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Congressman Combating Harassment Settled His Own Misconduct Case

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Mr. Meehan called on the former aide to waive the confidentiality agreement in the settlement “to ensure a full and open airing of all the facts.” Mr. Elizandro did not respond to follow-up questions about why Mr. Meehan had agreed to the settlement and the confidentiality provision if the allegations were false.

Alexis Ronickher, a lawyer for the former aide, called Mr. Meehan’s statement “a desperate effort to preserve his career.” She said the congressman had demanded confidentiality in the first place, and was now asking her client to waive it knowing that she would not agree because she “prizes her privacy above all else.”

After this article was published online, AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, said that Mr. Meehan was being removed immediately from the House Ethics Committee, where he has helped investigate sexual misconduct claims, and that the panel would investigate the allegations against him. In addition, Mr. Ryan told Mr. Meehan that he should repay the taxpayer funds, Ms. Strong said.

Sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men across a range of industries in recent months have prompted a national conversation about gender dynamics in the workplace, and the inadequacy of support systems for victims. In Congress, several lawmakers have left office or announced their retirements in recent months over sexual harassment claims.

Still, Congress remains a workplace where victims say they have few effective avenues for recourse.

Mr. Meehan’s case sheds new light on secretive congressional processes for handling such complaints, which advocates say are slanted to favor abusers, allowing them to use the vast resources of the federal government to intimidate, isolate and silence their victims.

As a member of the Ethics Committee, Mr. Meehan was tasked with being a part of the solution. The panel has initiated investigations into sexual misconduct claims against at least four congressmen in recent months. Two have resigned: Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan. The other two, Blake Farenthold, Republican of Texas, and Ruben Kihuen, a freshman Democrat from Nevada, remain in office but have said they will not seek re-election.

Mr. Meehan has been pushing for protections for domestic violence victims since his time as a local prosecutor. In Congress, he has sponsored legislation mandating the reporting of sexual violence, and he is a member of a bipartisan congressional task force to end such violence.

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This account is based on interviews with 10 people, including friends and former colleagues of the former aide and others who worked around the office. The New York Times is not naming the former aide, who followed the recommended procedures for reporting harassment but came away from the experience feeling traumatized, according to several people with whom she shared her feelings.

Mr. Meehan’s family was close to the former aide, according to friends and colleagues, and she was regarded as an integral employee in the office, according to people who worked in or around the office. They said Mr. Meehan seemed to favor her over other employees, so much so that others saw his favoritism as unprofessional. He expressed interest in her personal relationships outside the office, then seemed to become jealous in April when word spread through the office about the aide’s boyfriend. After Mr. Meehan’s professions of attraction and subsequent hostility, the woman filed a complaint with the congressional Office of Compliance over the summer, alleging sexual harassment.

The handling of that complaint — which included an aggressive pushback by representatives from Mr. Meehan’s office and congressional lawyers, who suggested she had misinterpreted the congressman’s behavior — demoralized the aide. It led to her estrangement from her colleagues, and isolation from friends, family and her boyfriend, according to the people in whom she confided. It set her back financially and professionally, as she continued to pay legal costs associated with the complaint even after leaving her job in Mr. Meehan’s office and struggling to find a new one. She moved back in with her parents and ultimately decided to start a new life abroad.

Mr. Meehan was represented in this process by two officials from his congressional office and two lawyers for the House’s office of employment counsel.

After counseling and mediation sessions mandated by the Office of Compliance, the sides reached an agreement that included a settlement and a strict nondisclosure agreement, according to people familiar with the process.

The exact amount of the settlement could not be determined, partly because Mr. Meehan’s office paid it from a congressional office fund that allows such payments to be disguised as salary and reported months after they were made. But people familiar with the payout said it was thousands of dollars.

Several of those interviewed traced the woman’s difficulties in Mr. Meehan’s office to 2016, when a senior male member of the office staff professed his romantic attraction to the woman. She reported the advance to Mr. Meehan, and the senior employee left his job after reaching an agreement with Mr. Meehan, according to a person with direct knowledge of the episode who worked in the office. Not long after, Mr. Meehan signaled his own romantic desires to the woman.

The aide’s dealings with the Office of Compliance left her feeling as if the settlement was not worth the emotional distress the process had caused, said the friends and former colleagues. All spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were concerned that, if lawyers for Mr. Meehan or the House accused the woman of violating the nondisclosure agreement, her settlement could be withdrawn and her career prospects further damaged.

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Other women who have endured the complaint process have suffered personal and professional consequences.

“I tried to get another job with another member of Congress, and I was blackballed. Nobody wanted to touch me,” said Marion Brown, who filed the complaint that led to Mr. Conyers’s resignation, and who was not speaking about the Meehan case. “And I’m still going through backlash, because he resigned without admitting doing anything wrong.”

Under federal law, accusers must undergo a confidential process in which co-workers who might be able to provide corroborating evidence are excluded. They often must wait about three months before filing an official complaint, yet they must initiate the process no later than 180 days after the offending behavior. Once the process is initiated, accusers must submit to up to 30 days of counseling and complete another 30 days of mediation.

Ms. Ronickher, the lawyer for Mr. Meehan’s accuser, declined to comment on the specifics of her case. But Ms. Ronickher, who has represented multiple congressional aides who have filed sexual harassment complaints with the Office of Compliance, said, “Given the proven dysfunction of the process as we have it now, it’s critical that Congress act on legislation to revise the process so that victims aren’t re-harmed when they pursue their rights.”

Several proposals are pending before Congress to overhaul the harassment reporting process, and some would bar payouts from House members’ office accounts.

Mr. Meehan’s accuser paid her own lawyers’ fees, and the settlement she reached was not enough to cover her legal and living expenses while she was out of work, according to a person with whom she discussed her finances.

The congressman has been regarded as a target for Democrats because his district, which is considered among the nation’s most gerrymandered, was carried narrowly by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

One of the leading Democratic prospects, State Senator Daylin Leach, suspended his bid in December, after he was accused of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching.


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Supreme Court to Consider Challenge to Trump’s Latest Travel Ban

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The restrictions vary in their details, but for the most part, citizens of the countries are forbidden from emigrating to the United States and many of them are barred from working, studying or vacationing here.

In December, in a sign that the Supreme Court may be more receptive to upholding the September order, the court allowed it to go into effect as the case moved forward. The move effectively overturned a compromise in place since June, when the court said travelers with connections to the United States could continue to travel here notwithstanding restrictions in an earlier version of the ban.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the December ruling.

Hawaii, several individuals and a Muslim group challenged the latest ban’s limits on travel from six predominantly Muslim nations; they did not object to the portions concerning North Korea and Venezuela. They prevailed before a Federal District Court there and before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.

The appeals court ruled that Mr. Trump had exceeded the authority Congress had given him over immigration and had violated a part of the immigration laws barring discrimination in the issuance of visas.

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In his brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote that the president has vast constitutional and statutory authority over immigration. He added that the third order had been the result of “an extensive, worldwide review by multiple government agencies.”

“The courts below,” Mr. Francisco wrote, “have overridden the president’s judgments on sensitive matters of national security and foreign relations, and severely restricted the ability of this and future presidents to protect the nation.”

The appeals court based its ruling on immigration statutes, not the Constitution’s prohibition of religious discrimination. But both sides urged the Supreme Court to consider both the statutory and constitutional questions if it agreed to hear the case.

Lawyers for the challengers told the justices that Mr. Trump’s own statements provided powerful evidence of anti-Muslim animus. The latest order, they said, was infected by the same flaws as the previous one.

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“The president has repeatedly explained that the two orders pursue the same aim,” the challengers wrote. Nine days before the September order was released, they wrote, “the president demanded a ‘larger, tougher and more specific’ ban, reminding the public that he remains committed to a ‘travel ban’ even if it is not ‘politically correct.’”

On the day the September order became public, the challengers added, “the president made clear that it was the harsher version of the travel ban, telling reporters, ‘The travel ban: the tougher, the better.’”

Mr. Francisco said discrimination had played no role in the September order. “The proclamation’s process and substance confirm that its purpose was to achieve national-security and foreign-policy goals, not to impose anti-Muslim bias,” Mr. Francisco wrote.

The Supreme Court, back at full strength after Mr. Trump’s appointment of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, already had an unusually large number of significant cases on its docket, including ones on voting rights, union power, digital privacy and a clash between claims of religious freedom and gay rights.


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The most comprehensive look yet at how the Las Vegas concert massacre unfolded

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In an 81-page investigative report released Friday, Las Vegas police gave their most comprehensive timeline to date on how the Oct. 1 massacre unfolded at a country music concert on the Strip.

The report did not give any greater insight into why gunman Stephen Paddock, an amateur gambler, opened fire on thousands of people from his room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, killing 58 people before killing himself.

Nor was it likely to settle questions about why police arrived on the 32nd floor, where Paddock was perched, only after he had stopped shooting.

But investigators’ findings gave a little more detail on what police know about Paddock’s activities before and during the shooting — important because of lingering questions about how Paddock’s preparations had gone unnoticed, and why it took so long for his deadly shooting spree to end.

Trump gets mixed reviews from March for Life antiabortion protesters

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Thousands of activists at the annual March for Life enjoyed a rare display of political firepower Friday, with addresses by the president, vice president and House speaker all celebrating gains the antiabortion movement has made under Donald Trump. But the movement’s elevated status comes at the price of much internal debate.

“Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, in a speech that was broadcast to the marchers gathered near the Washington Monument.

The march — which typically draws busloads of Catholic school students, a large contingent of evangelical Christians and poster-toting protesters of many persuasions — falls each year around the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a legal right to abortion, and it intends to pressure Congress and the White House to limit legal access to the procedure.

Trump said he was “really proud to be the first president to stand with you here at the White House”; Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush addressed the march by telephone when they were in office.

[‘Badass. Prolife. Feminist.’ How some women are bridging the March for Life and the Women’s March.]

Megan Ensor, who came from Atlanta to attend her first March for Life, expressed her enthusiasm that Trump took the time to speak to the marchers. “When it comes to the greatest moral evil of our time, the question that is most important is that he cares. . . . When he comes today, that’s a good thing. We don’t have to agree with him on everything,” she said.

Anna Rose Riccard, 25, works for antiabortion organizations and called the president’s appearance not a boon but an “unfortunate distraction.” Riccard, of Alexandria, said she doesn’t believe the antiabortion cause is a priority for Trump, and she saw fellow Catholics disagreeing on social media about his appearance.

“I give him credit for appointing a conservative justice,” she said, referring to Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

Trump, however, touted his administration’s antiabortion policies, including new orders on Thursday and Friday establishing an office to support medical professionals who do not want to perform abortions and making it easier for states to direct funding away from Planned Parenthood.

[Trump will address the March for Life. Here’s what abortion opponents want.]

Most leaders of the antiabortion movement don’t blame Trump for what they perceive as a lack of progress; they fault Republicans in Congress for inaction.

“It’s because of the Senate. I put the blame with the Senate,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said in an interview last week. “I think that some of our members of Congress are afraid to be courageous on these issues.”

Though Trump said Friday that “Americans are more and more pro-life; you see that all the time,” views on abortion have remained quite steady for decades. Since the mid-1990s, about half of citizens, give or take a few percentage points, have said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40-odd percent have said it should be illegal in all or most cases.

[‘If they come for you, they come for me’: A priest faces deportation — and a divided church]

Last year, the March for Life fell just days after Trump’s inauguration, and the tone was ebullient. Marchers believed they were heralding an administration that would prioritize limiting abortion. Mancini said then that she had four goals for policy in the president’s first year in office: appointing an apparently antiabortion Supreme Court justice, defunding Planned Parenthood, codifying the annual Hyde Amendment that restricts federal money from funding abortions and passing a law banning abortion in many cases after 20 weeks.

A year later, only the first of those four goals has been accomplished.

Bills to make the Hyde Amendment permanent and to ban certain late-term abortions passed in the House but are unlikely to pass the Senate. Both chambers of Congress tried to defund Planned Parenthood in their unsuccessful efforts to pass a health-care bill.

Even abortion rights supporters are surprised that antiabortion policies haven’t made more headway in the past year.

“I think it goes to show how the Republicans just didn’t have a plan, in many ways,” said Heather Boonstra, director of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute.

[Sexual abuse case against the Mormon Church begins in West Virginia]

The White House has advanced several policies through executive orders rather than legislation, starting with an expanded version of the Bush-era Mexico City policy, which bars U.S. funding to public health organizations that promote abortion overseas and which Trump reinstated upon taking office. On Thursday, the day before the march, Trump announced another policy that pleased antiabortion activists — a new office meant to protect the rights of medical professionals who don’t want to participate in abortions because of their religious beliefs.

In his speech Friday, Trump noted those actions, and boasted about the stock market and unemployment rates as well. He called to the podium a mother who became pregnant at 17 and later went on to help establish a facility to support homeless pregnant women.

Trump repeated a claim he made during a presidential debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016 — that a fetus in “a number of states” can be aborted “in the ninth month.”

“It is wrong. It has to change,” he said about those late-term abortions. As the Post’s Fact Checker pointed out in 2016, 89 percent of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks and only 1.2 percent occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute. All but seven states prohibit some abortions after a certain point in pregnancy, making “ninth month” abortions exceptionally rare and largely banned already.

[HHS releases new rule on health workers’ religious, moral objections]

Vice President Pence mentioned the Roe v. Wade anniversary, saying, “Forty-five years ago, the Supreme Court turned its back on the inalienable right to life. But in that moment, our movement began.” He praised Trump as “the most pro-life president in American history” and vowed, “With God’s help, we will restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

At the marchers’ noon rally east of the Washington Monument, the White House satellite appearance was part of a slate of speakers, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

The crowd gave him rock star treatment, with whoops and applause. “How grateful are we to have a pro-life president back in the White House!” Ryan said.

“One thing that gets lost is how compassionate the pro-life movement is,” he said. “To help women who have gone through the pain of abortion, to help single mothers, to give them resources through thousands of pregnancy centers: This is the face of the pro-life movement.”

Ahead of the march, antiabortion groups around the region hosted events on Friday morning – huge youth Masses full of screaming teenagers, a meeting on legal strategies to limit abortion and a conference in the basement of a downtown hotel where the emphasis was on expanding the idea of “pro-life.”

Hundreds of people at the Evangelicals for Life conference wandered booths about prison ministries and health care and heard speakers talk about the importance of adoption and serving refugees.

Popular evangelical author and speaker Ann Voskamp talked to a crowd of largely young white listeners about a “robust pro-life ethic. … We are for both humans in utero and humans in crisis. This is us.”

The message echoed a talk on Capitol Hill Thursday, in which the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, one of Trump’s evangelical advisers, stood with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urging Congress to protect undocumented young adults. Noting that the March for Life would be the next day, Rodriguez said the two topics were linked as “life” issues.

Jessica Ponce, 26, marched at the very front of the pack with fellow parishioners from the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala. She said the experience is poignant because she just learned she is pregnant. A native Mexican who is now a permanent resident in the United States, she said that to her, “pro-life” means taking care of all human beings, including immigrants and refugees.

“It’s not possible to care for people if you are separating families, and parents cannot defend the lives of their children if they are not able to stay together,” she said.

In an effort to make the same point, a group of Franciscan priests stood near the front of the stage during the rally. When Trump appeared on the screen, they raised banners saying: “Keeping families together is pro-life! Keep God’s dream alive!”

“I’m here to stand for the integrity of my faith and of the gospel. I’m not willing to sacrifice that for political expediency,” said the Rev. Jacek Orzechowski, a community organizer with Catholic Charities of Washington. “For someone to say they’re pro-life but display callous policies that tear families apart is reprehensible.”

A Catholic priest from New York City said some in his parish – a heavily Central American congregation that includes many undocumented immigrants – didn’t come to Washington out of fear. The priest, who said he was afraid to use his name, still praised Trump’s talk at the rally. “We put our faith in no man. Our faith is in Jesus.”

About 50 demonstrators staged their own rally outside the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum rather than joining the main rally on the Mall, to protest Trump’s address. They said their belief that life begins at conception comes from scientific research on fetal development, not from faith. They brought “I am a pro-life feminist” signs that they hoped would indicate that the antiabortion movement is not just “a bunch of priests,” as Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa put it.

“Let’s put some secular, pro-life, bad-ass feminists up front,” she said.

Many leaders of the movement, though, publicly embrace Trump to greater or lesser extent. Mancini said she thinks the marchers, most of them young because of the prevalence of school groups in attendance, telegraphed a message of support to the president. “For Trump, hopefully, he feels thanked and strengthened for his perspective,” she said.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey contributed to this report. This post has been updated.

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Pope Francis Has Defended a Chilean Bishop Accused of Covering Up Sex Crimes

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(SANTIAGO, Chile) — Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander Thursday, an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country.

Francis said that until he sees proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the sex crimes of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, such accusations against Barros are “all calumny.”

The pope’s remarks drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates. They noted the accusers were deemed credible enough by the Vatican that it sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes in 2011. A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.

“As if I could have taken a selfie or a photo while Karadima abused me and others and Juan Barros stood by watching it all,” tweeted Barros’ most vocal accuser, Juan Carlos Cruz. “These people are truly crazy, and the pontiff talks about atonement to the victims. Nothing has changed, and his plea for forgiveness is empty.”

The Karadima scandal dominated Francis’ visit to Chile and the overall issue of sex abuse and church cover-up was likely to factor into his three-day trip to Peru that began late Thursday.

Karadima’s victims reported to church authorities as early as 2002 that he would kiss and fondle them in the swank Santiago parish he ran, but officials refused to believe them. Only when the victims went public with their accusations in 2010 did the Vatican launch an investigation that led to Karadima being removed from ministry.

The emeritus archbishop of Santiago subsequently apologized for having refused to believe the victims from the start.

Francis reopened the wounds of the scandal in 2015 when he named Barros, a protege of Karadima, as bishop of the southern diocese of Osorno. Karadima’s victims say Barros knew of the abuse, having seen it, but did nothing. Barros has denied the allegations.

His appointment outraged Chileans, badly divided the Osorno diocese and further undermined the church’s already shaky credibility in the country.

Francis had sought to heal the wounds by meeting this week with abuse victims and begging forgiveness for the crimes of church pastors. But on Thursday, he struck a defiant tone when asked by a Chilean journalist about Barros.

“The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak,” Francis said. “There is not one shred of proof against him. It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”

Francis had defended the appointment before, calling the Osorno controversy “stupid” and the result of a campaign mounted by leftists. But The Associated Press reported last week that the Vatican was so worried about the fallout from the Karadima affair that it was prepared in 2014 to ask Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops to resign and go on a yearlong sabbatical.

According to a Jan. 31, 2015, letter obtained by AP from Francis to the executive committee of the Chilean bishops’ conference, the plan fell apart and Barros was sent to Osorno.

Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of Osorno lay Catholics who have mounted a three-year campaign against Barros, questioned why Francis was now accusing the victims of slandering Barros when the Vatican was so convinced of their claims that it planned to remove him in 2014.

“Isn’t the pastoral problem that we’re living (in Osorno) enough to get rid of him?” Claret asked.

The reference was to the fact that — guilty or not — Barros has been unable to do his job because so many Osorno Catholics and priests don’t recognize him as their bishop. They staged an unprecedented protest during his 2015 installation ceremony and have protested his presence ever since.

Anne Barrett Doyle, of the online database BishopAccountability.org, said it was “sad and wrong” for the pope to discredit the victims since “the burden of proof here rests with the church, not the victims — and especially not with victims whose veracity has already been affirmed.”

“He has just turned back the clock to the darkest days of this crisis,” she said in a statement. “Who knows how many victims now will decide to stay hidden, for fear they will not be believed?”

Indeed, Catholic officials for years accused victims of slandering and attacking the church with their claims. But up until Francis’ words Thursday, many in the church and Vatican had come to reluctantly acknowledge that victims usually told the truth and that the church for decades had wrongly sought to protect its own.

German Silva, a political scientist at Santiago’s Universidad Mayor, said the pope’s comments were a “tremendous error” that will reverberate in Chile and beyond.

Patricio Navia, political science professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago, said Francis had gone much further than Chilean bishops in acknowledging the sexual abuse scandal, which many Chileans appreciated.

“Then right before leaving, Francis turns around and says: ‘By the way, I don’t think Barros is guilty. Show me some proof,’” Navia said, adding that the comment will probably erase any good will the pope had won over the issue.

Navia said the Karadima scandal had radically changed how Chileans view the church.

“In the typical Chilean family, parents (now) think twice before sending their kids to Catholic school because you never know what is going to happen,” Navia said.

Cable crew caught trying to sneak in fake bomb at Newark Airport

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Seven members of a cable TV crew were arrested at Newark Airport on Thursday after trying to film themselves passing a fake explosive device through a security checkpoint and onto a plane, according to reports.

The crew was working for the cable network CNBC, according to nj.com.

The fake explosive device was in a carry-on bag and never made it past security, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Michael McCarthy said.

“They failed, were caught and were arrested on multiple charges,” he said, without elaborating on the charges.

The crew members could also be assessed civil penalties in the tens of thousands of dollars, he said.

A law enforcement source told nj.com that the fake explosive consisted of a piece of PVC pipe with wires sticking out of it.

Another source told the website that the crew was employed by Endemol Shine Group, a Dutch production company that contracts with CNBC; Endemol also produces MasterChef and The Biggest Loser.

“We are looking into the details of what happened as a matter of priority and are in contact with relevant authorities on the ground,” a spokesperson for Endemol Shine North America told nj.com.

“We sincerely apologize for any disruption caused.”

York County sheriff’s detective dies a day after he and 3 other officers were shot

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A York County, S.C., sheriff’s detective who was critically injured in a shooting died Wednesday night at a hospital, authorities said.

Michael Doty was among four officers shot early Tuesday in connection with a domestic violence call. Doty had been with the sheriff’s office for 12 years.

The wounded also included sheriff’s K-9 Deputy Randy Clinton, sheriff’s Sgt. Buddy Brown and York Police Sgt. Kyle Cummings.

The officers were shot at two locations during a manhunt for suspect Christian Thomas McCall, 47. McCall was shot by law enforcement during the pursuit. His condition has not been released.

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The three other officers who were shot are expected to be OK, Observer news partner WBTV reported.

The shootings happened after deputies responded to a domestic violence call late Monday at a home on Farrier Lane, outside the city of York.

Joe Marusak: 704-358-5067, @jmarusak

A porn star had a racy tale about Trump. Why are we only learning about it now?

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Several journalists surely knew who Stormy Daniels was in 2016, and it probably wasn’t because they’d seen her in one of the many porn films she’d made.

The adult-film actress was on the radar of a number of mainstream news outlets in the waning days of the presidential campaign. Reporters from ABC, Fox News, the Daily Beast and Slate.com were pursuing a potentially explosive story: that Daniels had allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, only months after Trump’s wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron.

Yet no one went with the story.

Given the context and potential importance of Daniels’s story — on the heels of multiple sexual assault allegations against Trump and the controversy over his vulgar remarks on the “Access Hollywood” video — the question is, why? Why wasn’t the story reported at the time, when it might have intensified questions surrounding Trump’s character just before voters went to the polls?

Journalists say they held back because they couldn’t independently corroborate key elements of Daniels’s account, including in one instance from Daniels herself. The story, in other words, failed to rise to journalistic standards, never mind that it involved a man who regularly attacks the news media for lacking standards.

The story behind the story began to spill out only in the past week, touched off by a Wall Street Journal report about Michael Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The Journal reported that Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to Daniels a month before the election in 2016 in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump. Daniels, Cohen and the White House have denied any such relationship; she also denied in a statement issued by Cohen that she was paid “hush money” by Trump.

The most advanced reporting on the story in 2016 appears to have been done by Jacob Weisberg, the editor of the Slate Group. After receiving a tip about Daniels, Weisberg spoke with Daniels and exchanged text messages with her multiple times starting in the summer of 2016 — all of it on the record, meaning there were no restrictions on its publication. He also spoke to three of her friends, all of whom “confirmed the outlines of her story,” according to Weisberg’s account, published Tuesday by Slate.

In addition, Weisberg said he received a two-page document from Daniels that appears to be a nondisclosure agreement that binds her to silence about the terms of a settlement. The document identifies the other party only as “David Dennison a.k.a. [blank].”

But that was the end of that. Daniels stopped responding to Weisberg a week before the election, leaving him in the dark about crucial details. While he was aware of the alleged affair, Weisberg said he lacked independent corroboration of the confidentiality settlement. He calls that the most important part of the story. (The Smoking Gun website had already published details of the alleged affair in mid-October, to little public notice or reaction.)

“In sum, we just didn’t have the story in a form that we could use it,” Weisberg said in an interview.

He added: “I don’t think we were too cautious [in not publishing at the time]. We just didn’t have it nailed down. I regret that we couldn’t publish it, but not that we didn’t publish it under the circumstances.”

The Daily Beast’s executive editor, Noah Shachtman, said his publication decided not to go with a story despite having three sources confirming the affair, including one on the record, Daniels’s friend Alana Evans. (Evans recounted her story on the “Today” show on Tuesday.) Daniels herself was ready to confirm it as well, he said, but she backed out of an interview on Nov. 3, apparently after signing the nondisclosure agreement. That defection was critical; Shachtman said the Daily Beast would have published if Daniels had confirmed what other sources were already claiming.

“Without that first-person confirmation, we didn’t feel comfortable running the story, especially with just a few days to go before the election,” he said. The website’s reporters periodically checked back in with Daniels’s camp but were told she wasn’t talking. “Now we know why,” he said, referring to the nondisclosure agreement.

ABC News and Fox News, both of which also pursued the story but didn’t report it, declined to comment.

Of the two, Fox appears to have come closest; one of its reporters, Diana Falzone, reportedly filed an online story in October 2016 about an alleged sexual relationship between Trump and Daniels, according to CNN.com. The story was killed, though it’s not entirely clear why. In a statement to CNN, Fox News digital editor Noah Kotch said, “In doing our due diligence, we were unable to verify all of the facts and publish a story.”

Both the earliest and latest arrival to the story may be InTouch, the celebrity magazine. Despite Daniels’s denials of an affair, the publication on Wednesday unearthed what it said was an interview with her in which she described a year-long sexual relationship with Trump — an interview the magazine conducted with Daniels in 2011 but never published.

Why did it take more than six years to print Daniels’s account?

“I think that’s everyone’s question right now,” said James Heidenry, InTouch’s editorial director, in an interview. “I’ve only been here since November. I can’t speak to decisions that were made before then.”

Heidenry said the interview with Daniels, conducted by a former staffer, “had fallen off the radar” for the magazine’s current staff and only “rang a bell” after Daniels landed back in the news last week. InTouch has not published the recording or made it public.

Daniels — who wasn’t bound by a nondisclosure agreement at the time — spoke freely and at length about Trump to InTouch. Daniels and her then-husband, who corroborated his wife’s account, both took polygraph tests supervised by the magazine and passed, Heidenry said.

Although voters were left in the dark about Trump’s alleged relationship with Daniels before the election, news organizations’ reluctance to publish the story suggests a high level of professionalism, said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute.

“It is not clear whether any news organization had the hush-money story [or the affair itself] in a verifiable form prior to the election,” he said. “In journalism, you shouldn’t publish what you believe to be true. You should only publish what you can prove.”

State Department staff print off Trump tweets to help Rex Tillerson formulate foreign policy

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Wednesday State Department aides give him printed-out copies of President Trump’s tweets so he can determine whether he needs to tweak U.S. foreign policy based on the social media posts.

“The challenge is just getting caught up, because I don’t even have a Twitter account that I can follow what he is tweeting, so my staff usually has to print his tweets out and hand them to me,” Tillerson told former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a Hoover Institute event at Stanford University, where Rice is now provost.

The country’s top diplomat then asked himself, “How do we take that and now use it?”

Tillerson praised Trump for leveraging the social media platform to “great effect” by “bypassing the way you traditionally communicate.”

Trump has in the past dismissed Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts via his tweets.

In October, Trump said Tillerson should save his “energy” while dealing with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

“We’ll do what has to be done!” the commander in chief tweeted.

Tillerson on Wednesday also discussed at the event how he believed U.S. military forces should remain in Syria to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State or another terrorist group.