paula jones
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">her lawyers nearly settled, but stopped by</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">omg</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Sept. 7, 2018, </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By David Brock</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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."</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">SEPT. 4, 2018]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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. <b>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."</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Related OPINION</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> House anti-Clinton gumshoe<b> Barbara Comstock </b>is now a Republican member of Congress<b>. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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, <b>Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Related OPINION</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">When, as I came to know, <b>Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation</b>, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well.</span> (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">the elves"</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. <b>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.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Recommended OPINION</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">OPINION</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">That critical flow of inside information <b>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.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">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 </b>(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> 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.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[Related OPINION</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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, </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">. </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.</div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-was-right-about-the-vast-right-wing-conspiracy-heres-why-it-exists/2016/09/02/4a5e0fba-6879-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-was-right-about-the-vast-right-wing-conspiracy-heres-why-it-exists/2016/09/02/4a5e0fba-6879-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PROVES THE OPPOSITE OF ITS THESIS? AT LEAST IN RETROSPECT: CROOKED HILLARY / BUT THE EMAILS?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Hillary Clinton helped create what she later called the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>By Karen Tumulty</div><div>September 3,<b> 2016</b></div><div>
</div><div>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)]</div><div>
</div><div><b>The epic battles between the Clintons and their tormentors on the right have shaped American politics for nearly a quarter-century.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“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.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>The president would not budge — and both of them knew why.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div>She was not in the room, but the aides felt her presence.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>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</b>.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Nannygate, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate:</b> 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</span>. (Sarah Parnass,Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)]</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div>[The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire]</div><div>
</div><div><b>Clinton drew the opposite lesson from those early Whitewater experiences — one that also shapes how she operates today.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Her view was that she should have thrown up more resistance.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>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.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>[Documents from the Whitewater investigation are unloaded at the Ford House Office Building on Capitol Hill in 1998. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)</div><div>
</div><div><b>Industry of scandal</b></div><div>Since then, an entire industry has grown up around Clinton scandals, pseudoscandals and conspiracy theories.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>A search of Amazon.com finds more than 40 anti-Hillary books, with titles such as “American Evita” and “Can She Be Stopped?”</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">At the moment, three of the top-10 offerings on the New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction bestseller list are volumes bashing the Clintons.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">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</span>.</div><div>
</div><div><b>By the time Barack Obama took office, what she had called a conspiracy had grown into a permanent institution.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Through it all, Hillary Clinton has remained a target for a particularly intense kind of vehemence.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>“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.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>Their defensiveness seems to have deepened, which worries longtime friends and advisers.</div><div>
</div><div>“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?”</div><div>
</div><div>[What Hillary Clinton’s emails tell us about her management style]</div><div>
</div><div><b>Hillary Clinton cannot shake continuing questions over her use of a<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> private email account </span>when she was secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation’s omnivorous appetite for contributions from donors who have government business.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Polls consistently show that strong majorities of voters do not consider her to be honest or trustworthy.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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 device<b> but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible</b>.”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> She would delete more than 30,000 emails from her personal server before turning over the remainder in response to a State Department demand.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>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 .</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">On Aug. 27, the conservative group <b>Citizens United</b> 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</span>.</div><div>
</div><div><b>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.</b></div><div>
</div><div>[Emails reveal how foundation donors got access to Clinton and her close aides at State Department]</div><div>
</div><div><b>“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<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> David Bossie</span>, who until this week was president of Citizens United. O<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">n Thursday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump named Bossie his deputy campaign manager.</span></b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Bossie and other Clinton critics say that there is precedent in arrangements made during the 1990s.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>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.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>Clinton has called that speculation a “paranoid fever dream” on Trump’s part.</div><div>
</div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">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.</b></div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div>There were five official investigations into Foster’s death. None found evidence that it was anything but suicide.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>Each time a new set of allegations arose, the prediction would come: This is the one that will do them in.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Scalp-hunting as sport</b></div><div><b>“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.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>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. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">One of the women mentioned<b>, 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.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, news organizations had become more skeptical of government and less willing to take officials at their word.</div><div>
</div><div>When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in the White House, scalp-hunting had already become part of Washington’s political culture.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>One of the most dogged groups to pursue the Clintons has been<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Judicial Watch</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>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.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> AKA RWI?!</span></b></div><div>
</div><div>Why were the Clintons such an inviting target, and why have they remained one all these years?</div><div>
</div><div>As with everything else, the two sides have diametrically different views.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Trump has labeled Clinton “crooked Hillary” and says she may be “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>The couple had a reputation for shading the truth that began even before they reached the White House. Bill Clinton was known as “<b>Slick Willie”</b> back in Arkansas, and the nickname seemed to fit as he glided through political eruptions over his actions.</div><div>
</div><div>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 <b>Gennifer Flowers </b>— only to acknowledge in a deposition six years later that he had had a sexual relationship with her. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And while he did not admit to harassing<b> Jones, [ELVES?] </b>another Arkansas state employee, he ended up paying $850,000 to settle a lawsuit that originally asked for $700,000.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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?]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Clintons were also the <b>first baby boomers to reach the White House, </b>bringing with them the unresolved debates that had raged between the left and the right since the 1960s.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“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.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The former Clinton aide added, “It’s Vietnam, pot, sex — and God knows, Clinton represented all of that.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>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.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><b>“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.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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 <b>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.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“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,</span>” the former presidential aide said.</div><div>
</div><div><b>At one point, the Clinton team assembled a 332-page internal report which alleged a “communication stream of conspiracy commerce.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They came up with a <b>byzantine</b> 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.</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Opponents dismissed this view as paranoia.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> C. Boyden Gray, who had been George H.W. Bush’s White House counsel, called it “kind of goofy,</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">”</span> but he conceded that every president feels embattled at some point.</div><div>
</div><div>“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.”</div><div>
</div><div>Kenneth W. Starr, independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, talks to the media in 1997 outside his offices in Little Rock. (Jeff Mitchell/Reuters)]</div><div>
</div><div>Recruiting the enemy</div><div>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.”</div><div>
</div><div>“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.</div><div>
</div><div>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 a<b>s Accuracy in Media had been doing from the right since 1969.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div>Their checkbooks opened.</div><div>
</div><div><b>His group, Media Matters for America, launched in 2004. </b>Brock now runs four other organizations that he says were “built to counter the right-wing machine.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They are Correct the Record, which describes itself as “a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks;</span>” American Bridge 21st Century, which focuses on opposition research; the Franklin Forum, which provides media training; and<b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, </span>a watchdog group</b> he took over in 2014. He also sits on the board of the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action.</div><div>
</div><div>Brock added, “I feel like the playing field has gotten much more level from the time I started doing this until now.”</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>He also noted that new, explicitly liberal media players have emerged — among them, the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo.</b></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/17</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Three of the brief’s author’s names might be familiar to executive privilege experts. That’s because law professors Stephen B. Burbank, Richard D. Parker, and Lucas A. Powe Jr. were among the authors of a similar brief filed in regard to Bill Clinton’s legal standing to be sued by Paula Jones in federal court, 20 years ago. The three lawyers are represented by Project Protect Democracy, a legal group that aims to fight executive branch overreach.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The brief doesn’t take a position on whether the Zervos claim has merit; its authors are more concerned with establishing that the president can’t use “But I’m the president!” as an excuse to make issues like this just go away. “[B]y permitting injured parties to seek redress from a President under appropriate circumstances,” the brief reads, “state courts reinforce a bedrock constitutional principle: that in this nation, no one is above the law.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">One of those cases involved the sexual harassment case filed by Paula Jones against the president.</font></b></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/24/us/president-s-trial-lawsuit-quietly-team-lawyers-kept-paula-jones-s-case-alive.html</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The New York Times said George Conway was “a New York lawyer educated at Yale” who shared a “low view of President Clinton. When the Jones case led to Ms. (Monica) Lewinsky, (another lawyer) and Mr. Conway searched for a new lawyer for Mrs. (Linda) Tripp.” The article was headlined, “Quietly, a Team of Lawyers Kept Paula Jones Case Alive.</span>”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Times added, “Mr. Conway wanted his role kept hidden as well, because his New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, included influential Democrats like Bernard W. Nussbaum, a former White House counsel. Mr. Conway’s name does not appear on any billing records.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Observer claimed that Bill Clinton’s lawyer, Bob Bennett “was interested in evidence of possible collusion between the Jones lawyers and the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, stretching back well before the current White House crisis. After all, Mr. Starr and Mr. Conway have represented Philip Morris Companies in tobacco litigation at the same time, and both simultaneously worked on briefs for Ms. Jones arguing against Presidential immunity from a civil lawsuit such as hers.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Observer also claimed that George Conway was Matt Drudge’s source for a Jones’ claim about curvature in the president’s anatomy, but the site also quoted Drudge as denying he had ever met Conway. There is no evidence that Conway was in fact a Drudge source.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In an email to AmericanPolitics, Conway also denied any connections to Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire who financed some conservative efforts to expose Clinton’s problems, writing, “I have never met Mr. Scaife. I have never met any member of his family. I have never represented Mr. Scaife or his holdings. I have no connections whatsoever with Mr. Scaife, his holdings or his family.”</font></span></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In an interview with reporters from the site, Conway said it was “ridiculous” to tie him to Drudge.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">AmericanPolitics claimed Conway’s income from the law firm where he works in New York is at least $1 million a year. The Observer called Conway a “million-dollar-a-year partner.”</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">time ten yrs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 16px 0px 22px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Then:</span> She's the one who started it all. No, she didn't proposition anyone or commit adultery as a political figure, but she pointed the first finger of blame at the seated President Bill Clinton. With a formal lawsuit in May of 1994, Paula Jones accused the President of making a sexual advance toward her — which she rebuffed — while he was governor of Arkansas and she was a clerical worker in his administration. Although Gennifer Flowers had come forward during the 1992 Presidential campaign to allege a years-long sexual affair with him while he was governor, Jones' suit was the one that dragged out the President's demons. Clinton attempted to postpone the trial until after he was out of office, but history would not be so kind. Because the Jones case preceded the impeachment trials and included queries into the Clinton's alleged sexual misconduct as President, much of the testimony and evidence became a<b> feeder to Ken Starr's impeachment case against the President. In 1998, Clinton agreed to settle and pay $700,000, but Jones wanted an apology. Eventually she accepted an $850,000 settlement, allowing the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal to take center stage.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 16px 0px 22px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Now:</span> Still living in Arkansas, Jones remarried in 2001, becoming Paula Jones McFadden. She currently works as a real-estate agent. After legal fees she only saw about $150,000 of the settlement cash, so <b>in 2000 she posed nude for <i>Penthouse</i> magazine to "secure" a future for her children<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In 2002, she lost a <i>Celebrity Boxing</i> match to Tonya Harding, and earlier this year she attempted to sell audio recordings of her discussions with Gennifer Flowers about their encounters with Clinton over the Internet for $1.99 each. </span>Nowadays, Jones tells TIME, she doesn't "want to make a career out of what happened with the scandal." Still, she'll be playing herself in a small-budget comedy, <i>The Blue Dress,</i> about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, coming out this fall. While Jones calls the recordings with Flowers "a mistake," she says the other events were just for fun. "I mean, why not?" she says. "It wasn't hurting me. It wasn't hurting my family. It wasn't something I was ashamed of."</font></p><p style="margin: 16px 0px 22px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Jones does have one regret about her role in the Clinton Impeachment saga, however. She claims she was used as a political pawn by conservatives out to get Clinton, charging that they pressured her to reject the first settlement offer.</span> "I hate the fact that people thought it was political," Jones tells TIME. "It was their agenda to make it [seem] like I was trying to bring down the President. They let political views bog their mind of what really happened."</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/paula-jones-hillary-clinton-unfit-president-118368</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jones said that both Clintons would do anything “to get to the top,” adding that it is “all about political status.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He does not have a right to be in the White House to serve the people the way he treated women, sexually harassing women,” she said.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px; font-family: ff-tisa-web-pro, Georgia, Times, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clinton had denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky in his deposition for the Jones lawsuit. Clinton denied Jones’ claims as well, though he paid $850,000 to her and her attorneys in an out-of-court settlement in November 1998. The lawsuit was dismissed pre-trial in a summary judgment after it was ruled that Jones did not prove damages.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>