ABC reports that Barack Obama denies he gave an interview to French journalist and counterterrorism expert Alexis Debat that appeared in a French journal, Politique Internationale. Debat himself acknowledges that he conducted the interview through a third party, and has provided an email from that person who says he carried out the interview and asked Debat to sign it and keep his name off it. An Obama spokesperson told ABC that they are not aware of that third party interview taking place either. Debat also acknowledges that he made a mistake. There’s just one problem. Debat has been working since 2001 as a consultant for … ABC News. Many of his reports are co-signed by other reporters at ABC, and one can presume that after an extensive investigation, ABC will determine that all of the stories he worked on as a “source” (but many also with a byline or co-byline) were multiply sourced and therefore they stand by all of them. As a colleague suggests, “Clearly they want to distance themselves from him, while still protecting” the institution. It may well be that all of his reporting is solid, and Debat has personally offered to discuss his sources and reporting with me, at my soonest possible availability. Sources suggest that ABC is not going to take Debat back, even if the investigation outcome is that his stories hold up. Debat firmly stands by all of his reporting for ABC, writing “ABC is currently taking all of my reporting apart, and has not found any reason to doubt it. It will not. I stand completely by 100% of the information I provided ABC.”
Questions about Debat’s interviews and representations were first raised earlier this week by former Liberation correspondent Pascal Riche at the website, Rue89. Debat has threatened legal action against Riche and Rue89, claiming the article “puts my entire professional life in jeopardy.” ABC has indicated it demanded Debat’s resignation in June, three months before the Rue 89 piece, saying that a French government official told ABC that Debat did not have the Sorbonne PhD he claimed to have. Debat has written that he recently learned there were administrative problems with his PhD and is working to resolve them.
Update: ABC’s Jeffrey Schneider writes in reference to a post at my own blog, here “is a link to our blotter story about Debat. … We have reviewed that story (and all the other stories he worked on) and we had multiple US and European government sources that informed our reporting. As you will see from the blotter story above, we acted expeditiously to sever ties with Debat when we could not establish his credentials and we did immediately investigate his work.”
Meantime, we hear the Washington Post is working on its own story on the matter.
Update II: Here’s the Post piece.
