Sharyl Attkisson: 'Didn't The People Around Hillary Clinton And Brian Williams Say "Why Are You Changing The Story?"'
By Dom Giordano
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams has suspended himself for at least week after allegations have arisen of him fabricating a story of him in a helicopter in Iraq.
Similarly, in 2008 former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson broke a story that former First Lady Hillary Clinton had been lying about a trip to Bosnia that they were both on.
Attkisson told WPHT midday host Dom Giordano that she questions the kind of people that surround Williams and Clinton, especially when it comes to repeating a lie in which there are a number of people that can disprove it.
"When you're telling a tale that tall, they're so many people that know that it's not true, not the least of which is your own family. Certainly if the First Lady had been shot at in Bosnia, wouldn't it have made news at the time? Wouldn't the President of the United States, her husband have known when she started telling this story? Didn't people around her and didn't people around Brian say to them,'I don't think that that happened' or 'why are you changing the story?'...They must be surrounded by people who either aren't challenging them, or are but somehow they're being brushed off."
While there now being questions of whether or not Williams lied about something that happened to him in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Attkisson feels that it is his future that will be his biggest problem.
"Can he ever cover a military conflict again? Which, predictably he would do if he stayed at that position and there's another conflict. Can he credibly cover it without people thinking in the back of their minds about what he said before? Maybe some people can say that he could overcome it. I mean, Hillary Clinton went on to become Secretary of State and in the end did not apparently bother a great number of people that she either: was delusional and thought this thing happened or she intentionally mislead and either one of those things is fairly serious I think for a public official but she got past it. Maybe Brian can move past it too. Maybe people will get over it and he can just move on and they won't raise it again."
Though it has yet to be seen whether Williams will be able to move past the false reports, she's confident that at the very least, his mindset will need to change.
"I don't think that anybody's really irreplaceable. They are just sometimes treated as if they are."
