Carrying Water: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Promotes SNAP’s Public Defiance of Federal Court Orders to Reveal Truth About SNAP’s Activities

By David Pierre
TheMediaReport
August 1, 2016

http://www.themediareport.com/2016/08/01/david-clohessy-snap-2/

Together against the Church: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editor-in-chief Gilbert Bailon (l) and David Clohessy, National Director of SNAP (r)

Bravely fighting back: Rev. Joseph Jiang

After years of haranguing the Catholic Church over its alleged "lack of transparency" in its handling of abuse cases, David Clohessy, the national director of the lawyer-funded hate group SNAP, is again not only defying a federal judge's orders to hand over important documents in the case of a falsely accused priest, but he is also now orchestrating a fraudulent media campaign about it.

As we have reported before, Rev. Xiu Hui "Joseph" Jiang has filed a federal lawsuit against his accusers, SNAP, and members of the St. Louis police department for publicly and wrongfully accusing him of being a child molester.

After SNAP openly defied two court orders directing them to turn over important documents in its possession, Fr. Jiang's lawyers are now asking the court to sanction SNAP for its contumacious refusal to obey the court's discovery orders.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch promoting SNAP's lies

Jiang's legal team seeks to obtain SNAP's communications to prove its case of defamation, yet Clohessy and SNAP are fiercely trying to hide behind the silly claim that SNAP is somehow a "rape crisis center" and that divulging its communications would reveal "painful, intimate details" of a victim's "suffering."

In truth, there is no "painful, intimate details" or "suffering" in this case, and SNAP knows this.

Clohessy is desperately trying to dupe the public into believing that the court's order seeks to publicly divulge the names of abuse victims and violate their privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Jiang already knows the names of his accusers, and he has already proposed to redact any unrelated third-party names in the documents.

And the obvious reason that Clohessy does not want to reveal SNAP's communications is that they would likely uncover the fact that the abuse claims against Fr. Jiang are completely bogus and that SNAP knowingly defamed Fr. Jiang. They would also likely uncover the sordid relationship between SNAP and plaintiffs' contingency lawyers.

So in its effort to avoid complying with the court orders against them and sway public opinion, SNAP turned to the always-willing media to advance its phony story line. Naturally, the bleary-eyed gang at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were more than eager to oblige.

Kowtowing to SNAP, the Post-Dispatch's Joel Currier and Valerie Shremp Hahn published apologia articles (1, 2) for SNAP's refusal to obey the law, and then the paper's editorial board chimed in with a painfully biased editorial that dutifully echoed SNAP's media talking points.

It was obvious that either SNAP itself or SNAP lawyer/contributor Ken Chackes – or both – provided information to the paper's editors for its attack on the Church and Fr. Jiang, as the editorial, with its one-sided presentation of past cases and events, read more like a press release from SNAP than any kind of even-keeled analysis. And upon the editorial's publication, SNAP then petitioned a bunch of its wild-eyed "members" from around the country to flood the paper's comments section to cheer on the group's cause.

Yet what was most notably absent from all of the Post-Dispatch's biased reporting was even a scintilla of information from the mountains of evidence that Jiang has obviously been falsely accused. For example:

• "The alleged victim had made previous unfounded allegations of sexual abuse";
• "[The accuser's] parents had a history of making unfounded claims against the Catholic Church for monetary gain";
• "[The accuser's] fourth-grade teacher indicated that [the accuser] was a serial exaggerator to the point of being 'delusional'";
• The same teacher has stated that it was "virtually impossible" that the abuse took place as claimed;
• "[The accuser] has never had any personal acquaintance with Fr. Joseph, and he could not even identify Fr. Joseph's name when he made the allegation";
• "[A parent of the accuser once] physically assaulted the principal of [a Catholic school] by choking him or her";
• The accusers already have 2 liens and 16 judgments entered against them in other cases, they have avoided service of process, and still other process servers are trying to serve them with even more legal papers.

In other words, the mob at the Post-Dispatch has zero interest in justice and truth in the Jiang case, and it certainly does not care that SNAP's Clohessy – a lawyer-funded zealot who has a long history of bigotry against the Church – is flouting court orders to shine a light on SNAP's activities while perpetually berating the Catholic Church for not being open enough.

SNAP's hypocrisy is off the charts once again.

Same as it ever was.