Associated Press Under Fire as Senators, Lawyers Question Legal Liability After Moreno Attack Piece

Cleveland businessman and Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno speaks prior to remark
AP Photo/Jeff Dean
Matthew Boyle
Washington, DC

The Associated Press (AP) is feeling the pressure as an organization after the newswire service published an attack piece on Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.

The heavy scrutiny follows the article’s publication on Thursday evening, and since then, key elements of it have collapsed. Now, several U.S. senators, attorneys, and other high-profile conservatives are publicly questioning if the AP has opened itself up to legal liability should Moreno move to sue the organization.

The gist of the problem for the AP is as follows:

In two separate pieces, the AP revealed that Moreno’s email account was used more than a decade ago to create a salacious Adult Friend Finder account. The Moreno team responded to the AP prior to its publication with the revelation that while the account was in fact made, it was created by a then-intern for Moreno. That intern has signed a document taking responsibility for creating the account and claiming he did so as a prank. Another executive at one of Moreno’s companies confirmed the then-intern had access to Moreno’s email account and that his duties as an intern included regularly checking Moreno’s email account.

While the AP reported as much, its articles cast heavy doubt on this explanation — both in its original two pieces and in social media postings from AP reporter Brian Slodysko, whose byline is on the two articles. Slodysko in his social posts did not include this exculpatory evidence and entirely plausible explanation for why and how the account was originally created.

Bernie Moreno

Bernie Moreno, Republican candidate for Senate, attends the Columbiana County Lincoln Day Dinner in Salem, Ohio, on Friday, March 15, 2024. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

What’s more, as Breitbart News reported on Saturday evening, the two original AP pieces also — in an apparent effort to further link Moreno himself to the account that Moreno’s then-intern says he made as a prank — used the phrase “geolocation data” in an effort to show the “account was set up for use in a part of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where property records show Moreno’s parents owned a home at the time.”

The issue now centers heavily around the AP’s use of the term “geolocation data.”

On Saturday, the founder of Adult Friend Finder publicly came out and said the only location information associated with accounts created in 2008 on his site were latitude and longitude coordinates based off the self-reported zip code of whoever created the account. That means whoever set up the account could have done so from anywhere in the world and the account would have had the same location information because it was based off the zip code the user entered. So, in fact, there was no “geolocation data” associated with this account as that term is commonly understood, nor as that term is defined in the AP’s own style guide.

When originally confronted with these inconsistencies on Saturday, the Associated Press’s spokeswoman Lauren Easton sent back to Breitbart News a tweet thread from the Adult Friend Finder founder that confirms the Associated Press does not in fact have such “geolocation data” and that the location information associated with the account in question was in fact based off the zip code manually entered by whoever created the account. Easton later, after publication of the Breitbart News story, tried to use the official corporate communications account of the Associated Press to deny she did this and to demand a correction from Breitbart News. To set the record straight Breitbart News updated its original story by publishing full screenshots of the entire back-and-forth with Easton on Saturday showing exactly what she communicated.

Now, throughout the evening on Saturday after the initial publication of the Breitbart News investigation into the AP’s articles — and throughout the day on Sunday — several high-profile figures including top lawmakers like Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as some leading attorneys have raised questions about whether the AP opened itself up to legal liability on this front.

On Saturday evening, several top conservatives criticized the AP:

Vance kicked things off early on Sunday by tweeting a screenshot back at the AP’s corporate communications account showing that Easton did in fact tell Breitbart News that the AP does not have the “geolocation data” it originally claimed to have:

Donald Trump Jr., former President Donald Trump’s eldest son, then sent the AP the dictionary definition of “geolocation” and noted that what the AP published does not meet that definition:

Others, too, castigated the AP for the mistake:

Vance, meanwhile, kept the heat up all day:

Jonathan Turley, a top constitutional attorney, then weighed in saying the AP may have opened itself up to serious litigation:

Other attorneys zoned in on this as well:

Then, Vance found the Associated Press’s Style Guide definition of “geolocation,” which the senator says does not match what the Associated Press published in these Moreno stories:

Other prominent conservative attorneys like Mike Davis then highlighted this point as well:

And later in the day, Lee weighed in, becoming the second U.S. senator to hammer the AP on this front:

Meanwhile, other top conservatives and communications industry professionals pointed out the major issues facing the AP right now:

Apparently, the AP is facing problems internally as a result of this:

What happens next remains to be seen but the bar for a public official winning a defamation suit is extremely high.

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