Legendary television broadcaster Barbara Walters apparently helped out a Bashar Assad surrogate, lobbying to land the brutal dictator’s press aide a job at CNN, the New York Post reports.
Walters, who was granted a rare interview with Assad in Damascus in December, sent fawning emails to the 22-year-old advisor who arranged the interview, and promised to land her a news gig.
The Post reports:
The "View" founder had called [Assad adviser Sheherazad] Jaafari "dear girl" and signed her e-mails "Hugs, Barbara" while Jafaari referred to the 82-year-old TV veteran as her "adopted mother."
A few weeks after the airing of the Damascus interview, in which Assad brazenly denied ordering the bloody crackdown that has cost 9,000 lives, Walters had an intimate lunch with Jaafari at the Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, which first obtained the e-mails.
During lunch, Jaafari, the daughter of Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian ambassador to the UN, asked for a job at ABC News.
The Post reports that a "humbled Walters" apologized yesterday after the emails were exposed.
