The Washington Post faces lingering questions after liberal columnist Max Boot is threatened with a media scandal.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted Booth’s wife, Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst and senior National Security Council official, for acting as a covert operative for South Korean intelligence in exchange for luxury gifts.
According to the indictment, Terry allegedly received large gifts in exchange for advocating for the South Korean government’s positions during media appearances, sharing personal information with intelligence agents and brokering meetings to allow South Korean officials access to U.S. officials without registering as a foreign agent.
She denies the charges.
Booth is a former Republican columnist for The Washington Post, and together with his wife, he has written five articles for the paper, all about Korea issues.
The paper responded by placing editor’s notes at the top of several opinion pieces written or co-written by suspected foreign agents, but it used Terry as an expert on the news stories and did not disclose that he was married to a liberal columnist.
“On July 16, a federal indictment was unsealed alleging that Sue Mi Terry acted as an unregistered agent for the South Korean government since 2013,” the memo reads above Terry’s signature.
“If true, this information would have been relevant to The Washington Post’s decision to publish it. Terry denies these charges and, through his lawyers, maintains that the allegations in the indictment are without merit.”
Booth is known for being a fierce critic of former President Trump and was an ardent supporter of “Russiagate,” which claimed the former president may have been a Russian agent.
One of his most infamous articles was a 2019 CNN column titled “18 Reasons Trump Could Be a Russian Asset.”
Boot’s latest column, “Netanyahu May Win, But Israel Doesn’t,” was published on Tuesday.
“Max Boot is a longtime Washington Post Opinion contributor.
“He has not been accused of any wrongdoing and will continue to be a regular contributor to The Washington Post,” a Post spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
The Post did not immediately respond to a series of follow-up questions, including whether Boot would be investigated.
Fox News Digital counted nine opinion pieces with editor’s notes Thursday that Terry wrote or co-wrote, including one published May 27 with the headline “This New Trilateral Relationship Is the Best Answer to China.”
Boot also wrote an article in 2018 titled “Kim Jong Un Played Trump Like a Stradivarius”, in which he quoted Terry but did not inform readers of the personal relationship between the two men.
According to the 31-page indictment, one of the columns Boot wrote with his wife was written at the specific behest of the South Korean government and was headlined “Korea Takes Brave Step Towards Reconciliation with Japan.”
The Washington Post’s editor’s note on the story used the same language as the other articles but added, “The indictment alleges that Mr. Terry co-wrote the column at the request of South Korean officials.”
According to the indictment, the article, published on March 7, 2023, featured as one of the points of discussion a question Terry received via text message from a South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs official about relations between South Korea and Japan.
Beckett Adams, program director at the National Journalism Center, wrote a scathing piece in National Review saying the Washington Post’s “national security columnist may have posed a national security risk.”
Adams wrote that Booth rose to prominence because of his “willingness to spread conspiracies about a foreign takeover of the Republican Party in the Trump era.”
“The question now for the Post is whether to keep Boot on its staff. If it is true that Terry worked as a secret agent for the Republic of Korea for more than a decade, the indictment is severe enough that Boot has no viable defense,” Adams wrote.
Facebook / Sue Mi Terry
“Either he knew about Terry’s side business, in which case he is not qualified to write a national security column. Or he didn’t know, in which case he is not qualified to write a national security column,” he continued.
“In other words, he is either too corrupt or too stupid to ever be taken seriously as a national security and intelligence ‘analyst’ again.”
The situation has also attracted attention on social media.
According to Terry’s indictment, she admitted to FBI agents about a year ago that she was a “source” for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).
It has also been reported that he resigned from the CIA in 2008 rather than be fired due to concerns about contact with South Korean spies.
Terry, who was born in Seoul and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, denies the charges.
“These allegations are baseless and misrepresent the work of a scholar and news analyst known for her independence and longstanding service to the United States,” her lawyers said in a statement.
Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion and Gabriel Hayes contributed to this report.
