Conservative journalist says he infiltrated, escalated D.C. museum protest

www.washingtonpost.com

Posted by Suzy Khimm at 03:02 PM ET, 10/09/2011

A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have helped instigate the events that prompted the museum to close.

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)

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But Howley’s participation wasn’t cited in Saturday’s major media accounts of demonstration at the Smithsonian museum, which attracted significant coverage because of the protesters’ links to Occupy Wall Street.

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