Free Guilty Minds by Joseph Finder

Mall was postcard-perfect. “Slander Sheet
.
I detest that website with every fiber of my being.”
    “Everyone does, but everyone reads it just the same.”
    “It’s funny, Nicholas. Everything old becomes new again. Our republic had slander sheets even before it had newspapers. They were mudslingers, that’s all. Every printer belonged to a political faction, and they put out gazettes that endlessly circulated lies about their opponents. Defamation sluiced through those pages like sewage. Adams was declared a bugger, and Madison a spy, and Jefferson—what was it now?—was supposedly keeping a slave mistress!”
    “Actually, about that—”
    “So I will freely grant: our newborn electoral government was as shit-stained as any infant’s diaper. But something has changed, Nicholas. The Internet has supercharged the gossip pages. Weaponized them. Theselow-minded rags are like those smallpox-infected blankets we once gave the Indians. The japes and jeers of old now form permanent lesions. And American politics has become gravely disfigured as a result.”
    I nodded.
    “Let me tell you a story. In confidence.” He arched his great white brows. “I know I can trust you.”
    “Of course.”
    “About a year and a half ago, one evening, I had a few drinks with some Senate colleagues. Right here, in fact. Maybe I had a few too many. Well, there’s no
maybe
about it, I had a few too many. I was driving back to my house on Foxhall Road, and I may have gone through a red light, though I still maintain it was yellow. And I was pulled over by the police, who wanted to know if I’d been drinking.”
    “Was Congress in session?” I asked.
    “Ah, very good. Unfortunately not.”
    It’s a little-known fact that members of Congress cannot be arrested or detained while Congress is in session, except for treason or felony. “I told him who I was, and he said, ‘Shit,’ and he made a call. And after a long while he got out and told me to get into his cruiser and he took me home. And that was that, except for a nasty hangover. We managed to keep it quiet. Well, a few months after that, my office got a call from a reporter at Slander Sheet
.
Somehow they’d found out about the incident, and they were threatening to publish a story. You can imagine we went into something of a panic. What do you do? How do you induce them not to publish? Back in the day, if it was
The
Washington Post
, I’d call Ben Bradlee, and we’d do some horse trading. I’d offer him an exclusive on something . . . A splash more, Nicholas?” He poured himself another few fingers of bourbon.
    I shook my head. “I’m good.”
    “But Slander Sheet is a new creature entirely. Who owns it? Who calls the shots? The editor in chief is a loathsome little toad namedJulian Gunn, but he’s not the owner. And he doesn’t exactly play ball. My aides tried to negotiate with him, but no dice. So I called this Julian Gunn myself and said to him, ‘Look, what can we do here? Surely your readers don’t care about some antiquated senator from Massachusetts and what he does in his off hours!’ I promised him an exclusive, I offered him special access, but he wasn’t interested in any of that.”
    “He wanted dirt,” I said.
    “Exactly. Anything personal on the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, what have you. He wanted dirt, and he wasn’t going to settle.”
    “You gave him something, I assume, because I never saw the drunk-driving story.”
    Brennan bowed his head. A line of sweat beads had broken out across his forehead. “I did something I regret to this day.”
    I nodded sympathetically and waited. He looked genuinely agonized.
    “I gave them dirt. I gave them Steve Frazier.”
    “The congressman?”
    “Former.” He nodded. “And former friend.” Representative Steve Frazier was a powerful conservative congressman from upstate New York who’d recently resigned after Slander Sheet had published a story revealing that, in