“Normally, in the pitched tabloid battle for exclusives, losing a competitive bombshell like the McCain scandal would send Perel into fits. Not this time. Five Enquirer reporters had spent more than a month in 2007 chasing down the same rumors but failed to uncover any documentary evidence. ‘I wouldn’t have run that piece, there was nothing in it,’ Perel told me recently about the Times story, which received widespread criticism when it ran. ‘It was filled with innuendo. . . . When you’re done reading it, you’re like, there’s no there there.’…

The Enquirer’s reporters are already out there, digging, hustling, and working their sources. ‘We are definitely looking into Obama. We hear a lot of tips. I can’t tell you how many things we hear all the time,’ Perel says. And, while the Enquirer has remained silent on the McCain-Iseman connection, Perel hasn’t killed the story for good. ‘Let’s just put it this way, I don’t think it’s dead,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s right, but I don’t think it’s dead.'”