I earlier wondered aloud if the April 30 report on WSB-TV, Channel 2 in Atlanta, playing newly acquired audio from the Benoit home answering machine, was a leak to reporter Tom Regan.
This morning Richard P. Lindsey, the attorney administering open records requests for the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, told me that the CD with the previously unreleased audio had been sent to everyone who earlier ordered the complete Benoit file — not just Regan and me. I therefore am happy to clarify for the record that there was no leak here.
Regan himself could have headed off such speculation by not breathlessly introducing his audience to evidence he said he had long been seeking and “finally” obtained — implying that the answering machine messages were something he dug up rather than what the county acknowledged to be an inadvertent omission. But Regan isn’t the first reporter, on TV or elsewhere, unable to resist a little hype.
As I’ve said before, the home answering machine stuff is a sideshow to the overall scandal of the shoddy telephonic and other records of the sheriff’s Benoit case-closing report. This will become even more apparent in the next reports on this blog.
Irv Muchnick