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Geraldo Rivera, NPR reporter stir up old feud

A long standing feud between Fox News host Geraldo Rivera and NPR Media Reporter David Folkenflik was brought back to the surface Monday evening as the two engaged on Twitter over a 2001 report Rivera did from Afghanistan.

Folkenflik is a lying leech paid by taxpayers — Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) January 14, 2014

While reporting from Tora Bora in 2001 for Fox News, Rivera described on air an incident of friendly fire, claiming he had been on the scene where three Americans had died. Reporting then for the Baltimore Sun, Folkenflik found that Rivera was actually 300 miles from the site he described and that no Americans had died there that day. Rivera blamed his mistake on the “fog of war” and said he had confused the event near Kandahar with one where he actually was in Tora Bora — but the Tora Bora incident occurred three days after Rivera’s report.

(Also on POLITICO: Geraldo Rivera: Top 5 legendary incidents)

This all came back up on Twitter when a man tweeted at Rivera while watching Folkenflik on CSPAN talking about his recent book "Murdoch's World" about Fox News where he details the Tora Bora incident.

Rivera shot back: As I proved years ago, Folkenflik's story was dead wrong-a grossly unfair anti-Fox hatchet job" and that he is "pulling documents (and) will soon prove how he lied (and) how his (mainstream media) pals willfully ignored truth."

When asked by a follower why Rivera was just now pulling documents on a more than decade-old report, Rivera said he "proved it (in) 2002 but my facts didn't fit anti-Fox anti-war narrative so he skated."

"His premise-that there was no friendly fire in Tora Bora-is a provable lie," Rivera continued. "This skunk has been hiding at NPR for a decade cashing in on his anti Fox bias."

Rivera then promised to produce the documents proving his side of the story by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday.

Over a series of more than 15 tweets, Folkenflik responded to Rivera, outlining his original reporting and noting "I'd be very interested in hearing from @geraldorivera what proof he has now that he could not offer in the years since."

Stay tuned...

Update 6:30p.m.

In a lengthy Facebook post, Rivera said he made an "honest mistake" in 2001, that he apologized for it on air and that he had provided to The Baltimore Sun all of their footage but never got the retraction he sought.

"In the fog of war, on a day I narrowly escaped a sniper’s bullet, I confused the aftermath of a friendly fire incident I covered in Tora Bora, with a more widely reported friendly fire incident several hundred miles away in Kandahar," Rivera said.

He goes on to note that despite what Folkenflik's military sources said, that there was no friendly fire incident at Rivera's location that day, there have been hundreds of friendly fire incidents both documented and not. Rivera included a Doctors Without Border press release about bombings in Tora Bora around the date of Rivera's original report along with quotes from further interviews Rivera and his team conducted after the event.

"Since 2001, Folkenflik has essentially based his entire career, much of it taxpayer-supported, on being the man who successfully cut Geraldo Rivera and Fox News down to size," Rivera said in the post.

Folkenflik responded in a series of tweets, among them that he never saw an on-air apology from Rivera and that the footage Fox provided should no evidence of "dead soldiers, no tattered uniforms."