Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man suspected of plotting to assassinate Trump on Sunday, is not completely unknown to the media. In fact, he has shown up multiple times in stories regarding the war in Ukraine.
The New York Times’ Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote that he had interviewed Routh last year for an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine.
Gibbons-Neff wrote, “My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, D.C., he said, and had planned for a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that meeting ever happened.)”
Gibbons-Neff added, “By the time I got off the phone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in way over his head. He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight. I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice said otherwise. He was going to back Ukraine’s war effort, no matter what. Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map again. Until Sunday.”
Meanwhile, Routh also was in touch with CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams about the same topic — the war in Ukraine.
In a CBS News report, Williams said she believes she talked to Routh once by phone and that they texted “frequently.” Williams said Routh put her touch with those fighting in Ukraine. Williams added that he seemed “naive” about his ability to help the Ukrainian war effort. She said she had not heard from him since last November, when he told her he was in Hawaii.
There’s more.
Routh also was interviewed by Semafor in March 2023.
Semafor’s Tanya Lukyanova and Ben Smith wrote Sunday night, “When Semafor talked to him, Routh was one of a wave of American volunteers in Ukraine, the self-appointed director of a group he’d started called the International Volunteer Center. He was, even by the standards of that frantic moment, a bit over the top, a Ukrainian involved in the effort told us at the time. But he was also, they said, authentically involved in the efforts to bring in foreign troops, and we quoted him in a story about the Afghan fighters.”
Lukyanova and Smith wrote, “Routh was not the focus of our 2023 story, and we spoke with him for less than half an hour.”
(Semafor noted that Lukyanova interviewed Routh while she was a journalist at Semafor. She’s now a reporter for The Free Press.)
What’s curious is how Routh kept showing up as a source for various news outlets.
Taking a stand
Over the past four years, candidates running for office all over the country have cast doubt on the integrity of elections. Many have taken their cues from former President Donald Trump, who continues to put forth baseless and false claims about rigged elections.
One newspaper’s editorial board had enough.
The Sun Sentinel in South Florida recently refused to endorse a candidate for office, in part, because of that candidate’s claims of fraudulent elections. Not only did the editorial board endorse the other candidate, it published a lengthy explanation, which included why it refused to even run a questionnaire sent in by the candidate, which it said was full of “myths and falsehoods.”
And get this, the office in question was supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County!
In a scathing piece, the Sun Sentinel editorial board wrote:
For the first time, the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board will not publish online a questionnaire submitted by a candidate. It was submitted by Jeff Buongiorno, an elections conspiracy theorist and the Republican candidate for supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County.
Buongiorno’s questionnaire is replete with myths and falsehoods. He doubts the reliability of Florida election results because, he said, they cannot be “manually verified.” Voting tabulation machines are tested frequently and results are audited, then certified by a canvassing board usually chaired by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Buongiorno claims without evidence that “public trust in our elections has eroded to new lows,” when any mistrust is largely due to Donald Trump’s continued lie that he won the 2020 election. Election results in Florida are extremely reliable.
Buongiorno actively works to undermine public faith in voting by mail. Citing a group called Defend Florida, he claimed in his questionnaire that 20% of Florida’s mail ballots in 2020 were cast by “phantom” voters who were dead or who voted from phony addresses.
Really? More than 11 million Floridians voted in 2020, so 20% of that would be more than 2.2 million people. Such claims are recklessly irresponsible and seek only to undermine faith in honest elections. We wish to publish all candidate questionnaires, but as a trusted media source, we cannot knowingly publish these falsehoods. We are endorsing Wendy Sartory Link for Palm Beach County supervisor of elections.
A gutsy and completely appropriate stance by the Sun Sentinel editorial board.
Steve Bousquet, the opinion editor and columnist for the Sun Sentinel who helped make the decision to not run Buongiorno’s questionnaire, told me in an email, “We received two letters to the editor from readers on our decision, one strongly supportive and one highly critical. One reader said that the media has a responsibility not to perpetuate disinformation, and the other said our decision was ‘insane’ and readers can make up their own minds.”
Later, by phone, Bousquet told me that in its endorsement of Buongiorno’s opponent, the Sun Sentinel website did include a 40-minute or so video interview with Buongiorno in which he repeats many of the false or misleading claims from his questionnaire. Bousquet said that he was aware the news organization would be accused of censorship for not printing Buongiorno’s comments.
“But,” Bousquet said, “we can’t be a transmission belt for blatant misinformation.”
Powerful piece
Be sure to take some time to check out this important but disturbing story. From NBC News’ Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe and Susan Carroll: “Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas.”
The story says, “In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.”
The story adds, “… about 2,350 … unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.”
In addition, here are “5 things to know about NBC News’ investigation into unclaimed bodies used for research in Texas.”
The NBC story came after a 10-month investigation. The story was originally pitched and developed by Carroll, whose byline is on the story. Carroll, who was NBC News’ senior enterprise editor, died suddenly earlier this year.
Schuppe tweeted, “Susy developed the idea, and did a lot of the work on it. When she died earlier this year, we kept going, determined to honor her legacy.”
Schuppe and Hixenbaugh also worked on NBC’s “Lost Rites” project, which investigated America’s failed death notification system.
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