by David Brock
“She has a hard-on for Hillary,” said one source in the Times. “She wants that coonskin nailed to the wall.”
It was Ryan who made the case for assigning a full-time beat reporter to cover Hillary back in 2013, when Hillary was a private citizen and two years before she would make a decision to declare her candidacy for president. Most media outlets followed suit, producing a flood of excessive and at times trivial coverage. In defending the decision to public editor Sullivan, Ryan justified it by asserting “there is a certain amount of opacity and stagecraft” surrounding the Clintons—implying, wrongly, that they purposely mislead the public—without citing any evidence for such a palpably biased assertion.
That was Ryan’s mindset about the Clintons. She rendered a harsh judgment about the Clinton family, describing it as “dysfunctional” in a January 2014 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. And in an interview on the same program in July 2015, Ryan, who is one of the most important news editors in the country, used the occasion to opine that Hillary lacked “authenticity” and is unable to deliver an “uncalculated” message, points lifted right from the Republican playbook. So much for professionalism and impartiality.
For all the advance hoopla, and the controversy over the Times involvement, Clinton Cash didn’t deliver. Schweizer tried in vain to find a correlation between foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and actions taken by the State Department but there were none. He relied on faulty, conspiracy-laden time lines to imply, but never clearly allege, wrongdoing. On its website, in fact, the publisher of Clinton Cash stated clearly that the book “does not allege illegal or unethical behavior.” And in interviews, the author himself claimed, lamely, that he was just “asking questions,” that he had turned the book over to real journalists so they could further his investigation, and that if only he had subpoena power or access to Hillary’s e-mails, he would have nailed his target.
Many news outlets reviewing the book panned it.
ABC News: The author offers “no proof.”
Time: The book is based on “little evidence.”
Yahoo News: “No smoking gun.”
Politico: “No evidence.”
Yet the Times dug in, keying off Schweizer to revive an old story suggesting that a Clinton Foundation donor had won Hillary’s approval of the sale of a uranium company to Russia. But the chronology was off. The donor, Frank Giustra, had sold his interest in the company in 2007, two years before Hillary became secretary of state. Further, there was no evidence that Hillary Clinton was personally involved in the decision—or that she could have even made it. Deals that are deemed important to national security are made by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The Committee is comprised of multiple federal agencies, and the deal’s approval required at least nine federal officials and agencies, as well as independent agencies entirely outside of the State Department’s purview. According to Jose Fernandez, the former assistant secretary who was the State Department’s principal representative on the committee at the time, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.”
The Times reported that donations from an executive of the company that was sold to Russia, Uranium One, had not been disclosed by the Clinton Foundation, as required by the agreement reached between the Foundation and the Obama administration when Hillary took office. But that was wrong, too. The executive donated to the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, a Canadian philanthropy separate from the Clinton Foundation. The partnership’s donations to the Clinton Foundation were properly disclosed. It was the Canadian partnership that doesn’t disclose its donors, because it’s prohibited from doing so by Canadian law governing nonprofits.
The Times uranium story—which plugged the Schweizer book—was published on the front page on April 24. The next week, Fox News was set to air a one-hour special, The Tangled Clinton Web, also promoting Schweizer’s book and highlighting the uranium issue. Featured on the Fox special was none other than the Times reporter Jo Becker, who had written the Times piece. When Fox released a promotional clip of its special to the press, the clip featured Becker—allowing Fox to exploit its alliance with the Times to enhance its own credibility. According to Times guidelines, reporters are to avoid appearing on TV forums “that emphasize punditry and reckless opinion-mongering.” Fox certainly fits that bill, but maybe Times reporters get a special dispensation when pushing false stories trashing the Clintons.
The Times also touted the charge that Hillary had pushed for the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Pact to benefit Foundation donors. Again, not only was the chronology off, but the truth was the opposite of what was alleged. Hillary publicly opposed the trade deal after the contributions to the Clinton Foundation from donors favoring the deal came in. The donations were made in 2006 and 2007, and Hillary was vocal about her opposition to the trade deal while she was running for president in 2007 and 2008. Hillary’s position changed in favor of the pact only after she joined the Obama administration, after new labor restrictions were added to the deal, and after the agreement became a priority for the Obama administration. David Axelrod, a White House advisor when Obama sought to pass the trade deal, called the idea that this was done to reward Clinton Foundation donors “nuts.”
So, no quid pro quos. No failure to properly disclose donations. What we were left with was 100 percent innuendo—the definition of a political smear. Yet the press continued to report on “questions raised,” on “appearances,” on “how things looked.” And to Hillary’s critics, the answer was obvious: Things looked bad. Pressed for any sort of evidence for the allegations being made in an interview on Morning Joe, former Bush aide Nicole Wallace finally conceded that there was none, but deemed the Clinton dealings “shady” nonetheless.
Through it all, the Times, Schweizer’s partner, continued to protect Clinton Cash even as many other news organizations—organizations that didn’t have “exclusive” deals with the author—were finding and reporting on his many errors. But not the Times, which stuck by Schweizer as if he was one of their own reporters, and once again never corrected the record on any of it.
In what could be interpreted as a jab at his own newspaper’s shabby performance, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman summed it up this way:
If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all—all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing. The usual rules didn’t seem to apply; instead it was Clinton rules, under which innuendo and guilt by association were considered perfectly OK, in which the initial suggestion of lawbreaking received front-page headlines and the subsequent discovery that there was nothing there was buried in the back pages if it was reported at all.
Some of the same phenomenon resurfaced during the 2008 primary.
So, is this time different? First indications are not encouraging; it’s already apparent that the author of the anti-Clinton book that’s driving the latest stuff is a real piece of work.
Again, maybe there’s something there. But given the history here, we’d all be well advised to follow our own Clinton rules, and be highly suspicious of any reports of supposed scandals unless there’s hard proof rather than mere innuendo.
Oh, and the news media should probably be aware that this isn’t 1994: there’s a much more effective progressive infrastructure now, much more scrutiny of reporting, and the kinds of malpractice that went unsanctioned 20 years ago can land you in big trouble now.
The aggressive progressive pushback that Krugman cited—from the Clinton campaign itself and outside groups like Media Matters—made a difference. Schweizer’s right-wing ties became part of the story, and his journalistic credibility was questioned pretty much everywhere he went to flack the book.
But in the new media environment, the days of killing off a hit job disguised as a book like this were over. The book’s intended audience reac
ted as if on cue. The right-wing base went out and bought the book in droves—giving new meaning to “Clinton cash”—and the Fox News Channel showered it with more than $100 million in free publicity. A pandering Mitt Romney accused Hillary of having been “bribed.” And the Wall Street Journal editorial page called for a criminal investigation.
The mainstream press, hardly chastened by the experience, was teed up for more. One New York Times writer stated flatly that going forward, in the absence of a strong primary challenge, the press would function as Hillary’s opposition. At least the Times got that right.
And the worried Democrats were, well, worried. Asked about the impact of a stinging column on what he called the “disastrous” post-Clinton presidency, liberal writer Jonathan Chait speculated that it might “open up more space for a primary challenge.”
The false attacks on the Clinton Foundation were in a sense attacks on the notion of philanthropy itself. For what contemporary effort better fit the conventional modern definition of philanthropy as a “private initiative, for public good, focusing on quality of life”? In any fair view, the Clintons, especially the former president, deserved to join the pantheon of history’s most esteemed philanthropic actors.
Instead, their honorable motives were routinely besmirched, their good works defiled, by a partisan right-wing campaign of distortion, abetted by the news media. The Republicans aimed to turn the Clinton Foundation into 2016’s version of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital—an Achilles heel portrayed by Democrats as a rapacious, job-killing, corporate-greed machine. Of course, the only difference was that they were complete opposites. In this truth-twisting analogy, Hillary Clinton, a public servant for nearly three decades, now would be recast as an aloof and uncaring member of America’s corporate elite.
Chapter Ten
The Romney-ization of Hillary Clinton
In September 2014, the Washington Free Beacon broke a story the editors hyped as big news:
Previously unpublished correspondence between Hillary Clinton and the late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky reveals new details about her relationship with the controversial Chicago activist and shed[s] light on her early ideological development.
Clinton met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing.
Clinton’s relationship with Alinsky, and her support for his philosophy, continued for several years after she entered Yale law school in 1969, two letters obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.
Alinsky, of course, is a popular bogeyman for conservatives, who have used him as an avatar for everything they loathe and fear about populist grassroots politics. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, the right has looked for connections between Obama and Alinsky—two community organizers and, to conservatives, two terrifying socialists. So, to the right, that Hillary Clinton had a connection to Alinsky was proof of her radical sympathies.
But the story fell flat, even in the outer sphere of right-wing social media networks. So don’t expect to hear much about Saul Alinsky as conservatives focus their attacks on Hillary. As we explored in chapter 6, the political terrain is shifting beneath Republicans’ feet, causing even their own standard-bearers to feign interest in issues like economic inequality; hurling accusations of “socialism” doesn’t work anymore. Indeed, economic ideas that might previously have been denounced as socialistic are meeting with growing acceptance.
Thus, the right’s early efforts to spoil Hillary’s coming-out party as a presidential candidate focused not on attacking her as being too liberal, but rather on portraying her emphasis on growing economic equality as simply a pose. They’re trying to cast her as an inauthentic messenger for progressive economic policies, nothing more than another crony capitalist, out of touch with middle-class families and devoid of credibility when it comes to improving people’s lives.
Indeed conservatives don’t really want to turn Hillary Clinton into Saul Alinsky, after all. They want to turn her into Mitt Romney.
Romney’s economic policies, of course, offered little to the middle class. But their details didn’t really matter; Democrats succeeded in painting him as personally lacking empathy for ordinary people. Their best ally in that cause was named Mitt Romney: there was the time he said, “Corporations are people, my friend,” the time he tried to identify with NASCAR fans by pointing out that he had friends who owned teams, the time he mused about how much he likes to fire people, the time he was caught on tape attacking 47 percent of the American people as takers living off the government.
By the time Democrats ran ads featuring laid-off workers—victims of purges by Romney’s firm—everyone knew that Mitt Romney was out of touch with the middle class; they had heard the evidence in his own words. And by the time voters zeroed in on the choice between Obama and Romney, it didn’t matter what Romney’s actual policy proposals were. He could have come out in favor of actual, literal socialism; nobody would have believed him.
Especially when they’re struggling as the middle class has in the wake of the Bush recession, voters are looking for someone they can identify with, someone who has been through some of the same things they have, someone they trust to really understand what’s going on in their lives. And when they looked at Romney, they saw a guy who had a car elevator in his house.
In the same vein, conservatives figure they won’t have to wrestle with Hillary Clinton’s strong middle-class economic message if they can disqualify her as a messenger.
And, as always, the media is more than willing to help. In particular, a story about the Clintons’ personal finances is catnip to a political press that, beginning with the Whitewater tale twenty years before, loves to chase stories of how the Clintons are supposedly always grasping for money. Whether they were a young couple getting cut in on a sketchy Arkansas land deal or plutocratic power brokers bestriding the world stage, the same phony story line persisted.
When Hillary Clinton left the State Department, she accepted a variety of speaking engagements, some of which paid an honorarium or were donated to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for her time. Many more she did for free in support of other worthy causes.
It’s not uncommon for elected officials to embark on paid speaking careers after their time in office, of course. For example, the New York Times reported that Jeb Bush “appears to have generated millions” from “more than 100” paid speeches to corporate groups since 2007, part of an “unapologetic determination to expand his wealth,” which Bush justified by explaining “that his finances had suffered during his time in government.”
And while Hillary’s speaking fee was sizable, it was in no way out of line with the sums charged by other public figures. Her predecessor as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, charges as much as $150,000 to speak. Another former secretary of state, Colin Powell, has charged up to $200,000. And Rudy Giuliani (whose Cabinet experience extends to his failed suggestion that felon Bernie Kerik be allowed to run the Department of Homeland Security) once pocketed $270,000 for a single speech to a private equity firm.
But, as always, the rules are different for Hillary. And under those Clinton rules, Hillary’s fee—“said to be upwards of $200,000 per speech”—was quickly described by the Washington Post as a “potentially serious political problem.” The Clintons, per the Post, “are established members of the 1 percent, leading lives far removed from the millions of middle-class voters who swing elections.”
In just two months, the Post’s Chris Cillizza dedicated more than a dozen blog posts to obsessing over Hillary’s wealth, continually giving Hillary’s opponents space to say what Cillizza was more than willing to conclude himself: “The Clintons are not ‘average’ people.”
“You have a money problem,” insisted Post columnist Ruth Marcus. It’s a “liability,” warned an 1,800-word front-page news article. The Washington Post was your around-the-clock source for right-wing talking points about how Hillary was out of touch.
&nbs
p; And did Americans care? Not a whit. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll, taken in the midst of the “controversy,” found that 55 percent of Americans believed that Hillary relates to and understands average Americans. “It’s doubtful that the public holds the Clintons’ wealth against them, ” Post columnist Dan Balz concluded. But it wasn’t for lack of effort on his newspaper’s part.
The Post wasn’t alone. Reporters hammered on Hillary’s wealth, insisting that there must be something untoward afoot and never mentioning the millions the Clintons had donated to charity as they became wealthy. “Ex-presidents make money like this, not candidates before they run,” scolded Chuck Todd on Morning Joe, leaving out the buckraking of Jeb Bush and Rudy Giuliani as well as the fact that most precampaign candidates (and arguably even a few ex-presidents) are less accomplished and in demand than Hillary.
In July 2014, the story broke that Hillary would speak at an October fund-raiser at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), with special attention paid to her $225,000 fee. But the controversy surrounding the event ignored that the fee was to be donated to the Clinton Foundation, not to Hillary herself; not to mention that months before the event, Hillary’s anticipated presence had helped sell out the best tables, raising more than $350,000—just the third time in history the annual event would generate net profit.
Then the focus turned to a speech at the University at Buffalo. Again, as with all of Hillary’s university speaking fees, this one would also go to the Clinton Foundation to continue the Clintons’ charitable endeavors. But Jennifer Rubin, the conservative press release distribution engine posing as a Washington Post columnist, suggested that perhaps Hillary benefited by receiving a tax deduction—false, since the payment never touched Hillary’s account and went directly to the charity. Rubin wrongly also assumed that the speaking fee was paid from university funds—false, since these honoraria were paid for by private donors.
