NYT Reporters Defend Kavanaugh Hit Job on 'View': Trump's Wrong, We Had No 'Agenda'

New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly were grilled on Tuesday’s The View for omitting crucial information in their hit piece against Brett Kavanaugh published over the weekend. While Meghan McCain slammed the op-ed as a “hatchet job,” Pogrebin and Kelly acted as if they were innocent bystanders only out to seek the truth on Kavanaugh. Pogrebin self-righteously claimed they had no agenda to push and President Trump was merely using the paper for his “political purposes.”

Co-host Meghan McCain began by slamming the paper's reputation and asking what happened:

“I think this is sort of ground zero for why so many people mistrust the media, why people nickname The New York Times ,‘The New York Slimes’ in so many conservative circles.... How did this vital fact get left out?" McCain asked, referring to the named woman not recalling the alleged incident. 

Reporter Kate Kelly admitted it was an “oversight” and blamed the editing process: “[T]he essay is an adaptation of the book that of course we had to edit for length and clarity,” she explained.

When McCain pointed out their alleged witness, Max Stier was on President Clinton’s legal defense team, Kelly looked flustered. Abby Huntsman quickly followed that up, asking why that piece of relevant information was omitted from the Times article:

“Why was that not in the piece, if we’re talking about credibility?” she asked.

Again, Kelly claimed it was for brevity’s sake. But McCain kept on grilling the reporters, confronting them on why they threw the paper’s opinion board “under the bus” instead of admitting they played a part in what details were not included in the opinion piece.

Pogrebin and Kelly again lamely blamed the editing process, before claiming “as soon as they realized” what had been taken out, they issued a correction. McCain didn’t buy that.

“Didn't you realize it because Mollie Hemingway made the correction? I just want to know blankly, you understand why so many people think this is a hatchet job?” she bluntly asked.

Robin Pogrebin insisted that their piece was not intended to be political or partisan but was being used as such by both sides. “Everyone saw in it what they wanted to see. It was used for political purposes at the time. It's being used again,” she lamented.

Laughably, Pogrebin insisted they had no “agenda” to push by rehashing already discredited allegations against the Trump-appointed justice:

What we've seen and I don't think we even anticipated to this degree is that people have seized on certain things and 
magnified them for their own purposes. Frankly, it's fine to have a series of democratic candidates calling for impeachment but that was before the book came out which is today. And you also have Trump kind of jumping on things as if we have an agenda which that was not our intent. Our intent was to revisit these facts with detail and depth and then have people kind of open their minds.