Moe's Tavern, Baghdad, would have been an safer outpost for our R. Scott Moxley than the Hyatt Irvine bar a coupla minutes ago. Approaching him like a man on a mission was none other than Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), and boy was he pissed—pissed as in “pissed off” and not (as displayed in previous election nights) pissed drunk.
Rohrabacher took time away from the Orange County Republican celebration/wake to light into Moxley about his recent stories on Jeffrey Nielsen, the former county Republican party operative now facing prison for diddling underage boys.
Dana doth protest that Moxley's stories make him out to be a longtime friend of an accused child molester. Rohrabacher claims he hasn't talked to Nielsen in years, that he's had nothing to do with him, that he knows nothing about the guy, that they never were friends, etc.
Moxley countered that the Congressman hired Nielsen, brought him to Washington, D.C. and wrote a letter recommending him to USC Law School. Rohrabacher claims he would have done that for anyone. The worst impression left by Moxley's reporting, according to Dana, was that he used his powerful influence to interfere with Nielsen's much-delayed court case; truly a plagued, slow-as-molasses prosecution.
Moxley invites Rohrabacher and readers to pore through his coverage and point out where that has been written. Here's a hint: it rhymes with “nowhere.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.