The Washington Post has run an extended whitewash of dishonest conduct in Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaign for the Senate from New York. The article, “House of Cards,” ran today, 8 October, 2005. The money quote, the one when Tom Sawyer really slaps the white paint on the fence, is in the 14th paragraph:
“ ‘Who knew?’ turned out to be a $1.176 million question. Federal law enforcement officials eventually confirmed that the gala, night of a thousand egos -- when Cher sang 'If I Could Turn Back Time,' the president cried for the cameras and con artists hobnobbed with the most powerful couple in the world -- cost somebody at least $1.176 million to produce. Yet Hillary Clinton's joint fundraising committee eventually reported that the gala cost just $401,419 in donated goods and services.”
In the following paragraph, the reporter, April Witt, attempts to answer the question by noting that David Rosen, “the only person charged with criminal conduct,” was found not guilty. That finding does not establish that neither Hillary Clinton, nor her chief fund-raiser David Rosen, knew about the fraud. For example, does the not guilty verdict for O.J. Simpson mean that he didn’t know who killed his ex-wife?
The reporter spends most of her article savaging the witnesses against Hillary Clinton. But if no one could be found responsible based on testimony of witnesses who have themselves committed crimes, no member of the Mafia would ever have gone to jail. Reporters, like prosecutors, have to take their witnesses as they find them. Sometimes, apparently “bad” people do tell the truth.
Had Ms. Witt done her job competently, she would have found out that both Hillary Clinton AND David Rosen knew about the $716,000 swindle in her campaign, BEFORE the final Report on that campaign was filed with the Federal Election Commission. The papers on Peter Paul’s civil suit against Hillary Clinton and others was served on both her and Rosen, before that final report was filed, under oath, with the FEC. The papers included receipts and copies of checks to prove the real cost of the Clinton Gala, as found as a fact by the FEC.
Both the false FEC report and the court documents including their date of service, are matters of public record. Any reporter, even one from the Post, could have found these documents. And then she could have included them in her story. There are more than a thousand people, me included, who knew these critical facts months ago. They have been all over the blogosphere that long. The reporter would have been clued in had she written about “the truth of the Clinton 2000 campaign,” rather than “colorful con men you might find amusing.”
Not until the fourth page of a five page article does the Post get to the reason why the Clinton Campaign would lie by three-quarters of million dollars about Gala costs. It was to free up that amount of apparent “gains” from the Gala to be spent for all purposes in the critical stage of her Senate race.
The only way to squeeze the truth out of this lengthy Post article is to read the facts from back to front, and ignore all the personal profiles of the colorful characters involved. Buried in this long article is a small but important article, that Hillary Clinton and her cronies knew about and benefitted from the largest fraud in federal election history. It’s a shame that the reporter utterly missed the very story that she was supposedly writing about.
John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
