The month of July has provided former President Donald Trump with four reasons to celebrate.
First, on July 13, he survived a would-be assassin’s bullet that missed killing him by mere millimeters. Second, on July 18, he officially accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Third, on July 21, President Joe Biden announced he would not run for reelection.
Fourth, Trump received the news (although it got little coverage perhaps due to being overshadowed by the other three events) that on July 17, a contributing analyst and commentator to the Washington Post by the name of Max Boot – a dedicated never-Trumper who for years had falsely accused the former president of being a foreign spy – was indicted on espionage charges. Trump had to take some satisfaction in knowing karma had finally caught up with his journalistic nemesis.
Boot, 54, is married to a former CIA officer who also has been indicted and arrested following a lengthy investigation. He stands accused of using both his professional and personal positions of influence to gain access to national security information which was then shared with an unnamed foreign government.
The interest of our intelligence agencies was triggered after determining unusual communications were occurring between Boot and known foreign operatives. This interest spiked when it was also discovered his wife was having unauthorized contacts with them as well.
A Russian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, Boot had been enjoying a very successful career writing articles for various publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the LA Times and others, as well as best-selling books on military history and foreign policy. He often took to public forums to criticize U.S. foreign policy. A one-time conservative, he became disenchanted following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoring the book “The Corrosion of Conservativism: Why I Left the Right.” It appears this may also have led to a turning point in his loyalty to America.
As a conservative-turned-liberal, Boot became a popular commentator for newspapers with a leftist bent. Accordingly, they provided a platform for him to poison millions of readers with a personal, ideological agenda, undeterred by truth in reporting. Boot’s more recent newspaper publishers irresponsibly printed a myriad of stories maligning Trump over the past several years.
Sadly, many news publishers today fail to grasp the power of the pen when irresponsibly used to print fake news. It brings back memories of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded the New York Times for the reporting of one of the most popular journalists of the day, Walter Duranty.
Duranty had been dispatched to Moscow in 1931 to write a series of stories about life in the Soviet Union under dictator Josef Stalin. His stories irresponsibly painted a rosy picture, as they relied upon what he learned from Soviet officials, choosing not to investigate the facts that told of a famine that was killing millions. Despite learning later Duranty’s articles were not truthful, the NYT fought hard and succeeded in retaining the Pulitzer Prize. Being able to market the Prize in the future was more important to NYT editors than in memorializing truth ignored by surrendering it. Meanwhile, a generation of Americans was ideologically poisoned by the fake news the NYT let stand concerning a brutal Soviet dictator.
Boot’s editors should take a long hard look at his writings and reflect upon the influence he exerted upon their publications. However, even 92 years after the NYT turned a blind eye to truth and ethics by retaining their Pulitzer, it is doubtful we will see any reset of a journalistic moral compass that may have been offset by Boot’s anti-American influences.
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