information/article reported last tuesday was essentially correct and worthy of further investigation. jay wallace, fox president of news, said in a statement: the accusation that foxnews.com published malia zimmerman s story to help detract from coverage of the russia collusion issue is completely erroneous. the retraction is still being investigated internally, and we have no evidence that rod wheeler was misquoted by zimmerman. additionally, fox news vehemently denies the race discrimination claims in the lawsuit. the dispute has nothing to do with race. the story was first reported by npr. wheeler was hired to investigate seth rich s death, quote: the president just read the article, he wants the article out immediately. but he now says he was only joking, and he challenges wasn t serious because rod wheeler was always looking for a job because he has no money, and by the way, this lawsuit is all
information this is important here. i get the information about this federal investigator from who? malia zimmerman and ed butowski. that was my source for them. when i asked about the federal investigator i asked was this guy credible, the response was yes. after the story broke and this is important, quickly, chris, after the story broke i immediately, i didn t waste time, challenged malia about the quotes she put in the story. i asked her to contact the federal investigator to talk to him and to give his information to the d.c. police and i was told i could not talk to this guy. one quick thing for you, jean. i know the lawyer here is usually ignored in these interviews, not tonight. proof that he was misquoted, i know it is a little tricky. you could look at it as a demonstration of a non- existent fact. but is there anything you can show in the lawsuit that will demonstrate your client was misquoted? sure. i mean aside from the fact that we have a 33-page complaint that
malia zimmerman of fox news was. let me get some of the news out there. you ve suggested, i believe, that as part of the lawsuit, you wanted to pose both president trump and the former press secretary, sean spicer. first of all, do you think that s realistic? do you think that might happen? we re going to treat this case the way we treat any other case. we re going to seek to take testimony in terms of getting documents that might be relevant and then we re going to seek to take depositions and the president might through his counsel, try and get a protective order, might say he s too busy. he finds time to play over 20 rounds of golf. hopefully he ll find time to sit down with me and answer questions. what would you hope to gain from that. it s part of the bigger picture here. what you see is the motivation for ultimately defaming rod wheeler in the may 16th article. why did they want to attribute quotes to him that weren t true?
thread. reporter: according to the lawsuit, butowsky had also texted wheeler before the article was published saying, the narrative in the interviews you might use is that your and malia s work prove that the russians didn t hack into the n dnc and steal the e-mails and impact our election. i thought it was horrible because what did that have to do with the murder of this guy that i was investigating? reporter: wheeler insists the fox reporter attributed fake quotes to him, one even suggesting he had information that there had been an e-mail exchange between seth rich and wikileaks. he called butowsky to find out why. one day you re going to win an award for having said those things that you didn t say. keep the award. let s just tell the truth here. reporter: in that conversation, was he basically acknowledging to you that, yes, it s true, you didn t say these things but they sound good and we re going to use them? that s exactly what he was saying. he knew it and ed k
i never said that. let me also go back real quickly, stephanie, and say this. my heart and prayers go out to the rich family. i hate, stephanie, that they have to endure all of this stuff that s in the media. i even reached out to the father of aaron rich the day after this story broke seth rich. that s right, seth rich. the day after this story broke. i said, this is terrible for this story to be published, i told him that. i said i m hoping that fox will retract that story because those quotes clearly did not come from me. you went on fox news, though, after the story was published. right. why didn t you make it clear then? well, i did make it clear that i never said those things. i never made those quotes. i also made it clear that in my investigation, i believe that someone at the dnc was hindering the police investigation. so when you look at the totality of everything that i found in my investigation, it just made sense to me that more investigation was warranted in