UPDATE: Politico Magazine added an editor's note to the end of Kessler's piece, claiming readers had “misinterpreted” the conclusion:

Editor's note: Some readers have misinterpreted the original last line of Kessler's article as somehow suggesting that the president should be held responsible in the event of his own assassination. That couldn't be further from the truth, and we're sorry if anyone interpreted Kessler's meaning in any other way.

The note did not explain what a correct interpretation of the line would be.

Politico Magazine published a piece by Ron Kessler, a discredited conservative journalist with a history of pushing conspiracy theories, which suggested that President Obama would be to blame for his own assassination and that the president's death could be necessary for the reform of the Secret Service.

The September 30 piece came under fire for its conclusion, which criticized the president's management of the Secret Service:

Agents tell me it's a miracle an assassination has not already occurred. Sadly, given Obama's colossal lack of management judgment, that calamity may be the only catalyst that will reform the Secret Service.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted, this implies either that “Obama is at fault for his inevitable assassination, or he's the only thing standing in the way of cleaning up the agency responsible for his inevitable assassination,” both “bizarre” and troubling suggestions.

But also bizarre and troubling is why Politico published Kessler in the first place. As Marshall pointed out, while Kessler has written several books on the Secret Service and other national law enforcement agencies, “he's made a hard veer to the right” in recent years and is “a bit of a kook.”

Kessler, who left credible newspapers to become the chief Washington correspondent for the right-wing website Newsmax, has been widely been criticized for peddling trashy gossip. He previously accused former first lady Hillary Clinton of “pathological lying” and pushed the conspiracy theory that she drove then-deputy White House counsel Vince Foster to suicide, because Clinton “humiliated him in front of all these White House aides.” He also promoted the falsehood that Obama was in attendance at controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons.

As Media Matters has previously noted, numerous book critics have also slammed Kessler for his reliance on “Page Six”-style gossip and innuendo:

National security reporter James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post that for his book In The President's Secret Service, Kessler “milked the agents for the juiciest gossip he could get and mixed it with a rambling list of their complaints,” comparing the book's reporting to that of the National Enquirer. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called Kessler's Joseph P. Kennedy book The Sins of the Father a “meanspirited, speculation-filled biography ... which purveyed a determinedly poisonous portrait of the man.” That book was also described by Globe and Mail's Andrew Cohen as featuring research that “is sometimes suspect” because Kessler “relies too heavily on speculation, gossip, innuendo and secondary sources.” Publicity material for Kessler's The Secrets of the FBI, as Bryan Burrough wrote in the Post, even promised it would be “filled with revelations about the Bureau and Page Six tidbits.”

Kessler's work over the last few years has solidified his reputation for pushing gossip and conspiracy -- raising questions over Politico Magazine's decision to give him a platform.