What Really Happened to Harry Reid? Part 5 [Updated]

I have written about the severe injuries that Harry Reid mysteriously sustained on New Year’s Eve or New Years Day on five occasions: here, here, here here and here. In each of those posts, I expressed skepticism that Reid’s injuries, including the loss of sight in his right eye, broken facial bones, severe bruising down his right jaw, a concussion and multiple broken ribs, were the result of a breaking elastic exercise band–or, as Reid later changed his story to claim, a slipping exercise band. My constant theme has been to call for an investigation of what appear to be obviously suspicious circumstances, along with contradictory accounts coming from Harry Reid and his office.

In one of those five posts, this one, I turned the floor over to a man called Easton Elliott. (As I noted in the post, he said that “Elliott” is the name he uses in connection with his avocation as an addiction recovery counselor. He told me that his real name is Lawrence Pfeifer.) His story, if true, strongly suggested that Reid sustained his injuries in a New Year’s Eve altercation with his brother Larry.

I, of course, couldn’t vouch for the veracity of Elliott’s story, and I didn’t. In the linked post I wrote: “That is Easton Elliott’s account. I can’t vouch for it, of course….” Later, I said: “Is Easton Elliott telling the truth? I have absolutely no idea.” But I did check him out to the extent reasonably possible. Among other things, that included spending a couple of hours with him in multiple telephone conversations. He told his story consistently and with seeming sincerity, and swore repeatedly that it was true.

Now, however, he has told the Las Vegas Sun that it was all a lie. Elliott/Pfeifer says he made up his story and went to great lengths to persuade me and others to publish his lies out of pure civic-mindedness: he wanted to “show the lack of credibility and journalistic standards among partisan media figures.” [Footnote: Not sure why he invested so much effort. He could have “show[n] the lack of credibility and journalistic standards among partisan media figures” by noting that virtually every “mainstream” news outlet repeated Harry Reid’s fabricated charge that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes.]

“It was just so outrageous,” he said. “The fact that someone can say something completely false that can destroy somebody’s life, it’s just wrong. Where’s the moral compass?”

Odd words, coming from someone who now says that he made his story up out of whole cloth and went to great lengths to make it public. In any event, it is now clear that Pfeifer is a liar. This is how he explained my (and apparently others’) lack of “standards” to the Sun:

Pfeifer said the media figures who published and broadcast the rumor did so without corroboration and without knowing his true identity. He revealed to them that he was using a pseudonym, he said, yet none demanded proof of his true identity.

That claim is a lie. In fact, I told Elliott that I wouldn’t give him a forum to tell his story unless he would stand behind it, using his real name. He relented and told me that his real name is Lawrence Pfeifer. I Googled Lawrence Pfeifer, and found this on Corporation Wiki:

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 6.29.15 PM

Until recent weeks or days, if you Googled Easton Elliott, you got a LinkedIn page that showed him as an officer of Rainmaker Consultants, a business that had the same Las Vegas address and the same business partner (Darryl Dorfman) that one sees for Lawrence Pfeiffer’s company. So at that level, at least, Pfeifer’s story checked out. All of this was known to me before I agreed to give Pfeifer a forum to tell his story. His claim that I didn’t insist on knowing his real name is a lie.

Very recently, Pfeifer has changed his Easton Elliott LinkedIn page, so that it now reads as follows:

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 6.36.30 PM

It now appears that Pfeifer lied to me in other ways, as well. He sent me a total of 45 emails, as best I can count them, including one containing best wishes for my family for the Easter season. In one email he said that his story had been corroborated by a reporter:

Screen Shot 2015-04-26 at 7.08.49 PM

In another series of emails he said that a friend named Tim had been present at the AA meeting that supposedly was attended by Larry Reid, that Tim could corroborate Pfeiffer’s story, and that he was going to call me. Later Pfeifer told me that Tim had tried to call but had missed me. These were all lies, apparently:

TimScreen Shot 2015-04-26 at 7.12.07 PM

I have no idea what game Pfeifer is playing. Is he some sort of provocateur, as he now implies? Or, more likely, is he an attention-seeking nut? I don’t much care: one way or another, he is a liar, and nothing he says can be taken seriously.

Which leaves us with what I have said in my five posts on Harry Reid’s bizarre New Year’s incident: 1) It is highly unlikely that a breaking or slipping elastic exercise band could cause the severe injuries that Reid sustained. 2) Anyone looking at Reid in the aftermath of the incident would say that he appeared to have been beaten up, although it is also possible that he could have been injured in, say, an automobile accident. 3) Reid has changed his story on what happened, apparently to explain why he hasn’t issued a product liability warning in connection with the (probably fictitious) exercise band. 4) We don’t know basic facts about the incident, such as the time of day when it occurred. If it was in the middle of the night, it is highly unlikely that Reid was exercising. 5) As far as I know, no journalist has conducted even a primitive investigation into the incident. Our compliant media have simply accepted an account, propagated by Reid and his minions, that is implausible at best.

Someday the truth about Reid’s injuries, which may or may not be related to his surprise decision to retire from the Senate, may come out. But that will only happen if one or more journalists gets serious about investigating the incident, rather than allowing Reid to sweep it under the rug.

UPDATE: Speaking of journalistic standards: the Las Vegas Sun article was written by Ric Anderson, the Sun’s Managing Editor. Even though the principal point of his article was to criticize me, Anderson did not contact me prior to publishing the article to ask whether the story Pfeifer told him was correct. This omission is particularly remarkable, given that Pfeifer described himself to Anderson as a liar. Yesterday I sent Anderson a link to this post, with a message along the lines of, “You should have contacted me before publishing the Lawrence Pfeifer article. Pfeifer lied to you, too.”

I, on the other hand, did give Harry Reid’s office an opportunity to comment on Pfeifer/Elliott’s account before posting it. Reid’s office responded irrelevantly, neither confirming nor denying Pfeifer’s story.

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