04/01: AP Mentioned Forged FBI Documents, Too
Back in November, we reported on an AP report that
stated:
A former associate of Sean "Diddy" Combs filed a motion Wednesday to prohibit the hip-hop mogul from circulating FBI interrogation records in which an informant appears to link the associate to a shooting of the late rapper Tupac Shakur.
James Sabatino, once a consultant for Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment Inc., claims his former colleague is distributing the FBI reports as part of a smear campaign. Sabatino, 31, is imprisoned in Pennsylvania on fraud charges and sued Combs last month, claiming he is owed $19 million for music by the late Notorious B.I.G., another former client.
Of course, more recently, it has come out that
Sabatino forged FBI records used by the
L.A. Times. It turns out that the AP cited these forged documents in their story in November. From
Editor & Publisher:
The AP then notes that the documents were revealed as false last week after the Times' March 17 story about Shakur's shooting cited the documents. When the Web site, thesmokinggun.com, questioned the documents on Wednesday, the Times conducted an internal investigation and, later that day, admitted that it could not verify the documents as real.
"It reminded everybody that we had mentioned them ourselves," AP senior managing editor Mike Silverman said about the Times use of the documents. "There are some lessons leaned here that our Miami staff is taking to heart. Anyone can file something with a lawsuit, but that doesn't make it true."
Silverman stressed that the AP's reference to the documents was related to their use in a lawsuit. But he said that does not excuse the assumption that they were real. "There are some things, if we had to do over, we would do," he said about potential further investigation of Sabatino.
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