Among the trove of emails released by WikiLeaks this month are at least 22 that reveal a smear campaign directed against WND senior writer and New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi in 2008, the year he released his No. 1 bestseller "The Obama Nation."

Media Matters, the Soros-funded left-wing media "watchdog" organization founded with help from Hillary Clinton and her allies, was at the vanguard of the campaign.

In one email dated Aug. 13, 2008, Karl Frisch, Media Matters communications director, alerted a Google group of fellow leftists that Corsi, a senior staffer for WND, was to appear alongside Media Matters' Paul Waldman that night on CNN's "Larry King Live."

Frisch wrote, "If you feel moved to pick up the phone and call in to challenge Corsi on the problems with his past and his book I'm sure that could prove useful."

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He advised group members to lie to the call screener if necessary:

"Remember that you may want to present yourself as a Corsi fan to get on the air if too many well-informed Corsi critics call in."

Frisch then presented a long list of anti-Corsi talking points for his liberal allies to use to attack Corsi and his book if they should get on the air.

Two days later, Frisch alerted the same Google group that Corsi and Waldman were scheduled to appear the next day on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal."

He remarked, "I wonder if anyone will call in during Corsi's appearance with a tough question? Hmmmm hint, hint."

The email contained a link to Media Matters' archive of articles about Corsi.

In fact, several of the leaked emails contained Media Matters "research" on Corsi and "The Obama Nation."

Among other things, the book delved into controversies such as whether Obama ever revealed if or when he stopped using drugs, whether Obama dedicated his own book to his mother and grandparents, and whether Obama presented his father as a hero in his autobiography,

Media Matters succeeded in getting some mainstream media outlets to quibble over the details of Corsi's book. In one email, Frisch passed along a Washington Post editorial that chided Corsi for getting the date of Obama's marriage wrong and saying Obama never revealed that he took his future wife on his second trip to Kenya.

Corsi blasted Media Matters for the way in which they tried to sabotage his book.

"Everything they were doing was dishonest, because it was all predicated on lying, distorting what we said. Often in a first edition of a book, you'll make some mistakes," Corsi said, admitting he got the date of Obama's marriage wrong. "But instead of treating that as a minor error, what they do is they try to make those into errors that discredit your book, because [to them] if you got the date of his marriage wrong, then everything you said about him is a lie. That's the kind of technique they're using."

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In another email, Frisch forwarded a New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman in which the writers squabbled with Corsi over whether Obama was in church on July 22, 2007, for one particularly incendiary sermon by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

That Times article quoted Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying, "This book is nothing but a series of lies that were long ago discredited, written by an individual who was discredited after he wrote a similar book to help George Bush and Dick Cheney get reelected four years ago. We will respond to these smears forcefully, with all means necessary."

Corsi said reactions like that were evasive ways of criticizing his book.

"The whole idea in dealing with my book was to devise a technique to discredit it without having to discuss it, and that meant smearing the book or smearing me, attacking me and characterizing me as just a partisan for Republicans," he said. "I'm not even a Republican. I've always been with the Constitution Party. But that's an unimportant distinction to these people."

Indeed, undermining Corsi's book appeared to be the only objective of this left-wing campaign, based on the leaked emails. An email sent from [email protected] to the "big campaign" Google group forwarded a trove of Media Matters anti-Corsi research with this additional message: "We *need more than the facts though* (we had those in 2004 about Corsi and the Swift Boat guys) *we need a coordinated PLAN to make sure this doesn't get traction."

The plan was adopted by at least a few media outlets. Frisch boasted in one email that MSNBC's Contessa Brewer had already used Media Matters research to push back against Corsi and ask him why anyone should take his book seriously. And in a "Media Monitoring Report" sent by [email protected] on Aug. 14, the writer bragged, "The aggressive effort by progressive organizations to rebut Jerome Corsi has succeeded to the extent that media voices are almost all framing the book as negative, fairly inaccurate, 'swift boating.'"

But Corsi stands by his book, which went to the very top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. He says he did "very thorough research" and called attention to several of Obama's defining characteristics, including the influence of Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis on the future president's development.

The author believes Media Matters and its allies couldn't rebut the heart of his book – that Obama was an extreme leftist – so the organization went nitpicking instead.

"Basically what they were attempting to do was run a disinformation campaign on the book designed to back the media off from covering it, and to discourage people from reading it, because they really couldn't answer the fundamental points I was making, and that was that Barack Obama had a career in which he was a very extreme leftist and had adopted and supported very leftist positions even when he was state senator in Illinois," Corsi explained.

"In order to prevent that from getting onto the agenda, they attacked the book in a way that they didn't care whether they were fair or not. What they cared was that they discredited the book. It wasn't an honest evaluation; it wasn't an honest read."

Order your copy of No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi's newest blockbuster, "Partners in Crime: The Clintons' Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit," only at the WND Superstore!