No Haley exposé surfaces, Folks’ claim in doubt

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The Daily Caller's Alex Pappas calls out Will Folks:

Will Folks claimed he was pressured to admit his extramarital affair with South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley last week because of a soon-to-be-broken news story detailing his “inappropriate physical relationship” with the Republican. But, a week later, that damning newspaper article is nowhere to be found.

Speculation now centers on what Folks’s motivation might have been for hurting Haley just two weeks before her name appears on the Republican ballot in the Palmetto state.

From day one, Haley has denied an affair ever took place. Folks has countered those denials by disclosing a few phone, text records and conversations on his political blog that he says show the two had late-night phone conversations and hence an illicit relationship.

On his website, Folks insinuates the Columbia Free-Times newspaper was about to break a story about his affair with Haley, and indeed the newspaper itself has admitted one of its reporters did investigate such a rumor. But according to one knowledgeable source, while a Free-Times reporter did talk to Folks on May 13, no story was ever budgeted to run that week.

The reason? The Daily Caller has learned that around the time Sarah Palin endorsed Haley at a Columbia rally, an attorney for the paper advised editors not to run the story because the paper only had one source alleging the affair.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey comments, calling folks' apparently bogus claims "The shoe that didn’t drop":

Not only has a media exposé failed to materialize, the major media outlets now deny that they had anything in the works at all...

[...]

Folks has been shown to be wrong, if not entirely then at least about one key aspect of the story. That’s certainly reason for skepticism about the rest of Folks’ claims.

Unfortunately, there is no real vindication in stories like these. Once someone has thrown out an accusation like infidelity, racism, or some other charge that’s impossible to prove wrong, that bell can’t be fully unrung. That’s probably the reason that news media like those mentioned above avoided the story like the plague. Their reluctance is like the shoe that didn’t drop in l’affaire Folks, and it should put an end to this sideshow.

Folks made his allegations less than two weeks after Sarah Palin endorsed Nikki Haley.

- JP