MSNBC host Joy Reid's anti-gay crisis deepened Wednesday — with an expert hired to fight the scandal forced to deny he is a neo-Nazi sympathizer, and a nonprofit Internet library challenging Reid's claim old homophobic posts were hacked.
The furor erupted last December, when a slew of offensive posts from Reid's now-defunct blog surfaced, forcing her to apologize.
But then Mediaite revealed even more derogatory old posts from the now-closed blog, courtesy of an Internet archive service, called the Wayback Machine.
This time, Reid claimed the posts were hacked.
According to Fox News, NBC reportedly distributed to some reporters a report from independent security consultant, Jonathan Nichols.
His statement claimed he found evidence Reid's blog was breached using information available on the "Dark Web" and blamed other homophobic rhetoric on "screenshot manipulation."
On Wednesday, however, Mediaite reported Nichols once bragged about knowing famed white supremacist Andrew "weev" Auernheimer and "the leadership" of the Nazi site Stormfront.
Nichols has denied sympathizing with Auernheimer.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit Internet Archive, which maintains the digital archive of websites known as the Wayback Machine, on Tuesday challenged Reid’s claim someone added anti-gay material to an archived version of her now-defunct blog, BuzzFeed News reported.
In a statement, the Internet Archive said it had investigated the liberal commentator's assertion in December 2017, following a request from her attorneys.
"When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions," read the statement attributed to Internet Archive officer manager Chris Butler. "At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities."
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