Tag: Noel Fritsch

An accusation of sexual assault against Lt. Gov. But as mainstream news outlets scrambled to confirm the photograph on Mr. Northam’s medical school yearbook page on Friday, it became clear that Big League Politics — and its mission of promoting the Trump agenda and nationalist causes — had assumed outsized influence in an increasingly Democratic state. A cloud also now hangs over the head of Mr. Fairfax, who would succeed Mr. Northam if he resigns, after Big League Politics published unsubstantiated accusations that he sexually assaulted a woman he met at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Patrick Howley, the editor in chief, said he received the photograph showing a pair of figures in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes from a “concerned citizen,” declining to add more details. But one of Big League Politics’s owners, Noel Fritsch, described the source of the photograph as “some people who were classmates of Northam,” who brought it to light out of anger at the governor’s remarks early last week defending late-term abortions. In its mission statement, Big League Politics purports to be “not conservative” and “not liberal,” but it has trafficked in conspiracy theories favored by the far right, like the case of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staff member whose murder in Washington was falsely seized on by conservative commentators as linked to WikiLeaks. Last year, Mr. Fritsch was fired as a top aide by Corey Stewart, the Republican senatorial nominee in Virginia, after reports of anti-Muslim comments he had made on social media, as well as saying Senator John McCain “sold all his comrades down the river” as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Provocation is a stock-in-trade for right-wing writers in Washington, but former colleagues said Mr. Howley’s behavior, in public tweets and private emails, went beyond mischief and into darker territory. Later, at Breitbart News, Mr. Howley earned colleagues’ ire when he questioned the credibility of Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter who said she was assaulted by Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, at a Florida rally. “The fact The Washington Post did not run that despite in other cases running things about Brett Kavanaugh and other people based on thinner sourcing is, I think, a dereliction of duty,” he said.