Said something you’d like to forget? CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski won’t let it go
CARL Higbie was a top Trump administration appointee until CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski showed up bearing audiotapes. Within a few days, amid regrets and apologies, Higbie was a former federal employee.
Same with Jamie Johnson, Christine Bauserman, William Bradford and Todd Johnson. All resigned from plum government posts shortly after Kaczynski and his team looked into them. Monica Crowley, Sheriff David Clarke, Kathleen Hartnett White and Jeff Mateer never even got that far; their nominations were withdrawn after Kaczynski and Co. went to work on them, too.
In each case, Kaczynski and cohorts dug up something damning about the nominee or appointee. And in each case, it wasn’t some dark secret or sinister conspiracy from long ago. It was their own words. Kaczynski’s four-member group - known as KFile after its 28-year- old founder - may be the foremost practitioner of the journalistic equivalent of dumpster diving. Their reportorial MO is simple, if tedious: They dig through social-media posts, old audio and video recordings and forgotten speeches, articles and books to find troubling comments uttered or written by the people they’re investigating.
KFile didn’t pioneer this archaeological approach ( political campaigns on the left and right have been doing “opposition research” for decades). But in the socialmedia age, it can be a highly effective journalistic technique. Virtually everyone who has ever tweeted or posted to Facebook or Instagram has laid a digital trail that can be followed by anyone with some time and a lot of patience.
These days, the art of exhuming offensive statements is not just focused on political figures. Showbiz and sports figures are called out as well: Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Josh Hader, among others, was recently found to have fired off offensive tweets years ago. Some purists may consider the technique more of a “gotcha” hit than enlightening journalism, but it seems here to stay.
In Higbie’s case, KFile came up with a trove of internet radio programmes hosted by the former Navy SEAL and conservative media personality in 2013 and 2014. The recordings captured Higbe disparaging African-Americans, Muslims, women, gay men and others. In one instance, he suggested gun owners should be permitted to shoot immigrants at the border. He also asserted that 75 per cent of veterans with PTSD “don’t actually have it” and are “milking something for a little extra money in disability or they’re just ... lying.”
After KFile’s expose in January, Higbie quit as chief of external affairs for the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps and other volunteer- service programmes. “I’m sorry,” he tweeted afterward.” Those words do not reflect who I am or what I stand for, I regret saying them.”
Higbie, now the host of a podcast, added in an interview: “Kaczynski is a reporter with an agenda. I won’t take away from his due diligence, but he clearly has the same agenda as CNN. They’re anti-Trump.”
KFile found instances in which other Trump appointees made racist comments (Jamie Johnson) and anti- gay slurs ( Bauserman, Mateer); promoted the “birther” conspiracy and said crude things about President Barack Obama ( Bradford and Todd Johnson); or floated bizarre theories ( Hartnett White, Trump’s pick for a top environmental post, had once likened scientific evidence of global warming to “a kind of paganism”). It found multiple instances of plagiarism in books and academic work by Crowley and Clarke.
The CNN team’s track record raises a couple of questions: Why have Kaczynski and his young colleagues (editor Kyle Blaine, 27, and researcherre porters Chris Massie, 26, and Nathan McDermott, 30) proved better at vetting Trump’s nominees than the people in the federal government who are supposed to be vetting Trump’s nominees? And why are there so many people with questionable records knocking around Trump’s administration in the first place?
“A lot of the people who joined Trump’s campaign weren’t the usual operatives, especially very early in the campaign,” answers Kaczynski, at work in CNN’s office in New York. When Trump won, “there were thousands of positions to fill, and not that many people willing to work for him. They got people from the fringes. I don’t think there was a lot of vetting.”
The most promising trails typically emerged from those who had been bloggers or radio hosts before joining the administration.
One such appointee, a White House senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security named Frank Wuco, had been a radio host in Florida and a frequent guest on other radio programmes. Jackpot: Recordings revealed that Wuco had been an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claims that former CIA director John Brennan had converted to Islam and that Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., had been a member of the radical Black Panthers group in the 1970s. KFile posted the sound clips of Wuco’s comments in December. Unlike many of KFile’s targets, Wuco retained his job. Kaczynski, who grew up in Cleveland’s suburbs, was a news and politics geek from an early age. His father, Stephen, a lawyer (now retired), watched countless hours of cable news, and his son absorbed the habit.
He made his first splash as an internet deep diver in 2011, when he was a 21-year- old student at St. John’s University in Queens.
While rummaging through some online videos, he found one of David Weprin, the Democratic candidate for Anthony Weiner’s vacated congressional seat, awkwardly dancing at an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn. Kaczynski put the clip on his YouTube channel and tipped off a few journalists, such as Ben Smith, then at Politico. A few news outlets wrote up the find, which was more comical and embarrassing than scandalous.
Weprin went on to lose narrowly to Republican Bob Turner. ( Kaczynski later served as an intern for Turner but said he had no connection to Turner’s campaign when he found the Weprin video.)
Thereafter, Kaczynski started rooting around C- SPAN’s archives, unearthing curious clips, such as one of Mitt Romney as a Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate in 2002 in which Romney promised voters that he holds “progressive” views. At the time ( 2012) Romney was telling Republican primary voters that he was the most conservative choice for president.
Kaczynski’s scoops earned him invitations from CNN, CSPAN and MSNBC to talk about his emerging specialty. He also drew the attention of Smith, the new editor of BuzzFeed. Smith offered Kaczynski a job at BuzzFeed; Kaczynski accepted, dropping out of St. John’s before his senior year. He never finished his degree.
Smith - who has called Kaczynski “a self-made genius” - seemed to know what he had. He created a team to support Kaczynski, eventually putting him together with two interns, McDermott and Massie. Blaine became their editor. — WPBloomberg