#Jeff Bezos exposed as the king of fake news

Wow: It now looks like Jeff Bezos and his damage-control team just made up not one but two whole stories to deflect coverage of his affair with a then-married woman: one, a claim that the Saudis had hacked his phone to get telling texts and revealing photos; two, charges that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him into halting his investigation into how the shots had leaked.

Eventually, the world learned that the guy who sold the info to the Enquirer was Bezos’ girlfriend’s brother, a Hollywood press agent — no hacking required and nothing to make the Enquirer fear any “investigation.”

Brad Stone’s new book, “Amazon Unbound,” excerpted for Bloomberg News, details how a consulting firm helped the Amazon CEO assemble his false counterstory, which relied on the suggestion that he’d been targeted because his Washington Post was so critical of both the Saudi regime and then-President Donald Trump — and allowed him to reveal the affair himself while pretending he was being heroic by refusing to be blackmailed.

Pretty masterful while it lasted . . . except that the owner of The Washington Post (“Democracy dies in darkness” is its self-righteous Bezos-era motto) now stands exposed as a cynical purveyor of fake news who even tried to frame a media outlet to protect his own image.