Daily Caller sticks with Menendez claims; ABC News discredits them

Oh, Tucker. Well, Tucker Carlson's shop is sticking by its November story about Sen. Bob Menendez and supposed Dominican Republic prostitutes, in spite of debunkings by the Washington Post and, now, ABC News. According to the Daily Caller, it's because everybody else has been talking to the wrong fake prostitute.

"The Washington Post mistook one prostitute for another Monday in a report that initially seemed to debunk a November 2012 Daily Caller exposé of New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez," DC editor David Martosko wrote. "While the Post said it had an affidavit from a woman in the Dominican Republic admitting she fabricated claims Menendez paid her for sex, that woman was not one of the two prostitutes TheDC interviewed for a Nov. 1 report."

On the other hand, ABC News identified the woman as indeed one of those they talked to before the election, when the story was being shopped to them. ABC sez:

Early Tuesday the Daily Caller said the woman who said she was lying was not one of the women featured in their original report. However, the attorney who presented the affidavit Monday identified the woman to reporters in attendance as the female wearing a yellow shirt in a video on the Daily Caller website. [']

Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as "Bob."

So the Daily Caller explanation hinges upon there being two separate groups running around making the exact same claims at the same time, and everyone but them just happens to be talking to the wrong one. Among the other more implausible bits of the story (and, presumably, one of the reasons ABC did not run with the story while the Daily Caller still lapped it up):

Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named "Bob" was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name "Bob" into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.

Really? You knew who he was because you did a web search for people in the world with the name "Bob"? That's what we're going with? Gawd.

Fox News, on the other hand, has decided that while they were very, very eager to hype the Daily Caller video, they are now tired of the story and don't want to talk about it anymore.

Fox News has yet to discuss the latest developments that undermine what the Daily Caller has reported for months. By contrast, Fox aggressively hyped the uncorroborated allegations when they were being pushed by the Daily Caller, discussing them during at least 22 segments since November 2012, according to a search of the Nexis database.

Of course.