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“You Can’t Convict Someone With Maybe”: They Were Never Close To Indicting Hillary — 20 Years Ago Or Yesterday

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear: specifically to September 1992, when Attorney General William Barr, top-ranking FBI officials, and — believe it or not — a Treasury Department functionary who actually sold “Presidential Bitch” T-shirts with Hillary Clinton’s likeness from her government office, pressured the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock to open an investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater investment.

The Arkansas prosecutor was Charles “Chuck” Banks, a Republican appointed by President Reagan, and recently nominated to a Federal judgeship by President George H.W. Bush.  It was definitely in Banks’s interest to see Bush re-elected.

The problem was that Banks knew all about Madison Guaranty S&L and its screwball proprietor Jim McDougal. His office had unsuccessfully prosecuted the Clintons’ Whitewater partner for bank fraud. He knew perfectly well that McDougal had deceived them about their investment, just as he’d fooled everybody in a frantic fiscal juggling act trying to save his doomed thrift.

Banks and local FBI agents were unimpressed with the “Presidential Bitch” woman’s analysis. She showed shaky grasp of banking law, and obvious bias — listing virtually every prominent Democrat in Arkansas as a suspect. When FBI headquarters in Washington ordered its Little Rock office to proceed on L. Jean Lewis’s criminal referral, Banks decided he had to act.

He wrote a stinging letter to his superiors in the DOJ refusing to be a party to a trumped-up probe clearly intended to affect the presidential election. “Even media questions about such an investigation,” he wrote, “all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven.’”

Keep that phrase in mind.

Banks also promised to refer reporters to the Attorney General. And that was the end of the Bush administration’s “Hail Mary” attempt to win the 1992 election with a fake scandal. Also the end of Chuck Banks’ political career.

The prevailing themes of the Clinton Legends, however, were set: imaginary corruption, and a “Presidential Bitch.” Eight years and $70 million later, Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater prosecutors folded their cards, proving the Little Rock prosecutor had been right all along.

Shamefully, several of Starr’s assistants recently showed up in the Washington Post reminiscing about how they almost indicted Hillary Clinton. Except that they never did, and for the same reason FBI director James Comey wouldn’t dare take his largely adverbial case (“extremely,” “carelessly,” etc.) into a courtroom against her.

Because when the accused can afford competent defense counsel, a bogus case endangers the prosecutor more than the defendant. Indict the former Secretary of State and lose? Goodbye career.

If the Post had a sense of humor, they’d have illustrated the article with a photo of “Judge Starr,” as he liked to be called, dressed in his cheerleader costume leading Baylor University’s felonious football team onto the field.

But back to Comey’s successful grandstand play — successful at protecting Comey’s own career while wounding the Democratic presidential nominee, that is. See, no way could the former Secretary of State be prosecuted for mishandling classified information without convincing evidence that a bad guy got his hands on it. The best Comey could do was to say that “it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”

Clinton herself noted that Comey was simply speculating. “But if you go by the evidence,” she said “there is no evidence that the system was breached or hacked successfully.” (Although the State Department’s was.) Pundits can sneer, but you can’t convict somebody with maybe.

What secrets are we talking about? Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains: “Seven of [Clinton’s] eight email chains dealt with CIA drone strikes, which are classified top secret/special access program—unlike Defense Department drone strikes, which are unclassified. The difference is that CIA drones hit targets in countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where we are not officially at war; they are part of covert operations… But these operations are covert mainly to provide cover for the Pakistani and Yemeni governments, so they don’t have to admit they’re cooperating with America.”

Top Secret, maybe. But regularly featured in the New York Times. The eighth email chain was about the President of Malawi.

Seriously.

Even Comey’s press conference assertion that Clinton handled emails marked classified failed to survive a congressional hearing. Shown the actual documents, Comey conceded that they weren’t properly marked. Indeed, it was a “reasonable inference” they weren’t classified at all. Both concerned trivial diplomatic issues in Third World countries. Really.

Michael Cohen in the Boston Globe: “Whatever one thinks of Clinton’s actions, Comey’s depiction of Clinton’s actions as ‘extremely careless’ was prejudicial and inappropriate. The only reason for delivering such a lacerating attack on Clinton was to inoculate Comey and the FBI from accusations that he was not recommending charges be filed due to political pressure. But that’s an excuse, not an explanation, and a weak one at that.”

The very definition, indeed, of legitimizing “what can’t be proven.”

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 13, 2016

July 14, 2016 Posted by | Bill and Hillary Clinton, Conspiracy Theories, James Comey | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Scandalous Matters That Are Real”: If He Shouts ‘Rape’, Donald Trump Should Unseal His Divorce Records

Evidently Donald Trump believes that his campaign can accomplish with an Internet video what Kenneth Starr failed to do with $50 million and a platoon of private detectives and FBI agents: Bring down Bill and Hillary Clinton by dredging through moldy muck. Somehow he doesn’t seem to understand his own vulnerability on scandalous matters that are real rather than invented.

The problem Ken Starr confronted during six years as independent counsel was neither a shortage of resources nor a lack of support from the political media, most of which seemed as eager to ruin Clinton as the right-wing Republican prosecutor. No, the trouble with Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate — so dubbed by scandal-addled reporters — was that substantive, plausible evidence of wrongdoing simply didn’t exist. The Lewinsky affair was all too real, but most Americans didn’t believe that sex, or even lying about sex under oath, merited a costly, hypocritical, and rabid investigation, let alone a presidential impeachment.

Aside from Lewinsky, the “Clinton scandals” each ended the same way: Despite all the blaring headlines, ranting editorials, grand jury dramatics, and talk-radio thunder, Starr never prosecuted the President and First Lady because he couldn’t sustain an indictment. The Clintons fully deserved the presumption of innocence that the press, the prosecutors, and the Republicans in Congress refused to afford them.

The hollowness of all those old pseudo-scandals is why the Clintons are still standing — even as ace sex detective Starr is ousted from the presidency of Baylor University in disgrace for covering up sexual assault by members of the school’s football team.

Yet Trump, under the tutelage of Nixon-era dirty trickster Roger Stone, apparently believes that he can resuscitate even the most discredited old tales to smear the Clintons – and especially Hillary, the Democrat he is likely to face in November.

It is typically insolent for Trump – the most dubious character ever to win a presidential nomination in this country – to bring up the failed Whitewater real estate venture. The Clintons lost money on that deal, ripped off by a huckster named James McDougal whose grandiose style of double-dealing was just a small-time, Southern-fried version of a Trump scam. Will the casino mogul still be talking about Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster when he goes to court to defend the con game known as “Trump University”?

Actually, both Trump and Stone know that Whitewater is too arcane. So this sordid pair quickly turned to Starr’s sex files, with a misogynist twist: The sexual accusations against Bill Clinton should be blamed on Hillary. They’re confident that if they shriek “rapist” and “enabler” loudly enough, nobody will realize that their attack has no factual basis.

Only Juanita Broaddrick and Bill Clinton know what, if anything, ever happened between them, and their accounts are directly contradictory – except that Broaddrick has offered at least two versions, under oath, that contradict each other. It is important to recall that Starr immunized Broaddrick and thoroughly investigated her revived rape accusation against Clinton during his impeachment probe in 1998. He found the evidence that she provided “inconclusive,” and didn’t include her case in his impeachment brief. (There are other reasons to wonder whether Broaddrick told the truth that are explored in The Hunting of the President by Gene Lyons and me. Our free e-book,The Hunting Of Hillary, is available here.)

Naturally, Trump is promoting Broaddrick’s additional claim that Hillary Clinton, only weeks after the alleged rape by her husband, sought to intimidate the Arkansas nursing home owner into remaining silent. But as with all of the sensational charges lodged by Broaddrick over the years, it isn’t easy to know what to believe about her charge against Hillary – because, again, she has also said, and may even have sworn, precisely the opposite.

Nearly a year after she testified before the independent counsel, Broaddrick was interviewed on NBC News Dateline by correspondent Lisa Myers. After tearfully describing her alleged encounter with a violent Clinton, she tried to explain why she had denied being raped for almost 20 years and – in a moment that Trump has made relevant again – stated firmly that nobody had ever tried to intimidate her.

From the Dateline transcript of February 24, 1999:

Lisa Myers: Did Bill Clinton or anyone near him ever threaten you, try to intimidate you, do anything to keep you silent?

Juanita Broaddrick: No.

Myers: This has been strictly your choice.

Broaddrick: Yes.

Did Broaddrick ever tell Starr or his investigators about Hillary’s alleged intimidation of her? Having received a grant of immunity against prosecution for perjury, did she tell them that Hillary – also a target of Starr’s broad-ranging investigation – had feloniously tried to “silence” her? Or did she tell the Office of Independent Counsel — as she later told Myers on NBC — that nobody had ever done so?

The next reporter to interview her might want to ask those questions.

Meanwhile, perhaps the moment has come when Donald Trump, blustering rape accuser, should respond to the rape accusations lodged against him by his estranged first wife Ivana – in a sworn deposition — during their bitter 1990 divorce, which a New York court eventually granted her on grounds of “cruel and inhuman treatment” by Trump. Journalist Harry Hurt III first recounted the ugly details of Trump’s allegedly very violent assault on Ivana –which involved ripping out her patches of her hair as well as sexually violating her – in his book The Last Tycoon.

Although Ivana sought to withdraw her accusation after the Daily Beast reported it last year, Hurt told me there is much more to be learned from the Trump divorce papers, which are under seal. So here is a suggestion for Trump, who still refuses to release his tax returns as American presidential candidates have done routinely for decades.

If he wants to accuse other people of rape and intimidation, Trump should unseal his divorce papers and let voters assess his standing to make those charges. The evidence gathered about Bill Clinton by the independent counsel’s sex probe is public record. If Trump has nothing to hide, he should let the public view the evidence of what he did to his first wife – and then they can judge him accordingly. If he doesn’t have the guts to disclose those scathing documents, then maybe he should shut up about the Clintons’ marriage, which endures.

 

By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, May 27, 2016

May 28, 2016 Posted by | Bill and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ivana Trump | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Trump’s Cult Of Lies”: Who Are You Going To Believe, Trump Or Your Lying Eyes?

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

            –Voltaire, 1698-1774

The first thing to understand is that before it’s a presidential election, it’s a TV program. To the suits at CNN, NBC, and Fox News that means it’s about ratings and money. So of course they’re going to play it as a cliffhanger.

Do they ever say “Tune in Saturday to watch the Alabama Crimson Tide humiliate hopelessly overmatched Kent State!”

Never.

So it’s going to be with Trump vs. Clinton. Almost regardless of what political scientists and number-crunchers say, the race will be depicted as a nail-biter. The fact that Charles Manson could win Texas’ electoral votes with an “R” after his name, while Democrats could take Massachusetts with a Kardashian sister, will prolong the manufactured suspense.

It’s going to be a very long six months.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine a manifest fraud like Donald J. Trump becoming president of the United States. Surely voters have too much self-respect.

“If Trump came to power,” writes Adam Gopnik, “there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks.”

All politicians fudge the truth, exaggerating their successes and minimizing their failures. Trump, however, takes it to a different level. He’s a contemporary version of Baron Von Munchausen, an 18th century literary character whose wildly exaggerated military exploits—riding on a cannonball, voyaging to the moon—made him a comic-heroic favorite for generations.

Trump tells falsehoods so brazen as to redefine political lying. To see what I mean, let’s compare a couple of Clinton classics that emailers harangue me about all the time.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

The beauty of this Clintonian masterpiece lies in the fact that people often misquote it—changing “sexual relations” to “sex.” Because according to the evidence assiduously gathered by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, it’s literally true and therefore perjury-proof.

Cunning and deliberately deceptive, yes. But sexual relations means “intercourse,” and that supposedly didn’t happen. Cute, huh?

That’s Bill Clinton.

Readers who have never lied about sex are encouraged to vent.

Then there’s Hillary infamous Bosnian adventure: “I remember landing under sniper fire,” she told a 2008 audience. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles.”

Confronted with CBS News footage that showed her walking calmly across the tarmac of Tuzla airport from an Air Force C-17 in 1996, Mrs. Clinton basically blamed an overactive memory. She’d actually written about the incident in her 2003 book “Living History” without mentioning the imaginary snipers.

Her press secretary later explained the possible origin of Mrs. Clinton’s false memory: “We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla.”

She won’t say so but I’m guessing Hillary got scared, and her mind played a trick on her. Confronted with the discrepancy, however, she owned it.

Suffice it to say that is not the Trump method. With a background in professional wrestling, he understands that there’s a vast audience out there only slightly more discerning than a potted geranium and willing to believe (or pretend to believe) damn near anything.

Trump doesn’t trim or embroider as much as invent huge, thunderous fictions aimed at boosting himself or hurting his enemies—evidence be damned. In Trump World, facts don’t exist. He cannot be shamed.

Trump went on Morning Joe recently to attack Hillary’s terrible judgement about Libya. See, if people had listened to Donald, the U.S. would never have helped NATO overthrow Ghaddafi.

“I would have stayed out of Libya,” he affirmed.

Except that Trump shot a video back in 2011 urging an immediate invasion: “Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people,” he said then. “Nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers all [around] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage… Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.”

The candidate does this stuff every day, on every imaginable topic. It’s brutal, demagogic make-believe, demanding his followers blind themselves to reality and enlist in his cult of personality.

So who are you going to believe, Trump or your lying eyes?

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, May 25, 2016

May 25, 2016 Posted by | Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton | , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Democrat That Can Win Is What We Need”: Translating Values Into Governance And Delivering The Goods

In my estimation, there’s only one presidential candidate in 2016 fully capable of doing the job, and she’s anything but a natural.

As Hillary Clinton has also been the target of maybe the longest-running smear campaign in American history — including roughly a dozen partisan Congressional investigations and a six-year leak-o-matic “independent counsel” probe led by the fastidious Kenneth Starr — it’s no wonder some voters mistrust her.

Overcoming that suspicion is her biggest challenge.

Republicans have predicted her imminent indictment for 20 years. You’d think by now they’d have made something stick, if there was anything to it. But it didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now for an obvious reason: in a democracy, political show trials endanger the prosecution as much as the defense.

Anybody who watched Hillary’s one-woman demolition of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s vaunted Benghazi committee should understand that.

Meanwhile, one of the best things about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is his unwillingness to smear his opponent. Too bad many of his most passionate supporters aren’t so fastidious. With Iowa’s make-or-break moment approaching for Sanders, it’s getting nasty out there.

It’s not so much the tiresome attacks on anybody who disagrees with them as a corrupt sellout. (My corporate overlords, of course, dictated that sentence.) It’s the seeming belief that people can be browbeaten into supporting their guy.

Some are a bit like Trump supporters–although normally without the threats. That too may be changing. Recently a guy visited my Facebook page saying people like me deserve “to be dragged into the street and SHOT for…treason against not only our country and our people, but the ENTIRE [BLEEPING] WORLD.”

My response — “Settle down, Beavis” — sent him into a rage.

But no, Hillary’s not an instinctive performer, although her stage presence strikes me as improved since 2008. A person needn’t be “inauthentic” (pundit-speak for “bitch”) to be uncomfortable in front of an audience.

As for authenticity, few Democrats could work a crowd like North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

President Obama nailed it during a recent Politico interview:

Hillary does better with “small groups” than big ones, he observed, before putting his thumb heavily on the scale. He described Hillary as a fighter, who’s “extraordinarily experienced — and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out — [and] sometimes [that] could make her more cautious, and her campaign more prose than poetry,” he said.

Even so, she came closer to defeating Obama in 2008 than Republicans have. “Had things gone a little bit different in some states or if the sequence of primaries and caucuses been a little different,” the president said, “she could have easily won.”

Indeed. As non-endorsements go, the president’s remarks couldn’t have been more complimentary. “She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” he added.

Obama wisely said nothing critical about Bernie Sanders, but nothing particularly warm either. “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” he observed. The president said he understood the appeal of Sanders “full-throated…progressivism.”

Well, Mr. Hopey-Changey as Sarah Palin calls him, certainly should.

Seven years of trench warfare with congressional Republicans, however, have brought out the president’s inner pragmatist. Which Democrat is best-positioned to consolidate the Obama legacy and move it forward?

First, one who stands a good chance of being elected.

Look, there’s a reason Karl Rove’s super PAC is running anti-Hillary TV ads in Iowa. Bernie Sanders “radical” past makes him a GOP oppo-research dream. Never mind socialism. Did you know he once wrote a column claiming that sexual frustration causes cervical cancer?

That in the 1970s, he called for nationalizing oil companies, electric utilities, and — get this — TV networks? Asked about it, he deflects by noting that Hillary once supported Barry Goldwater. Yeah, when she was 16. Bernie was in his mid-30s when he called for confiscating the Rockefeller family fortune. How most Americans hear that is: if he can take away their stuff, he can take away mine.

Sure, many people went off the rails during the Seventies. Most aren’t running for president. Bernie strikes me as a fine senator and a decent man. However, the current U.S. Congress has voted 60 times to repeal Obamacare. And he’s going to give us single-payer “Medicare for all?”

No, he’s not. Assuming he could find a sponsor, it’d never get out of committee. I doubt I’ll live to see single-payer health insurance in the USA. And I’m younger than Bernie. A complete retrofitting of American health care simply isn’t in the works. The votes just aren’t there, and they won’t materialize by repeating the magic word “revolution.”

President Obama says Hillary represents the “recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.”

Hard-won reality, that is, as opposed to fantasy.

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 27, 2016

January 28, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

“Below Par”: Donald Trump’s Ardent Courtship Of Bill And Hillary Clinton

Nobody should be surprised that the Washington press corps, perennially obsessed with Bill Clinton’s real and imagined private life, would seize upon any chance to revisit that favorite topic, especially if that means mimicking Donald Trump. They’ve never quite gotten over the departure in disgrace of their favorite pornographer, the former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

What the political press mostly fails to explore is the overall absurdity of Trump’s new Bill-bashing gambit. They may wonder aloud how a misogynist bully can accuse anyone else of “sexism” or “abusing women,” but if Trump got the same treatment as Clinton, the media would remind us every day of his vile attacks on Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, his distasteful remarks about his suppressed desire to “date” his daughter Ivanka, and his alleged battering and marital rape of his former wife Ivana.

Like so much of Trump’s loud talk, his disparaging remarks about Bill and Hillary Clinton have scant credibility, at least to anyone who knows anything about him. Whatever he claims to think of them now, he has spent years sucking up to the Clintons in the most abject way. His one-sided courtship of the former First Family goes well beyond Trump’s ridiculous insistence that they attend his wedding to his third wife in Florida.

Although he now claims to deplore Bill Clinton’s misbehavior, Trump awarded the former president a free membership at his Trump National Golf Club, just a few miles from the Clinton home in Westchester County. Still a member to this day, Clinton has long enjoyed all kinds of special privileges at the club, where he maintains a locker in a special VIP section near those of former Yankees manager Joe Torre and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Not only has Trump boasted repeatedly about Clinton’s membership and displayed pictures of them together, but on Clinton’s 65th birthday a few years ago, he cleared the course so that the Clintons, including Chelsea and her husband, could play a leisurely foursome there.

Gullible wing-nuts who admire Trump and hate Clinton won’t like hearing any of these facts, of course. But the impeccably far-right Washington Free Beacon told the story not so long ago, illustrating it with fun photos. (Evidently the Beacon story was designed as a “racist” smear of Clinton, but that fizzled.)

This silly episode illustrates once more why only the very dimmest Americans believe that Trump “tells it like it is” and “says what he really thinks.”

 

By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 2, 2015

January 3, 2016 Posted by | Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

   

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