WHERE IS MEREDITH MCIVER?







Donald Trump has invented employees out of thin air before.



He has pretended to be someone named John Miller or John Barron when speaking to the press, and those instances are documented. So when someone in the Trump Organization named Meredith McIver released a written statement claiming responsibility for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech from 2008, some, including myself, became suspicious that perhaps Trump had duped us again.



Those suspicions have only grown. A social media account claiming to be McIver popped up in the days AFTER the speech, possibly even of Russian origin as the Twitter account for 'her' today went from defending herself in English to simply stating ‘nothing can stop us’ in Russian.



(And possible Russian involvement notwithstanding, why would a woman who’d gone her entire life without any social media presence suddenly choose to join Twitter a few days after committing one of the biggest blunders of the campaign, and opening herself up to the inevitable online scorn and hate?)



Obviously photo-shopped pictures have popped up online, and the fact that no one seems to have physically seen this woman outside of the Trump Organization in the past ten years, and it was enough for me to go digging.



My search for Meredith McIver continues (and there are others out there doggedly looking, too), as there is still no physical proof of her existence, but the hunt has also provided some sad insights into the media today.



When I called the Associated Press New York City bureau to ask if they’d interviewed McIver, their response was ‘oh, yeah, we tried once, but it didn’t work out.’ I was shocked at their lack of effort. The New York Times wrote a story about her – apparently without sitting down and talking with her. I believe the Times – the ‘paper of record’ – was duped. Politico blew me off as well, sending me a link to that same flawed New York Times article. I could go on and on and on.



Only the Washington Post and the Daily Beast were receptive to listening, but as of right now I don’t know for sure if they will go to press with anything.



I don’t know why the media hasn’t done any real investigating here. Maybe they can only pay attention to anything within the past 24-hour news cycle. Maybe because someone saw a link to something somewhere, then it must be true. Maybe newsrooms are now so decimated that, whereas there once would have been a team of reporters fleshing out stories, there is now no one.



But I know that personally, I won’t stop until I know for sure whether or not Meredith McIver exists. Many people out there don’t think it matters one way or another, and they are entitled to that opinion. But I can’t help but wonder what kind of field day the media would’ve had if, in the 2008 campaign, it came out that Barack Obama had invented someone out of thin air to take the blame for a plagiarism incident, or pretended to be someone else while dealing with the press, or simply said ‘no’ to the time-honored tradition of presidential candidates opening their tax returns to public scrutiny.



Why should Trump be treated any differently? Hillary Clinton may have earned a high level of scrutiny due to her own highly questionable past actions, but shouldn’t the press spend half as much time examining Trump’s paper trails as they do on her e-mails?



And if it turns out that in fact, Meredith McIver is a real person, I’ll proclaim from the highest mountaintop (which, in New Orleans, is admittedly not that high) that I was wrong, and I’ll apologize to her for any trouble I may have caused. Then I’ll happily go back to other pursuits.



But until we know for sure, I’m not giving up the search.



Brian R. Friedman

Contributing Writer,

nolavie.com



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