( CNN ) -- That was an interesting week ! On Wednesday , Google Alerts brought me a piece of startling news : A lawyer speaking to a tribunal of the Supreme Court of Pakistan had accused me of acting as a paid agent of the government of Pakistan . No , seriously , that 's what the man said . From Pakistan 's Daily Times on May 23 : . `` Counsel Akram Sheikh had claimed in a statement that a Pakistani embassy provided funds to Harlan Ullman and David Frum for damage control after the memo controversy . '' I was so taken aback by the claim that I telephoned Sheikh to ask whether it was true . We had a short but intense exchange . Sheikh flew immediately into a rage at me , accused me of harassing him , insisted that I was somehow violating Pakistani law by telephoning him , refused to confirm or deny the Daily Times account and ended by inviting me to sue him for defamation . My confidence in the Pakistani system of justice not being very high , I declined the latter invitation . But given that Sheikh 's charges have gained a hearing inside Pakistan , some kind of answer seems due . Sheikh 's charges are false , of course . Duh . More surprising than the falsehood , though , is the sheer laziness of the charge . Where is the fake evidence ? The forged check , the bogus wire transfer , the suborned courier ? Money always leaves a record . Can you really stand up in front of a Pakistani tribunal and spout whatever fool nonsense pops into your head ? Apparently so . Yet as ludicrous as are Sheikh 's statements about me -- I 'll leave Ullman to speak for himself -- this small comedy is a piece of a much larger drama . On October 10 , Britain 's Financial Times printed an opinion piece that contained an arresting claim : The author said he had personally conveyed a memo from the Pakistani Embassy in the U.S. to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff , requesting U.S. help to prevent a military coup . The story was dramatic and important , but there was one troubling element : the byline on the piece . The author was Mansoor Ijaz , a writer with a long , long history of discredited assertions . Remember the story about the Clinton administration rejecting a 1996 offer by the government of Sudan to extradite Osama bin Laden ? That story , investigated and debunked by the September 11 Commission , continues to circulate among the American right to this day . That story was the work of Ijaz , the first -- but not the last -- of his disproven allegations . ( Click here for a comprehensive list by CNN 's Peter Bergen and by Andrew Lebovich . ) Yet despite the dubious source , the Financial Times story ignited a firestorm in Pakistan . Pakistan 's ambassador to the U.S. was forced to resign . Not content with his first success , Ijaz added further allegations , including one that the government of Pakistan had been tipped off the to bin Laden raid . That latter claim was even more explosive : Â Only last week , a Pakistani court sentenced to 33 years in prison a local doctor convicted of helping the United States track bin Laden . Mansoor Ijaz : Pakistan is stronger after 'memogate ' Now to my part in the story . Writing here at CNN.com in December , I ridiculed Ijaz 's suggestion that the U.S. government would ever have shared such information with the government of Pakistan , and reminded readers of Ijaz 's history of unreliability . This column caught the attention of authorities inside Pakistan . Pakistan had convened a special commission of its Supreme Court to investigate Ijaz 's memo allegations . On March 15 , that commission asked Ijaz to answer my column . Ijaz , who was under oath , told the tribunal that he had sued me for libel . He said , `` In view of the fact Mr. Frum defamed me , my lawyers in Washington informed him that if he does not retract , I will be taking legal action against him . '' ( You can read the transcript here . This exchange is on page 43 . ) This statement was untrue . No lawyer for Ijaz had ever contacted me , I was never threatened with legal action over the column , and I did not retract it , points I made in a follow-up column March 21 . Sheikh is Ijaz 's counsel before the investigating commission . I surmise it was irritation with my March 21 column that led Sheikh to concoct the new accusation that I was a Pakistani government spy . My sense , from the distance of Washington , is that Pakistanis are slowly coming to the realization that the memo controversy was a hoax . Yet as with the false charges against Clinton , the damage to Pakistani civil institutions from the memo controversy will not soon be undone . Those Western media organizations that enabled the hoax have a reckoning to do . Ijaz has a long and proven record of false reporting about some of the most serious issues of international security . It seems only elementary editorial prudence to decline to put media institutions ever again at risk of publishing further false stories , by closing their pages and their TV studios against such a man with such a record . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
David Frum : I think the most important thing to understand about this is that it was a very small group of people who were trying to get rid of him. He says the lawyer offered no evidence to back up the spurious charge . Frum says the context of the accusation is Pakistan 's `` memogate '' scandal . He says the evidence makes it seem likely that `` memogate '' is a hoax .