Whitewater

this node for clinton scandals in gen'l, but see also ark pjt, bimbogate

see vast RW conspiracy

see IWF

ginni?!

gingrich or just in bimbo-gates?

"crooked hillary' trump 2016

starr tried to bail for pepperdine, stuck for a while?

===

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB861917340688900500}:}:

clinton jihad:

no lnx

By Edward Felsenthal and David Rogers Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

April 25, 1997

WASHINGTON -- Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to force herself to be pleasant when she met Hillary Clinton for the first time four years ago.

Mrs. Clinton had been an outspoken supporter of Anita Hill, the woman who had famously accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings. Ms. Thomas couldn't get the association out of her mind.

"For me, it was, 'Wow, now I have to, in my role, be respectful and cordial and courteous,' " Ms. Thomas recalls thinking as she moved through a receiving line toward the new first lady. Although the brief encounter was awkward for her, Ms. Thomas says she was proud of how she handled it. She gave Mrs. Clinton some verses from the Bible, along with a warning about how tough this city can be.

Today Ms. Thomas feels a kinship with Mrs. Clinton. Like the first lady, she is best known as the spouse of a prominent man. But also like Mrs. Clinton, she has become a controversial political player and has been the subject of vigorous public criticism for her partisan activities.

Although she takes pains to carve out her own identity, Ms. Thomas, 40 years old, is inevitably linked with her husband in much of what she does. "A lot of people treat her a certain way ... because of who she is married to," says radio-host Armstrong Williams, a former close aide and a friend to Justice Thomas.

Awkward Predicament

Ms. Thomas says there are challenges that come with "being a Supreme Court spouse, as opposed to just a lawyer working in Washington." Her dual role highlights an increasingly common political phenomenon: Now that many political partners are professionals themselves, they face an awkward predicament. Many find they have to struggle to avoid being used as political tools or being perceived as benefiting from their spouse's position.

Barbara Olson,an aide to the Senate leadership who has worked in congressional investigations of the Clinton administration, has been a target of Democratic sniping that she is a proxy for her husband, Theodore Olson, a prominent lawyer who has represented one of the president's accusers in the Whitewater affair. Republicans in the last Congress delighted in cutting money for a small anticrime program that paid consulting fees to Sylvia Panetta, wife of then-White House Chief-of-Staff Leon Panetta. That put Mr. Panetta in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to get the money back.

Ms. Thomas had already made a name for herself as an activist in conservative circles before Republicans took over Congress in 1994. But her influence grew after that election when her boss, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, became House majority leader.

Ms. Thomas operates much as an eager young administrative officer back at the base camp for the Republican infantry. She works behind the scenes, serving as part strategist and part cheerleader for the leadership's effort tobeef-up the GOP's ability to investigate and oversee the White House and executive agencies.[benghazi much later?]

Partisan Battles

It is a role that takes her from dry, detailed General Accounting Office reports to the higher-profile and more partisan-edged investigations of administration scandals. She has assisted with the investigations of White House ethics, Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's financial dealings. When Republicans approved an expanded budget for House committee investigations last month, the move partly reflected Ms. Thomas's influence.

She has figured in several high-profile fights involving the House Appropriations Committee. Over the objections of some Republicans on the committee, she pressed hard for deep cuts in funding to Legal Services Corp., a provider of legal aid to the poor that she viewed as using federal money to advance liberal causes.

And in a stormy panel meeting in1995, she stood watch on behalf of Mr. Armey as Republicans reluctantly lined up behind a leadership attempt to bar funding for nonprofit organizations that engage in advocacy, in many cases for poor constituencies. The measure ultimately failed because of opposition in the Senate.

During this Congress, Ms. Thomas has stepped back, as the leadership has relaxed its efforts to control committee chairmen. But she is still a force behind continuing investigations, and before last year's election she helped gather information on White House scandals for Republicans to use on the campaign trail. (That project was abandoned after word of its existence leaked, prompting concern that it would make Republicans look like scandalmongers.)

A memo this past January titled "Foreign Money Contributions Scandal" illustrates Ms. Thomas's style. Throwing as wide a net as possible, she addressed it to Republican staff on 19 committees, including the sensitive Intelligence panel. In it, she cited statutes or regulations that might have been violated by overseas contributions to Democrats. She urged staff directors to be "watchful" for administration efforts to dismiss problems as just "campaign finance." Ms. Thomas wrote, "what we don't know is how much was for sale in the Clinton presidency."

Though Ms. Thomas is good-humored and engaging, her writing sometimes gets her into trouble.Much of her job is simply informational: She helps produce a biweekly "Oversight Bulletin" publicizing current investigations. But when she pens strategy, she betrays a partisan edge that makes experienced staff directors blanch.

A case in point is an April 1996 memo she wrote for Republican congressmen Bob Walker and Jim Nussleand sent to House committees, asking for "examples of dishonesty or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration" and "anecdotes that amplify these areas." The memo requested that all such materials be sent to her as quickly as possible and reminded committee chairs that "you are a tremendous resource for this project."

Democratic Backlash

Democrats quickly turned Ms. Thomas's memo on the Republicans, claiming it proved that the investigations were partisan. During one hearing, Democrats blew up the memo and posted it on an easel to suggest that the proceeding was part of a GOP plot to denigrate the administration.

Even some Republican staff members complained that it went too far. "It didn't dawn on her that in Congress, things aren't supposed to appear politically driven,"even if they are, says a senior GOP aide who has worked with her.

In May, two weeks after the memo was distributed, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia spotted Ms. Thomas in the audience at a hearing on the White House travel-office firings. In a rare public attack on a congressional staffer, he demanded to know why "Mrs. Clarence Thomas in that bright blue dress" was present. "I really smell a political witch hunt," he said.

Ms. Thomas didn't endure the attack silently. Later that day, she confronted Mr. Moran on a House elevator and showed him a copy of a book, "Everything Men Know About Women," in which all the pages are blank. "This book is about you," she said.Justice Thomas later left his wife a voice-mail message in which he teasingly sang verses of the song, "Devil With a Blue Dress On."

Spousal Conflict?

Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who also questioned Ms. Thomas's role at the travel-office hearing, believes it is a conflict of interest for her to be involved in disputes between Congress and the White House that the Supreme Court might be called on to settle. "We may have a problem here where the marital relationship confuses the constitutional intent" of the separation of powers, Mr. Kanjorski says. Ms. Thomas laughs when told of Mr. Kanjorski's statement, but declines to comment....[much more]

===

brett kava helped?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ken-starr-dead-1234592249/

no lnx

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

Ken Starr, Who Turned a Blind Eye to Rape and Defended a Sex Trafficker, Dead at 76

The right-wing lawyer was known for probing Bill Clinton’s affair, mishandling sexual assault cases at Baylor, and helping Jeffrey Epstein secure a sweetheart deal

BY JON BLISTEIN

SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr offers his testimony to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee, in Washington, D.C, on Nov. 19, 1998. DAVID HUME KENNERLY

KENNETH STARR, THE lawyer known for investigating Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, mishandling sexual assault cases as president of Baylor University, and helping Jeffrey Epstein secure a sweetheart deal, died Tuesday, Sept. 13. He was 76.

Starr’s family confirmed his death, saying he died from complications from surgery at St. Luke’s Medical center in Houston, Texas.

Starr was a stalwart conservative foot soldier throughout his career. He started as a lawyer and was nominated by Ronald Reagan to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1983, a post he maintained for about six years before resigning. George H.W. Bush later appointed him solicitor general, and he was even briefly in the running to fill a Supreme Court vacancy later taken by David Souter.

Though always lurking around the right wing, Starr really started to rise to prominence in the mid-’90s, when he was tapped to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged involvement in an Arkansas real estate project. Neither Clinton was prosecuted,but Starr’s probe expanded to include an investigation into Paula Jones’ claims of sexual assault against bill Clinton, as well as Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky.

The “Starr Report,” released in Sept. 1998, claimed Clinton lied about about his affair with Lewinsky and cited obstruction of justice, perjury, abuse of power, and more as reasons for impeaching Clinton. The report led to Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives, but he was acquitted on all counts in the Senate.

[RELATED

Ken Starr Now Thinks Impeachment Is... Bad?

Ken Starr

Noah Cyrus Finds Her Own Voice]

After making a name for himself investigating Clinton’s sexual impropriety, Starr returned to his career as a lawyer and found himself involved in a handful of prominent cases. He successfully represented the Juneau, Alaska, school board and principal that suspended a student for unfurling a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” sign as the Olympic torch passed through the the city. He failed to secure constitutional immunity for the mercenary firm Blackwater after its contractors slaughtered four unarmed civilians in Fallujah. And he also failed to uphold Prop 8 in California, the ballot measure banning same-sex marriage that was later overturned in the courts.

Despite being busy defending opponents of same-sex marriage and private military contractors, Starr found plenty of ways to return to the world of sexual impropriety. With his plethora of connections to George W. Bush’s administration, Starr joined Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team and played a crucial part in pressuring the Justice Department to drop its sex-trafficking case against the billionaire. For his efforts, Starr helped his client secure the infamous sweetheart deal that landed him in prison for just 18 months and effectively ensured him immunity from future prosecution.

Epstein wasn’t the only alleged child molester Starr tried to help either. In 2013, he wrote a letter of support for Christopher Kloman, just before he was sentenced to 43 years in prison for molesting five girls while teaching at the elite Potomac School in the Sixties and Seventies.

Three years after that, Starr resigned as chancellor of Baylor University, and a professor at its law school, not long after being removed from his post as president. The reason? An investigation found that Starr and other administrators mishandled numerous accusations of sexual assault — including multiple rape allegations — against the school’s football players.

For his final act, the man who made a name for himself trying to take down one president tried to help another stave off the same fate. First as a TV talking head, he argued against impeaching Donald Trump over the Mueller report, claiming it would be “bad for the country.” Starr later joined Trump’s legal team when he was impeached (the first time) for abuse of power and obstruction of justice after he allegedly tried to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden.

omg

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,

ByDavid 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

GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]

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

Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

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.)

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.

[Recommended OPINION

What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.

OPINION

Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]

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 Fosterwas 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.

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

PROVES THE OPPOSITE OF ITS THESIS? AT LEAST IN RETROSPECT: CROOKED HILLARY / BUT THE EMAILS?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB861917340688900500

clinton jihad:

no lnx

By Edward Felsenthal and David Rogers Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

April 25, 1997

WASHINGTON --Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to force herself to be pleasant when she met Hillary Clinton for the first time four years ago.

Awkward Predicament

Barbara Olson, an aide to the Senate leadership who has worked in congressional investigations of the Clinton administration, has been a target of Democratic sniping that she is a proxy for her husband, Theodore Olson, a prominent lawyer who has represented one of the president's accusers in the Whitewater affair. Republicans in the last Congress delighted in cutting money for a small anticrime program that paid consulting fees to Sylvia Panetta, wife of then-White House Chief-of-Staff Leon Panetta. That put Mr. Panetta in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to get the money back.

Ms. Thomas operates much as an eager young administrative officer back at the base camp for the Republican infantry. She works behind the scenes, serving as part strategist and part cheerleader for the leadership's effort tobeef-up the GOP's ability to investigate and oversee the White House and executive agencies.[benghazi much later?]

Partisan Battles

It is a role that takes her from dry, detailed General Accounting Office reports to the higher-profile and more partisan-edged investigations of administration scandals. She has assisted with the investigations of White House ethics, Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's financial dealings. When Republicans approved an expanded budget for House committee investigations last month, the move partly reflected Ms. Thomas's influence.

A memo this past January titled "Foreign Money Contributions Scandal" illustrates Ms. Thomas's style. Throwing as wide a net as possible, she addressed it to Republican staff on 19 committees, including the sensitive Intelligence panel. In it, she cited statutes or regulations that might have been violated by overseas contributions to Democrats. She urged staff directors to be "watchful" for administration efforts to dismiss problems as just "campaign finance." Ms. Thomas wrote, "what we don't know is how much was for sale in the Clinton presidency."

A case in point is an April 1996 memo she wrote for Republican congressmen Bob Walker and Jim Nussleand sent to House committees, asking for "examples of dishonesty or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration" and "anecdotes that amplify these areas." The memo requested that all such materials be sent to her as quickly as possible and reminded committee chairs that "you are a tremendous resource for this project."

Democratic Backlash

Spousal Conflict?

http://www.constantinereport.com/on-floyd-brown-and-david-bossie-deconstructing-the-obama-smear-machine-2/

Berkowitz

www.mediatransparency.org

May 5, 2008

Floyd Brown and David Bossie: Back in the Swift Boat captain's chairs

Two longtime practitioners of negative campaigning are mainstreaming attacks on Clinton and Obama

Floyd Brown and David Bossie have spent a good part of their political careers making life miserable for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Unlike Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire financier who was unremitting in his efforts to take the Clintons down during the latter part of the twentieth century and whose newspaper endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton prior to the Pennsylvania primary, neither Brown nor Bossie have had a pro-Hillary conversion.

These days, however, Brown's new organization, The National Campaign Fund -- which launched a new website "ExposeObama.com" -- and Bossie's Citizens United have added Sen. Barack Obama to the mix.

Brown recently told Time magazine that "he had established several other front groups to fund a long-range effort to erode Obama's support, including a second PAC, called The Legacy Committee, a 527 organization called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America and a so-called "social welfare" 501(c)4nonprofit called the Policy Issues Institute."

Bossie told Newsweek that he was "assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with [Bill] Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War."

Best known for his infamous Willie Horton television advertisement that helped put the kybosh on Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis' presidential aspirations in 1988, Brown's National Campaign Fund has prepared a new TV attack ad called "Victims," which lambastes Obama for being too easy on gang murderers.

"The campaign by Hillary Clinton has not been able to raise Obama's negatives," Brown told Time. "It is absolutely critical that Obama's negatives go up with Republicans." Time reported that copies of the ad were "e-mailed to between 3 and 7 million conservatives this week, with a plea for more funding to further spread the message."

While declining to comment on how much money he was hoping to raise, Brown pointed out that "All of the efforts I have ever done in my life have been significantly funded. This is going to be the most Internet-intensive effort for an ad debut ever."

"The ad draws a parallel between Obama's weakness on gang violence and the war on terror," said Brown. According to the conservative news site, NewsMax.com, the ad "tells of a woman leaving church choir practice who was killed by gang gunfire while shielding her 6-year-old daughter, a 15-year-old boy beaten with bricks after a gang member crashed into his car, and a 14-year-old boy shot five times in the back for refusing to flash a gang hand sign."

"That same year, Barack Obama -- then an Illinois state senator -- voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders, the ad points out," NewsMax reported. The ad ends: "When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. So the question is: Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"

According to Time, "Brown's new ad focuses on a 2001 vote by Obama in the Illinois Senate to oppose a bill that would have expanded the use of the death penalty if the perpetrator of a crime belonged to a gang. The links between Obama's vote on that issue and the deaths of three Chicago resident's are indirect and tenuous, as is the further connection the ad draws between the issue of Obama's position on the death penalty and the issue of international terrorism."

The ExposeObama team consists of Brown, who is also president of Excellentia Inc., which according to his bio, is "a consulting company specializing in non-profit organizational strategy, development and the marketing of ideas"; executive director Bruce E. Hawkins, "a highly skilled political strategist" who has worked for such conservative as Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and Mike Huckabee; treasurer and general counsel James V. Lacy, the co-founder and managing partner of Wewer & Lacy, LLP and the cofounder in 1978, along with the late anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis, of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

On another front, a group called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America, headed by California State Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, teamed with Brown to attack both Obama and Hillary Clinton for wanting to raise taxes on the American people. According to DeVore, both senators "want to raise taxes. Americans should have this information and be aware of the other extremely liberal positions Obama and Clinton hold."

"The ad draws a parallel between Obama and Clinton's records on taxes," said Brown. "The bottom line is that they can't deal with our economic problems by raising taxes. International competition cannot be addressed by raising taxes and raising the costs of business in America."

In the early 1990's Brown penned "Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton," and he took credit for creating a 1-900 line for callers to listen to edited excerpts of telephone conversations between Bill Clinton and Arkansas lounge singer Gennifer Flowers who, during Bill Clinton's run for the presidency in 1992, claimed that she had had a twelve-year relationship with him.

Last summer, when it looked as if Hillary Clinton was a sure-fire cinch to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, Brown announced that he was working on a movie that, according to the website of Citizens United, would "expose the truth about her conflicts in the past and her liberal plot for the future."

Now, with Brown having moved on, "Hillary: The Movie" (website) is about to "explode onto the scene!" claims Citizens United's website. Produced by CU Chairman of the Board and President, David Bossie, the author of the recently released book, "Hillary: The Politics of Personal Destruction," the movie contains more than 40 interviews "with experts, opinion makers, and many of the people who personally locked horns with the Clintons."

The film has "a cast to end all casts," and includes Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Jeff Gerth, Buzz Patterson, Michael Barone, Billy Dale, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Tony Blankley, Dick Armey, Bay Buchanan, Joe Connor, Mark Levin, Frank Gaffney, Peter Paul, Gary Aldrich, Dan Burton, John Mica, Michael Medved, Kathleen Willey, Kate O'Beirne, and Larry Kudlow.

Two Trailers for the film and three clever -- one 30 second and two 10 second -- advertisements for the film are featured at CU's website. The ads have been the cause of legal action: In late March, CNN reported that the Supreme Court had rejected CU's fight "to air commercials promoting" the movie without having to "indicate by name its sponsorship and disclose its political donors."

According to CNN, The case, rejected on jurisdictional grounds by the Supreme Court, had been appealed after a federal District Court refused to issue a preliminary injunction clearing the way for the promotions to run.

"At issue," CNN reported, "was whether broadcast ads promoting the 90-minute documentary ... are subject to strict campaign finance laws on political advocacy, or would be considered a constitutionally protected form of commercial speech." The three-judge District Court panel "rejected the group's arguments that the documentary is more akin to news or information programs like PBS' 'Nova' or CBS' '60 Minutes.'"

"'The Movie' is susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary world, and that viewers should vote against her," wrote the judges in their ruling.

Both trailers are fast paced goulashes of Hillary sound-bites, flashing headlines and talking heads. The first one begins with a campaigning former North Carolina Senator John Edwards cautioning against "nostalgia," and climaxes with a long quote from former Clinton aide and Fox News Channel commentator **Dick**Morris: "We must never underestimate thiswoman. We must never underestimate her chances of winning. And we must never forget thefundamental danger that this woman poses to every value that we hold dear. You see," says Morris," I know her."

Although in reality, the film is "explod[ing] onto the scene" in only a handful of selected venues, the American Spectator's Quin Hillyer called it (and the companion book), "The best compendium of Hillary mendacity (and at-least-near-criminality) available right now." Hillyer acknowledges that he "did a final copy-edit for -- but did not write -- the book." Hillyer assures readers that the film does not merely re-hash Hillary's greatest hits, but includes "an examination of more recent scandals that never received the attention they deserved."

David Bossie is also the president and manager of an entity called The Presidential Coalition LLC, described by SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy as "a Republican front group that registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a Section 527 political action committee on June 30, 2005 ... [and] is affiliated with Citizens United. The group's IRS filing stated that the PAC was "Organized to directly or indirectly accept contributions and/or make expenditures to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of individuals to federal, state or local public office, or office in a political organization."

Bossie "was fired in 1998 from his job as chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight -- which was investigating alleged Clinton White House campaign finance abuses -- for his role in releasing selectively edited transcripts of former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell's prison conversations," Media Matters for America has reported. "(Hubbell went to prison for defrauding his Little Rock, AR, law firm.)"

He is also the author of a spate of books attacking Democrats including "Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore (2000), "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11" (2004), and "The Many Faces of John Kerry: Why This Massachusetts Liberal Is Wrong For America" (2004).

Ramping up the rage and ranting up the rhetoric about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers

According to Newsweek,David Bossie has placed Obama in his sights. The magazine reported that Bossie maintained that he was "assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with [Bill] Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War."

Shortly after Obama's victory in the Wisconsin primary, longtime conservative columnist Cliff Kincaid, accused the Illinois Senator of having "controversial socialist connections." Kincaid, the editor of Accuracy in Media, a right wing media watchdog group, and a contributing editor to FamilySecurityMatters.org, charged Obama with being "an associate of a Chicago-based Marxist group with access to millions of labor union dollars and connections to expert political consultants, including a convicted swindler."

Questions about Obama's relationship with Ayerswere subsequently raised by conservative radio and Fox News Channel talk show host Sean Hannity. ABC News' George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about Ayers during the Obama-Clinton debate prior to the Pennsylvania primary.

Recent columns by Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter also raised the specter of Ayers.

According to Krauthammer, Ayers, along with Tony Rezko, "the indicted fixer," and Jeremiah Wright, "the racist reverend," make up Obama's "Three Amigos":

Obama makes it sound as if the relationship consists of having run into each other at the DMV. In fact, Obama's political career was launched in a 1995 meeting at Ayers' home. Obama's own campaign says that they maintain 'friendly' relations.

Obama's defense is that he was 8 when Ayers and his Weather Underground comrades were planting bombs at the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and other buildings. True. But Obama was 40 when Ayers said publicly that he doesn't regret setting bombs. Indeed, he said, 'I feel we didn't do enough.'

Would you maintain friendly relations with an unrepentant terrorist? Would you even shake his hand? To ask why Obama does is perfectly legitimate and perfectly relevant to understanding what manner of man he is.

Newsweek reported that "Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago's Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers's house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995 -- and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them 'detestable,'" says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood 'but has not seen him for months.' At a recent dinner party, according to one guest who asked not to be identified discussing a private gathering, Ayers 'ridiculed' the notion that Obama shared his left-wing views: 'He thought the idea that there was a political connection between them was absurd.'"

In early March, John Ponder of the Pensito Review wrote that Obama biographer, John K. Wilson, author of "Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest," who said that Ayers was "not affiliated with the Obama campaign," described the Ayers relationship: "In 1995, State Sen. Alice Palmer held an event for supporters at the home of Ayers, where she announced her plans to run for Congress and introduced Obama as her chosen successor. Obama also served on the board of directors for a progressive foundation, the Woods Fund, from 1999-2001, when Ayers was also on the board. In 2001, Ayers gave $200 to Obama's state senate campaign fund. And Obama and Ayers appeared together on a 1997 panel at the University of Chicago dealing with juvenile justice (Obama also praised Ayers' approach on the subject in an op-ed he wrote that year), and on a 2002 panel on public intellectuals at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Just as Obama's explanations about his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- and Wright's increased public presence -- has not put that saga to rest, there is no doubt that right wing columnists, talk show hosts, partisan advertising and public relations specialists, pundits and two longtime practitioners of negative campaigning, Floyd Brown and David Bossie, will squeeze every last drop out of the Ayers controversy.

http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=236

•••••••

David Bossie

The 29-year-old currently works for Senator Lauch Faircloth. Previously, he served as the national youth director in Senator Robert Dole's 1988 presidential campaign. In 1992, he became the executive director of Floyd Brown's Presidential Victory Committee which produced an ad and a 1-800 number with recordings of Gennifer Flowers' alleged conversations with Bill Clinton. Floyd Brown also worked on Dole's 1988 campaign as the Midwest political director but is most famous for creating the Willie Horton commercial that helped sink the Dukakis campaign. In May 1994, Bossie claimed to be working sixteen hours a day on Whitewater.

Additional Information on David Bossie

Bossie held August 1994 impeachment press conference with Howard Phillips. On August 10, 1994 David Bossie -- who was identified as "Director of Government Relations and Communications for Citizens United" along with Howard Phillips chairman of the Conservative Caucus held a press conference addressing the "Latest Whitewater Developments, Impeachment Possibility."

Citizens United press release, 8/10/94

At the press conference, Bossie said he would present Jack Brooks, the House Judiciary Committee chairman with petitions with 10,000 signatures calling for impeachment hearings. Phillips said he would present Brooks with 26,000 petitions calling for Clinton's impeachment. Bossie was also highly critical of Robert Fiske at this press conference.

Gannett News, 8/10/94

Columbia Journalism Review described Bossie in May 1994. In May 1994, Trudy Lieberman, a senior editor at Consumer Reports wrote: "Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation's press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency."

Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1994

The article also described him as a "source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp" who claims to get eighteen calls an hour.

Columbia Journalism Review, May/June1994

In 1992 Brown & Bossie harassed the family of a suicide victim. In April, 1992, 30 news organizations received "an anonymous and untraceable letter" by fax "claiming Clinton had had an affair with a former law student who committed suicide 15 years ago." Floyd Brown attempted to link Clinton to the 1977 suicide of this, "emotionally distraught young woman, seven-months pregnant," Susan Coleman.

CBS Evening News, 7/13/92

Brown's associates "repeatedly contacted the woman's family in an unsuccessful attempt to confirm the charges."

San Francisco Chronicle, 7/28/92; "CBS Evening News," 7/13/92

Bossie and ex-DC police officer Jim Murphy questioned Susan Coleman's mother and her husband as well as her friends. They even tried to find out what was in Susan's suicide note.

"CBS Evening News," 7/13/92

Bossie and Murphy followed Susan's mother to an Army hospital in Augusta, GA where her husband was being treated for a stroke. They "burst into the sick man's room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide."

CBS Evening News, 7/13/92

Bossie & NBC executive producer chased Schaffer around Fayetteville. In January 1994, Brown's associate, David Bossie was seen with NBC network producer Ira Silverman attempting to interview former Arkansas state Banking Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer. Silverman admitted using Bossie for background information, but denied working together on the interview. Schaffer's husband said the two "jumped out from behind [a] car... [and] chased her through the streets."

Chicago Tribune, 3/27/94; Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1/20/94

Beverly Bassett Schaffer said she was "ambushed" and then "stalked" around Fayetteville by Bossie and Silverman. Schaffer said that her car was rushed twice by Silverman, an NBC camera crew, and Bossie.

The Fayetteville Morning News, 1/15/92

Silverman said, "I talk to them [Brown and Bossie] along with everyone else. Back in October and November it was difficult to develop sources."

Columbia Journalism Review, 5-6/94

Bossie claimed to be fueling Whitewater. In May 1994, Bossie said that "Citizens United" had provided Whitewater information to "the top fifty major publications, networks, and editorial boards... We've provided the same material on the Hill both on the House and Senate side." Bossie also claimed that he would have gladly provided documents to Democrats, but they haven't asked.

Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1994

Bossie praised Brown... called politics a "full contact sport." In 1994, Brown claimed that he was harsher and meaner than most in politics and Bossie said, "That's right, Stick and jab. Stick and jab and keep on moving. Politics. It's definitely a full-contact sport."

New York Times, 4/24/94

Chicago Tribune described Bossie in March 1994. In March 1994, Carol Jouzaitis of the Chicago Tribune wrote of Bossie, "The researcher, David Bossie, harvests tales of alleged wrongdoings from a network of Clinton enemies, then peddles them to Capitol Hill and media contacts in hopes of prompting scandalous stories."

Chicago Tribune, 3/27/94

Time described Bossie's dirt-digging in January 1994. In January 1994, Time magazine wrote, "Brown's associate, David Bossie has been to Little Rock several times digging for dirt. Evidently some Whitewater tale tellers prefer to deal with Brown & Co., figuring Brown can be trusted to protect their sources.

Time, 1/24/94

In mid-January Time reported that Floyd Brown was covertly feeding information and "hard-to-find" documents to reporters and Hill Republicans looking into Whitewater.Time said that David Bossie had been to Little Rock several times "digging for dirt." Evidently, some Whitewater "tale tellers" prefer to deal with Brown and Bossie "figuring Brown can be trusted to protect their sources."

Time, 1/24/94

chip b

Political Research Associates Researching the right for progressive change makers

CLINTON, CONSPIRACISM, AND THE CONTINUING CULTURE WAR: WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE

By Chip Berlet, on April 1, 1999

The roar was visceral. A torrent of sound fed by a vast subconscious reservoir of anger and resentment. Repeatedly, as speaker after speaker strode to the podium and denounced President Clinton, the thousands in the cavernous auditorium surged to their feet with shouts and applause. The scene was the Christian Coalition’s annual Road to Victory conference held in September 1998 three months before the House of Representatives voted to send articles of impeachment to the Senate.

Former Reagan appointeeAlan Keyes observed that the country’s moral decline had spanned two decades and couldn’t be blamed exclusively on Clinton, but when he denounced Clinton for supporting the “radical homosexual agenda,” the crowd cheered and gave Keyes one of his several standing ovations. Republican Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire attacked Clinton’s foreign policies, stating that the “globalists of the New World Order” must not be allowed to sell out American sovereignty.

Most attacks on Clinton highlighted his sexual misconduct and subsequent cover-up as proof that he was unfit to remain President, but the list of complaints was long. When the American Conservative Union distributed a National Impeachment Survey with the type of loaded question typical of the direct-mail genre, it asked:

Which Clinton Administration scandal listed below do you consider to be “very serious”? The scandals listed were: Chinagate, Monicagate, Travelgate, Whitewater, FBI “Filegate,” Cattlegate, Troopergate, Casinogate, [and] Health Caregate…

In addition to attention to scandals, those attending the annual conference clearly opposed Clinton’s agenda on abortion, gay rights, foreign policy, and other issues.

Several months later, much of the country’s attention was focused on the House of Representatives “Managers” and their pursuit of a “removal” of Clinton in the Senate. Few people understood the vast right-wing political machinery that was mobilized to pressure the managers to fight on and never give up. Those gathered at the Road to Victory Conference are naturally inclined to oppose Clinton, but they were “educated” by a large number of relatively unknown rightwing groups and individuals to see Clinton as the embodiment of evil, not just a liberal, but corrupt, immoral, and even a murderer. They are the foot soldiers in the “culture war,” the backlash launched by the political right against the post-WWII social liberation movements. It has replaced communism as the right’s major unifying focus.

Today’s culture war is, in part, a continuation of the right’s long-standing campaign against the ideas of modernity and even the Enlightenment. Some openly support the culture war as part of the age-old battle against forces aligned with Satan.

Demonization is central to the process. Essayist Ralph Melcher notes that the “venomous hatred” directed toward the entire culture exemplified by the President and his wife succeeded in making them into “political monsters,” but also represented the deeper continuity of the right’s historic distaste for liberalism. As historian Robert Dallek of Boston University puts it, “The Republicans are incensed because they essentially see Clinton…as the embodiment of the counterculture’s thumbing of its nose at accepted wisdoms and institutions of the country.”

Liberals are demonized for tolerating godless moral relativism and sinful immorality— especially in the form of abortion and gay rights. Liberals also are demonized for supporting a strong federal government, aggressive regulatory oversight, and global interdependence—seen as subversive collectivism that undermines sovereignty and the spirit of free enterprise.

The Christian Coalitionaudience’s palpable hostility to Clinton and all he represents illustrates the zeal of the foot soldiers mobilized in the crusade for God and country. We should not discount the political impact of these activists, who are motivated by deep ideological, theological, and emotional commitments. While the Senate voted not to sustain the charges sent over by the House of Representatives, there is no truce in the culture war. Bill and Hillary Clinton continue to serve as high profile targets.

Much of the original constituency for the impeachment battle came from the Christian Right, but the Christian Right does not act alone or in isolation. Rightwing attacks on President Clinton flow from a large and diverse networkof individuals and organizations. This is not so much a secret conspiracy against President Clinton as a loosely-knit pre-existing coalition among several sectors of the political right that share an anti-Clinton agenda, despite wide differences in political outlook and style. As analyst Russ Bellant explains, “different sectors on the right didn’t have to agree on the person they would choose to replace Clinton; all they had to do was agree that they wanted Clinton to go.” It is this convergence of anti-Clinton sentiment across sectors of the right that accounts for the fervor and drive of the anti- Clinton campaign.

Most of us are tired of the impeachment scandal and interminable pundit ruminations about it. This article, however, will review the attacks on President Clinton with an eye to discerning clues to how the Christian Right and its allies will regroup and launch the next battle in the culture war. I will pay special attention to the process by which dubious conspiracy theories became acceptable within the Republican Party, and then became major headlines. I also will examine why the right’s leaders and followers pushed so hard for the impeachment of Clinton, and why the failure of the campaign has left such bitterness and disillusionment within the right’s ranks.

THE CONSPIRACIST WORLDVIEW

Critics of Clinton in the conspiracist subculture range across the political spectrum and incorporate both secular and religious themes. That a wide variety of conservative and hard right groups work together in coalition to challenge liberalism is hardly surprising. However, right-wing coalitions in the 1990s increasingly tolerated, or even embraced, the most outlandish and nasty assertions of conspiracist subcultures. Even conservative groups with a more cautious and rational track record appear more and more open to the paranoid sounding vernacular and conspiracist narratives of hard right populist movements. Many of these themes became the subtexts of the anti-Clinton campaign.1 The impeachment struggle demonstrated the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to enlist (or at least accommodate for political gain) three sectors of the right that use apocalyptic conspiracism— the Christian Right, right wing populist and patriot groups, and the far right.

Critics of Clinton in the conspiracist subculture range across the political spectrum and incorporate both secular and religious themes.

The conspiracist wing of the Republican right had been pushed back following the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his reign of error and false accusation in the 1950s, and again after the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, where its alarmist charges about Lyndon Johnson and liberalism helped doom Goldwater’s candidacy.2 This wing, rooted in nativism, took the movements built to support Goldwater (and later, right-wing populist George Wallace) and used them to build the “New Right.” A conspiracist worldview undergirded this movement. According to Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy:

Former congressman Vin Weber, an early and active member of the “movement conservative” Republican faction on Capitol Hill, recalled that “people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, leftwing conspiracy” that had to be mimicked and countered with new conservative organizations that were “philosophically sound, technologically proficient and movement-oriented.” This became a mantra for the new conservative activists.3

Academic studies have shown that some conspiracist groups on the right, such as the John Birch Society, are not “marginal” to the electoral process, but have members with above-average income, status, and education, who often are long-term activists within the Republican Party.4 As the political scene has shifted to the right over the past twenty years and the culture of conspiracism spread into television’s prime time news and commentary outlets, the apocalyptic prophets of the right-wing paranoid style have reintegrated themselves into the Republican Party.5 [-->TP?]

Within the hard right and the far right, a considerable amount of the information being circulated is undocumented rumor and apocalyptic conspiracist theory. Rightwing conspiracist movements in the US grow from a belief that common citizens are held down by a small network of secret elites who manipulate a vast legion of corrupt politicians, mendacious journalists, propagandizing schoolteachers, and nefarious bankers. This conspiracist subculture has a long historical pedigree and periodically appears on the US political scene, usually accompanying a right-wing populist upsurge such as we are currently experiencing.6 Conspiracism is not merely a marginal “extremist” phenomenon, but is deeply embedded in our culture.

An alarming number of our fellow citizens saw symptoms of secret conspiracies afoot during the 1990s. These symptoms include restrictions on gun ownership, government abuse of power, federal health and safety regulations, abortion, homo-sexuality, the feminist movement, sex education, new age spirituality, modern educational curricula, environmentalism, and rock or rap music, to name just a few. The conspirators are many: politicians and law enforcement officials above county level, game wardens, internal revenue agents, judges, lawyers, bankers, journalists, unionists, leftists, the Rockefellers, the UN, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger banking discussion group, the Council on Foreign Relations, Federal Reserve bank officials, Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Arabs, and Asians.

The charges against Clinton were influenced by these historic right-wing conspiracist theories—that link liberalism, sexual immorality, statist intrusion, collectivism, and treason. Those who are immersed in hard right conspiracist discourse frequently believe that liberals are engaged in criminal conspiracies to subvert the country. This apocalyptic paradigm is deeply rooted in the American psyche. Joel Kovel, in Red Hunting in the Promised Land, reviews the influence of this paradigm on American anti-communism, and traces it to the same “diabolism” and apocalyptic demonization that shaped the Catholic Inquisition and the witch hunts of Protestant Puritanism.7

During the Cold War, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s political patron, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), was in the forefront of purveying conspiracist allegations of a global “red menace,” including charges that domestic subversives were undermining the US. Throughout the twentieth century there has been an elaborate network of conspiracist anti-communists who spread the gospel against liberal collectivist treachery through books, magazine articles, electronic media, and workshops. The right’s anti-Clinton campaign replicated the style and themes of those anti-communist witch hunts, adding new media such as fax machines, AM talk radio, shortwave radio, and the Internet.

People who see the world through conspiracist lenses frequently distrust the government no matter what party is in power. According to a Roper Center study of over 20 polls over a 30-year period, “belief in a Kennedy assassination conspiracy has been related to a political world view which sees the government as failing to provide its citizens with the help they need to cope with the problems of modern life.” For many, this neglect is seen as the intentional policy of a small group of powerful people who control the government and ignore the needs of average citizens. In 1992 and 1998, around 75 percent of those polled thought there was a larger plot to assassinate Kennedy.8

Those who are immersed in hard right conspiracist discourse frequently believe that liberals are engaged in criminal conspiracies to subvert the country.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

The amount of conspiracist material attacking Clinton before and during the impeachment hearings was staggering. There are few reasons to think the attacks will cease now that the impeachment crisis is over.

The small but vocal minority that originally supported the Starr investigation was nurtured by the conspiracist stories circulating about Clinton. Much of the media coverage of Clinton from 1997 until 1999 focused on scandal and impeachment rather than ideological political issues or electoral politics. This was true not only in alternative right-wing media, but also in mainstream corporate media. Reporter Gene Lyons is especially critical of The New York Times (and to a lesser degree the Washington Post) for devoting so much coverage to the alleged “Whitewater Scandal” over a collapsed land deal, for which no evidence implicating the Clintons in criminal acts has ever been substantiated.9 Lyons argues that much of the scandal coverage in the mainstream media “rests on ‘facts’ that are somewhere between highly dubious and demonstrably false,” and he calls it “journalistic malpractice” resulting from a coordinated right-wing “dirty tricks” campaign.10

In addition to corporate newspaper and magazine coverage attacking Clinton, there were books, newsletters, fax reports, videotapes, audiotapes, direct mail pieces, Internet sites, and more that spewed out from tiny—sometimes one-person—operations to international media conglomerates.

The most alarmist attacks on Clinton originated in right-wing alternative media, then spread throughout right-wing information networks, finally appearing in mainstream outlets. This troubling dynamic was described in a 1995 White House memo “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.”11 The memo was widely derided in the corporate media, but it is essentially accurate. Eric Alterman in The Nation described how reporters dismissed the criticisms of their role in feeding conspiracist rumor to the public:

Listen to Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson [Bossie promo video?] giggle like school-kids on ABC’s This Week. Cokie: “The White House seems to have a theory of how this happens…and it appears to be a right-wing conspiracy. Who knew…we were such dupes?” Sam: “Not since Rube Goldberg came up with contraptions.” McLaughlin compared the report to beliefs that “Elvis is alive, J.F.K. is alive and both are living on an alien mother ship.’ Fred Barnes chimed in, “It can now be told—there are full-mooners at the White House.”12

Actually, similar contentions about unsubstantiated conspiracy theories fueling anti-Clinton news stories had already appeared in mainstream newspapers and magazines, including the Columbia Journalism Review.According to Michael Kazin, this process is typical of how populist movements move their ideas into the mainstream.13 A 1998 scholarly book edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, Culture, Media, and the Religious Right, contains several chapters that show how discussions in right-wing alternative media help frame issues that are refined for later coverage in the mainstream media.14

In early 1995, Mary Ann Mauney of the Center for Democratic Renewal, was quoted in a Scripps Howard syndicated news feature discussing how conservative and militia conspiracy theories seemed to be blending together.15 An example is Michael Reagan, the top-rated nighttime talk radio host, who has an ultraconservative worldview but a reputation for being fair and open-minded. Nonetheless, Reagan used his nationally-syndicated program to promote conspiracy theories emerging from the patriot movement—the post Cold war populist backlash against liberalism and globalism—about a global one-world government and attempts to rewrite the US Constitution. He also pushed various theories claiming Clinton aide Vincent Foster did not die due to a self-inflicted gunshot, but was assassinated. These conspiracist allegations are also in Reagan’s book, Making Waves, endorsed in back cover blurbs by former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, III, Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour, and several current and former congressmen.16

There has been a rapid growth of new “horizontal” electronic communications networks that bypass traditional media filters and editing standards.17 Editors and producers have responded by lowering traditional standards on checking sources and facts. In the case of accusations against Clinton, the mainstream corporate news media was willing to peddle rumors for ratings. As corporate owners sought to squeeze more profits out of news media, there was less investment in research and investigative reporting. Increasingly, reporters began to rely on pre-packaged information from think tanks and publicists, which came overwhelmingly from conservative and libertarian sources. Fact-checking was de-emphasized. There was also a blurring of the lines between news, entertainment and advertising.

This transition in the news media was happening at a time that popular acceptance of conspiracy theories was growing on the right, left, and center. In a lengthy article on snowballing conspiracism in The New Yorker, Michael Kelly called this “fusion paranoia.”18 With the rise of “info-tainment” news programs and talk shows, hard right conspiracism, especially about alleged government misconduct, jumps into the corporate media with increasing regularity.19 As Kelly observes, “It is not remarkable that accusations of abuse of power should be leveled against Presidents—particularly in light of Vietnam, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. But now, in the age of fusion paranoia, there is no longer any distinction made between credible charges and utterly unfounded slanders.”

The most alarmist attacks on Clinton originated in right-wing alternative media, then spread throughout right-wing information networks, finally appearing in mainstream outlets.[ESCALATOR / ECHO]

A tremendous range of right-wing information exchange takes place in traditional and alternative media throughout the US. Mainstream analysts habitually fail to consider this massive information network when calculating the political clout of the right, and also overlook the important relationship between right-wing alternative media and corporate media.20

Secular conservatives have long molded public opinion through major traditional corporate media—especially in large-circulation publications such as Reader’s Digest, through conservative commentary on radio and TV, as well as through TV drama programs such as “I Led Three Lives,” and “The FBI.” But during the 1980s and 1990s, the right refined its use of the media. Many of the right’s ideas and proposals are first developed at think tanks funded by right-wing foundations and corporations. After these ideas are sharpened through feedback at conferences and other meetings, they are field-tested within right-wing alternative media, such as small-circulation newsletters, journals, and direct mail appeals. As popular themes that resonate with conservative audiences emerge, they are moved into more mainstream corporate media through columns by conservative luminaries, press releases picked up as articles in the print media, conversations on radio talk shows, and discussions on TV news roundtables.

As the increasingly refined arguments reach a broader audience, they help mobilize mass constituencies for rightist ideas. This in turn adds to the impression that all fresh ideas are coming from the right, as there is no comparable left infrastructure for the refinement and distribution of ideas.21For example, between 1990 and 1993, four influential conservative magazines (National Interest, Public Interest, The New Criterion, and American Spectator) received a total of $2.7 million in grants, while the four major progressive magazines (The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones) received less than 10 percent of that amount, under $270,000.22

Christian Right media is extensive and reflects a large subculture in our society. For example, televangelist Jerry Falwell periodically sends material to “162,000 conservative pastors and churches through Pastors’ Policy Briefings.” In late 1998, he solicited funds to expand in order to “[A]lert, educate and rally America’s 200,000 conservative pastors who collectively speak to 50-60 million persons each week.” Moreover, Falwell is just one of many national Christian Right leaders seeking to mobilize evangelicals and fundamentalists to engage in conservative political action.23 In January 1999 Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” TV program featured a special week-long series of reports on “America’s Moral Crisis.” Evidence of “America’s moral decline” included abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and “America’s obsession with sex.” Viewers with concerns about the moral crises were urged to call the National Counseling Center, part of the Christian Broadcasting Network Ministry. According to the “700 Club,” the Center logged 5,000 calls per day.

As popular themes that resonate with conservative audiences emerge, they are moved into more mainstream corporate media through columns by conservative luminaries, press releases picked up as articles in the print media, conversations on radio talk shows, and discussions on TV news roundtables.

Studies show members of some Christian Right activist groups, such as Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, share three related attributes; they are much more likely than the general population to:

Depend on religious television, radio, magazines, and direct mail as important sources of information.

Vote in primary and general elections.

Believe that most political issues have “one correct Christian view” that shouldn’t be compromised.24

This subculture was the core of the constituency pushing for Clinton’s impeachment and removal. It is important not to dismiss the Christian Right as “religious political extremists” or a “lunatic fringe” because it trivializes their significant role in electoral politics and masks their drive to deny basic human rights for people they label as sinful.

DIVERSITY IN COVERAGE AND FRAMING

The content, tone, and amount of anti-Clinton coverage varied considerably across both the secular and Christian right. Within the hard right, coverage was far more consistently conspiracist and apocalyptic in tone. But not everyone jumped on the impeachment bandwagon. For instance, Phyllis Schlafly, the grande dame of ultra-conservative conspiracism, wrote only the occasional column blasting Clinton’s morality as symptomatic of decadent liberalism.25 Although D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries is embedded in the conspiracist subculture, only one out of 30 of his direct mail letters reviewed was directly about Clinton—a call for resignation penned by Kennedy in November of 1998.26

The glossy conservative evangelical magazine World featured consistent coverage of Clinton’s travails, but while highly critical of Clinton and liberal politics, its coverage was generally thoughtful, and based on solid reporting and interviews. World often displayed more professionalism than The Wall Street Journal, and contained less salacious pandering and self-referential conceit than Newsweek. However, World awarded Kenneth Starr a “Daniel of the Year” cover story on December 8, 1998. The reference is to the Biblical story of devout Daniel in the lion’s den.

RINGLEADERS IN THE ANTI-CLINTON CAMPAIGN

There was a robust and diverse cast of characterswho joined the attack on Clinton:

Opportunists and publicity seekers such as Linda Tripp and her agent Lucianne Goldberg.

Conservative political operatives in think tanks, foundations, legal advocacy groups and law firms, exemplified by John W. Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute.

Scandal and gossip mongers such asMatt Drudge and The Star supermarket tabloid.

Christian Right ideologues such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Randall Terry.

Arkansas-based political enemies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, such as Larry Nichols.

Ultra-conservative Senators and Representatives and the staff they hire to work as aides or committee researchers.

Conservative media seeking to undermine a Democratic President, including the Washington Times, New York Post, American Spectator, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

Hard right ideologues such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, and Floyd G. Brown of Citizens United.

Conspiracist-oriented right-leaning media and reporters such as Christopher Ruddy of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London, William Rees- Mogg of The Times in London, and Joseph Farah of the Western Journalism Center and its online WorldNetDaily.

The conspiracy subculture, spanning talk radio hosts such as Michael Reagan, online sites such as Washington Weekly, and veteran sources such as Sherman K. Skolnick of Chicago.

The patriot and militia movements, including individuals such as Mark Koernke, known as Mark of Michigan, and the website Free Republic.

More detailed descriptions of some of the essential players in the right’s anti-Clinton campaign illustrate the diversity of individuals and ideologies that converged in the right’s hatred of Bill Clinton. Clearly many anti-Clinton activists (including some who favored impeachment and removal) avoided undemocratic techniques. These critics had substantial complaints against Clinton, and articulated their grievances in a sincere and logical manner. This article focuses not on legitimate criticism of Clinton, but on anti-Clinton activism that employed demonization, scapegoating, apocalypticism, millennialism, or conspiracism.

Contrary to popular punditry, polls show that during 1998 those endorsing the impeachment process and either removal, forced resignation, or formal censure grew from a small minority to “a huge majority of the public and even a majority of those who say they approve Clinton’s handling of the job as president,” according to Everett Ladd, head of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE

A number of alarming allegations against Clinton came from people funded or encouraged by ultraconservative activist and millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. While his network was not the command center of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” his funding was important in sustaining anti-Clinton conspiracism, especially around the Foster case. Scaife is an heir to the Mellon family fortune made through the Mellon Bank, and major investments in Gulf Oil, and Alcoa. Part of his success as an important political player within the right is that he surrounds himself with sophisticated advisors. Both critics and supporters describe Scaife’s chief aide, Richard M. Larry, as having great influence and autonomy.

Scaife controls three foundations from his base in Pittsburgh, PA: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, with assets of $302 million; the Allegheny Foundation, with assets of $39 million; and the Carthage Foundation, with assets of $24 million; and his children control a fourth, The Scaife Family Foundation, with assets of $170 million. These foundations fund numerous conservative policy think tanks, legal groups, and publications, including many that pursued Clinton, his aides, or his administration. (See sidebar)

Sidebar

Scaife Funding List

This is just a partial list of the conservative, libertarian,

and hard right groups Scaife foundations have

funded:*

Accuracy in Media

American Enterprise Institute for Public

Policy Research

American SpectatorEducational Foundation

Cato Institute

Center for Individual Rights

Center for Media and Public Affairs

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Center for the Study of Popular Culture

Collegiate Networks

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Ethics and Public Policy Center

Federalist Society for Law and Public

Policy Studies

Federation for American Immigration Reform

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Free Congress Research and Education Foundation

Freedom House

Fully Informed Jury Association

Heritage Foundation

High Frontier

Hudson Institute

Independent Women’s Forum

Institute for Contemporary Studies

Institute for Justice

Institute on Religion and Democracy

Institute on Religion and Public Life

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Judicial Watch

Landmark Legal Foundation

Maldon Institute

National Association of Scholars

National Taxpayers Union Foundation

Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy

Political Economy Research Center

Reason Foundation

Washington Legal Foundation

Western Journalism Center

Women’s Freedom Network

*Funding documents from Scaife foundations, online at cnn.com,

and other sources.

Scaife funded GOPAC, the political action committee that Newt Gingrich used to help himself become Speaker of the House. According to reporter Nurith Aizenman:

A crucial element of Gingrich’s effort was to use his political organization, GOPAC, to identify likeminded candidates and provide them with the ideological and logistical support they needed to win office. Scaife was naturally a big backer— donating $60,000 to GOPAC between 1989 and 1995. And by funding National Empowerment Television, which broadcasted Gingrich’s “Renewing American Civilization” course and the Gingrich-hosted “Progress Report,” Scaife made it possible for Gingrich to reach 11 million American homes.

Other Scaife-funded organizations include the Western Journalism Center, American Spectator, Accuracy in Media, Landmark Legal Foundation, and Judicial Watch—all were especially active in the anti- Clinton network. According to People for the American Way (PFAW), two other organizations supported by Scaife, Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment Television, also served as significant “anti-Clinton media outlets.” Scaife is not an investor in Regnery Publishing, but this house published Gary Aldrich’s similar totally discredited book about the Clinton White House, Unlimited Access. Regnery has published a number of other books critical of Clinton or raising conspiracy theories about his administration.

Scaife, publisher of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, hired reporter Christopher Ruddy to pursue the idea that the death of Vincent Foster was not a suicide. Ruddy’s work and several other Scaife-funded anti-Clinton projects will be discussed later.

Scaife gave grants to the Fund for a Living American Government (FLAG), run by attorney William Lehrfeld. Lehrfeld, through FLAG, gave “a secret $50,000 contribution in 1995 to the legal fund of Paula Corbin Jones [while he] simultaneously served as the primary legal counsel to a covert, multimillion-dollar effort by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to investigate President Clinton” according to reporters Murray Waas and Jonathan Broder. An anti Clinton “Arkansas Project” was run by a foundation tied to the neoconservative American Spectator magazine, another Scaife grantee.

One Scaife grantee that has received little attention is the Maldon Institute, a right-wing think tank that studies national security and terrorism from a countersubversive and often conspiracist perspective. One Maldon consultant and author, John Rees, infiltrated the political left in the 1970s, and passed the information to groups ranging from the John Birch Society to the FBI.

For two years Scaife funded the Fully Informed Jury Association, a group that encourages jury members to disregard judges’ instruction if they feel strongly about a verdict, but which also has some leaders and followers who use the group to recruit for the patriot movement, and to spread conspiracy theories, some of which are rooted in anti-Semitism.

At the very least, Scaife’s funding produced an echo effect that amplified the voices of critics and conspiracists targeting Clinton, creating the illusion that these ideas had widespread support at a time when they did not. Credulous media coverage of scandal mongering then helped create a broader base of support than the original relatively small base in the Christian Right and populist right. There was much inbreeding. For instance, Scaife funded Gingrich projects, and Gingrich raised questions about the death of Vincent Foster, a pet project of Scaife’s. There were circles within circles. Anti-Clinton authors and publications funded by Scaife gave coverage and favorable reviews to other anti-Clinton authors and publications funded by Scaife. Nontheless, there were a substantial number of Clinton critics and conspiracy peddlers who did not receive funds from Scaife.

WESTERN JOURNALISM CENTER

The Western Journalism Center (WJC) is a project of Joseph Farah, former publisher of the ultra-conservative Sacramento Union—once owned by Scaife. The Carthage Foundation, controlled by Scaife, is one of the largest funders of the WJC. Founded in 1991, for several years the major product of WJC was a small newsletter, Dispatches, once billed as “from the front lines of the culture war.” According to reporter Trudy Lieberman, Farah has assembled for the Western Journalism Center:

a high-profile board of advisers to help with fund-raising, including such conservative luminaries as Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute, Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, and Arianna Huffington. Both Olasky and Huffington are senior fellows at Newt Gingrich’s Progress & Freedom Foundation. Scaife also funds the Pacific Research Institute and GOPAC.

The Center placed some 50 ads reprinting reporter Christopher Ruddy’s anti- Clinton stories—first published in Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review—in the Washington Times. WJC then repackaged the articles as a packet titled “The Ruddy Investigation,” which sold for $12. Farah also bought full page ads publicizing Ruddy’s allegations that appeared in papers including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times. The ad campaign brought in over $500,000, half from individual donors— many of whom bought Foster conspiracy materials—and half from foundations, including $100,000 from Carthage.

WJC circulated a video featuring Ruddy’s claims, “Unanswered—The Death of Vincent Foster,” that was produced by ultra-conservative James Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and co-editor of the Strategic Investment newsletter. NTU’s research arm receives funds from Scaife. Davidson is a large financial contributor to Farah’s Western Journalism Center, which gave its first “Courage in Journalism Awards” to Ruddy, reporter David Brock of the Scaife-funded American Spectator, and ABC correspondent JohnStossel, whose reports often repackage themes from conservative and libertarian think tanks.

In 1997 Farah started a daily Internet newspaper WorldNetDaily.com, which featured anti-Clinton stories. In a three-page interview in the John Birch Society’s magazine The New American, Farah claimed that by March 1998 the website was receiving 20,000 to 30,000 hits per day. In the April 17, 1998 issue of Dispatches, Farah claimed 150,000 hits per day. That issue carried a lead story rife withanti-communist redbaiting aimed at Barbara Lee, an African- American elected to Congress from California. She is described as filling the seat of retiring “Ron ‘Red’ Dellums.” Christopher Ruddy is listed as a Contributing Editor.

AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD

The work of British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a mix of industrious investigative reporting and irresponsible rumor-mongering. His book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, is an example of material that should remain unreported by the general media until it is corroborated with further documentation. A significant number of footnotes track back to rightist anti-Clinton sources, especially to the American Spectator, a neo conservative magazine that ran articles on Clinton with allegations that often lacked adequate corroboration.

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton

One chapter in The Secret Life of Bill Clinton alleges official misconduct and a cover-up in the death of Vincent Foster, tracing the conspiracy all the way to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Other assertions in Evans-Pritchard’s book include the claimed assassination of two teenagers who, Evans-Pritchard says, stumbled across a major drug delivery tied to Clinton. Other deaths attributed to Clinton or his operatives are discussed: “Already, people associated with the case were beginning to die in what amounted to a reign of terror among young people in…Arkansas.” Evans-Pritchard tells the story of one parent who “joined up with a California film producer named Pat Matrisciana to make a documentary on the deaths.” Matrisciana runs Jeremiah Films, which produces hard right Christian apocalyptic videos riddled with conspiracy theories, and made a widely circulated anti-Clinton video,The Clinton Chronicles.

Evans-Pritchard uses James Davidson of the rightist newsletter Strategic Investment to introduce the idea that Clinton’s actions mirror those of Nazi totalitarians. In his role as a far right prophet of financial doom, Davidson has written a book, The Story of a One-Term President, which forecasts a vast economic collapse and “bloodbath in US stocks and bonds” under Clinton. Davidson’s in-house “muckraker” for Strategic Investment is Jack Wheeler, described in his bio as a “veteran of six anticommunist guerilla wars [and] anti-Soviet insurgencies, including those in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Laos.”

Evans-Pritchard cites Davidson’s Strategic Investment several more times, noting that Davidson financed examinations by several handwriting experts of the Foster suicide note. Claims that the suicide note was a forgery were later debunked, and one “expert” was later revealed as having misrepresented his credentials. Hard-right ideologue Joe Farah from the Western Journalism Center is introduced as a dispassionate media ethics expert.

According to the 1995 White House memo, Evans-Pritchard was a crucial link in taking hard right conspiracism and publishing it in the Sunday Telegraph of London where it was picked up and reported on by mainstream US media. Another British journalist who played a similar role was William Rees- Mogg of The Times of London.

CHRISTOPHER RUDDY

Christopher Ruddy, the most energetic of the journalists claiming vast Clinton conspiracies, left the New York Post after his early 1994 stories on the death of Vincent Foster were heavily criticized in other media outlets. Hired by The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ruddy was assigned by publisher Scaife to pursue stories about Clinton. Scaife learned of Ruddy through the Western Journalism Center, a Scaife grantee, which had placed ads consisting of republished Ruddy articles on Foster.

Some of the most interesting information on Ruddy comes from his ally, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. While praising Ruddy in his book, Evans-Pritchard details how Ruddy was an activist in a nationwide right-wing network:

He waged war on the airwaves, broadcasting night after night across the country on the radio talk circuit where he soon became a folk hero. He gave speeches, endlessly. He lobbied on Capitol Hill. He lobbied at the Christian Roundtable meetings in Tennessee. He lobbied wherever people would listen. He built alliances: with Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media in Washington; with Jim Davidson’s Strategic Investment; with the Western Journalism Center in California; with Jeremiah Films (which made the Clinton Chronicles). He signed up with Richard Scaife, writing about the Foster case for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It was a modest little brigade. But it was enough for insurgent warfare.

Evans-Pritchard also discusses the crucial role played by the Internet: “What was bothering the White House most about the Internet was the enormous amplification it gives to newsletters like Strategic Investment,” or articles by Evans-Pritchard or Ruddy. According to Evans-Pritchard:

In the 1980s our stories would not have gained any traction. Now they are “posted” within hours of publication, and are then perused by the producers of radio talk shows, who surf the Net in search of avant-garde material. A good scoop may be picked up….[and] read on the air by G. Gordon Liddy, Paul Harvey, or Chuck Harder. It might be featured by Blanquita Column, or by Rush Limbaugh, with his 20 million “ditto heads.”

Ruddy has become a commodity. The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation by Christopher Ruddy, was published by the mainstream Free Press in 1996. Ruddy even started a monthly newsletter, Vortex, and solicited subscriptions in a letter headed, “Investigative reporter Chris Ruddy, the man who blew the whistle on the Clinton cover up of Vincent Foster’s death has an urgent message for you.” The message was simple:

Our country is in crisis…Monica Lewinsky and her mother…could be murdered if details of her relationship with Clinton ever got out….This man and his wife have abused the power and trust of their office…. Slick Willie earned his nickname because his lack of integrity governed his actions as a family man, lawyer, and politician.

In his style of demonizing rhetoric, Ruddy goes on: “Clinton is the quintessential slippery lawyer. Just as a weasel sucks the blood from its prey, so Clinton sucks the ordinary meaning out of words to deceive others…Clinton is a filthy-minded, self-centered man who fits the criteria of a sociopath….” Ruddy reveals that “In recently released grand jury testimony, Linda Tripp, who worked as Foster’s secretary, said she knew of one Clinton ‘body count’ list of some 40 people who have died suspiciously.” Vortex, claims Ruddy, will bring you the truth, “Stories too hot for the Clinton-compliant, Establishment media to handle.”

Subscribers to Vortex get “FREE BONUSES” including a new video, “The Death of Ron Brown,” with vivid death-scene photos suggesting a bullet hole in the brain. With the warning, “THIS FREE TAPE IS GRAPHIC,” the video suggests Brown may have been murdered, a theory covered in Ruddy’s own “special report on the Ron Brown case…a $15 value.” Ruddy also sells a report on the TWA Flight 800 explosion “cover-up” by a former naval officer, and an audiotape interview by Ruddy of Larry Nichols, a former aide to Governor Clinton.

In addition to Vortex, Ruddy started an Internet news site at www.NewsMax.com. Its breathless, near hysterical tone is common to the genre. And don’t think the failure of the impeachment drive has stopped Vortex. A March 5, 1999 ad in Human Events announces that Vortex, “America’s most controversial Journal,” now features “special reports by Chris Ruddy, Carl Limbacher, Jr., Jeffrey Nyquist and many others.”

MATT DRUDGE

Matt Drudge parlayed an Internet gossip page into international celebrity when he surfaced the Monica Lewinsky story in January of 1998. Drudge claims to have scooped Newsweek magazine when he reported rumors that Newsweek editors were not running a Lewinsky scandal story that reporter Michael Isikoff had been working on for months. This is less a scoop than an act of scavenging. Actually, Newsweek editors were exercising appropriate caution with a story that needed more confirmation. After Drudge “broke” the story, Newsweek ran an Isikoff article on the scandal…the first of many. The previous summer, Drudge had surfaced Isikoff ’s Kathleen Willey story in the same manner. Conservative sources, including Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp, had fed Isikoff the basics of the story. Isikoff now admits in his book on the subject that he was being used by conservative activists, but he is accurate in noting the extensive research he devoted to nailing down the details of the Lewinsky and Willey stories.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz described Matt Drudge as an “Internet gossip-monger,” who refused to “play by the rules.” According to Kurtz, “Untutored in such basic survival techniques as getting both sides of the story…Drudge seemed to overreach as he moved from titillating fare to serious scandal.” According to Kurtz:

Drudge understood how to tap into his self-absorbed audience. By making himself an object of fascination for media types, who love reading about themselves and their political pals, he turned the hype machine to his own advantage. He billed himself as an “old fashioned troublemaker” putting out a “gotcha sheet,” with no annoying editors, free to disseminate the latest rumors at the touch of a button.”

“He gets to write some of the things we all hear but can’t put into print because we can’t corroborate it,” says conservative author David Brock, who recently threw a Washington dinner party for Drudge. “Some part of all of us wishes we could do that.”

Steven Johnson, co-editor of the online magazine Feed, calls Drudge “a showman who plays at a serious calling.” The “moral panic” over the supposed dangers of the Net, he says, overlooks the amplifying role played by traditional news organizations when they trumpet its stranger stories.

“All these conspiracy theories— Kurt Cobain lives—wouldn’t really attract any attention if the big media didn’t pick them up and start broadcasting them,” he says. “If they treated the fringes of the Web with a grain of salt, it wouldn’t be that big a deal.”

Drudge…intentionally sets his personal bar fairly low. Declaring that he’s not a journalist, he seems to feel he can dispense with double checking the facts. By boasting that his information is 80 percent accurate, he figures to defuse criticism when a scoop blows up in his face. Alternately charming and infuriating the media elite, he reaps a publicity bonanza from the very folks whose stories he sometimes steals.

In early 1999, Drudge again claimed a story had been suppressed, this time by NBC news. The story concerned allegations that 20 years ago, while he was Arkansas Attorney General, Clinton forced an unnamed woman to have sex with him. Tim Cuprisin of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel dismissed Drudge’s story, calling Drudge a “cybergossip:”

The source of this latest wave of interest in the case is Drudge. Before this, he told us all about how a supermarket tabloid was testing an Arkansas teenager to prove the boy was the president’s “love child.”

That story turned out to be bogus, but not before it became grist for Jay Leno’s monologues and front-page fodder for tabloids like the New York Post.

And anyone claiming that the TV networks are holding up a story to avoid embarrassing the president must have been asleep for the past 12 months.

Actually, even Drudge had quoted an NBC source saying the story was delayed while further corroboration was sought. Furthermore, the entire censorship controversy was a staged event to crowbar more media attention for Drudge. Cuprisin noted that NBC News had already reported the story in March 1998, and had named the woman. David Horowitz, who with his partner Peter Collier founded the rightist Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), wrote that he was proud that he and Collier “organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly,” and complained:

Why then the seeming tolerance for the current White House witchhunt, whose purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? As anyone can see, there was no conspiracy in the events leading up to the First Lady’s accusation. There is no Communist Party of the right with secret codes and top-down discipline that possesses the ability to give marching orders to anyone. If Monica Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats. It was Newsweek—no conservative institution— that developed the story that Drudge only made public.

CSPC’s online FrontPage magazine website features a “Matt Drudge Information Center and Defense Fund.” CSPC is funded by Scaife.

For his part, Drudge has demanded an apology from his mainstream media critics, and compared his own pioneering spirit to that of “Ben Franklin, or a Thomas Edison, or a Henry Ford, or an Einstein…They all leapt so far ahead of the system, shaked it up, changed the balance.”

ACCURACY IN MEDIA

Accuracy in Media (AIM) is the brainchild of Reed Irvine, a hard right activist who also created Accuracy in Academia. Irvine fixated on the Vincent Foster case, publishing a 218-page book, Vincent Foster, The Ruddy Investigation. In 1996 he created a five-part series of print ads excoriating The New York Times for refusing to print the facts about the death of Foster. The ads ran in several newspapers, including the Times. As recently as January 1999, the Accuracy in Media AIM Report featured a cover story on Foster, “Find the X-Rays or Exhume the Body,” complete with a forensic drawing detailing a cross-section of a human head. After DNA testing showed that a young Black man had not been fathered by Clinton, Irvine argued that “I see no reason why [Ruddy’s] NewsMax.com, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily, the New York Post or AIM should feel embarrassed for having reported that the Williams family believed Clinton” was the father.

JUDICIAL WATCH

As of January 1999, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch had filed 18 lawsuits against the Clinton administration. He claims most of the money to support his filings comes from direct mail solicitations, but admits some funding comes from Scaife, including $550,000 in 1997. According to Time magazine, “Klayman calmly and routinely proposes the most outlandish conspiracies,” including speculation that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash was not accidental. Klayman is an industrious media hound who “regularly faxes his findings to hundreds of media outlets around the country and travels the television circuit.” According to a bio from Judicial Watch:

In addition to his role as General Counsel representing Judicial Watch in court, Mr. Klayman has made frequent television appearances on such programs as CNN’s Crossfire, ABC’s Prime Time Live, and FOX television speaking on ethics and the need for honest government. Mr. Klayman is currently providing legal commentary on the campaign finance hearings for NET….

According to Francine Kiefer in The Christian Science Monitor, “Klayman spends much of his 70- to 80-hour work week waging a ‘guerrilla war’ against the Clinton administration, because, as Klayman says, you might as well start at the top.”

In March 1999, Judicial Watch’s main web page included a teaser for an article on the “Clinton body count.” This macabre charge is a staple in the conspiracist cupboard:

List of deceased persons reportedly associated with the Clinton Administration left on Linda Tripp’s chair by Monica Lewinsky, according to Ms. Tripp’s Filegate testimony. (The origin of the handwriting is unknown. Ms. Tripp perceived this as a threat to her.)

At the top of the same opening page is a banner that encourages a visit to the web site of Free Republic, an anti-Clinton organization that uses conspiracist patriot movement rhetoric. In an exercise in mutual back-scratching, a Christopher Ruddy advertisement quoted Klayman, saying about Ruddy: “An Intrepid Journalist—read his stuff!”

In 1997 US District Judge Denny Chin of New York City imposed sanctions on Klayman and an associate after they questioned his impartiality in a commercial case unrelated to Klayman’s anti-Clinton lawsuits. After an unfavorable ruling, Klayman and his associate had sent a letter with a conspiratorial and racist subtext to Judge Chin, an Asian-American. The letter noted that Judicial Watch had filed a lawsuit claiming the Clinton administration, a Clinton appointee named John Huang, and “other persons in the Asian and Asian-American communities,” were involved in illegal fundraising activities. According to the AP report:

The letter to Chin mentioned that the judge, too, was a Clinton appointee, and asked him to tell the lawyers whether he knew and had dealings with Huang and others involved in the Judicial Watch litigation over the Democratic campaign.

Klayman has not been slowed by the Senate’s failure to remove Clinton. In a late- January 1999 direct mail fundraising letter, Klayman continues to target both Clinton and Al Gore over the “Chinagate” scandal he claims involves “crimes that include election fraud, espionage and possibly treason.”

CITIZENS UNITED

The web banner for Citizens United explains that the group is dedicated to “Reasserting Traditional American Values: limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, national sovereignty and security.” The group claims 150,000 members, but that is most likely a count of anyone who has sent money for projects touted in frequent direct mail appeals. The group has a member newsletter, Citizens Agenda, and a specialty periodical,ClintonWatch,sent to selected reporters and political activists.

Slick Willie

Citizens United is the project of Floyd G. Brown who published “Slick Willie:” Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, a slim paperback book distributed as part of a direct mail fundraising effort. The book is a right-wing tirade designed to document Clinton’s lack of character. What it also showed was that Brown unabashedly mixes sexism and homophobia in his conservative analysis. Along with standard attacks on Clinton as a draft dodger and friend to labor unions, Brown claims: “Bill Clinton’s America sees no difference between families of ‘homosexual lovers’ and the traditional, monogamous, faithful family…In addition, Mr. Clinton has surrendered completely to the pro-abortion feminists who dominate the Democratic Party.”It’s no surprise to find cites to the ultra-conservative Human Events and neo-conservative American Spectator in “Slick Willie.”

Brown’s bio establishes his ultra-conservative credentials and his success at attracting media attention:

In 1988 and 1992, Mr. Brown’s independent expenditure campaigns supporting President Bush produced effective and memorable ads including the now-famous “Willie Horton ad.” In 1991 Citizens United produced the highly controversial ad “Who Will Judge the Judge” in its successful campaign supporting Judge Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court…A frequently sought after commentator and lecturer, Mr. Brown has appeared on radio and television talk shows including CNN’s Crossfire and Inside Politics, NBC News, ABC’s Prime Time Live, CBS News, FOX Morning News, Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect, Donahue, and many more.

Brown remains proud of the 1992 Willie Horton ad which was widely denounced as racist pandering. Also in 1992, he attempted to place ads for a $4.99 paid phone call that would play tapes of Gennifer Flowers in a telephone conversation with then-governor Clinton. The hook was a promise that the conversation probed sexual matters. The incident was so tasteless that the Bush/Quayle campaign was again forced to condemn Brown and his tactics. Brown also arranged a screening for a reporter of Militia leader Linda Thompson’s video, “Waco: The Big Lie,” a potage of conspiracy theories linking Clinton to premeditated murder.

In a 1994 Chicago Tribune opinion piece, reporter Carol Jouzaitis wrote that the main researcher for Citizens United, David Bossie,“harvests tales of alleged wrongdoings from a network of Clinton enemies, then peddles them to Capitol Hill and media contacts in hopes of prompting scandalous stories. Bossie was the main researcher for Brown’s “Slick Willie” book, and wrote for ClintonWatch. Jouzaitis found that some members of the mainstream media regularly checked in with Brown “for the latest Whitewater grist.” For instance, Jouzaitis reported that “Members of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board… [met] with Brown and examined his pile of information.” Following that meeting, “the Journal devoted nearly half of its editorial page one day to reprinting” materials obtained from Brown:

Brown and Bossie claim that “dozens” of networks, newspapers and magazines—including Time and Money magazines, NBC and the London Times—have used them for information or interviews.

When journalist Trudy Lieberman researched the influence of Citizens United for the Columbia Journalism Review, she reviewed some 200 news stories in late 1993 and early 1994 and found four stories where there was “an eerie similarity between the Citizens United agenda and what has been appearing in the press, not only in terms of specific details but in terms of omissions, spin, and implication.” Lieberman tracked one incident where Citizens United repackaged previously reported charges about a letter from Vincent Foster in a more dramatic form, and sent the charge out to media contacts. According to Lieberman, “From January 1 to the end of March, twenty-three news organizations referred to the Foster letter— more than triple the number that picked up the story after the November 3 Washington Post piece.” According to Lieberman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic, The Boston Globe, and Newsday regularly featured what ClintonWatch had highlighted.

The worldview of Citizen’s United is easy to trace to anti-Clinton Republicans in the House. According to an article from The New York Times News Service posted on the Free Republic Website:

The dominant staff member of the House committee [investigating campaign finances] is its chief investigator, David N. Bossie. He reports directly to [Rep. Dan] Burton and not through the general counsel….He was an investigator in last year’s Whitewater inquiry conducted by Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y.

As reporter Francis X. Clines reports, Burton, an ultra-conservative Republican from Indiana, seemed to have adopted the Citizens United line:

“Who moved the body?” Burton boomed from the House floor in rejecting the official finding of suicide and feeding conspiracy theories with an account of re enacting the event in his own backyard by shooting bullets into a “head-like object.”

Citizens United is an example of how the players and themes in conspiracist anti communism shifted seamlessly to conspiracist antiliberalism and joined the campaign against a demonized Clinton, pulling their conspiracy theories into the mainstream media and Congress

Brown’s ClintonWatch newsletter, which referred to Clinton’s “radical socialist agenda,” reflects the apocalyptic conspiracism commonly found in the hard right. Despite this, Brown’s work reached deep into mainstream politics. In 1994, according to Jouzaitis:

Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) quietly invited Brown to give 10 junior House Republicans his highly partisan take on Whitewater probes. Brown’s materials also have wound up in the hands of Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) whose staff also has been doing its own investigation as the congressman presses for hearings into Whitewater. Leach’s spokesman, Joe Pinder, declined to say how they got there.

Two of Brown’s senior staff are veterans of the ultra-conservative subculture with its conspiracist worldview of communism as a vast left wing conspiracy—a worldview that originated in the Old Right.Cliff Kincaid is director of Citizens United Foundation’s American Sovereignty Action Project. He is the author of two conspiracist books on the United Nations, Global Bondage: The U.N. Plan to Rule the World and Global Taxes for World Government, both published by Huntington House. Kincaid’s claims about the UN are promoted within the patriot movement. Kincaid also works for Accuracy in Media, and writes columns for Human Events and the American Legion Magazine, with a circulation of 3 million. Human Events is now published by Eagle/Phillips Publishing, which also owns Regnery Publishing, which published the Gary Aldrich book.

Michael Boos, a longstanding hard right ideologue, is the Legal Director of the National Citizens Legal Network, a project of Citizens United Foundation. In the Winter 1982-83 edition of the Young Americans for Freedom magazine, New Guard, he wrote an article headlined “The Nuclear Freeze Fairy Tale: Communist Front Groups Behind the Peace Movement.”/ Boos warned that the peace movement is, in fact, not spontaneous but, “Rather, it is a well conceived and thus far successfully implemented sinister scheme being directed by the Soviet Union through its front groups in the U.S. and abroad.” In 1984 Boos spied on the anti-intervention group Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), then wrote a report titled: “Group in Nation’s Capitol to Aid Left Wing Terrorists.” Boos also filed a story with the right-wing newsletter from Phillips Publishing, American Sentinel, and sent an unsolicited copy to the FBI, which promptly distributed it to 32 of its field offices. The FBI launched an official probe of CISPES based in part on the Boos report.

Citizens United is an example of how the players and themes in conspiracist anti-communism shifted seamlessly to conspiracist antiliberalism and joined the campaign against a demonized Clinton, pulling their conspiracy theories into the mainstream media and Congress.

CITIZENS FOR HONEST GOVERNMENT

“The Clinton Chronicles” is probably the best known video attacking Clinton with spurious conspiracy theories,although there are several others. “The Clinton Chronicles” is presented as a secular investigative narrative, but is produced by Jeremiah Films, which specializes in apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist videos. Jeremiah is one of several projects of Pat Matrisciana, who also runs the parent group, Creative Ministries, and Citizens for Honest Government, publisher of the newsletter Citizen’s Intelligence Digest.

Widely distributed by Jerry Falwell and other anti-Clinton activists, the video was circulated in June 1994 to Republican members of the House of Representatives with a cover letter from ultra-conservative Illinois Republican Philip M. Crane. Falwell alone claims to have sold more than 60,000 copies of the video. A companion item is The Clinton Chronicles Book, also from Jeremiah. The Clinton Chronicles Book includes footnotes, which frequently cite to standard ultraconservative sources such as the Washington Times, Insight, and Human Events. One chapter, “compiled by Citizens for Honest Government,” includes condensations of articles by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Another chapter, by ultra-conservative Scott Wheeler, claims liberal media conspire to circulate “engineered information” in an “onslaught of manipulated facts” in order to protect Clinton.

A chapter by Lt. Col. Tom McKenney (retired), titled “Bill Clinton—The Unthinkable Commander in Chief” picks up the theme of treason in high places. McKenney asks: “How could we have a Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces who holds the military in contempt, who is anti-patriotic, who long ago embraced the dream of world socialism, and who, if he were not President, could not receive a security clearance.”

The Clinton Chronicles has an appendix of cites allegedly tying Clinton to “The Mena Airport Drug Smuggling Operation.” The appendix includes articles based in part on claims by Richard Brenneke, a “source” used by journalists who described details of a vast drug-running conspiracy but who was later shown to have misrepresented his knowledge. One article about Brenneke’s charges listed in the appendix was by Frank Snepp, a respected journalist at the Village Voice. But Snepp had written a later article exposing Brenneke’s unreliability and retracted his earlier articles based on Brenneke’s dubious assertions. Another article cited is from Executive Intelligence Review, a journal controlled by conspiracist demagogue Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Matrisciana spoke at a October 4, 1997 “Take America Back” rally near the US Capitol, a few blocks away from the massive Promise Keepersrally, “Stand in the Gap.” “Take America Back” turned into a pro-impeachment rally. Other speakers included Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, and Alan Keyes, a 1996 Republican presidential candidate, radio host, and founder of Black America’s PAC. The rally program blurb for Matrisciana claims that “Edwin Meese III, former U.S. Attorney General said ‘Citizens for Honest Government is doing important work on behalf of the American people.’”

The Clinton Chronicles

Matrisciana’s Citizens for Honest Government also distributed a 12-page booklet titled “The Citizens Presidential Impeachment Indictment.” The 25 counts listed in the booklet included numerous conspiracist allegations claiming misconduct by Clinton. The Paula Jones case was listed, as well as charges that Clinton engaged in massive and repeated conspiracies such as laundering drug money, bribery, and accessory to murder in the Vincent Foster case. Many of the allegations are standard fare in the US conspiracist subculture.

The January/February 1998 issue of Citizens Intelligence Digest featured a posed photograph of John Wheeler Jr., director of publications for Citizens for Honest Government, handing “The Citizens Presidential Impeachment Indictment” toRep. Bob Barr (R-GA), at a “Strategy Briefing Breakfast” held in Washington, DC on Nov. 7, 1998. Flanking the two was Howard Phillips, president of the Conservative Caucus, and a leading player in the hard core theocratic wing of the fundamentalist Christian Right.That same issue of Citizens Intelligence Digest also featured an article by Christopher Ruddy suggesting that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was assassinated. Along with Ruddy, other “Contributing Writers” to the newsletter included former Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA), Joseph Farah, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Timothy LaHaye,apocalyptic fundamentalist author Chuck Missler, antigay author Dr. Stanley Monteith, andLarry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, which is to the right of the National Rifle Association.

Citizens for Honest Government is an example of the practical linkages among the Republican Party, the conservative Christian Right, Christian Right theocrats, and hard right conspiracism.

REV. JERRY FALWELL

A major distributor of “The Clinton Chronicles” was Jerry Falwell Ministries and his “Old Time Gospel Hour.” During 1998 Falwell relentlessly harangued against Clinton in TV appearances, radio programs, direct mail, his monthly National Liberty Journal newspaper, and The Falwell Fax, a chatty memo sent weekly to subscribers.

A review of 1997 and 1998 issues of the National Liberty Journal shows that the majority of attacks on Clinton centered on scandals involving Monica Lewinsky, Webster Hubbell, Whitewater, Vincent Foster, Paula Jones, “communist Chinese influence,” and impeachment. Sometimes a single issue would contain a front page anti-Clinton scandal article and as many as five additional scandal-oriented articles on inside pages. Many issues contained advertisements for anti-Clinton items such as a book on “The Murder of Vince Foster.” Typical headlines included “Many Blacks Wonder Why The Black Caucus Defends Clinton to the Bitter End,” and “Clinton Tabs Lesbian Nun for White House Post.”

In a December 1998 fundraising letter for his lobbying organization, the Liberty Alliance, Falwell decried Clinton’s “immoral and illegal activities…and illegal foreign political fundraising by the President and Vice President.” Yet Falwell, like others in the Christian Right, sees Clinton as just part of the “powerful liberal forces” that are destroying America. Falwell also sought to raise funds for a broader list of issues he wanted to organize around in 1999:

Initiate “grassroots” lobbying on critical issues like hideous partial-birth abortion.

Stand up and fight for our precious religious freedoms.

Lobby against ENDA, the extremist proposal to require hiring of homosexuals, even by churches, schools and day-care centers.

Oppose homosexual marriages and adoption of children.

Battle the homosexual invasion of our schools.

Oppose unelected liberal, activist judges who dangerously throw out decisions by Congress and voters.

Lobby for much-needed family tax relief.

Promote a strong national defense, including a desperately needed anti-missile defense system.

Falwell’s lush rhetoric aside, this is a fairly representative list of the grievances of the Christian Right. As is standard, Falwell warned that if money didn’t flow in, “the Clintons, the radical homosexuals, anti-family feminists, Godless atheists, and the liberal media will have won.” This, too, is a fairly representative list of enemies demonized by the Christian Right in the culture war. Falwell opened 1999 by declaring the Antichrist was alive and a Jewish man.

THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE

John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, has gone to great lengths to conceal the ideological leanings of his Christian Right legal center in statements to the mass media. He told The New York Times that “Oh, gosh, no,” he had no political agenda in representing Paula Jones, and that he had founded the Rutherford Institute by himself. The New York Times reporter described The Rutherford Institute as “a kind of evangelical Christian civil liberties union.”27

John W. Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, has gone to great lengths to conceal the ideological leanings of his Christian Right legal center in statements to the mass media.

Whitehead’s claims misrepresent the group. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is blunt: “Our files on the Institute go back 10 years. After examining the material, we can safely say Whitehead is not being honest in his description of his organization.”28

From its founding, the Rutherford Institute has pursued a highly-politicized, ultra-conservative agenda. A review of Rutherford Institute newsletters, reports, and direct mail appeals going back seven years shows a long pattern of attacks on liberals in government and President Clinton in particular. Whitehead consistently puts forward an apocalyptic conspiracist vision of devout Christian activists under concerted attack by corrupt and repressive government officials in the service of godless and immoral secular humanism.

In the late 1990s, Whitehead claimed he had changed his earlier views, giving a detailed interview on the subject to Christianity Today in December of 1998.29 Yet Whitehead’s shift is more tactical than a shift in basic ideology, and reflects the trend in the Christian Right toward re-applying the principle of “hating the sin, but loving the sinner,” even when the goal is still theocratic and monocultural.30

From time to time Rutherford’s periodical carries broad-based articles to buttress the organization’s claim that it is just like an American Civil Liberties Union for people of faith. In the September 1996 issue, which carries a cover story on “Politics & Religion: A Recipe for Disaster,” there are interviews with centrist political commentators such as E. J. Dionne, Jr. and Larry Sabato—as well as a column by Barry W. Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, rounds out the issue of Rutherford magazine with a litany of all the reasons he hates government under Clinton and his liberal allies. Claiming that “liberals have dominated politics in this country for more than sixty years,” Weyrich paints a paranoid picture of life in the US where “God-fearing,law-abiding, taxpaying citizens” live under a statist globalist tyranny. He then concludes that a nation with a government that is in opposition to his hard right view of Constitutional and godly laws “will deserve the hatred of God and its people.”31

In Facing the Wrath: Confronting the Right in Dangerous Times, sociologist Sara Diamond describes the political activism of the Rutherford Institute:

Active since 1982, the Rutherford Institute represents a variety of Christian “civil liberties” litigants, antiabortion demonstrators, students asked not to read Bibles at public schools, parents whose home school facilities fail to meet government regulations. No doubt, Christians deserve as much legal protection as anyone else. But with much of the ACLJ and Rutherford case load, there’s a fine line between defending the interests of clients and stepping on the rights of other people.

In a…commentary sent to Christian radio stations, Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead argues that workplace seminars on gay rights are a form of “religious discrimination” against employees who are “told to rid themselves of stereotypes about gays and to accept homosexuality as a valid lifestyle choice.”

In an odd assertion of victim status, Whitehead claims Christian military personnel may jeopardize their careers if they “speak out against homosexuality….The immediate remedy is for the military to exempt religious people from compelled personal acceptance of homosexuality.”32

The politics of the Rutherford Institute, at least until recently, represented a form of theocratic Christianity that characterizes the hard right of the evangelical world. There is little reason to believe that a change in tone means a change in Whitehead’s underlying philosophy.

AMERICAN SPECTATOR

There had been stories about Bill Clinton’s affairs in various tabloid media but an article in The American Spectator, a neoconservative magazine, raised the stakes.

The cover of the January 1994 issue of The American Spectator featured a caricature of Bill Clinton sneaking down a moonlit alley with the headline: “His Cheatin’ Heart: David Brock in Little Rock.” Reporter David Brock had already gained a reputation for cutthroat journalism for his March 1992 attack piece, “The Real Anita Hill,” and he returned to that mode in his 1994 article “Living with the Clintons: Bill’s Arkansas bodyguards tell the story the press missed.”

The Brock article is long on gossip and hearsay and short on facts corroborated outside the circle of troopers. Several years later, Brock wrote an “open letter” published in Esquire magazine where he apologized for the Troopergate article and said the troopers’ greed and anger had motivated their stories. One trooper later changed his story.

Buried on page 26 of the original Brock article was a paragraph mentioning a “Paula” who allegedly was taken to Clinton’s hotel room. Neither a date nor a conference name was mentioned. Nonetheless, Paula Jones stepped forward and claimed her reputation had been sullied. The rest is history.

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 on Whitewater 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.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Washington Times’ coverage of the scandal was voluminous. In fact, the paper even delayed its September 14-20, 1998 “National Weekly Edition” for a day in order to run a special pullout section with the text of the Starr Report. In that special issue, ultra-conservative columnists Cal Thomas, Mona Charen, Thomas Sowell,Joseph Sobran, Don Feder, Oliver North,Suzanne Fields, and Tod Lindberg each excoriated Clinton. Columnist Richard Grenier started his column by bashing Clinton, but then devoted the rest of the column to bemoaning the “feminization” of our society. Clinton is frequently represented as both weak and effeminate, and controlled by the bossy feminist Hillary.

Two of six editorials in the special issue were anti-Clinton, including one titled, “Don’t forget those other Clinton Scandals.” Here The Washington Times takes its readers into the world of right-wing conspiracism. There was also a half-page ad for the “Conservative Voices Tape of the Month Club,” featuring two audiotapes claiming a cover-up in the “case” of Vincent Foster’s death and a full-page ad for the anti-Clinton group, Judicial Watch. A full-page ad for two Jerry Falwell publications, the National Liberty Journal and “The Falwell Fax,” had anti-Clinton hooks. Another ad promoted a conspiracist report on intelligence agency abuses. The “Inside the Beltway” column by John McCaslin contained several anti-Clinton snippets, and a note that “James C. Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, sent a letter this week to more than 2.4 million U.S. households, commenting on the ‘humiliation’ President Clinton has brought ‘on himself, his family and our nation.’”

Without an apparent sense of irony, the paper ran an article deprecating the farther fringes of Clinton conspiracy mongers. Meanwhile the paper also carried some fifty ads from the Western Journalism Center reprinting Ruddy’s Tribune-Review stories.

HUMAN EVENTS

The popular ultra-conservative weekly newspaper Human Events gave regular coverage of real and alleged scandals. From its perspective, House Republicans including Judiciary Chair Henry Hyde (R.-IL)— didn’t go far enough. “Hyde Punts Impeachment Inquiry: Starr, Not Clinton, to Be Put on Trial,” blared the front-page headline for Human Events on November 13, 1998. Before the Senate vote in mid-January 1999, Human Events ran a banner headline “It’s All About an Oath,” over a full front page article, continuing inside with five pages of Senate impeachment-related material, several more anti-Clinton articles and briefs, and a 3/5 page ad for Judicial Watch. That issue also contains a half-page ad for the video “Bill Clinton’s Rise to Power,” which promises information on the “Other Clinton Scandals,” including Chinagate, organized crime, Whitewater, and the “mysterious deaths of dozens of witnesses who had insider knowledge of Clinton’s scandals.”

PATRIOT CONSPIRACISM

Further to the right, numerous groups reflecting the conspiracism of the patriot movement issued attacks on Clinton. Representative examples include The Free Republic, the American Sentinel, and the John Birch Society.

The Free Republic is a loosely knit organization that exists primarily as a web page with articles and discussion groups. Periodically the group stages a demonstration. Here is an example of where the patriot movement and the theocratic Chistian Right can intersect with more mainstream sectors of the anti Clinton campaign.

Jim Robinson of Free Republic echoes the basic position of the patriot movement:

The federal government has overstepped its Constitutional limits and the complicit media is acting in concert to continue the illegal government expansion and to strengthen its own stranglehold on truth and to continue its agenda of projecting the socialist government propaganda slant on the news.

…the government and the corporate media have over the years created, through regulation and policy, a liberal propaganda machine whose goal is to continue the expansion of a collective state and to control every aspect of our lives and fortunes.

We, the People, are exercising our Constitutional right to free speech to alert our elected representatives to fulfill their Constitutional duty.

The patriot movement was awash with this type of right-wing populist conspiracism, which is rooted in anti-collectivist ideology. Consider the statement of Dr. L. K. Landis, circulated by Wilderness Voice Publications and posted in the WhiteWater topic discussion group:

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON:

Mother of the Village People

According to an article in the December 8, 1995 issue of Human Events, First Lady (?) Hillary Rodham (even she was so embarrassed by it that she refused to take her husband’s last name until after he was elected president) Clinton has written a book titled “It Takes a Village.” The thesis of the upcoming book on child rearing supposedly comes from an African proverb that maintains children should be raised by a whole village.

To quote the article written byFloyd G. Brown, “…it appears that Mrs. Clinton’s manual on child rearing will showcase her radical ideas on parenting and the family. In [this model,] parents rights are secondary and the village (i.e. the state) knows better than the parents how to raise a child.”

Four years ago when the Clintons were running for president, I warned that they had a hidden agenda which was not thoroughly revealed in the news media. Mr. Clinton’s adulterous lifestyle and Hillary’s open, flagrant attack on the institution of motherhood were brought to the surface during their campaign, but their radical philosophies on “children’s rights” and child rearing were not exposed until after they were fully intrenched in Washington.

God’s people must loudly proclaim outrage against this socialist propaganda of a society better fit to raise children than the parents to whom God gave them. Remember, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.” Children are NOT the property of the state, but rather a gift from God.

The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton

This excerpt from a short post is worth dissecting. The author cites to an article in the ultra-conservative Human Events written by Floyd G. Brown who runs the anti-Clinton Citizens United. Liberalism, radicalism, feminist principles, statist collectivism, and socialism are seen as a package. Biblical scripture is quoted.

On October 31, 1998, Free Republic staged a “March for Justice” in Washington, DC. Invited speakers includedLarry Klayman, Gary Aldrich, Matt Drudge, Alan Keyes, Rep. Bob Barr, Lucianne Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Reed Irvine,and former Arkansas State Trooper L. D. Brown.

When Clinton cited his old professor, Carrol Quigley, during the campaign and in his convention speech, he inadvertently mentioned a Birch Societyhero. The Birchers and others in the patriot movement have long claimed that Quigley revealed the truth about the Anglophile network of “Insiders” who secretly run the world through organizations such as the Rhodes scholarships, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

Early in the Clinton administration the publisher of the hard right American Sentinel put out a booklet titled The Clinton Clique, by long-time John Birch Society stalwarts Larry Abraham and William P. Hoar, detailing the JBS theory that Clinton is part of the Anglo- American conspiracy which supposedly rules the world. The John Birch Society itself has been promoting bulk distribution of one issue of its magazine, The New American, with a cover story and special report on the “Conspiracy for Global Control,” linking Clinton to the purported Council on Foreign Relations conspiracy.

STARR, THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY AND COLLEGIAL NETWORKS

Kenneth Starr was appointed Special Prosecutor to investigate alleged Clinton wrongdoing despite his being enmeshed in a network of conservative, libertarian, and hard right attorneys and political activists for years. According to People for the American Way:

Judge David Sentelle, who was one of the three judges appointed to oversee the selection of the independent prosecutor, was instrumental in the decision to fire the previous prosecutor and appoint Starr. Shortly before Starr’s appointment, Sentelle lunched with Senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, who had been demanding a new prosecutor. Faircloth later hired David Bossie as a personal aide on the Senate Whitewater Committee. Bossie previously worked with Floyd Brown at Citizens United where he helped compile the book, “Slick Willie,” and has been a long-time anti-Clinton investigator.

Eric Schlosser in Rolling Stone pointed to further connections:

Linda Tripp has known Kenneth Starr since at least 1994, when she met him during the Vincent Foster investigation. Tripp happens to be a friend of Unlimited Access author Gary Aldrich, the FBI agent who claimed to have seen the cock rings on the Clinton Christmas tree. Aldrich’s publisher, Alfred Regnery, has been friends with Kenneth Starr since their days together at the Reagan Justice Department. Tripp’s attorney, James Moody, attended meetings of the Federalist Society and did work for the Landmark Legal Foundation, as did Kenneth Starr. Tripp’s literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, has known Alfred Regnery for years. None of these facts proves the existence of any hidden conspiracy. Nevertheless, when it comes to the far right, it’s an awfully small world.

War Against Impeachment

In early 1997 Starr announced he would leave the position of Special Prosecutor to take a position at Pepperdine University. The position had been funded by Richard Mellon Scaife. Although news stories discussed the possibility that Scaife had specifically arranged for Kenneth Starr to accept the job, all the parties denied a quid pro quo arrangement, and records show Scaife funded the university well before Starr was offered the post. Starr first accepted, then declined the post at Pepperdine, although the school said the offer was still open. Scaife’s prior funding of the position certainly made Starr’s original acceptance improper given Scaife’s ongoing campaign against Clinton who was being investigated by Starr.

Other substantialconflicts of interest issues were raised in the media about Starr’s appointment and conduct, including questions about his continued representation of the tobacco industry. According to columnist Frank Greve, there was an informal network of libertarian attorneys that aided investigations of Clinton, “including Richard Porter,a partner in Starr’s Chicago law firm, Kirkland & Ellis; Theodore Olson, a former Starr partner and lawyer for the Clinton-bashing monthly magazine The American Spectator; and Jerome Marcus, a Philadelphia sexual harassment law specialist.” Says Greve:

Even Starr, it turns out, served as an unpaid counsel to Jones’ lawyers in 1994 before he was appointed independent counsel.Because of Starr’s discussions with Jones lawyer Gilbert Davis, Starr “never should have been appointed” special counsel, [according to] Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Starr’s law firm contacted theIndependent Women’s Forum (IWF) to see if they would sign on a proposed legal brief opposing President Clinton’s claim of immunity in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit. Those discussions should have been disclosed. The Scaife-funded IWF grew out of the informal “Women for Clarence Thomas” in 1991.IWF was founded by by Barbara Olson, wife of Theodore Olson, the former Starr law partner and a funder of the Federalist Society. An informational tip to Starr’s office regarding the Paula Jones case should have been reported as well. That incident involved two attorneys, Jerome Marcus and Paul Rosenzweig, who had been in law school together.

At the center of this network is The Federalist Society, libertarian attorneys, and attorneys with Kirkland & Ellis. Starr is a founding funder of the Federalist Society’s James Madison Club, consisting of those who donate $1,000 or more. Others on the roster include Alfred Regnery, ultra-conservative activists Richard and Betsy DeVos and Donald and Barbara Hodel, C. Boyden Gray, William Bradford Reynolds, and Theodore Olson. According to The New York Times:

Marcus recruited others to assist his efforts, including several friends from the University of Chicago Law School. One of those who was approached, Paul Rosenzweig, briefly considered doing work for Jones in 1994, according to billing records and interviews, but decided not to. In November 1997,Rosenzweig joined Starr’s office, where he and Marcus had several telephone conversations about the Jones case.

It was Rosenzweig who fielded a “heads-up” phone call from Marcus on Jan. 8, 1998, that first tipped off Starr’s office about Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. The tip was not mentioned in the 445-page Starr report, even though the information revived a moribund Whitewater investigation that would not have produced, it now seems, an impeachment referral to Congress.

Another example of how collegial networks such as the Federalist Society advance ideas and actions, as well as careers, is the case of author and legal commentator Ann Coulter.Coulter attended Cornell University, where she launched the conservative Cornell Review, part of the conservative Collegiate Network funded by Scaife. She trained at the National Journalism Center, run by conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans, whose lectures are sometimes sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation. The Center claims no partisan bias but its lecturers and postings are skewed to the right. The center receives funding from the conservative Olin Foundation. While at the University of Michigan law school, Coulter founded the local chapter of the Federalist Society. After Republicans captured the majority of Congressional seats in the 1994 elections,Coulter joined the staff of Sen. Spencer Abraham, (R-MI), a Federalist Society activist. She then became a legal commentator for MSNBC.

Coulter’s book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was published by Regnery, in which Scaife is a major investor. The Regnery parent company is Phillips/Eagle, which also publishes Human Events.Coulter went to work for the Scaife-funded Center for Individual Rights, then became a legal affairs writer for Human Events, which had previously run a favorable review of her book. Coulter also played matchmaker, helping Paula Jones find lawyers and suggesting that attorney Jim Moody help Linda Tripp with her legal problems.

Another conservative network, the Council for National Policy, also played a role in developing Republican impeachment strategy.

APOCALYPTIC FRAMES, MILLENNIAL GLASSES

The Jeremiah Project is not connected to Jeremiah films, although both organizations oppose Clinton. Various Jeremiah, Joseph, and Joshua projects now populate the Internet. The Jeremiah Project website includes a section on Clinton’s “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which lists many links to discussions of alleged criminal behavior by President Clinton.” One sublink had a variant on the Clinton body count, the “Clinton Casualties:”

A “Casualty” is defined as anyone threatened with harm or actually harmed because of their knowledge of and/or involvement in one or more of the Clinton Scandals.

Aquitted

The following is a partial list of a large number of persons who are presumed to be “Casualties” of the various Clinton scandals. President Clinton has told political supporters in Arkansas he will devote a lot of time going after detractors who pursued him on Whitewater and other ethical questions. (USA Today, November 8, 1996). It is a partial list because new additions are added regularly and the full extent of being associated with Bill Clinton is not completely known.

The accounting of these mysterious deaths began in 1994 when in a letter to congressional leaders, former Rep. William Dannemeyer listed 24 people with some connection to Clinton who had died “under other than natural circumstances” and called for hearings on the matter. Dannemeyer’s list of “suspicious deaths” was largely taken from one compiled by Linda Thompson, an Indianapolis lawyer, containing the names of 34 people she believed died suspiciously and who had ties to the Clinton family. [Ed. Note: Thompson was an early Militia leader.]

Some of the “Casualties” were openly murdered, but many were killed in such a way so that their deaths could be ruled accidents or suicides. This was especially true if they died in Arkansas where the medical examiners routinely rule apparent murders as either accidents or suicides when it suits political purposes. In fact, this is so common that it is often referred to as “Arkancide” or “Arkansas Suicide.”

The worldview expressed by the Jeremiah Project is common in this sector of the far Christian Right that overlaps with the patriot movement. There is also a focus on apocalyptic themes of moral decay and sin:

For the first time in our history the leadership of this great country willfully and philosophically turned away from the covenantal vision and biblical principles of our Founders. On January 20, 1993, our new President, joined by many in the land, formally “broke” the covenant of our Fathers when he and the affirming electorate demonstrated allegiance to his “new covenant” and began promoting as “constitutional” those things which God condemns.

For the first time in American history we have a president that has openly endorsed the killing of babies, openly encourages homosexuality as a lifestyle, and encourages the pagan worship of Mother Earth….

This nation has forsaken God and as a result we can see in our families, our schools, the inner-cities, our government, indeed in all areas of our lives, the removal of God’s blessing.

The crime in our streets, the poverty in the inner-cities, the war zones in our homes and the violence of our children will not end until we understand the days we are living. Contrary to liberal propaganda, we don’t have an economic problem, we have a problem of our spirit. We have willfully and systematically rejected God and as a result, we are now beginning to experience the fruit of that sin.

A similar right-wing Christian conspiracist website called Exegesis runs the following lists:

Reliable US News Sources:

The Washington Times, WorldNetDaily, NewsMax, C-SPAN, Christian Science Monitor, National Review, The Drudge Report, World Magazine, Conservative News Service.

Liberal/Socialist US Media

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time, The Boston Globe, US News and World Report, MSNBC, CNN.

On his website, apocalyptic televangelist Texe Marrs adds the bitter herb of anti-Semitism in “The Esther Option,” an April 1998 article with the subtitle: “The Untold Story Of The Secret War For Global Supremacy Between Two Rival Jewish Factions.” A longer audiotape provides the full story “For Your Gift of $10.” The teasers read:

Discover why the future of America and the world may now rest on the shoulders of a giggly, immoral, 24 year old, Jewish woman named Monica Lewinsky—a woman acclaimed by many religious Jews as their new “Queen Esther.” [Originally in all caps.]

Has Vice President Al Gore been chosen by…the right-wing Jewish faction to replace Clinton as President of the United States? If and when Gore does take office, will the new President prove more loyal to their cause? Will a prophetic chain of events then lead to the appearance of the antichrist in a rebuilt, great Jewish temple in Jerusalem?

Buy the tape. Stay tuned. The millennium is near.

AFTERMATH AND FUTURE SHOCK

The acquittal of Clinton in the Senate was met with stunned disbelief within the hard right. “The failure to remove Clinton was a devastating blow, especially for the Christian Right,” says PRA director Jean Hardisty. “People need to understand the depth of disappointment.” The ultra-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard devoted an entire issue to a symposium on the acquittal, with 22 articles from rightist luminaries such asElliott Abrams, Jeffrey Bell, Peter Collier, James Dobson, Charles Krauthammer, Charles Murray, Norman Podhoretz, Tod Lindberg, and Dennis Prager.

Human Events, which in November 1998 had decried Henry Hyde for undermining the hearings, now lionized him with a full front page mostly filled with a flattering drawing of his face, and the banner headline with giant type: “Henry Hyde, Hero.” “Culture War Personified” read the subhead in a section on Clinton as part of a band of “perverse rebels” from the 1960s crop of “self-indulgent…baby boom liberals.”

For Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich, the failure of the impeachment drive prompted an exasperated admission of defeat. In late 1997 Weyrich had been squeezed out of the NET television network he had founded, apparently for his divisive behavior in attacking GOP pragmatists.Weyrich, dubbed by the New Republic the “Robespierre of the Right,” is known for his doctrinaire views.Now, in a widely-circulated and debated letter, Weyrich promoted a separatist post-impeachment strategy:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn’t mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn’t going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture.

What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead “condition” students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.

I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy. If we expend our energies on fighting on the “turf ” they already control, we will probably not accomplish what we hope, and we may spend ourselves to the point of exhaustion.

For Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich, the failure of the impeachment drive prompted an exasperated admission of defeat.

This view is not, in fact, new. In 1996, militant Protestants and Catholics unhappy with the pragmatism of the Christian Coalition began to question the legitimacy of electoral politics, the judiciary, and the government itself. These groups began to push openly theocratic arguments. A predominantly Catholic movement emerged from this sector to suggest civil disobedience against abortion is mandated by the primacy of natural law over the constitutional separation of powers which allowed the judiciary to protect abortion rights. An example of this theocratic movement is the periodical Culture Wars with its motto: “No social progress outside the moral order.”

Christian Right ideologues such as James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, and Carmen Pate, president of Concerned Women for America, rejected Weyrich’s call. A debate quickly emerged among Christian Right leaders with comments and roundtable essays appearing in the evangelical media. Weyrich clarified his meaning in several printed responses where he said he never meant to suggest giving up. In the influential evangelical magazine World he wrote:

…when critics say in supposed response to me that “before striking our colors in the culture wars, Christians should at least put up a fight,” I am puzzled. Of course they should. That is exactly what I am urging them to do. The question is not whether we should fight, but how.

…in essence, I said that we need to change our strategy. Instead of relying on politics to retake the culturally and morally decadent institutions of contemporary America, I said that we should separate from those institutions and build our own.

Weyrich is proposing a separatist strategy as a way to build enclaves with parallel institutions such as “schools, media, entertainment, universities” from which to continue the culture wars—essentially “creating a new society within the ruins of the old.”

The evangelical right is discussing several strategies. At the 1998 Christian Coalition “Road to Victory” conference, the workshop on education included two panelists Marty Angell and Marshall Fritz who argued in favor of expanding separate, parallel Christian school systems. Fritz blasted the idea of state funded public schools. Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson wrote a book, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, suggesting that evangelicals had compromised their piety by pushing too far into electoral politics.

Separatists, purists, and pragmatic political players in the Christian Right have in the past and will in the future agree on what needs to be done and be able to form coalitions and work jointly in what Sara Diamond calls “projects,” which are less formal than coalitions. The justification for pursuing the emerging agendas will most likely be phrased cleverly in secular language to mask the underlying theocratic agenda. Among possible campaigns:

Attach “rider” amendments that restrict abortion and gay rights to pending legislation.

Reduce federal funding for public education while encouraging private and home schooling. Push for vouchers and charter schools.

Reduce federal spending on education research and model curricula, especially programs promoting multiculturalism and gay tolerance.

Abolish the National Endowment for the Arts because it promotes blasphemy and pornography.

Continue to undermine multiculturalism and affirmative action, masking the underlying racism through re-framing of rhetoric.

Some conservative critics of this “domestic moralism,” such as Andrew Sullivan, warn that failure to move away from puritanical campaigns against abortion and homosexuality and back to bedrock economic issues will destroy the conservative revival. He blames Religious Right ideologues William Kristol, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert Bork for leading the “neoreligious revival” toward abandoning “the secular underpinnings of the American constitutional experiment,” and replacing it with “a radically theocratic reinterpretation of the Constitution itself.”

It is entirely possible that the right wing of the Republican Party has overreached and hurt its credibility through zeal and divisiveness. But how can the Republican Party successfully retain political power by casting adrift the Christian Right, its single biggest voting bloc? Moderate Republicans respond by noting that while hard-line conservative Republicans took over the House in 1994, Republicans then lost seats in 1996 and 1998. They say it’s time for a return to moderation.

The rhetoric of some hard right Republican Presidential hopefuls, however, combines Christian Right moral absolutes with patriot movement xenophobia and suspicion of collectivism. New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith, speaking at the Christian Coalition’s Road to Victory conference, sounded like he was addressing a meeting of the armed militia movement. Even Dan Quayle hits patriot and Christian Right hot buttons. In an exploratory “Campaign for America” direct mail solicitation containing a “National Referendum on Security and Sovereignty,”Quayle sketched out his game plan:

NO to the surrender of our sovereignty to the U.N.;

YES to the vital Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);

NO to further military disarmament;

YES to keeping America’s Armed Forces the world’s strongest;

NO to women in combat and avowed homosexuals in uniform;

YES to more intelligence agents in enemy lands;

NO to further “U.N. peacekeeping” operations

… and YES to a full-scale investigation into Red China’s possible infiltration of our government at the highest levels…

… and YES to determining how much damage the Clinton/Gore cozy relationship with the Red Chinese may have caused our nation’s security.

In this context, Pat Buchanan sounds restrained. If moderate Republicans take control, then a third-party candidate could emerge in the 2000 presidential election, but historically such candidacies have little hope for success. The bungling of the impeachment by the House managers has given breathing room to moderate Republicans, who now will emerge looking like liberals simply because they aren’t the purist wing of the Christian Right. Contrary to Weyrich’s assertions, the right has won so much that the Christian Right purists only look extreme because they are pushing for the last, most zealous pieces, of their theocratic agenda.

WINDING UP FOR CHINAGATE

Without sex scandals, the right will use old and new scapegoats and hot button issues that are demonizing and divisive. Abortion is key for some on the Christian Right, as is homosexual rights, but an emerging issue with broader appeal is Chinagate.

Chinagate is the name given to allegations that communist Chinese agents funded the Clinton campaign, and in return, Clinton and Gore are selling out US interests to China through special treatment in foreign and domestic policy matters, and even in allowing spies to obtain classified technology. This is a hyperbolic conspiracist interpretation of what appear to be actual fundraising abuses and mishandling of classified material. These allegations have been circulating for years, well before the Cox report on Chinese spying was issued in May 1999.

The themes of the Chinagate charges track back to the Old Right “China Lobby” that influenced foreign policy following WWII. Interest in this topic has heightened with reports that Chinese government agents may have obtained nuclear secrets from a government laboratory. Chinagate is likely to tar Al Gore in the upcoming Presidential election race, no matter which Republican faction’s nominee runs. Four questions concerning Chinagate from an American Conservative Union survey letter, distributed at the 1998 Christian Coalition conference, provide a summary of the allegations and illustrate how direct mail fundraising surveys both educate and build a constituency:

Before you received this letter, did you know that, at about the same time China was funneling millions of dollars into the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort, Clinton permitted Communist China to acquire sophisticated American missile guidance system and nuclear technology which has allowed China to modernize its nuclear arsenal?

In general, what’s your reaction to the news that Chinese nuclear missiles are now targeted at American cities, towns and homes—missiles which have been made more accurate by highly-sophisticated American guidance system and satellite technology provided to China by Bill Clinton?

Before you received this letter, did you know that, at about the same time China was funneling millions of dollars into the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort, Clinton agreed to lease a shipyard in Long Beach, California to the Communist Chinese military and gave China an “anchor port” to the strategically crucial Panama Canal?

In your opinion, how serious is the “Chinagate” scandal—in which Clinton may have gravely jeopardized American national Security in exchange for illegal campaign contributions?

The bungling of the impeachment by the House managers has given breathing room to moderate Republicans, who now will emerge looking like liberals simply because they aren’t the purist wing of the Christian Right.

Christian Right columnist Cal Thomas anticipated this theme in his syndicated Human Events column in November 1998. Most of the column was a positive review of a new book, The Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash. Authors Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II both have served as staff on Republican congressional committees, showing how deep into the mainstream political system these ideas have penetrated. In mid-March 1999, there were over 50 customer reviews of the book on the Amazon.com website. The vast majority were laudatory. The conspiracist rumor mill on the right is already using the same paradigm it used in the impeachment drive to seed stories into the mainstream media.

CONCLUSION

Although the sectors reviewed above are quite diverse in both ideology and methods, they all agreed that Clinton had to go and they reinforced each other in attacking him. Together they made a formidable machine that was able to keep the attack in the limelight. It is a case study of how a small minority can exert influence far beyond its number if it’s organized and its factions collaborate.

Activists in the Christian Right represent only a small percentage of the population, but they are a much larger segment of those citizens who actually vote, and are a highly significant portion of Republican Party voters. It is true that most citizens still supported Clinton’s job performance as president. Public opinion polls, however, do not always reflect electoral power.

The Christian Right scored several successes. Starting with a relatively tiny core group of national strategists and local activists, it mobilized an anti Clinton coalition that included Republican Party pragmatists, theocratic purists, and hard right conspiracy theorists. Jointly, they tied up the political process for over a year while continuing to push their legislative agenda at the national and state level. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this coalition convinced a majority of Americans that Clinton should resign, be removed, or be censured. While the failure to remove Clinton from office was a setback, the Christian Right continues to exert tremendous influence on the political and social system.

Paul Weyrich is correct when he says that the culture war will continue. But because he senses that in the long run the right cannot win, it is no wonder he is bitter. It will take at least a decade, perhaps even more, to restore the rights and liberties lost during the twenty-year culture war and its drive for patriarchal monoculturalism and economic Darwinism. But there is an opening created by the failed impeachment drive, and we must take advantage of it.

Chip Berlet is Senior Analyst at Political Research Associates.

Author’s Note:

This article is based on original file research using primary documents from conservative and hard right groups, found in the libraries of Political Research Associates, People for the American Way, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This was supplemented with extensive online research and reading of secondary sources. Although it confirms much of the analysis (and the list of those influential in the anti-Clinton network) contained in the 1995 White House memo “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” there was a conscious decision not to rely on that memo for documentation or conclusions. Portions of this article are adapted from the book Right-Wing Populism in America, by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons. Some sections appeared previously as “Who’s Mediating the Storm? Right–Wing Alternative Information Networks,” in Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, eds., Culture, Media, and the Religious Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

CORRECTION:

AN ERROR IN A WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE (CORRECTED IN A SUBSEQUENT

ISSUE) RESULTED IN SEVERAL INACCURATE STATEMENTS

IN THE PUBLIC EYE ARTICLE “CLINTON, CONSPIRACISM, AND THE

ONGOING CULTURE WAR,” (VOL. XIII, NO. 1). RICHARD MELLON

SCAIFE IS NOT AN INVESTOR IN REGNERY PUBLISHING AND DOES

NOT HAVE A FINANCIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH PHILLIPS PUBLISHING,

CO-OWNER OF REGNERY.

ENDNOTES

1 The importance of studying common vernacular and rhetoric in popular culture, especially in terms of purveying scapegoating and conspiracism, has been discussed in papers and discussions by Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, David Redles, and Lee Quinby at symposia at the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. See for example, Richard Landes, (1996) “On Owls, Roosters, and Apocalyptic Time: A Historical Method for Reading a Refractory Documentation,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 49:1-2, 165-185.Andrew Gow, (1999) Medieval Racism? The Red Jews and Dehumanization in Popular Medieval Apocalypticism; David Redles, (1999) Final War, Final Solution: WWII and the Holocaust as Eschatological Conceptions; ___, (1998) The Day Is Not Far Off’: the Millennial Reich and the Induced Apocalypse; Lee Quinby, (1994) Anti-Apocalypse: Exercise in Genealogical Criticism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. See also: Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, (1997) Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources, http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/annual3/chap09.html

2 See generally Himmelstein, To The Right; Diamond, Roads; Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1997); Berlet and Quigley, “Theocracy & White Supremacy,” in Eyes Right!

3 Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy, “How Scaife’s Money Powered a Movement,” Washington Post, 5/2/99, p. A10, online.

4 Fred W. Grupp, Jr., “The Political Perspectives of Birch Society Members;” and James McEvoy, III, “Conservatism or Extremism: Goldwater Supporters in the 1964 Presidential Election;” both in Robert A. Schoenberger, ed., The American Right Wing: Readings in Political Behavior, (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969). Charles Jeffrey Kraft, A Preliminary Socio-Economic & State Demographic Profile of the John Birch Society, (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates (PRA), 1992).

5 Michael Lind, “On Pat Robertson: His Defenders”, The New York Review of Books, April 20, 1995, pp. 67-68; Jacob Heilbrunn, “On Pat Robertson: His Anti-Semitic Sources”, pp. 68-71; Frank Rich, “The New World Order,” New York Times, Op-Ed, Journal, 4/27/97.

6 Kevin Phillips, “The Politics of Frustration” The New York Times Magazine, April 12, 1992, pp. 38-42.

7 Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America, (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 76-79, 123-132, 215-218.

8 Sheldon Appleton, “The Mystery of the Kennedy Assassination: What the American Public Believes,” The Public Perspective, The Roper Center, Oct./Nov. 1998, pp. 12-17.

9 See generally, Lyons, Fools for Scandal.

10 Ibid., pp. 4-5.

11 Memo prepared in 1995 by the White House counsel’s office, with attachments, “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” obtained from the White House Press Office. First revealed by editorial writer Micah Morrison in Wall Street Journal, 1/6/97. See criticism of the memo in “Who’s Shooting the Messenger Now?” Media Watch, March 1997.

12 Eric Alterman, “A Stupidity Conspiracy,” The Nation, 2/10/97, p. 5; online.

13 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History. (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 172-190. See also Ellen Messer-Davidow “Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education,” Social Text, Fall 1993, pp. 40-80, especially p. 41.

14 Linda Kintz & Julia Lesage, eds., Culture, Media, and the Religious Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); including a chapter by the author of this article, “Who’s Mediating the Storm? Right-wing Alternative Information Networks,” from which some material in this section is taken.

15 Lisa Hoffman, “Whitewater and Oklahoma City Get Linked as Conspiracy,” Scripps Howard News Service, 4/28/95.

16 Michael Reagan, Making Waves, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996); on one-world government, pp. 135-147; on Constitutional Convention, pp. 121-133; on Vince Foster, pp. 81-118.

17 Some of my research into right wing conspiracism online was to prepare for an interview by Grant Kester that appeared as “Net Profits: Chip Berlet Tracks Computer Networks of the Religious Right,” in Afterimage, Feb./March 1995, pp. 8-

18 Michael Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, pp. 60-70.

19 Kelly, in his New Yorker article, writes of this seepage phenomenon from alternative to mainstream in terms of conspiracist anti-government allegations.

20 This section is drawn from Berlet, “Who’s Mediating the Storm? in Kintz & Lesage. Detailed articles on the general theme of rightwing media can be found in Afterimage (Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY), special issue on “Fundamentalist Media,” Vol. 22, Nos. 7/8, Feb./March 1995; and Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), special issue on “The Right-Wing Media Machine,” March/April 1995. Jim Danky and John Cherney, “Beyond Limbaugh: The Hard Right’s Publishing Spectrum,” Reference Services Review, Spring 1996, pp. 43-56.

21 David Callahan, “Liberal Policy’s Weak Foundations: Fighting the `Bull Curve,'” The Nation, November 13, 1995, pp. 568-572.

22 Beth Schulman, “Foundations for a Movement: How the Right Wing Subsidizes its Press,” Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), special issue on “The Right-Wing Media Machine,” March/April 1995, p. 11. Attempts to call The New Republic a left magazine will be met with laughter.

23 12/98 Falwell fundraising letter, on file at PRA.

24 Smidt, et. “The Characteristics of Christian Political Activists,” pp. 148-152.

25 Review of archives of Schalfly’s columns online at http://www.eagleforum.org/column/. Schlafly spent more space on her perennial issues such as fighting a big federal government, dismantling the Department of Education, opposing the UN, stopping globalism, and calling the nuclear device dropped on two Japanese cities near the end of WWII the “Lifesaver Bomb.” For bomb reference, see column of 8/10/95.

26Kennedy direct mail on file at People for the American Way. The most frequent topics in the months prior to that were prayer in school, the ACLU (leading the “anti-virtue” battle), and gays and lesbians; followed by fewer mentions of abortion and activist judges.

27 Neil A. Lewis, “Group Behind Paula Jones Gains Critics as Well as Fame,” New York Times, 1/18/98, p. 18.

28 Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “Rutherford Institute, Other Religious Right Groups Have Long Track Record Of Vicious Attacks On Bill And Hillary Clinton, Says Church-State Watchdog Group,” News Media Backgrounder, January 1988.

29 Ted Olsen, “The Dragon Slayer,” Christianity Today, Dec. 7, 1998, pp. 36-42.

30 John Whitehead, “Point of View” column, Action, Rutherford Institute newsletter, August 1996.

31 Paul Weyrich, “Fear & Oppression: American Birthright?” perspective, Rutherford magazine, August 1995, p. 16.

32 Sara Diamond, Facing the Wrath: Confronting the Right in Dangerous Times, (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996), pp. 110-111.

Chip Berlet is a former senior analyst at Political Research Associates. He authored Eyes Right! and Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (with Matthew N. Lyons) and is a frequent contributor to Talk2Action and Huffington Post.

A Guide To The Clintons' Scandals

### Whitewater, 1992

Allegation: The granddaddy of all Clinton scandals surfaced during Bill Clinton's bid for the presidency. It centered on financial contributions by Bill and Hillary Clinton into a real estate entity known as Whitewater Development Corporation during his time as an Arkansas state official. Eventually, the Justice Department and independent counsel launched investigations.

Outcome: Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton faced prosecution for their involvement in Whitewater. But their public statements about the matter, and the handling of documents that went missing and later reappeared, came under intense scrutiny. Their partners in the real estate investment were Jim McDougal and his then-wife Susan. Jim McDougal was convicted of fraud charges for making bad loans and he died of heart disease in a Texas prison. Susan was convicted of fraud in connection with obtaining a $300,000 federally-backed small business loan. She refused to answer grand jury questions in the Whitewater affair and was held in contempt of court, spending 18 months in jail. Bill Clinton pardoned her before he left the White House in early 2001.

### Travelgate, 1993

Allegation: Not long after Bill Clinton entered the White House, in May 1993, seven workers in the travel office were fired. The White House attributed the ouster to ethics and financial record-keeping problems in the office. Critics said the Clintons got rid of government workers to make room for cronies. The FBI was tapped to investigate.

Outcome: The Justice Department, at least one congressional panel, and special prosecutors all probed the reason for the firings. Independent Counsel Ken Starr found no blame rested with Bill Clinton. Another independent counsel scrutinized Hillary Clinton's involvement and statements about the firings but seven years after the event, he found no basis to bring any charges against her.

### Vince Foster Death, 1993

Allegation: White House lawyer Vince Foster was found dead in a Virginia park in 1993. Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups suggested foul play in the death, perhaps tied to swirling ethics investigations of the Clintons that Foster had handled. In a document found in his briefcase, Foster wrote, "I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport."

Outcome: Investigators and family members said Foster had struggled with depression and fears about keeping his security clearance if he sought help for the problem. Multiple investigations by the FBI, the Justice Department and special prosecutors concluded that Foster died at his own hand.

### Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky, 1994

President Clinton embraces Monica Lewinsky and other guests at a White House lawn party in 1996.

Allegation: Former Arkansas employee Paula Jones sued Bill Clinton for civil money damages in 1994 alleging that Clinton had propositioned her in a Little Rock hotel room years earlier. Clinton fought the case, but the Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit could proceed. In the course of the long and bitter litigation, Jones's lawyers identified other women with whom Bill Clinton allegedly had intimate relationships. They included Gennifer Flowers, a cabaret singer whose contacts with Clinton were detailed in a tabloid report, and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Outcome: In a deposition for the Jones civil lawsuit, in early 1998, Bill Clinton denied having "sexual relations" with Lewinsky. Her name had already come to the attention of Independent Counsel Ken Starr, who sought her cooperation in his own investigation. Months later, in front of a federal grand jury, Clinton acknowledged the personal relationship with Lewinsky and later appeared on television to offer a public apology. The statement failed to head off a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach the president. Clinton settled the Jones lawsuit for $850,000 but he did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In February 1999, the U.S. Senate acquitted Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice.

### Filegate, 1996

Allegation: Investigators delving into a different scandal found hundreds of FBI files on former White House workers. The information also covered the backgrounds of Republicans in Congress.

Outcome: Two staff members who obtained the files quit their jobs. An independent counsel uncovered no wrongdoing by the Clintons themselves....

1st result ggl 8/16 wiki flagged for verification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy

The Whitewater controversy (also known as the Whitewater scandal, or simply Whitewater) began with an investigation into the real estate investments of Bill andHillary Clinton and their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater Development Corporation, a failed business venture in the 1970s and 1980s.

A March 1992, New York Times article published during the U.S. presidential campaign reported that the Clintons, then governor and first lady of Arkansas, had invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation.^[1] The article stimulated the interest of L. Jean Lewis, a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator who was looking into the failure of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim and Susan McDougal. Lewis looked for connections between the savings and loan company and the Clintons, and on September 2, 1992, she submitted a criminal referral to the FBI naming Bill and Hillary Clinton as witnesses in the Madison Guaranty case. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Charles A. Banks and the FBI determined that the referral lacked merit, but Lewis continued to pursue the case. From 1992 to 1994, Lewis issued several additional referrals against the Clintons, and repeatedly called the U.S. Attorney's Office in Little Rock and the Justice Department regarding the case.^[2] Her referrals eventually became public knowledge, and she testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee in 1995.

David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against the Clintons, claimed in November 1993, that Bill Clinton had pressured him into providing an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal.^[3] Clinton supporters regarded Hale's allegations as questionable, as Hale had not mentioned Clinton in reference to this loan during the original FBI investigation of Madison Guaranty in 1989; only after coming under indictment in 1993, did Hale make allegations against the Clintons.^[4] A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation did result in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project.Jim Guy Tucker, Bill Clinton's successor as governor, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years of probation for his role in the matter.^[5] Susan McDougal served 18 months in prison for contempt of court for refusing to answer questions relating to Whitewater. The Clintons themselves were never prosecuted, after three separate inquiries found insufficient evidence linking them with the criminal conduct of others related to the land deal,^[6] and Susan McDougal was granted a pardon by President Clinton before he left office.

The term Whitewater is sometimes used to include other controversies from the Bill Clinton administration, especially Travelgate, Filegate, and the circumstances surrounding Vince Foster's death, that were also investigated by the Whitewater independent counsel.^[7]

History

Origins of Whitewater Development Corporation

In spring of 1978, McDougal proposed that the Clintons join him and his wife, Susan, in buying 230 acres (0.93 km²) of undeveloped land along the south bank of the White River near Flippin, Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains. The goal was to subdivide the site into lots for vacation homes, intended for the many people coming south from Chicago and Detroit who were interested in low property taxes, fishing, rafting, and mountain scenery. The plan was to hold the property for a few years and then sell the lots at a profit.^[9]Bill Clinton had known Arkansas businessman and political figure Jim McDougal since 1968, and had made a previous small real estate investment with him in 1977.^[9] The Clintons were seeking ways of supplementing their income: Bill Clinton's salary was $26,500 as Arkansas Attorney General (which would rise to $35,000 if his campaign for Governor of Arkansas succeeded) and Hillary Clinton's salary was $24,500 as a Rose Law Firm associate.^[10][11] It was around this time that Hillary Clinton also began trading cattle futures.^[9]

The four borrowed $203,000 to buy land, and subsequently transferred ownership of the land to the newly created Whitewater Development Corporation, in which all four participants had equal shares.^[9] Susan McDougal chose the name "Whitewater Estates" and their sales pitch was, "One weekend here and you'll never want to live anywhere else."^[12][13][11] The business was incorporated on June 18, 1979.

Failure of Whitewater Development Corporation

....

Clinton's request, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske, to investigate the legality of the Whitewater transactions in 1994. Two allegations surfaced: 1) that Clinton had exerted pressure on an Arkansas businessman, David Hale, to make a loan that would benefit him and the owners of Madison Guaranty; and 2) that an Arkansas bank had concealed transactions involving Clinton's gubernatorial campaign in 1990. In May 1994, Fiske issued a grand jury subpoena to the President and his wife for all documents relating to Madison Guaranty, with a deadline of 30 days. They were reported as missing by the Clintons. Almost two years later, the subpoenaed billing records of the Rose Law Firm were discovered in the Clintons' private residence in the White House by a staffer.

The Kenneth Starr investigation

In August 1994, Kenneth Starr was appointed by a three-judge panel to continue the Whitewater investigation, replacing Robert B. Fiske, who had been specially appointed by the attorney general, prior to the re-enactment of the Independent Counsel law. Fiske was replaced because he had been chosen and appointed by Janet Reno, Clinton's attorney general, creating a conflict of interest.

David Hale, the key witness against President Clinton in Starr's Whitewater investigation, alleged in November 1992 that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater deal.^[3]

Hale's defense strategy, as proposed by attorney Randy Coleman, was to present himself as the victim of high-powered politicians who forced him to give away all of the money.^[29] This self-caricature was undermined by testimony from November 1989, wherein FBI agents investigating the failure of Madison Guaranty had questioned Hale about his dealings with Jim and Susan McDougal, including the $300,000 loan. According to the agents' official memorandum of that interview, Hale described in some detail his dealings with Jim Guy Tucker (then an attorney in private practice, later Bill Clinton's lieutenant governor), both McDougals, and several others, but never mentioned Governor Bill Clinton. Nor did Clinton's name come up when Hale testified at Mcdougall's^[which?] 1990 trial, which ended in an acquittal.

Clinton denied that he pressured Hale to approve the loan to Susan McDougal. By this time, Hale had already pleaded guilty to two felonies and secured a reduction in his sentence in exchange for his testimony against Bill Clinton. Charges were made by Clinton supporters that Hale had received numerous cash payments from representatives of the so-called Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million campaign established to assist in Hale's defense strategy, and to investigate Clinton and his associates between 1993 and 1997.^[3] These charges were the topic of a separate investigation by former Department of Justice investigator, Michael E. Shaheen, Jr.^[30] Shaheen filed his report in July 1999 to Starr, who stated that the allegations that Hale had been paid in hopes of influencing his testimony were "unsubstantiated or, in some cases, untrue". Furthermore, no charges were brought against Hale or the Arkansas Project outlet, The American Spectator.^[31] Writers from *Salon* complained that the full, 168-page, report had not been made public, a complaint still being reiterated by Salon as of 2001.^[32]

State prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Hale in early July 1996, charging that Hale had misrepresented the solvency of his insurance company, National Savings Life, to the state insurance commission. The prosecutors also alleged in court papers that Hale had made those misrepresentations to conceal the fact that he had looted the insurance company. Hale said that any infraction was a technicality and that no one had lost any money.^[33] In March 1999, Hale was convicted of the first charge, with the jury recommending a 21-day jail sentence.^[33]

Starr drafted an impeachment referral to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1997, alleging that there was "substantial and credible evidence" that Bill Clinton had committed perjury regarding Hale's allegations.

Theodore B. Olson, who with several associates, launched the plan that later became known as the "Arkansas Project", wrote several essays for The American Spectator, accusing Clinton and many of his associates of wrongdoing. The first of those pieces appeared in February 1994, alleging a wide variety of criminal offenses by the Clintons and others, including Webster Hubbell. These allegations led to the discovery that Hubbell, a friend and former Rose Law Firm partner of Hillary Clinton, had committed multiple frauds, mostly against his own firm. Hillary Clinton, instead of being complicit in Hubbell's crimes, had been among his victims. In December 1994, one week after Hubbell pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, Associate White House Counsel, Jane C. Sherburne, created a "Task List" which included a reference to monitoring Hubbell's cooperation with Starr. Hubbell was later recorded in prison saying "I need to roll over one more time" regarding the Rose Law firm lawsuit. In his next court appearance, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination (see United States v. Hubbell).

In February 1997, Starr announced he would leave the investigation to pursue a position at the Pepperdine University School of Law. However, he "flip flopped" in the face of "intense criticism", and new evidence of sexual misconduct.^[34]

By April 1998, diverted to some degree by the burgeoning Lewinsky scandal, Starr's investigations in Arkansas were winding down, with his Little Rock grand jury about to expire.^[18] Hubbell, Jim Guy Tucker, and Susan McDougal had all refused to cooperate with Starr.^[18] Tucker and McDougal were later pardoned by President Clinton. When the Arkansas grand jury did conclude its work in May 1998, after 30 months in panel, it came up with only a contempt indictment against Susan McDougal.^[30]Although she refused to testify under oath regarding the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater, Susan McDougal did make the case in the media that the Clintons had been truthful in their account of the loan, and had cast doubt on her former husband's motives for cooperating with Starr. She also claimed that James McDougal felt abandoned by Clinton, and told her "he was going to pay back the Clintons". She said to the press, again not under oath, that her husband had told her that Republican activist and Little Rock lawyer, Sheffield Nelson, was willing to "pay him some money" for talking to the New York Times about Bill Clinton, and in 1992, he told her that one of Clinton's political enemies was paying him to tell the New York Times about Whitewater.

From the beginning, Susan McDougal charged that Starr offered her "global immunity" from other charges if she would cooperate with the Whitewater investigation. McDougal told the jury that refusing to answer questions about the Clintons and Whitewater wasn't easy for her, or her family. "It's been a long road, a very long road...and it was not an easy decision to make", McDougal told the court. McDougal refused to answer any questions while under oath, leading to her being imprisoned by the judge for civil contempt of court for the maximum 18 months, including eight months in isolation. Starr's subsequent indictment of McDougal for criminal contempt of court charges resulted in a jury hung 7-5, in favor of acquittal. President Clinton later pardoned her, shortly before leaving office.

In September 1998, Independent Counsel Starr released the Starr Report, concerning offenses alleged to have been committed by President Clinton, as part of the Lewinsky scandal. The report mentioned Whitewater only in passing; Clinton friend and advisor, Vernon Jordan, had tried to help Webster Hubbell financially with "no-show" consulting contracts while he was under pressure to cooperate with the Whitewater investigations.^[30] Indeed, it was on this basis that Starr took on the Lewinsky investigation, under the umbrella of the Whitewater Independent Counsel mandate.^[30]

There was much acrimony from the most fervent critics of the Clintons, after the release of the Starr report on the Foster matter and after Starr's departure and return to the case. The death of Foster had been the source of many conspiracy theories. **Christopher Ruddy**, a reporter for Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, helped fuel much of this speculation with claims that Starr had not pursued this line of inquiry far enough.^[35]

Reaction of the Clintons

On January 26, 1996, Hillary Clinton testified before a grand jury concerning her investments in Whitewater. This was the first time in American history that a first lady had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. She testified that they never borrowed any money from the bank, and denied having caused anyone to borrow money on their behalf. Over the course of the investigation, fifteen individuals—including Jim and Susan McDougal, White House counsel Webster Hubbell, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker—were convicted of federal charges. Other than Jim McDougal, none of the convicted agreed to cooperate with the Whitewater investigators, and Clinton pardoned four of them in the final hours of his presidency (see list of people pardoned by Bill Clinton).

Reaction of Congress

Parallel to the Independent Counsel track, both houses of the United States Congress had been investigating Whitewater and holding hearings on it. The House Committee on Financial Services had been scheduled to begin hearings in late March 1994, but they were postponed after an unusually angry, written communication from Democratic Banking Committee chair Henry B. Gonzalez to Republican Jim Leach. Gonzalez called Leach "obstinate", "obdurate", "in willful disregard" of House etiquette, and "premeditatedly" plotting a "judicial adventure".^[36] The House Banking Committee began its hearings in late July 1994.^[37]

The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee also began hearings on Whitewater in July 1994.^[38] These hearings intensified in May 1995, following the Republican gain of control, when the Republican Banking Committee chairman Al D'Amato also became chair of the newly formed Special Whitewater Committee. The Whitewater committee's hearings were much more extensive than those held previously by the Democrats, running for 300 hours over 60 sessions across 13 months, and taking over 10,000 pages of testimony and 35,000 pages of depositions from almost 250 people.^[39] The hearings' testimony and senatorial lines of investigation mostly followed partisan lines, with Republicans investigating the President and the Democrats defending him.^[39] The Senate Special Whitewater Committee issued an 800-page majority report on June 18, 1996, which only hinted at one possible improper action by President Clinton, but spoke of the Clinton Administration as "an American presidency [that] misused its power, circumvented the limits on its authority and attempted to manipulate the truth". The first lady came in for much stronger criticism, as she was "the central figure" in all aspects of the alleged wrongdoings.^[40] The Democratic minority on the Committee called these findings "a legislative travesty", "a witch hunt", and "a political game".^[40]

On November 19, 1998, Independent Counsel Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee in connection with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton over charges related to the Lewinsky scandal. Starr said that in late 1997, he had considered preparing an impeachment report regarding the fraudulent $300,000 loan to Susan Mcdougall and the question of whether the President had testified truthfully regarding the loan.^[41] Starr said that he held back the charges because he was not sure that the two major witnesses had told the truth,^[42] but that the investigation was still ongoing. Regarding the reappearance of Hillary Clinton's Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House residential section, Starr said the investigation had found no explanation for the disappearance or the reappearance. "After a thorough investigation, we have found no explanation how the billing records got where they were or why they were not discovered and produced earlier. It remains a mystery to this day."^[42]Starr also chose this occasion to completely exonerate President Clinton of any wrongdoing in the Travelgate and Filegate matters;^[41] Democrats on the committee immediately criticized Starr for withholding these findings, as well as the Whitewater one, until after the 1998 Congressional elections.^[42]

Convictions

Ultimately the Clintons were never charged, but 15 other persons were convicted of more than 40 crimes, including Bill Clinton's successor as governor, who was removed from office.^[43]

Jim Guy Tucker: Governor of Arkansas at the time, removed from office (fraud, 3 counts)
John Haley: attorney for Jim Guy Tucker (tax evasion)
William J. Marks, Sr.: Jim Guy Tucker's business partner (conspiracy)
Stephen Smith: former Governor Clinton aide (conspiracy to misapply funds). Bill Clinton pardoned.
Webster Hubbell: Clinton political supporter; Rose Law Firm partner (embezzlement, fraud)
Jim McDougal: banker, Clinton political supporter: (18 felonies, varied)
Susan McDougal: Clinton political supporter (multiple frauds). Bill Clinton pardoned.
David Hale: banker, self-proclaimed Clinton political supporter: (conspiracy, fraud)
Neal Ainley: Perry County Bank president (embezzled bank funds for Clinton campaign)
Chris Wade: Whitewater real estate broker (multiple loan fraud). Bill Clinton pardoned.
Larry Kuca: Madison real estate agent (multiple loan fraud)
Robert W. Palmer: Madison appraiser (conspiracy). Bill Clinton pardoned.
John Latham: Madison Bank CEO (bank fraud)
Eugene Fitzhugh: Whitewater defendant (multiple bribery)
Charles Matthews: Whitewater defendant (bribery)

Tax returns

fiske:

Some of his work highlights include: representing Clark Clifford and Robert Altman in investigations of their roles in the BCCI matter; representing Exxon in New York and New Jersey investigations of the Arthur Kill oil spill; representing General Electric, Exxon, Bankers Trust and other clients in securities actions; and successfully defending a US$4 billion suit arising out of the Three Mile Island accident, brought by General Public Utilities against Babcock & Wilcox, which had designed and manufactured the nuclear reactor.

see holy cow 2000:

huge sums spent, lots of plum gigs

5.500 plane trips 73M$ 12 ft pros, 78 fbi barrett spend 23M$ on cisneros

indep council hogged fbi resources so cincinnati office did not follow up on moussawi plane pilot training?

nyt fail

Julie Myers went after susan mcDougal, ICE, KBR got 385m$ to build 4 prisons over the 23 existing, meatplant sweep, some arrestees wnt to taylot Tx jail owned by CCA (cheney son in law lobbied before DHS); kids got uniforms and # at the T Don Hutto res ctr (jm went to party foto w/ guy in blackface

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/arkansas/etc/chron.html

6/78	Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, join Jim and Susan McDougal in purchasing 230 acres along the White River in Northern Arkansas. Susan McDougal christens the property "Whitewater."
11/78	Bill Clinton is elected Governor of Arkansas.
10/80	Jim and Susan McDougal buy the Bank of Kingston, a small state-chartered bank, which is renamed Madison Bank & Trust.
11/80	Bill Clinton is defeated in bid to be re-elected Governor.
1/82	Jim McDougal buys the Woodruff Savings & Loan in Augusta, renames it Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and moves the headquarters to Little Rock.
11/82	Bill Clinton wins back the Governor's office.
5/84	Federal Home Loan Bank Board issues highly critical exam of Madison Guaranty. Soon after, the S&L enters supervisory agreement to correct lending practices.
4/85	McDougal holds fundraiser for Governor Clinton at offices of Madison Guaranty. The event raises an estimated $35,000. Questions are later raised about whether the source of some individual contributions was, in fact, other Madison accounts.
Spring 1985	According to McDougal, the Governor jogs by Madison's office and asks that some of the S&L's legal work be given to his wife, Hillary. The Rose Law Firm is later placed on a $2,000/month retainer.
10/85	Jim McDougal, through Madison Guaranty's real estate subsidiary, Madison Financial, and friend Seth Ward purchase the Castle Grande property for $1.75 million. Madison Financial puts up $600,000, its legal limit, and Ward pays $1.15 million, borrowed on a non-recourse loan from Madison Guaranty.
2/86	According to local municipal judge David Hale, a meeting between Hale, McDougal and Governor Clinton takes place at the Castle Grande sales office where they discuss a $300,000 loan from Hale to Susan McDougal.
2/28/86	The Dean Paul Loan is implemented. Madison Guaranty loans Paul $825,000, who then buys three properties from David Hale. Hale, through his SBA-backed lending company, then loans $150,000 to Jim Guy Tucker and R.D. Randolph, who borrow an additional $1.05 million from Madison. Tucker, Randolph and Senator William Fulbright, who borrows $700,000 from Madison, buy out the bulk of Seth Ward's Castle Grande holdings. Ward's non-recourse loan, a potential red flag to examiners, is moved off of Madison's books.
3/86	Federal Home Loan Bank Board examiners arrive at Madison Guaranty.
4/3/86	Hale loans $300,000 from his SBA-backed operation to Susan McDougal d/b/a Master Marketing, an advertising agency. The money is deposited into Jim and Susan McDougal's personal account at Madison Guaranty. Funds are used to pay down a year-old McDougal personal loan, $25,000 is used to cover overdrafts in the Whitewater account and another $25,000 is used as downpayment on additional property purchased in the name of Whitewater Development Corp.
4/7/86	Madison Guaranty senior loan officer Don Denton has telephone conference with Rose Law Firm attorney Hillary Clinton. According to Denton, the two discuss transactions intended to provide commissions to Seth Ward for his role in Castle Grande deal.
5/86	An option agreement is drafted providing Ward with compensation for the future sale of property to Madison. According to Rose Law Firm billing records, the agreement is prepared by Hillary Clinton. Federal investigators would later determine that the option agreement was used by Madison to further conceal the ¦sham² Castle Grande deal.
7/86	Federal Home Loan Bank Board meets in Dallas to review Madison Guaranty examination. Jim and Susan McDougal are forced to resign from the institution.
1988	As part of "routine" document retention procedures, Hillary Clinton authorizes the destruction of her working files on Madison Guaranty and Castle Grande.
2/89	The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation is appointed conservator for Madison Guaranty.
11/89	Jim McDougal is indicted on bank fraud. He is acquitted during jury trial in 1990.
10/91	Governor Clinton announces his candidacy for President.
2/92	A Clinton Campaign Whitewater team is assembled to address reporter's inquiries. A copy of the Rose Law Firm billing records for Madison Guaranty are printed from the Rose computer. The underlying computer record vanishes. Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster review the billing records. Mrs. Clinton believes she also looked at them at that time.
3/92	Articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post question the Clinton's Whitewater investments and Hillary Clinton's representation of Madison Guaranty.
11/92	Bill Clinton is elected President of the United States.
1/93	Jim McDougal agrees to buy out the Clinton's interest in Whitewater for $1,000.
7/20/93	Vince Foster commits suicide. The removal of the Clinton's personal files from Foster's office generates new interest in the Whitewater controversy.
9/93	David Hale is indicted for defrauding the federal government with his SBA-backed operation. He would later plead guilty and cooperate with the independent counsel.
1/94	Attorney General Janet Reno names Robert Fiske as independent counsel to investigate Whitewater.
8/94	Fiske is replaced by Kenneth Starr as independent counsel.
1995	House and Senate Congressional Committees hold months of Whitewater hearings.
8/95	Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker are indicted on multiple counts of bank fraud.
1/4/96	A copy of the Rose Law Firm billing records, under subpoena for nearly two years, is turned over to investigators by Mrs. Clinton's assistant Carolyn Huber. Ms. Huber has testified that she found the records, along with a stack of other papers, in the First Lady's book room in August, 1995. She moved all of the documents to her office before realizing in January that the billing records were among the papers.
1/26/96	Mrs. Clinton becomes the first First Lady ever to be called to testify before a grand jury.
4/96	Jim and Susan McDougal and Governor Jim Guy Tucker stand trial for bank fraud. David Hale testifies that then-Governor Bill Clinton inquired about his $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal in 1986. President Clinton testifies via videotape and denies that he had any involvement with or knowledge of the Hale loan to Susan McDougal.
5/96	The McDougals and Governor Tucker are convicted. Soon after, Jim McDougal begins to cooperate with the independent counsel. Susan McDougal refuses to answer any questions before the grand jury and is sent to prison for contempt.
11/96	President Clinton is relected to a second term.
2/97	Kenneth Starr announces his intention to resign as independent counsel and become dean at Pepperdine Law School. Following a few days of negative publicity, Starr announces he will stay on until the investigation is over.
9/97	The General Accounting Office reports that costs of the independent counsel's investigation of Whitewater have exceeded $30 million.