Bloomberg Law has retracted a Sept. 3 article on Trump Labor appointee Leif Olson and admitted that the piece did not “meet our editorial standards for fairness and accuracy.”
Bloomberg Law retracted the article at 4:35 p.m. on Oct. 4, more than a month after the article was originally published and was accused of misrepresenting several August 2016 Facebook posts by Olson mocking anti-Semites. The article was originally titled, “Trump Labor Aide Quits After Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts Surface.”
“Bloomberg Law has retracted this article, published on Sept. 3. In reporting on a series of social media posts from Department of Labor official Leif Olson, we failed to meet our editorial standards for fairness and accuracy. We regret that lapse and apologize to our readers and to Mr. Olson,” Bloomberg Law said in a statement replacing the article.
The retraction comes a day after Bloomberg Law reporter Ben Penn’s correspondence with the Department of Labor about the story was released. In presenting the Department of Labor with the Facebook posts in question, Penn characterized the posts as anti-Semitic.
“Does the Labor Department find comments that are disparaging to Jews acceptable for a senior appointee?” Penn asked the Department of Labor when reaching out for a comment on the retracted story.
“If this is the first DOL is learning of this, why didn’t this get flagged during his vetting? Does it raise concerns about the thoroughness of PPO/DOL vetting?” he also asked.
? ? ?@blaw refused to answer my questions about their abusive journalism fail on the Leif Olson story, so we FOIA’ed Penn’s emails to DOL to see how it happened. As you can see, this was a total hit job, @benjaminPenn truncated & mischaracterized the Facebook posts. pic.twitter.com/CzTsMKWUBN
— tedfrank (@tedfrank) October 3, 2019
Penn attached screenshots of Olson’s 2016 Facebook posts. The posts in part said, “Establishment insider RINO corporate tool Paul Ryan … just suffered a massive, historic, emasculating 70-point victory,” referencing Ryan’s 2016 election victory over alt-right provocateur Paul Nehlen.
Olson briefly resigned from his position at the Department of Labor after Penn questioned the agency over the Facebook posts, but Olson was reinstated several days later after the Department of Labor accepted his explanation that the posts were satirical.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Penn about the retraction of his article and to see if he stood by a number of statements defending his article from criticism leveled at it on Twitter. While Penn has not responded to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment, his tweets referencing his story appear to be deleted.
After Penn’s initial tweet about his story, he posted several follow-up tweets noting that Olson said the posts were written to mock the alt-right. Penn characterized the posts as anti-Semitic.
After facing criticism for his article, Penn defended himself by citing the Department of Labor’s decision to accept Olson’s resignation after Penn brought the posts to the department.
