Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon exposes a major media outlet’s campaign to smear a conservative jurist involved in a current controversy.
On April 15, one week after Matthew Kacsmaryk suspended approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the Washington Post published what it framed as a scandalous story about the Texas judge.
When he got word of his impending nomination in April 2017, the Post claimed, Kacsmaryk, then the deputy general counsel of the religious freedom group First Liberty Institute, removed his name from an article he had allegedly drafted for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, substituting the names of two of his colleagues for his own byline.
The switcheroo meant that Kacsmaryk did not have to list the article, which concerned religious conscience exemptions for abortion and transgender surgeries, on his Senate Judiciary Questionnaire. The revelations “raise questions” about whether Kacsmaryk “was seeking to duck scrutiny” of his views on hot-button issues, the story said—and prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers for an investigation.
The firestorm was fueled by prominent attorneys quoted in the Post, including Adam Charnes, a high-ranking official in George W. Bush’s administration, who said it was abnormal and unethical for nominees to publish things they’d written under other people’s names.
Almost every part of the story appears to have been misleading or false.
This report is based on dozens of interviews with experts on legal ethics from across the political spectrum, attorneys at First Liberty, and people involved in Kacsmaryk’s nomination process. It suggests that Kacsmaryk did not write the article in question but insteadsupervised the attorneys drafting it, stepping back from that project—and many others—once his nomination was imminent.
This is a common practice, ethicists and people who have worked with judicial nominees said. And it hardly constitutes a duplicitous dodge.
