To the Editor,
We may be about to see the most significant criminal case relating to the free press in our country in over a century. Criminal complaints were filed today with the New York State Attorney General and the Department of Justice against New York Times Executive Editor Dan Baquet.
These filings were a long time coming and are based on a number of serious financial and other white-collar crimes. In February of 2016, victims started to reach out to Dan Baquet, his senior editors and journalists.
They were claiming they were victims of bond fraud, and alleged that a relatively small group of Wall Street firms and their executives issued and sold fraudulent bonds to an unsuspecting public. Pretty simple on the surface.
The victims alleged that the three big bond credit rating agencies sold knowingly false credit ratings for the bonds and the major American banks sold these knowingly worthless bonds to their customers.
Evidence was submitted to the NYT in the form of forensic audits and sworn testimony by people involved with the bonds. The NYT editors refused to investigate or run the story. Instead, the Times ran dozens of knowingly false stories that would intentionally lead the victims to believe they had no legal rights to sue and that no fraud took place.
This continued up to and until the current day. Between 2015 and 2021, the evidence of this fraud grew to include political payoffs for protection from investigations, prosecutions and regulatory actions.
Victims were able to identify the politicians involved and presented evidence to the New York Times of these criminal acts. It made no difference to Dan Baquet or the senior editors at the Times.
They dug their feet in and even told their journalists, according to testimony from a number of their journalists, that “this story would never be told, do not investigate it, do not write about it, and do not discuss it.” Now the legal questions come into play.
Do executive editors, editors and journalists have special legal rights? If not, Dan Baquet, his editors and journalists committed a number of serious felonies.
Picture for a minute that your boyfriend or girlfriend came to you and told you they murdered someone. Do you have a legal obligation to report that to authorities? Does it matter if you are a New York Times executive editor or just an unemployed college student?
According to both New York State criminal statutes and Federal criminal statutes, “everyone” has a legal requirement to report what they know about serious felonies. Now the question of withholding the story and running knowingly false articles brings into the question of “aiding and abetting” in the crime.
There are also serious civil liability issues at play here. By withholding the true story, how many of their readers didn’t know they were victims of fraud?
By writing misleading articles, how many of their readers didn’t know they had legal rights to recover their stolen money? Can the victims hold the New York Times libel for these actions? The answer appears to be yes.
Victims can sue under both State and Federal statutes. In New York [state], victims can sue for up to two years after they first find out they have been defrauded. Even though these crimes may have happened in 2016, they didn’t know because the New York Times did not report it.
They may find out from this article that they were one of the victims and the two-year clock starts today; or they may find out in three years from a cable news show – and their two- year window starts then.
Now, even though Dan Baquet, his editors and journalists had nothing to do with the original fraud, their actions, according to the law, make them liable for damages suffered by the fifty-million victims of the bond fraud.
No kidding, it is true. Victims can now sue Dan Baquet personally, his editors personally or New York Times journalists personally. They only need to prove “they knew about the fraud and failed to report it to authorities.” The fact they ran knowingly misleading stories may allow the victims to recover more than their losses through punitive damages.
It is difficult to predict what the State Attorney General or the DOJ will do in this case. Neither the Attorney General or the DOJ properly investigated these charges when hundreds of victims came to them in 2016, and neither agency prosecuted anyone. Regardless of what the Attorney General or the DOJ did or didn’t do, they were still crimes and individuals and companies can pursue their own civil actions.
Sincerely,
Richard Lawless
Discover more from Oswego County Today
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.