How Embarrassing! Dana Loesch Didn't Even Know About Additional Medical Records She Used for Self-Righteous Rant

Last week, Dana Loesch attacked a blogger who made an innocent mistake and corrected it. I called Loecsh out, pointing out that if she was going to call herself a "journalist" and attack others, then she needs to correct the multiple falsehoods she has put out. My story was written about in a blog post at Media Matters, and Loesch attacked them in an extremely cowardly way. I detailed multiple false claims of hers and she responded by focusing only on one: the fact that she falsely reported in November that County Counselor Patricia Reddington's office had filed charges against Kenneth Gladney "without looking at his medical records."

Now I pointed out yesterday why Loesch is still wrong, but what's really embarrassing for her is that her defense is completely undermined by the primary blogger she relied on to make her case. According to Loesch, her claim that they filed charges "without looking at the medical records" was true because they didn't see the full medical records. As I pointed out, her previous statements were still false, since they didn't just say that the full medical records hadn't been accessed: they said that the medical records hadn't been accessed. Actually, before I even pointed this out, @theboneblog on Twitter did a nice job of laying it out:




Now it sure looks like Dana Loesch's husband Chris came by the blog to call me an "idiot" and make a metaphysics argument about how Loesch's original statement was actually correct:

Why do I think that that this comment was from Chris Loesch? Because his Twitter avatar, Shock City Music, was making the exact same point about "financial records:"

Whoops! Anyway, though I'm sure the Loeschs would love to turn this into a philosophical debate about how many parts of a ship you need to take away before it's no longer a ship, the clear intent of Dana Loesch's original post was to suggest that the prosecutors hadn't even checked on the extent of Gladney's injuries. But they had checked on his injuries by getting information from St. John's Hospital, so her claim was false.

Even worse for the Loeschs, however, is the fact that Dana did not even know about the additional medical records when she made her claim, and in fact was making it based on a misleading document. Loesch based her defense on the report of blogger Jim Durbin at 24thstate. But Durbin makes it clear that he but not Dana Loesch knew about the additional records. He writes that Loesch's original claim was based entirely on this letter:
Records Letter
Here's the quote from Durbin:

Kenneth Gladney went to the hospital where he was treated and got a signed copy from the hospital stating that no one had accessed the records...That document is presented here, and is the basis of that aspect of Dana's report.

But the problem is that the implication of the statement is inaccurate. Kenneth Gladney went to St. Johns the night of the altercation, and that information was included in the records that were sent. In other words, the phrase following, "To my knowledge" (which was already a hedge phrase) was incorrect. The hospital already had sent over Gladney's information. So Dana Loesch's whole report was based on a document with misleading information, and she used it in a way that was false.

Furthermore, you can see this is the case by observing Jim Durbin's statements. Durbin, if you recall, says that he knew that the information was false but he didn't want to issue a correction because it might help SEIU "concoct a new story." But he makes it very clear on two occasions that Dana Loesch did not know about the additional medical visits when she wrote her original story. Here's Durbin in his blog post:

So we'll call it three and a half correct accusations by Dana, and one that could have been worded better, but couldn't be defended without tipping off SEIU to information that I chose to not reveal. I provided that information to Dana, and so any fault is mine - but a correction could not be provided until now.

And on Loesch's May 17 Radio Show at about the 6:30 Mark of Hour #2:

Jim Durbin: We thought, well surely this must be a mistake and when we looked into it Kenneth actually went to the hospital and said, "has anyone accessed my records?", and they said, "no." And we got a piece of paper, and they signed it, and that was the original source of the report...But there are also other medical records that were out there...that we didn't want to...I personally, it was my fault...and I didn't want to....it was my fault, so if you take flak about them saying that you lied, it's my fault because I didn't want to publish that as we talked about.

In other words, Durbin knew about the other records. Loesch didn't, as is clear from the fact that her original claim was based on the misleading letter.

But if anyone has made it this far and somehow still doesn't believe that Dana Loesch put out false information about the County Counselor's office and owes them an apology and a correction, I now present the smoking guns. Dana Loesch, on November 30, tweeted and wrote a blog post claiming that Reddinton's office did not check the hospital records.


But this, as even Loesch and Durbin have admitted is not true. The hospital records were exactly the records that were requested and received. Game. Set. Match. Dana Loesch, you owe Patricia Reddington an apology and you owe all of us a correction. That is, if you want to call yourself a journalist with a straight face.