Media Goes Nuts Over Sheriff Clarke Search Warrant… But There’s One (Big) Problem

Last week, media news outlets were freaking out over the release of an FBI search warrant executed with an email address related to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

In a tweet series, NBC breathlessly announced,

“NEW: According to federal court filing made public today, the FBI has executed a search warrant on an e-mail address associated with Trump surrogate and former sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.”

“MORE: The search warrant executed on Clarke Jr. e-mail states that this investigation is a civil rights investigation into the detainment of a man who had flown on the same flight as Clarke Jr.”

“The man, ID’d as Dan Black, alleged to county auditors and FBI that after verbal exchange with Clarke on flight, he was met by deputies and bomb-drug sniffing dogs when flight arrived in Milwaukee, and Clarke motioned to Black and he was escorted and questioned for 15 minutes.”

“The FBI asserts that county auditors advised of emails from Clarke that purportedly pertained to the incident, leading to the search warrant.”

But IJR explains why this is media distortion, or in a shorter parlance “fake news.”

The fact that the warrant was executed in March — nine months prior to the story being published — appeared in the fine print. NBC’s report noted the warrant had only just been made public, not that it had only just been executed.

But there was one additional fact that was left all but unnoticed — and that was the game changer:

Re: FBI search warrant affidavit for David Clarke’s email account: Clarke says the investigation was closed in May and passed along this letter from the US Attorneys Office https://t.co/33OQuMJDrL pic.twitter.com/twt2E4WYDm

— CJ Ciaramella (@cjciaramella) December 29, 2017

Ciaramella then posts David Clarke’s response:

Clarke said, “I am NOT currently under investigation by the FBI in the Black case.  That investigation was closed back in May of 2017…  You’ll have to ask the FBI why the return of the search warrant took so long.  I was notified by Google that the request was made back in March… if you had searched, you would have seen that the local newspaper Journal Sentinel (Dan Bice) covered that story in real time in May on the decision that no civil rights violation could be proven.  Great theater in your inquiry but nothing else.”

Fake news will do nothing to help the media’s credibility.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr

Hat Tip: IJR