ALLEGED FABRICATOR CONTRIBUTED TO THE GUARDIAN’S MANAFORT-ASSANGE ‘BOMBSHELL’

• The Guardian is under fire over a questionable article published in November that alleged former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met secretly with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
• But as The Washington Post notes, one of the reporters who helped write The Guardian piece has been accused of fabricating documents provided to The Guardian for a 2014 story about an oil deal between Ecuador and China.
• WikiLeaks and Manafort have vehemently denied the latest story, and The Guardian has issued a tepid response supporting the article.

An Ecuadorian journalist who has been accused of fabricating documents in the past helped write a would-be bombshell for The Guardian in November that alleged former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met multiple times, including during the 2016 presidential campaign, with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Fernando Villavicencio was listed as one of three reporters, along with Luke Harding and Ben Collyns, on the print version of the Guardian’s story, which was published on Nov. 27. His name was left off of the web version of the article.

As The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi notes, the Ecuadorian government previously accused Villavicencio, a vocal critic of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, of fabricating documents related to an agreement between Ecuador and China to drill for oil in the Amazon forest.

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