Did Alana Goodman time her Daily Mail story about Weiner for an October surprise?

[suffragette]

This last week we have seen Comey insert the FBI into the end of the election by first issuing a cryptic statement about the 'possibility' of emails 'perhaps' associated with Hillary being discovered by the FBI in connection with its investigation into Weiner sexting with an under-aged girl from across state lines.

This week,the FBI released information about its 2001 investigation of President Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, stirring up new discussion and speculation over a 15 year old process and story.

The timing of both of these actions is suspect, especially since these aren't issues that have a resolution before Election Day, but instead are aimed at stirring up feelings of trust or distrust in voters.

As Obama has now said:

"I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations we don't operate on innuendo and we don't operate on incomplete information and we don't operate on leaks," Obama said in the interview, which was taped Tuesday. "We operate based on concrete decisions that are made. When this was investigated thoroughly last time the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was she had made some mistakes but that there wasn't anything there that was procecutable."

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/02/politics/obama-on-fbi-we-dont-operate-on-innuendo/index.html

Yet, the information selectively put forth looks EXACTLY like the kind of innuendo that usually occurs in whisper campaigns and that type of information doesn't depend on accuracy for impact. The impact is in the focus being shifted to discussion of possibilities based on suspicion, rumor and distrust.

I've been wondering more about the story that started this whole chain of events, specifically about the timing of that story. So I went back for another look at it and then at the background of the reporter.

Alana Goodman broke the story for the Daily Mail on September 21, 2016. The story includes the information that the sexting began in January 2016 and went on for some time, "months-long" is what the article notes.

The article gives one clue as to how long the Daily Mail had the information and that it wasn't discovered by them but was delivered to them, stating that:

"DailyMail.com reached out to the 15-year-old girl's family earlier this month after receiving information about her relationship with Weiner."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3790824/Anthony-Weiner-carried-months-long-online-sexual-relationship-troubled-15-year-old-girl-telling-hard-asking-dress-school-girl-outfits-pressing-engage-rape-fantasies.html

This raises questions about the timing, both in terms of whether the information was specifically given to the Daily Mail in early September to be released just before October and whether the Daily Mail further waited until late September when they already had the story in early September.

That got me curious about the reporter. It turns out she has quite the history in other very conservative media. Her bio from her previous position at the Washington Free Beacon states "Alana Goodman is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, she was assistant online editor at Commentary. She has written for the Weekly Standard, the New York Post and the Washington Examiner. Goodman graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 2010, and lives in Washington, D.C." That page includes links to some of her stories there, which are predominantly anti-Clinton hit pieces.

She has also appeared on Fox for one of the stories about Clinton which she apparently broke.

Most interesting, in terms of the timing question, is that this is not the first time Goodman has launched an October surprise at a Democratic candidate.

Mother Jones magazine had a 2015 article about the Washington Free Beacon, noting its "success" at investigation and highlighting some of Goodman's work as an example.

In May 2014, reporter Lachlan Markay obtained a secret list of donors' pledges to the progressive Democracy Alliance—something akin to getting the Koch brothers' political ledgers. A month later, Goodman posted previously unreleased audio of Hillary Clinton candidly discussing her vigorous defense, as a young court-appointed attorney, of an accused child rapist. In October, she uncovered Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor's college thesis, in which he described school desegregation as a "figurative invasion." Two weeks later, the Democrat lost his reelection race. Like the Southern Avenger expose, each of these stories was picked up by the mainstream media, a rare accomplishment for a conservative outlet.

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/washington-free-beacon-conservative-investigative-media

Timing, hmmmmm.