The National Review continues to tell Cory Booker that his stories need more real people.
First it was Booker's imaginary drug-dealer friend, T-Bone; now it turns out the Newark, N.J., mayor, who is running in a special election for U.S. senator, may have created another fictitious tale to boost his superhero profile. According to the Washington Post, the National Review, which revealed that Booker's story about T-Bone was not true, sued Booker after they were refused records relating to Wazn Miller, a person in another one of Booker's tales about life in his city.
The conservative publication previously cast doubt on the existence of a drug-dealer named "T-Bone" whom Booker claimed to have befriended. It has also been digging into Booker's claims that he held Wazn Miller in his arms as the teenager died of a gunshot wound in 2004.
Editor Rich Lowry said the publication had been "stonewalled" in its search for public records on the matter. It sued the City of Newark and the Newark Police Department.
"It should be easy to get more information about the Miller case. New Jersey is an open-records state," Lowry wrote Wednesday afternoon. "Yet for weeks now, we have been stonewalled and given the run-around by everyone we've asked for help in obtaining the relevant police records."
Lowry continued: "We've asked nicely, we've asked firmly, we've asked in every way imaginable, but gotten nowhere. It is much easier to learn about the most sensitive aspects of top-secret national-security programs than it is to get Newark police records related to that day."
James Allen, Booker's spokesman, said that electronic records of the incident don't exist, which meant the police department had to do an old-fashioned search for the hard-copy files. The files were eventually found and will be delivered to the National Review on Thursday.
Whatever the records may show, Booker doesn't stand to take too big a hit from the report if it turns out that he may have stretched the truth. Since the T-Bone story, a recent poll by Rutgers-Eagleton shows the Democratic nominee has a strong, 35-point lead against his Republican opponent in the New Jersey special election for U.S. senator.
Read more at the Washington Post.
Jozen Cummings is the author and creator of the popular relationship blog Until I Get Married, which is currently in development for a television series with Warner Bros. He also hosts a weekly podcast with WNYC about Empire called Empire Afterparty, is a contributor at VerySmartBrothas.com and works at Twitter as an editorial curator. Follow him on Twitter.