With Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign under way, WorldNetDaily is reliving its ’90s glory, right down to Joseph Farah dreaming once again of a Hillary perp walk — after all, one of the reason it was founded in 1997 is to serve as a repository for anti-Clinton sentiment.
Thus, we have an unbylined May 18 WND article dedicating to “a fresh look at the top 20 scandals involving Hillary” — never mind that the article’s headline says 22 scandals and the article itself lists 23 (apparently, nobody at WND has ever passed a math class in one of their homeschools). WND clearly had to pad out the article, because more than a few of these “scandals” turned out to be anything but, and were found to be so years ago — not that WND will ever report that, of course. Let’s review, shall we?First up…
3) Looting the White House
[…]
When the Clintons left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2001, they reportedly vandalized and looted the White House.Additionally, the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reported that ”damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex” during the presidential transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush – including the theft of a presidential seal.
In fact, as we’ve reported, the GAO found that the Clintons did not leave the White House in any worse condition than the first Bush administration left the White House for Clinton, and a review by the General Services Administration determined that “the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy.”
4) Filegate: FBI files on GOP enemies
The Clinton duo was involved in a scandal known as “Filegate” in which they illegally obtaining FBI files on perceived adversaries, most of whom served in previous Republican administrations.
“In an effort to discredit the women who charged President Clinton with sexual misconduct, personal files and papers were illegally obtained and released. The courts found, under the Privacy Act, that the privacy of Linda Tripp and Kathleen Willey had been violated,” a Judicial Watch report said, citing just a few of more than 900 relevant files. Judicial Watch said Hillary had been linked “directly to the center” of the controversy.
In fact, independent counsel Robert Ray’s final report on the issue states that “there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation background reports of former White House staff from the prior administrations of President Bush and President Reagan.”
5) Hillary’s ‘Muslim Brotherhood princess’
Huma Abedin, who served as Hillary’s longtime deputy chief of staff and has worked with her for nearly 20 years, has known ties to the Muslim Brotherhood – a group bent on “destroying Western civilization from within” – and other Islamic supremacists. As WND has extensively reported, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic supremacist connections not only extend to Abedin’s mother and father, who are both deeply tied to al-Qaida fronts, but to Abedin herself.
This is a classic guilt-by-association attack, so scurrilous that none other than Republican John McCain was moved to defend Abedin, calling it “nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American and a loyal public servant.” WND doesn’t mention, as McCain did, thatAbedin’s father died two decades ago and, thus, is not plotting anything right now.
Abedin found another right-wing defender in Republican operative Ed Rollins, who pointed out that WND’s attacks on Abedin are “unsubstantiated” as well as “extreme and dishonest.”
6) Vince Foster’s 1993 death
Vince Foster was deputy White House counsel and Hillary’s friend and law partner who had connections to the Travelgate and Whitewater scandals. In 1993, Foster was found dead in a park with a fatal gunshot wound to his mouth. As WND reported, his suicide was the subject of much speculation and three official investigations.
Investigations by the U.S. Park Police, the Department of Justice, the FBI, Congress, Independent Counsel Robert B. Fiske and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr concluded Foster’s death was a suicide. However, as WND reported in 2003, one of Starr’s key investigators challenged the official line, insisting the probe’s result was predetermined, only a few plotters were required to engineer the result, the crime scene was altered and that major newspaper editors killed stories by reporters pursuing the truth. The Washington Post reported that federal investigators were not allowed to enter Foster’s office after his death, but “White House aides enter[ed] Foster’s office shortly after his death, giving rise to speculation that files were removed from his office.”
Yep, WND is still trying to blame Hillary for Foster’s death and invent a cover-up that has no actual evidence to support.
9) Travelgate: Always room for friends
In the Travelgate scandal, the staff of the White House travel office was fired to make way for Clinton cronies, including Bill’s 25-year-old cousin, who was reportedly promised the position of office director.
Hillary allegedly fired seven employees and gave the positions to her Arkansas friends. According to the Washington Post, there was an effort to award a White House airline contract to a Clinton friend.
Also, Hillary reportedly had the FBI investigate the former head of the travel office, Billy Dale, who was fired without notice and removed from White House grounds. Dale was charged with embezzlement but found not guilty of the crime in 1995. He was later audited by the IRS.
WND doesn’t mention that, as the report by independent counsel Robert Ray concluded, the Travel Office employees “served at the pleasure of President Bill Clinton, and they were subject to discharge without cause.” Ray’s report also found evidence of financial mismanagement in the Travel Office and that “sufficient evidence existed to provide the requisite predicate for the opening of a criminal investigation.”
10) Whitewater: Jail for friends, but not Clintons
The Whitewater investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr began in 1994 with accusations of impropriety against the Clintons and others concerning improper campaign contributions, political and financial favors, and tax benefits. Its initial subject was a failed Arkansas real-estate venture involving the Clintons in the 1980s that was linked to the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, a Little Rock savings bank run by the Clintons’ Whitewater business partners. Clinton friends James and Susan McDougal went to jail for fraud (James died while serving his sentence), as did former Arkansas Gov. Jim Tucker and municipal judges David Hale and Eugene Fitzhugh.
The probe eventually expanded to include the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, the dismissal of White House travel office employees, receipt by the White House of a number of FBI files and the issue of whether President Clinton lied or obstructed justice to hide an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
WND doesn’t mention that the reason the Clinton’s were never prosecuted was because Robert Ray found that whatever evidence he found was ” insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either of them committed any criminal offense.” The fact that Starr’s Whitewater investigation spread so far afield to an affair is the reason why there aren’t independent counsels anymore.
15) Clinton body count: ‘You find dead people’
“The Clinton body count,” first published in WND and later circulated by Linda Tripp to Monica Lewinsky, is a collection of names of people associated with Clinton administration scandals who have died mysterious and often violent deaths. Reporter David Bresnahan broke the story of the list during the summer of 1997 while researching his book, “Cover Up: The Art and Science of Political Deception.”
WND’s Clinton Body Count has been utterly discredited.
21) Peter Franklin Paul: Another Hillary friend goes to prison
As WND reported, Hillary was named in a lawsuit brought by Peter Franklin Paul for allegedly directing to her 2000 Senate campaign an illegal, in-kind contribution from Paul that included a fundraiser at the exclusive Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills, a tea hosted at the Beverly Hills home of socialite Cynthia Gershman and a lavish, A-list, million-dollar-plus Hollywood gala honoring Bill Clinton. At the trial of Clinton’s finance director for the 2000 senatorial campaign, David Rosen, the government told the jury Paul personally gave more than $1.2 million to produce the events.Paul, a former business partner of Spider-Man creator Stan Lee who sued Bill for fraud and accused Hillary of hiding nearly $2 million in Senate campaign donations, alleged they sabotaged the media company he formed with Lee to get out of a $17 million agreement made with Bill Clinton to serve as an international promoter for the company after he left the White House. Paul was indicted in June 2001 for manipulating the price of the stock in his company, Stan Lee Media, as it was collapsing. A judge determined Paul didn’t profit from the attempt to save his company, but he accepted a plea bargain and served three years in prison. WND reported in 2012 that Paul charged Attorney General Eric Holder and his Justice Department obstructed justice by reneging on a sentencing agreement.
“Hillary is carrying out her promise to finally destroy my family to punish me for exposing the corruption that elected her to the Senate,” Paul told WND at the time.
As we’ve noted, Paul was claiming a Clinton conspiracy against him — thus getting rabid Clinton-haters like WND on his side — in an effort to deflect the fraud charges against him. If Paul is the upstanding guy WND portrays him as, why did he flee to Brazil to evade prosecution, then fight extradiction back to the U.S. for two years?
And, as we’ve also noted, the fact that — as WND admits — Paul wasn’t indicted until 2001 means that the Bush administration, not Hillary Clinton or any other member of the Clinton administration, was leading the prosecution against him. That sort of blows up his whole victim schtick.
And that’s just the beginning. Imagine if we had the time to examine in detail all 22 (or 20, or 23) so-called “scandals” on WND’s list.
But that, of course, is what WND is counting on — to repeat the lies until people are tired of correcting them. Joseph Farah and Co. think that this is some strange form of “journalism,” but it’s actually yet another reason why nobody believes WND.