Report: Brian Williams 'Fabricated, Embellished' News at Least Five Times

NBC News' ongoing investigation of Brian Williams has expanded to a heretofore unknown incident involving comments he made on "The Daily Show" about what the anchor witnessed during the Arab Spring, The New York Times reported Friday.

The internal investigation that was ordered in the wake of Williams' six-month suspension was already known to be focusing on at least five other questionable incidents.

Williams “fabricated, misrepresented or embellished” news accounts a half-dozen times – including a previously undisclosed fib about his coverage of riots in Cairo during the Arab Spring, according to the Times.

Williams, 55, was suspended on Feb. 10 after being caught in an apparent lie about coming under fire while flying in a military chopper in Iraq. He had repeated the story that his helicopter was struck by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003.

In reality what came under fire was a Chinook helicopter flying well ahead of Williams’ craft that was actually hit and forced into an emergency landing. The anchor was not even close to the action.

In February 2011 Williams made an appearance on the Comedy Central show in which he described to host Jon Stewart an incident in which he witnessed on the ground in Tahrir Square a confrontation between protesters and government troops.

But the testimony potentially conflicts with evidence from NBC footage that places Williams in a balcony "overlooking Tahrir Square," not in the middle of the protest.

Williams also had claimed to have seen a body floating down a French Quarter street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and that he was mugged in a New Jersey Christmas-tree lot. Both stories are in serious doubt.

And he has maintained that Navy SEALS had sent him a piece of the chopper that crashed during the operation that killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in his lair Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.

The New York Times' report noted that the internal investigation has yet to reach a conclusion about that incident, or about any of the other episodes already widely reported to be under suspicion.