The New York Times today published a piece by Bill Carter that contains more details about Debat's denials and ABC News' efforts to investigate his previous work for the network. Background on this story here. From the Times:
Alexis Debat, the former consultant to ABC News who has been accused of fabricating interviews with American political figures for a French magazine, strongly defended his reputation yesterday in a telephone interview...
Mr. Debat fought back yesterday against many of the charges against him, saying that he never conducted fake interviews, claiming that the issue of his Ph.D. degree arose from a misunderstanding with the Sorbonne (though he acknowledged he never received a diploma). He also said he welcomed ABC’s investigation.
“I am totally cooperating with them,” he said. “I am 100 percent confident that there will be no inaccuracies found in my reporting.”
But Rue 89, the French Web site that first reported suspicions that an interview with Senator Barack Obama was fake, continued to report new details that undermined Mr. Debat’s credibility. And the French Ministry of Defense tried to debunk his claims to have been an official or adviser in the ministry, saying he was little more than an intern...
ABC News has sent a producer to Pakistan as part of its second investigation into reports involving Mr. Debat. One report it is re-examining concerned a guerrilla organization called Jundullah, which, ABC reported in April, had the support of the United States and Pakistan for operations that led to the kidnapping and murder of several Iranian officials... Brian Ross, the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources.
“We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,” he said.
...So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network “at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.”
ABC did cite some accounts that Mr. Debat accurately tried to warn the network against reporting. In one instance, ABC believed it had information that a terror suspect named Matiur Rehman had been captured in Pakistan in August 2006. Mr. Debat warned ABC it was not true. A day after the report was broadcast, ABC retracted it because Mr. Rehman had not been captured after all.
During the interview, Mr. Debat also denounced challenges of interviews with subjects including former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York that Mr. Debat supplied to the French magazine Politique Internationale. All of those subjects have said they never met with Mr. Debat.
According to his account, the magazine set up the interviews, asked him to submit questions and translate the answers, and put his byline on the results. The editor of Politique Internationale, Patrick Wajsman, has been quoted widely saying that the explanation is untrue and that Mr. Debat is “a grand liar.”
Mr. Debat’s account was further undermined yesterday in a new report from Rue 89, which published an e-mail message from him to Politique Internationale discussing the interview with Mr. Bloomberg, in which he wrote: “The interview with Michael Bloomberg went well. It lasted a little less than one hour but I managed to go over all our questions.”
When asked about the report yesterday, Mr. Debat said, “I have no recollection of these e-mails.”
Similarly, when asked why he had told a reporter for Rue 89, Guillemette Faure, that his Ph.D. had come from the University of Edenvale in Britain, Mr. Debat said: “I never told her that. I know that university is a fake.”
