Report: Daily Caller paid man to fabricate Menendez prostitution story

• claim According to the Washington Post, a lawyer in the Dominican Republic has told authorities that the Daily Caller, the conservative news outlet owned by Tucker Carlson, paid him to fabricate a story about Democratic Senator Bob Menendez soliciting prostitutes.
• denial  The new org denies the charges, with Carlson saying in a statement that “The Daily Caller never paid anyone, was never asked to pay anyone and of course never would pay anyone for this story.”

There’s a wrinkle here: In its recounting of today’s revelations, the Daily Caller writes that the lawyer “blamed four news outlets — CNN, The Daily Caller, Telemundo and Univision — for allegedly encouraging him to fabricate false accusations about Menendez.” This isn’t true; according to the Post, the man only accused the Daily Caller—not the other three outlets—of offering to bribe him (the other three were mentioned as having requested to interview the man after he made the claims). The lawyer’s reliability is already shot, having reversed his story at least once, but the Daily Caller has seriously undermined its own credibility by reporting the original story in such a misleading, and indeed factually inaccurate, way. This is one of those weird news stories where all parties involved seem to have been dishonest to some degree—with the possible exception of Menendez himself.