Tag: travelgate
If He Shouts ‘Rape,’ Donald Trump Should Unseal His Divorce Records

If He Shouts ‘Rape,’ Donald Trump Should Unseal His Divorce Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Dateline transcript of February 24, 1999:

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

Juanita Broaddrick: No.

Myers: This has been strictly your choice.

Broaddrick: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Scandalizing Hillary: If The First Time Is Tragedy, Then The Second Time Is…

Scandalizing Hillary: If The First Time Is Tragedy, Then The Second Time Is…

With a self-proclaimed socialist running a credible campaign for president, perhaps the time has come to revive Karl Marx’s wittiest aphorism – although his pungent quip is relevant to Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders.

At the outset of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the young revolutionary said Hegel had once observed that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

That piercing insight can be applied to the “Clinton scandals,” now playing again, courtesy of the Congressional Republicans and especially the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), that committee is hardly the first on Capitol Hill to investigate, at great length and expense, a series of vague accusations against Bill and/or Hillary Clinton and/or various staffers and/or associates. (Indeed, it is the seventh Congressional committee to investigate this particular set of vague accusations concerning the former Secretary of State, with none of the earlier probes finding any evidence of wrongdoing by her in the consulate attack on September 11, 2012.)

Back in 1994, just before the Republicans gained control of Congress in the midterm elections, Newt Gingrich gloated that his agenda as Speaker of the House would include multiple investigations of the Clinton administration, the President, the First Lady, and all their friends and associates. He wasn’t kidding. Whitewater? Definitely. Travelgate? Certainly. Filegate? Absolutely. Even those obviously fabricated tales implicating the president in cocaine smuggling at a tiny Arkansas airstrip called Mena? Of course!

While the national press corps treated all those farcical “investigations” as matters of the utmost gravity, even a cursory glance at the underlying facts would have quickly showed that there was nothing to investigate (as Gene Lyons and I explain in considerable detail in our free ebook, The Hunting of Hillary).

Whitewater was a defunct land deal that cost the Clintons about $45,000 and ended long before his election as president. Travelgate was an inter-office dispute of no consequence to anyone, except the traveling press corps that had enjoyed favors from a few White House employees. Filegate was a complete fake, based on a misreading of a list of former staffers. And no, there was never any evidence that Clinton knew about drug trafficking at Mena. But a presumably sane Republican Congressman from Iowa named Jim Leach pretended to believe it for a while, anyway.

Still these official hoaxes dragged on for months and years, courtesy of the Republican majority and an independent counsel appointed by Republican judges (a position happily eliminated from the statute books when its enabling legislation finally expired). Their aim was blatantly political, even though nobody in the GOP leadership was stupid enough to brag about driving down Clinton’s poll numbers. And they all ended with nothing to show for the millions of taxpayer dollars expended. In fact, the following midterm elections saw the most prominent figures on the Senate Whitewater Committee – Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina – abruptly ousted from their seats.

If Whitewater wasn’t quite tragedy, despite the damage inflicted on many innocent people in Arkansas, #Benghazi/email is assuredly farce. Not only has Rep. Kevin McCarthy exposed the scam with his juvenile bragging on Fox News Channel, but now a second Republican member, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) has confirmed that the Benghazi committee was “designed” to “go after…an individual, Hillary Clinton.”

According to the New York Times, the committee’s members and staff occupy their time with a “wine club” and a “gun-buying club,” while issuing subpoenas to Clinton’s friends and associates – and failing to discover anything of consequence about that incident in Benghazi. Gowdy likes to claim that he uncovered Clinton’s use of a private email server – as used by many public officials, including her predecessor Colin Powell – but even that fact, obviously known to many in the Obama administration, had been revealed by a Romanian hacker long before the committee was appointed.

At the first Democratic debate, Sanders turned to Clinton and declared that the American people “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Laughing, she agreed. Nevertheless the damned emails will return on October 22, when Clinton appears before the Benghazi committee for a full day in open session to answer the committee’s questions, and say a few words about the committee and its masterminds.

As that date approaches, let’s hope this partisan burlesque, at the very least, provides a few more laughs before its inevitably ignominious conclusion. We’ve already spent more than $4 million in tax revenues on its production, and we’ll never get that money back.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shakes hands with rival candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (L) and thanks him for saying that he and the American people are sick of hearing about her State Department email controversy and want to hear about issues that effect their lives as they participate in the first official Democratic candidates debate of the 2016 presidential campaign in Las Vegas, Nevada October 13, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Recycling For Fun And Profit: The Imminent Return Of The ‘Clinton Scandals’

Recycling For Fun And Profit: The Imminent Return Of The ‘Clinton Scandals’

Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists – often in concert – will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”

The latest trip around this endless loop began when Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony-toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.

Suddenly the media frenzy of the Nineties resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.

What was truly bizarre in Senator Paul’s outburst was his suggestion that somehow Hillary Clinton is implicated in the Lewinsky affair (which he and others have wrongly characterized as “harassment” or victimization of the young White House intern). Most voters will consider that kind of insinuation more repulsive than persuasive.

Still, there were other long-running pseudo-scandals that featured Hillary. Are we doomed to revisit every crackpot allegation and conspiracy theory? Very likely so, if only because that brand of moonshine brought in wads and wads of money from the same credulous wingnuts who follow Fox News. Last week many of them surely sent money to Senator Paul or clicked on the Free Beacon.

The Clintons are still big box office in the mainstream media as well. Our historical amnesia will make the old charges against them sound new again. And if there’s a sucker born every minute, a lot of minutes have passed since they left the White House.

To prepare for the coming tsunami of bullbleep, a brief guide to past scandals may prove useful. Then when another lightweight politician or television personality starts spouting about Whitewater or Filegate or Travelgate – about which he or she actually knows approximately nothing – pertinent facts will be available. (For the longer version, with colorful narrative, consult The Hunting of the President.)

Whitewater: Kenneth Starr spent roughly millions of dollars trying to find evidence of chicanery in a land deal that lost money for the Clintons – and his probe ended up demonstrating their innocence, like several earlier investigations. Having whispered to gullible journalists that he was about to indict Hillary in December 1996, Starr instead abruptly resigned  as independent counsel in February 1997, knowing he had no case against her.

Indeed, the Clintons have undergone more thorough and invasive financial vetting than any couple in American history, from the exhaustive Starr investigation through Hillary’s Senate financial disclosures to the Clinton Foundation donors disclosed before her nomination as Secretary of State.

Travelgate:  Feverish coverage of Hillary Clinton’s firing of several White House employees who handled press travel arrangements neglected some salient facts –such as the suspicious absence of accounting records for millions of dollars expended by the White House Travel Office, the Travel Office director’s offer to plead guilty to embezzlement, and evidence that he had accepted lavish gifts from an air charter company. The First Lady and her staff didn’t handle the controversy skillfully, but she had plenty of reason to suspect chicanery. And again, exhaustive investigation found no intentional wrongdoing by her.

Filegate: Sensational accusations that Hillary Clinton had ordered up FBI background files to target political opponents soon became a Republican and media obsession, with respectable figures warning that Filegate would be the Clintons’ Watergate. “Where’s the outrage?” cried Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Starr investigated the matter and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Finally, in 2010, a Reagan-appointed federal judge mockingly dismissed a civil lawsuit based on the allegations, saying “there’s no there there.”

In truth, there never was.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons