— Evan Joshua

This is a fact check of the The Root’s ‘Mayor Pete’s Invisible Black Police’.

The author of the original piece is Michael Harriot of The Root, but the article is also jointly published by TYT(The Young Turks) and Jonathan Larsen. We will analyze Harriot’s veracity and fact check aspects of his article.

Credibility

TYT: I’ll be frank, I find TYT to be extremely biased. That alone doesn’t disqualify the article, but they are essentially a Bernie Sanders TV and news network, and that has to be recognized if they are writing opposition pieces against other candidates while trying to keep the appearance of being objective.

Their managing editor, and seemingly main writer in these Buttigieg stories is Jonathan Larsen. Looking at Larsen’s credibility it seems that he has a decent background in media and journalism, however investigating his writings for TYT it seems he has concentrated his time for the past 9 months writing almost exclusively anti-Buttigieg articles which increases my skepticism of the article being objective journalism.

Further, I’ve interacted with Larsen on Twitter and asked for proof of some of his claims, and rather than providing evidence he suggested I ask Buttigieg myself. This to me is a gigantic red flag and goes against basic journalistic ethics. To be clear Larsen wasn’t even saying that he had anonymous sourcing, he at times provides no indication of where his sources for his claims come from at all.

The Root: The Root also tends to write sensationalized articles quoting unknown people on Twitter who have small amounts of followers to gin up stories. My fear is that they follow the click bait model of “If It Bleeds It Leads” hyping up sensationalized headlines that they know will get shared.

The Content

This article largely depends on anonymous or non-published sourcing that can’t be verified. This is not normally an issue with publications that have high journalistic ethics, but as we have previously noted TYT has an obvious opposition bias and their authors seem to deny that they need to provide evidence in other cases or show any proof at all. That doesn’t mean we can dismiss this article outright though, so let’s jump in.

The Tapes

Having followed the court cases closely these sentences within the first few paragraphs struck me.

“Soon after Buttigieg took office, word got out about the tapes and the officers complained that the recordings violated the Federal Wiretap Act. Even though the recording system had been in place for more than a decade, its existence somehow became the black guy’s fault.”

Immediately the race card is played here, but how accurate is this?

The article conveniently leaves out the distinction multiple judges have made, which was deliberate spying versus routine recordings with consent.

This has absolutely nothing to do with their skin color but the fact that they broke the law by spying on other’s conversations as two judges have now ruled. This is intellectually dishonest and an attempt to simply say it is because Police Chief Boykins is black, not because he and Police Department Communications Director Karen DePaepe decided to start spying on colleagues and ended up breaking the law. By ignoring 7 years of court proceedings that go against the author’s narrative, I can only assume this is done on purpose to try and trick the reader, as this is a central component of this saga.

In a January 2015 order, a judge ruled that the wiretaps were in fact illegal under the Federal Wiretap Act. “After a trial in U.S. District Court in 2014, a judge ruled that most of the tapes were created illegally under federal wiretap law, and those tapes could not be released”, the South Bend Tribute correctly reported.

“[Judge] Van Bokkelen wrote in his ruling that any recordings made before then-city police communications director Karen DePaepe discovered on Feb. 4, 2011 that the wrong lines were being tapped do not violate the law and could possibly be released. Recordings made after that discovery are illegal and must not be disclosed, Van Bokkelen ruled.” Source: SBT

Later in April 2019 a state court judge ruled that routine recordings (the ones going on for decades) were admissible in court, but the later recordings that Boykins and DePaepe recorded, did in fact break the Indiana Wiretap Act.

Boykins was demoted for this wiretapping activity but claims his demotion was because of racism. The article states:

Buttigieg repeatedly says he demoted Boykins because Boykins was the “subject” or “target” of an FBI investigation — but the U.S. attorney has never confirmed that Boykins was the “subject” or “target” of their investigation. Pete’s chief of staff confirmed that the U.S. attorney never said it in a deposition. No one knows why Buttigieg pressured Boykins to resign and subsequently demoted him. The only thing we know is Buttigieg’s explanation that Boykins was the target of a federal investigation is not true. It was never true. Still, Buttigieg — or proxies from his campaign — continue to repeat it.

Did the U.S. attorney deny it or did he not confirm it? Those are two very different things.

We do know that Buttigieg’s Chief of Staff Mike Schmuhl’s deposition shows that he testified under oath that certain police officers approached the FBI, as well as Shcmuhl’s office to complain about illegal wiretapping. This would seem consistent with Buttigieg’s claim about an FBI complaint.

A few more lines down in that same deposition, Schmuhl testified that U.S. Attorney David Capp contacted him 2 days after the officers approached him indicating that there were problematic telephone recording issues.

According to an article from TYT’s Jonathan Larsen himself, he writes:

According to internal FBI documents, the case was brought to prosecutors the following day, Jan. 19, and then to the attention of the FBI.

He also states that,

In a March 23, 2012, meeting with prosecutors and the FBI, Schmuhl testified, U.S. Attorney David Capp “held two fingers up and said, ‘There are two problems, again, director of communications [DePaepe], the chief of police [Boykins].”

We also have the letter from United States District Court to South Bend reiterating that it had received complaints (likely from officer Young) that people were being illegally recorded. The Root article states:

… the U.S. attorney wrote to the city, explaining that before Boykins was demoted, “We advised [the city] that our primary concern was that the SBPD practices comply with federal law.” The phone calls, the top prosecutor wrote, were “mistakenly recorded.”

This is quite deceptive of The Root and TYT to cut the paragraph short, making this all seem as a mistake, and once again leaving out the same facts about both judges’ rulings of wiretapping illegality.

Let’s look at the letter:

After they mistakenly recorded the officers, they continued to record and create cassette tapes which broke with the officers’ consent and now two judges have ruled this to be illegal both federally and at the state level. This is notably deceptive and quite telling that this massive fact about seven months of deliberate spying after the mistaken recordings is left out of the article.

Let’s consider a thought experiment. Let’s assume Buttigieg lied and completely fabricated a story that the FBI was looking into the police chief’s wiretapping activity.

Wouldn’t it be quite the coincidence that Pete fabricates this story about an FBI investigation into federally illegal wiretapping and it turns out shortly after that a judge rules the chief was breaking the Federal Wiretap Act?

This next quote from Harriot left me incredulous:

No one knows why Buttigieg pressured Boykins to resign and subsequently demoted him.

He was demoted for wiretapping, which Buttigieg publicly said at the time when he heard about it from federal investigators, and then two judges subsequently ruled that the acts did break both federal and state law.

How to Disappear for 40 Years

This is in reference to the section titled “How to Disappear for 40 Years” in the article which is an overview of Nathan Cannon, a black police officer with the South Bend Police Department nearly 40 years.

For more than 20 years, Cannon and other black officers watched while white officers with less seniority or qualifications were promoted to the rank of lieutenant while he continued to hold the rank of sergeant.

The article likes to put blame on Buttigieg for this action but let’s take a look at something wholly peculiar. Buttigieg doesn’t control the inner workings of the police department he just appoints the police chief. Further, we are talking about incidents before Buttigieg was even in office as we well know that Pete was not Mayor for 20 years.

Why does The Root not blame Darryl Boykins, the black police chief who had been in charge since 2007 for racism in police promotions during that same period?

They did however make those accusations against the white police chief Teachman who served under 3 out of the 20 year period during the racist police job promotion issues. The bulk of the blame is saved for one person, Buttigieg, and of course largely through anonymous or non-published sourcing which I cannot verify.

I believe there is enough intellectual dishonesty and bias between TYT and The Root to obviously show this is not objective or fair journalism. I can come to no other conclusion than that Michael Harriot and perhaps Jonathan Larsen as well, are intentionally writing in bad faith, purposely leaving out the facts that go against their claims. The fact that the article doesn’t mention the actual findings of the court cases should leave anybody who has followed them up in arms and asking questions. Purposely leaving out the distinction multiple judges have made over deliberate spying versus the routine recordings is too important to ignore. I cannot believe that seven years of multiple court battles were left out of this article on accident, conveniently at all the correct timings needed to maintain the narrative.

The authors simply didn’t want to give all of the information because it hurts their accusations. I believe this will only be a detriment to their own credibility as ‘news’ organizations.