestic, an awful lot about the Hunter Biden story doesn’t add up and stinks to high heaven.” Aside from screeching for me to be subpoenaed, Heilemann also claimed that in the 1980s, I bought and sold cocaine, which is false. Heilemann based this fantasy on the fact that he worked with my older brother at a bar.
My brother passed away earlier this year, and just recently, at a celebration of his life, I saw two of the former owners of the bar where he worked — and yes, where I logged way too many hours when I was younger. Both owners knew me well throughout my adolescence and college years, and both said that the idea that I bought and sold cocaine was pure hogwash. Quote: “That just wasn’t you.”
I don’t wish the mauling that happened to me to happen to anyone else, including Hunter Biden. Yet I can only imagine what would have occurred if I had lost a laptop in the fall of 2018 and it had turned up and connected me to lucrative payments from, say, the Federalist Society. Zucker and Griffin would have gone berserk.
And I have never been the son of a prospective president.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
