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vast rightwing conspiracy

omg engineered clinton impeachment over consensual bj

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see Ted Olson Barbaras IWF Ginni

starr dead 9 22 see fuckery jeffrey epstein, blackwater...

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https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018,

By David Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

[Related OPINION

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Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION

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When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

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Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

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That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

But the cabal's godfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

==

His Cheatin' Heart

During this period the editor of The American Spectator was R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., author of Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, published by Regnery. Scaife’s foundations gave $2.4 million to The American Spectator Education Foundation while it was running anti-Clinton articles. The foundation launched the “Arkansas Project,” financing information-gathering operations involving reporters, private investigators, former law enforcement officers, and political operatives. Public tax records of the foundation were obtained by Joe Conason at the New York Observer, who discovered that $1.7 million of the Scaife funds between 1993 and 1996 had been reported as legal fees but apparently used for the “Arkansas Project.”

Some $35,000 of these funds ended up with Parker Dozhier, who owns a fishing camp in Arkansas. One witness for Starr, David Hale, “was staying at Dozhier’s fishing cabin complex in Hot Springs, Ark., between 1994 and 1996.” Two former friends of Dozhier claim he made small cash payments to Hale, but Dozhier denies that claim. Dozhier, however, provided free accommodations to Hale. Dozhier served as a conduit for information onWhitewater from Hale and others to investigators, reporters, and representatives from The American Spectator.Theodore Olson, a director at the Spectator Foundation, was Hale’s lawyer in 1995 and 1996. Olson is Ken Starr’s former law partner. A grand jury is considering if illegalities were committed.

Other potential witnesses against Clinton were clearly in the cash pipeline. According to Boston Globe reporter John Aloysius Farrell:

…Peter W. Smith, a wealthy Chicago businessman and supporter of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, paid thousands of dollars to the Arkansas state troopers whose tales of Clinton’s sex life, published in the Spectator, sparked the Paula Jones case.

Since the Spectator article in December 1993, it was known that unnamed conservative benefactors gave the troopers financial assistance. The Chicago Sun-Times pierced the veil of anonymity…identifying Smith—a big contributor to GOPAC, the political action committee once led by Gingrich— as the man who gave $6,700 each to two troopers and introduced them to David Brock, the writer of the article. Smith has given $150,000 to GOPAC in the last 12 years.

He told the Sun-Times he spent $80,000 in the 18 months after Clinton’s election to get stories about the president’s personal life into the media.

"Vast right-wing conspiracy" is a conspiracy theory first described in a 1995 memo by political opposition researcher Chris Lehane and then referenced in 1998 by the then First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton, in defense of her husband, President Bill Clinton, characterizing the continued allegations of scandal against her and her husband, including the Lewinsky scandal, as part of a long campaign by Clinton's political enemies.[1] The term has been used since, including in a question posed to Bill Clinton in 2009 to describe verbal attacks on Barack Obama during his early presidency.[2] Hillary Clinton mentioned it again during her 2016 presidential campaign.[3]

Earlier uses

While popularized by Mrs. Clinton in her 1998 TODAY Show interview,[4][5] the phrase did not originate with her. In 1991 the Detroit News wrote:

Thatcher-era Britain produced its own crop of paranoid left-liberal films. ... All posited a vast right-wing conspiracy propping up a reactionary government ruthlessly crushing all efforts at opposition under the guise of parliamentary democracy. [Emphasis added.][6]

An AP story in 1995 also used the phrase, relating an official's guess that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of "maybe five malcontents" and not "some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy."[7]

1995 memo

A 332-page memo titled "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" was commissioned by Mark Fabiani and written by Chris Lehane in 1995. It was the first document to describe the conspiracies surrounding the Clintons, which Hillary Clinton later popularized with the term "vast right-wing conspiracy."[8] It described how online conservative media outlets such as The American Spectator spread conspiracy theories about the suicide of Vince Foster, the Whitewater controversy, and other events. According to the memo, these conspiracies spread from conservative think tanks to British tabloids, and then to the mainstream press.[9]

The Today Show interview

On January 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton appeared on NBC's The Today Show, in an interview with Matt Lauer.In response to ongoing accusations surrounding the Clintons' investment in a real estate development known as Whitewater in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno had appointed an independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, to investigate those accusations in 1994. Starr's investigation began to branch out into other issues, from Filegate to Travelgate to Bill Clinton's actions in the civil case of his alleged sexual harassment of Paula Jones prior to his presidency.

In the course of the last of these, White House intern Monica Lewinsky signed an affidavit that she had not had a relationship with Clinton, but Lewinsky's confidant Linda Tripp had been recording their phone conversations and offered Starr tapes of Lewinsky describing her feelings for, and alleging intimate encounters with, the president. The president was asked to give a deposition, and accusations that he lied about an affair under oath first made national headlines on January 17, 1998, when the story was picked up by the conservative-right e-mail newsletter The Drudge Report. Despite swift denials from President Clinton, the media attention grew.

Matt Lauer: "You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here."

Hillary Clinton: "Well, I don't know if I've been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

Clinton elaborated by decrying the tactics "and the kind of intense political agenda at work here". Bob Woodward recounts in his book The Agenda (1994) that the then-first lady claimed that when her husband was making his decision to run for the presidency in 1991, he reported receiving "a direct threat from someone in the Bush White House, warning that if he ran, the Republicans would go after him. 'We will do everything we can to destroy you personally,' she recalled that the Bush White House man had said."[1]

Later uses

David Brock, a conservative-turned-liberal author, has said he was once a part of an effort to dredge up a scandal against Clinton.[10] In 1993 Brock, then of the American Spectator, was the first to report Paula Jones' claims.[10] As Brock explained in Blinded by the Right, after learning more about the events and conservative payments surrounding Paula Jones he personally apologized to the Clintons.

He documented his experience in Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, wherein he alleged that Arkansas state troopers had taken money in exchange for testimony against Clinton which Brock had published in a previous book. Adam Curtis also discusses the concept in his documentary series The Power of Nightmares. Brock has agreed with Clinton's claim that there was a "Right wing conspiracy" to smear her husband, quibbling only with the characterization of it as "vast", since Brock contends that it was orchestrated mainly by a few powerful people. MSNBC also described the comment as once-ridiculed but now taken more seriously by "many Democrats" who point "to the well-documented efforts by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife to fund a network of anti-Clinton investigations."[11]

Specific claims of such funding have been made against conservative Republican supporter and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.[12] Scaife played a major role in funding the Arkansas Project investigating President Clinton; former Clinton White House Counsel Lanny Davis claimed Scaife was using his money "to destroy a president of the United States." Scaife claims to be public about his political spending (q.v.[13]). CNN stated in a study the news outlet conducted on Scaife, "If it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty open one."[14]

Hillary Clinton wrote in her 2003 autobiography, "Looking back, I see that I might have phrased my point more artfully, but I stand by the characterization of Starr's investigation [regardless of the truth about Lewinsky]."[15]By 2007 her experiences caused Hillary Clinton to say in presidential campaign appearances that the vast right-wing conspiracy was back, citing such cases as the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal.[16] On the stump for Al Franken's 2008 Senate campaign, Bill Clinton acknowledged his Air America Radio show by quipping that he had been taking on the "vast right wing conspiracy before others even acknowledged that it existed".[17]

Former President Clinton, when asked on Meet the Press (September 27, 2009) whether the vast right wing conspiracy was involved in the attacks on President Barack Obama, said "Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was ... when they accused me of murder and all that stuff."[2]

Two other figures who have used the phrase are Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman and journalist Joe Conason. Conason, in an article called "The vast right-wing conspiracy is back," refers the National Republican Trust PAC and Newsmax Media, which are run by former foes of Bill Clinton and who made attacks on then-President Barack Obama. The National Republican Trust PAC sponsored a campaign commercials against Obama in 2008 which FactCheck.org described as “one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign.” One of Newsmax Media owners "was among the most insistent endorsers of the Obama birth certificate myth" and a popularizer of the canard that Bill Clinton's White House counsel Vince Foster did not commit suicide—as determined by five official investigations—but was murdered.[18]

In some of his books, Krugman has used the phrase ("Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy"[19]) to refer not to a conservative Republican-leaning campaign against Clinton (or Obama), but more generally to "an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters" in the service of "movement conservatism." The network of institutions provide

obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists.[20]

In Krugman's view, the network of foundations that fund conservative scholarship, the national and regional think tanks and advocacy groups, talk radio media outlets, and conservative law firms through which they pushed their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right, far surpass in funding, size, inter-connectedness or influence anything the Democratic Party or the American liberal movement have at their disposal.

2014 reemergence

In April 2014, the Clinton Presidential Center published the original 1995 memo on the conspiracy.[9] The memo's author, Chris Lehane, wrote, "As for the premise of the memo, I absolutely stand by it. Not only was it right about the right wing then, it is more accurate than ever today."[21]

2016 reemergence

In 2016, Hillary Clinton said she still believed in the "vast right-wing conspiracy", adding that it was "even better funded" 18 years later.[3][22] However, she opined, "At this point it's probably not correct to say it's a conspiracy because it's out in the open."[3]

In October, after footage of Donald Trump boasting about his sexual exploits emerged and multiple women accused Trump of sexual misconduct, Melania Trump defended her husband and said, "This was all organized from the opposition."[23] Writers for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post noted that Melania's response "echoed" Hillary's original use of the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy."[24][23]

Use in popular culture

After the release of a deposition Bill Clinton had given to the Independent Counsel in which he perjured himself,some conservatives began to adopt the VRWC phrasing ironically. In 2004, conservative lawyer Mark W. Smith wrote the *New York Times* Best Seller Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, which came with a "membership card" that made its owner an "official member of the VRWC." A number of entrepreneurs are selling VRWC merchandise.[citation needed] Similarly, a number of newspaper, magazine, and website articles have used the phrase to report on left-wing politics.[25][26] Eugene Volokh's blog The Volokh Conspiracy is said to have derived its name from as a reference to the "Vast right-wing conspiracy" statement.[27]

The term "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" continues to be mocked by conservatives.[28][29]

See also

References

NO LNX

How Hillary Clinton helped create what she later called the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’

By Karen Tumulty

September 3,2016

Hillary Clinton speaks to news organizations on Jan. 26, 1996, the day she testified before a grand jury investigating the Whitewater scandal. (James A. Parcell/The Washington Post)]

The epic battles between the Clintons and their tormentors on the right have shaped American politics for nearly a quarter-century.

But there was a moment early on when the toxic course of that history might have been changed, had it not been for Hillary Clinton’s impulses toward secrecy.

It came one weekend near the end of Bill Clinton’s first year as president, and it pitted the first lady against her husband’s advisers.

“If a genie offered me the chance to turn back time and undo a single decision from my White House tenure, I’d head straight to the Oval Office dining room on Saturday morning, December 11, 1993,” ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, then a top aide to the president, wrote in his memoir “All Too Human.”

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There was an urgent meeting that day to discuss a request by The Washington Post for documents relating to the Whitewater Development Corp., a failed Arkansas real estate investment in which the Clintons had been involved.

Whitewater had been an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign. More recently, questions had arisen about whether the land deal and the Clintons might be linked to the collapse of a savings and loan.

Stephanopoulos and David Gergen, another senior adviser, were internal rivals at the time who agreed on almost nothing. But both argued for full disclosure of the records. After a few days of rough coverage, they confidently predicted, the story would go away as the press corps discovered there was nothing sinister to the land deal and turned its attention elsewhere.

The president would not budge — and both of them knew why.

“Hillary Clinton is a woman of many strengths and virtues, but like all of us, she also has some blind spots,” Gergen said in a recent interview. “She does not see the world in the same way that others do, when it comes to transparency and accountability.”

She was not in the room, but the aides felt her presence.

“You could usually tell when Clinton was making Hillary’s argument: Even if he was yelling, his voice had a flat quality, as if he were a high school debater speeding through a series of memorized facts,” Stephanopoulos wrote. “Gergen and I didn’t know what was in the Whitewater documents, but whatever it was, Hillary didn’t want it out — and she had a veto.”

The fallout from that decision to stonewall would be enormous. Pressure built for the appointment of a prosecutor, first Robert B. Fiske Jr., then Kenneth W. Starr, who had been solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush.

Starr’s far-ranging investigation ultimately uncovered Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

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Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, would have the dark distinction of becoming the only first lady ever called before a federal grand jury. In 1996, she testified for four hours, mostly to answer ­questions about subpoenaed ­Whitewater-related documents that had vanished and then suddenly reappeared in the White House living quarters.

Gergen, Stephanopoulos and other top Clinton aides from that era — some of whom ended up with huge legal bills of their own — contend that none of this might have happened had Hillary Clinton been more open in the first place.

“I believe that decision against disclosure was the decisive turning point. If they had turned over the Whitewater documents to The Washington Post in December 1993, their seven-year-old land deal would have soon disappeared as an issue and the story of the next seven years would have been entirely different,” Gergen wrote in “Eyewitness to Power,” his book about his time working for four presidents, from Nixon to Clinton.

Nannygate, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate: It's tough to remember all the scandals that plagued President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton through the '90s. For millennials, here's what you missed. For everyone else, here's a refresher. (Sarah Parnass,Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)]

As he has watched the controversies that have beset her current presidential campaign, particularly the one over her private emails, Gergen has been struck by parallels to that pivotal moment in 1993.

“She has built a protective shield around herself,” Gergen said. “Her first response is, when people come after me, I’m going to have my guard up and be suspicious of what their motives are.”

[The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire]

Clinton drew the opposite lesson from those early Whitewater experiences — one that also shapes how she operates today.

Her view was that she should have thrown up more resistance.

In a conference call on Jan. 11, 1994, exactly one month after the meeting in which Stephanopoulos and Gergen had been overruled, the president’s aides convinced the Clintons that they should request an independent investigation to quell the growing media furor.

“We will never know if Congress would eventually have forced an independent counsel on us. And we will never know whether releasing an inevitably incomplete set of personal documents to The Washington Post would have averted a special prosecutor,” she wrote in “Living History,” her memoir. “With the wisdom of hindsight, I wish I had fought harder.”

The real problem, Clinton argued, was that “we were being swept up in what legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin later described as the politicization of the criminal justice system and the criminalization of the political system.”

[Documents from the Whitewater investigation are unloaded at the Ford House Office Building on Capitol Hill in 1998. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)

Industry of scandal

Since then, an entire industry has grown up around Clinton scandals, pseudoscandals and conspiracy theories.

Millions of dollars have been raised and spent, both by their adversaries and their defenders. Republican-led congressional investigations have been launched, and lawsuits filed by conservative watchdog groups. The two sides wage constant war on the Internet, talk radio and cable news channels.

A search of Amazon.com finds more than 40 anti-Hillary books, with titles such as “American Evita” and “Can She Be Stopped?” At the moment, three of the top-10 offerings on the New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction bestseller list are volumes bashing the Clintons.

So Hillary Clinton had it right when she made her famous declaration that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was out to get her and her husband. The opposition was and is passionate. It is well financed. It sees dark — sometimes preposterous — motives in nearly everything the Clintons do.

By the time Barack Obama took office, what she had called a conspiracy had grown into a permanent institution. On an ideological and political level, it fought Obama’s expansive view of government through legislation, lawsuits and grass-roots movements such as the tea party. In its darker corners, it spread sinister rumors about his patriotism, his religious beliefs and even his citizenship.

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Through it all, Hillary Clinton has remained a target for a particularly intense kind of vehemence.

“Over time, some on the far right have made her into a ­boogiewoman to instill fear and raise money,” said John Weaver, a GOP strategist. “Is she the devil incarnate? No. These critics can’t even explain why they hate her. It’s unhealthy for our politics.”

The Clintons’ aversion to transparency, as well as their tendency to skirt the rules and play close to the legal and ethical line, have made it easier for their enemies.

Their defensiveness seems to have deepened, which worries longtime friends and advisers.

“I think she’s much more of that bent than he is. He sees the sunnier side, rather than the darker side,” said one former top aide who has known both Clintons for decades, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely. “It’s grown worse over the years, and it’s now built up into, ‘They are out to get us.’ They’re not wrong, but did part of this come from their secretiveness and unwillingness to make a clean breast of things?”

[What Hillary Clinton’s emails tell us about her management style]

Hillary Clinton cannot shake continuing questions over her use of a private email account when she was secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation’s omnivorous appetite for contributions from donors who have government business.

Polls consistently show that strong majorities of voters do not consider her to be honest or trustworthy.

That is because the perceptions have had a long time to settle. There are many through-lines from the controversies of the 1990s to the ones dogging the Clintons today.

When the existence of her private email account became public last year, Hillary Clinton initially claimed that she had set it up for convenience. It later became clear that she did it in part because she wanted to have the power to keep her records outside the realm of public discovery — just as she had hoped to do with the Whitewater documents.

A State Department inspector general’s report noted that when the agency’s deputy chief of staff for operations suggested in 2010 that she set up a government account, the secretary responded, “Let’s get separate address or devicebut I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.” She would delete more than 30,000 emails from her personal server before turning over the remainder in response to a State Department demand.

Similarly, the current questions of whether donors to the Clinton Foundation received special State Department access are an echo of the campaign-finance scandals that erupted during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The evidence thus far does not confirm any “pay to play” operation. It does indicate that some who wrote big foundation checks saw those gifts as a means of opening doors .

On Aug. 27, the conservative group Citizens United released emails obtained as part of a public records lawsuit. They showed that Clinton Foundation official Doug Band had pressed Clinton aide Huma Abedin to invite three donors, who had given millions to the foundation, to a 2011 State Department lunch with Hu ­Jintao, the Chinese president at the time.

Emails made public earlier showed, among other things, a sports executive using his foundation connections to press for a visa for a soccer player, and the crown prince of Bahrain going the same route to ask for a last-minute meeting with the secretary of state after “normal channels” failed.

[Emails reveal how foundation donors got access to Clinton and her close aides at State Department]

“You can’t tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. Big donors get all the access, and that’s what this is about,” said David Bossie, who until this week was president of Citizens United. On Thursday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump named Bossie his deputy campaign manager.

Bossie and other Clinton critics say that there is precedent in arrangements made during the 1990s.

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Six-figure contributors to the Democratic National Committee were offered sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and invited to coffees in the White House Map Room, where regulators with oversight of their industries were present.

Sometimes, the fundraising touched the tripwire between the unseemly and the illegal. Bundler Johnny Chung made at least 49 visits to the Clinton White House, including one when he dropped off a $50,000 check at the first lady’s office. Two days after that, he was allowed to bring a group of Chinese business executives to watch the president’s radio address, where they had their pictures taken with Bill Clinton.

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Chung later told federal investigators that $35,000 of the $366,000 he donated to the Democratic Party in 1996 came from the Chinese government. He pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy.

On the other hand, many of the murky conspiracy theories and rumors that have swirled around the Clintons over the years have proven to be groundless — ridiculous, even.

And yet, they persist. Trump has trafficked in ­rumors that Clinton has serious health problems, although there is no real evidence, outside of doctored ­video and ­out-of-context photos that keep bouncing around the Internet.

Clinton has called that speculation a “paranoid fever dream” on Trump’s part.

Earlier this year, Trump dredged up old speculation that the Clintons might have had a hand in the 1993 death of their close friend Vincent Foster, the White House deputy counsel.

“He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide,” Trump said. “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.”

There were five official investigations into Foster’s death. None found evidence that it was anything but suicide.

All told, seven separate ­independent-counsel investigations of Clinton administration officials were conducted during his years in office. They had cost taxpayers nearly $80 million by the spring of 1999.

Each time a new set of allegations arose, the prediction would come: This is the one that will do them in.

Scalp-hunting as sport

“There seems to be an undying belief that there’s a silver bullet here,” said David Brock, who runs a group of organizations allied with the Clintons, and who has been on both sides of the Clinton wars. When one does not pan out, he said, “another conspiracy theory is hatched.”

In the early 1990s, Brock was an investigative reporter for conservative publications. A story he wrote for the American Spectator claimed that Arkansas state troopers had arranged for trysts for Bill Clinton while he was governor there. One of the women mentioned, Paula Jones, subsequently filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton that became part of Starr’s investigation and ultimately triggered the perjury charge against him.

Controversies of varying degrees of seriousness tumbled by during Clinton’s eight years in office: Troopergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Chinagate, Pardongate. Even the more trivial ones left an aroma of malfeasance long after details had become a blur.

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All of it drew upon a cynicism and suspicion of government officials that harked back to the first “gate” — Watergate. Hillary Clinton had come to Washington fresh out of law school to work for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry of Richard M. Nixon.

Watergate produced new levers against corruption. After Nixon’s resignation, the Freedom of Information Act was strengthened. Congress also passed the Ethics in Government Act, which called for more financial disclosure from government officials and set up procedures for independent investigations of those who were accused of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, news organizations had become more skeptical of government and less willing to take officials at their word.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in the White House, scalp-hunting had already become part of Washington’s political culture.

The Reagan administration’s Iran-contra affair was still a fresh memory. The Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 had turned into epic partisan battles. In 1989, former senator John Tower (R-Tex.) failed a confirmation vote as defense secretary because he had a reputation as a heavy drinker, marking the first time in 30 years that a president had been denied a Cabinet pick. Later that year, a tenacious backbench congressman named Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) forced the resignation of House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) over ethics charges.

One of the most dogged groups to pursue the Clintons has been Judicial Watch, a conservative organization founded in 1994. Its current efforts include 18 active lawsuits to force the disclosure of public records from Hillary Clinton’s State Department tenure.

“The permanent infrastructure around government corruption began with Watergate. Up until Judicial Watch, [watchdog groups] were all creatures of the left,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The right is increasingly using the same tools to great effect.”

Among Judicial Watch’s early funders was Richard Mellon Scaife, the reclusive heir to a banking fortune who died in 2014. He also bankrolled American Spectator and its “Arkansas project” to examine the Clintons’ past. AKA RWI?!

Why were the Clintons such an inviting target, and why have they remained one all these years?

As with everything else, the two sides have diametrically different views.

Trump has labeled Clinton “crooked Hillary” and says she may be “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

The couple had a reputation for shading the truth that began even before they reached the White House. Bill Clinton was known as “Slick Willie” back in Arkansas, and the nickname seemed to fit as he glided through political eruptions over his actions.

He had smoked marijuana at Oxford University, he admitted, but insisted he had not inhaled. He had avoided the Vietnam draft around that time by signing up for ROTC, then reneged on the promise when a high lottery number ensured that he would not be selected. He steadfastly denied a 1992 tabloid report that he had had a 12-year affair with an Arkansas state government worker and cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers— only to acknowledge in a deposition six years later that he had had a sexual relationship with her. And while he did not admit to harassingJones, [ELVES?]another Arkansas state employee, he ended up paying $850,000 to settle a lawsuit that originally asked for $700,000.

Hillary Clinton also became known for telling implausible stories when her back was against the wall. When it came out in 1994 that she had turned a $1,000 investment in cattle futures into nearly $100,000 in a matter of months in the 1970s, the White House initially claimed that the novice trader had based her decisions on information she found in the Wall Street Journal.[VS?]

The Clintons were also the first baby boomers to reach the White House,bringing with them the unresolved debates that had raged between the left and the right since the 1960s.

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“They represented a huge cultural shift, not only generationally, but Hillary as the first lady, with her own professional identity and political portfolio. All of that inspired a lot of fear among opponents of that change,” Brock said.

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The former Clinton aide added, “It’s Vietnam, pot, sex — and God knows, Clinton represented all of that.”

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Some argue that what really bothered the right was the fact that Bill Clinton was such a skillful politician. He had co-opted them on issues they regarded as their own — among them, crime, trade and welfare reform.

“I think the Republicans figured early on they couldn’t take him down politically. He was too adept,” so they found other ways, the Clinton aide said.

Whether that was the calculation or not, his opponents were constantly attacking. They went far beyond raising questions of government impropriety. Right-wing talk radio and the new medium of the Internet, which brought in fresh players, including the Drudge Report, spread fantastic theories tying the Clintons to everything from drug-running to murder.

“By 1996, it was in full force. Although we had the White House, Hillary was always very critical of the lack of effectiveness in our response,” the former presidential aide said.

At one point, the Clinton team assembled a 332-page internal report which alleged a “communication stream of conspiracy commerce.”

They came up with a byzantine theory of how it all worked: Unverified stories would originate at right-wing organizations, find their way onto the Internet, be picked up by conservative publications or London tabloids, make their way back into the U.S. media, then trigger congressional inquiries — at which point, they would become legitimate fodder for mainstream news organizations.

Opponents dismissed this view as paranoia. C. Boyden Gray, who had been George H.W. Bush’s White House counsel, called it “kind of goofy,” but he conceded that every president feels embattled at some point.

“I think that happens to many White Houses,” Gray told The Post. “But I don’t think any of us would have put that much pen to paper.”

Kenneth W. Starr, independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, talks to the media in 1997 outside his offices in Little Rock. (Jeff Mitchell/Reuters)]

Recruiting the enemy

Brock, whose article about the Arkansas state troopers had sparked the Paula Jones lawsuit, disavowed the anti-Clinton forces in a 1997 Esquire article headlined “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man.” He followed that up in 2002 with a book, “Blinded by the Right.”

“What interested Democrats about the book was not the personal confessions part of it, but the part that described the largely institutional efforts by the right,” he said.

Early the next year, Brock got a thank-you call from Bill Clinton, whom he had never met. The former president asked Brock what he planned to do next, and Brock described an idea for a liberal organization to push back against news coverage, much as Accuracy in Media had been doing from the right since 1969.

Clinton suggested that Brock create a business plan, which Brock did and sent to him. Bill Clinton shared it with Hillary, who by then was a New York senator.

She invited Brock to present it at meetings with her major donors in the fall of 2003, both in Washington and at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Their checkbooks opened.

His group, Media Matters for America, launched in 2004.Brock now runs four other organizations that he says were “built to counter the right-wing machine.”

They are Correct the Record, which describes itself as “a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks;” American Bridge 21st Century, which focuses on opposition research; the Franklin Forum, which provides media training; andCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group he took over in 2014. He also sits on the board of the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action.

Brock added, “I feel like the playing field has gotten much more level from the time I started doing this until now.”

He also noted that new, explicitly liberal media players have emerged — among them, the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo.

All of which suggests that, should there be another Clinton presidency, the battles of the last one will continue and escalate. What Bill Clinton once described as the “politics of personal destruction” are now a permanent fixture of the U.S. political system, likely to endure long after anyone can remember what started it all.

see

fitton jud watch

Clinton crazies" is a pejorative term in American politics of the 1990s and later that refers to intense criticism of United States President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton.[1][2][3] The phrase refers to Clinton opponents who, according to Clinton supporters, "systematically ... sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office."[a] Such intensity of feeling existed throughout the Clinton years, leading commentators to wonder what was at the root of it.[5][6] The term was especially used in reference to people and media outlets that focused on all manner of Clinton scandals and controversies, some of which had substance behind them and some of which did not.[1][7] In particular, there was a tendency towards the holding of conspiracy theories among these people and outlets.[2]

Characterizations

A 1997New York Timesprofile said that, "The number of influential Clinton crazies is probably no more than a hundred, but their audience is in the tens of millions."[1]

The term was used in an extraordinary report released by the White House Counsel's office,Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, which challenges persons "for spreading vicious reports about Bill Clinton that place him and some of those closest to him in criminal conspiracies."[1] The package, containing hundreds of news clips and Internet postings, purports to show how the Clintons have been tarred by what it calls the "communication stream of conspiracy commerce." Moreover, it alleges "a close connection . . . exists between Republican elected officials and the right wing conspiracy industry."[8] The central concept is that the traditional media are not the driving factor on these issues. "But on a central point the Administration and its enemies are in perfect agreement: because of new forms of communication – talk radio, newsletters, the Internet, mail-order videos – a significant portion of the population has developed an understanding of Bill Clinton as a debased, even criminal politician."

The "conspiracy" idea was famously resurrected by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1998 during the Lewinsky scandal. She said there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he ran for president."[9] A month after her remark, political strategist James Carville referred to the "Clinton crazies" in terms of those who "spare no expense" in attacking President Clinton.[10] A fact that was later reinforced by a former-conservative liberal, David Brock, who opined that the Lewinsky matter caused an alliance of traditional conservative critics with the "Clinton crazies."[11]

The term came back into use during the 2016 United States presidential election, when Donald Trump sought to revive the 1990s era controversies.[12] A March 2015 article in The Atlantic, written before Trump entered the race, had previously surmised that the establishment Republican strategy for the 2016 election cycle was to stick to traditional criticisms of the Democrats and to "keep the Clinton crazies muzzled."[13] [UNTIL ^HE ^BECAME ONE?  ^AFTER ^ACCUSING ^tED ^CRUZ ^DAD ^OF ^JFK HIT?]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ A bibliography identifies the activities and the activists, including "individuals and organizations that have opposed Clinton. The bibliography is divided into five sections: General; 'The conspiracy stream of conspiracy commerce', a White House‐produced 'report' presenting its view of a right‐wing conspiracy against the Clinton presidency; Funding; Conservative organizations; and Publishing/media. Many of the annotations note the links among these key players."[4]

References

...

  1. Weiss, Philip (February 23, 1997). "THE CLINTON HATERS: Clinton Crazy". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved July 23, 2016.
  2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_crazies#cite_ref-beast_2-1) Freedlander, David (22 May 2014). "These Clinton Haters Can't Quit the Crazy". The Daily Beast.
  3. ^ "When Anthony Lewis stood up to the New York Times and the Clinton crazies". History News Network. Media Matters. March 27, 2013.
  4. ^ Metz 1999.
  5. ^ Reynolds, Glenn Harlan (November 4, 2008). "Whoever Wins, Chill A Bit". Forbes. Retrieved January 29, 2008.
  6. ^ Drum, Kevin (November 12, 2007). "CDS". The Washington Monthly. Retrieved January 29, 2008.
  7. ^ Isikoff 1999, p. 113.
  8. ^ Harris, John F.; Baker, Peter (January 10, 1997). "White House Memo Asserts a Scandal Theory". The Washington Post. p. A01. Retrieved July 24, 2016.
  9. ^ Gold, Hadas (April 18, 2014). "The Clintons' 'conspiracy commerce' memo".
  10. ^ Jurkowitz, Mark (February 26, 1998). "The Right's Daddy Miorebuck's Billionaire's Cash Fuels Conservative Journalism's Fires". The Boston Globe. Boston, MA. Archived from the original on September 11, 2016. Retrieved July 27, 2016 – via Highbeam.
  11. ^ Brock 2003, p. 331.
  12. ^ Boehlert, Eric (25 May 2016). "Embracing the 'Clinton Crazies,' Trump Becomes AM Talk Radio's Nominee for President". The Huffington Post. Media Matters for America.
  13. ^ "Among the Hillary Haters". The Atlantic. March 2015. Retrieved July 27, 2016.

Bibliography

Further reading