David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon caught NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell making a very strange argument on Wednesday’s Morning Joe about Hillary’s staunch opposition to any special prosecutor in the Whitewater scandal. Mitchell sounded like she felt Hillary’s pain, that the Clinton scandal probes in the 1990s “shaped her resistance to scrutiny” and she opposed an independent counsel because it caused Bill Clinton to give a “faulty deposition on Paula Jones.”
Lying under oath is downgraded on MSNBC to a “faulty deposition”! Here’s Mitchell’s spiel after MSNBC played clips of the “Pink Lady” press conference of April 22, 1994:
WILLIE GEIST: In 1994, you saw a dogged reporter on the front row and she's with us now from Washington. NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent, host of Andrea Mitchell Reports. Andrea, good morning.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Good morning. That was my younger sister. The evil twin. Wow. That does take you back, doesn't it? Look, I do think that this is, it's very interesting that you pulled this up because I do think that all of those experiences informed and shaped her resistance to scrutiny, arguably even the fact that she ended up with a private server after all of those years of investigations and the special prosecutors and Ken Starr, which she resisted until the last moment and didn't agree to it.
It was announced when the President was in — we were in Moscow for a summit with Boris Yeltsin and that's when he announced it. I think the President wanted to be as far away as possible from the First Lady when he caved in and agreed to the special prosecutor, which she had said it was going to lead to no good because it didn't turn up anything on Whitewater. What it did turn up, of course, the — his faulty deposition on Paula Jones and that's what led to the impeachment, so she has a very, very uncomfortable and painful history there.
Mitchell is always feeling Mrs. Clinton’s pain and discomfort. But her survey of Hillary’s feelings is plainly and simply a bald-faced lie. The special prosecutor led to "no good" and “didn’t turn up anything on Whitewater”? The special prosecutor's report in 2000 summed up:
The Madison Guaranty-Whitewater investigation resulted in the conviction of 12 defendants, including former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Jim and Susan McDougal, and former Associate Attorney General Webster L. Hubbell.
In other words, that's Clinton’s lieutenant governor, Clinton’s Whitewater real-estate business partners, and Hillary Clinton’s former law partner. Even in real time, those convictions (and their potential damage to the Clintons) were aggressively downplayed, as anchors felt the pain of the convicts.
Geist began with a faulty explanation of the main reason for the “Pink Lady” press conference. “Hillary Clinton is still reportedly still stung by the fallout from the Whitewater controversy when she was forced to back down on her resistance to having a special prosecutor investigate her financial dealings. A First Lady in 1994 she held an unusual marathon news conference at the White House trying to put the issue to rest.”
Wrong. The primary “issue” that day was Hillary’s bizarrely-manipulated $100,000 windfall from a $1,000 investment dabbling in the cattle-futures market in a one-year period in 1978-79 through Clinton pal Jim Blair, a lawyer for Tyson Foods. MSNBC showed video of a female correspondent next to Hillary asking a tough question, and not Mitchell's question. Mitchell's joke she had an “evil twin” only underlines that asking Hillary tough questions that cause her to lie incessantly is somehow "evil."
On that day, Mitchell herself asked Mrs. Clinton about her failure to fork over her money in “margin calls,” proof that her profit was manipulated for her by commodity brokers at the firm Refco. Typically, Hillary denied any knowledge of it, denied there was evidence (though there was). Mitchell was asking why a lawyer for a major chicken company would be helping her make commodity trades:
MITCHELL: Why do you think that they gave you this treatment with you being such a small customer? Don't you think that was preferential treatment based upon who you were and who your husband was?
Mrs. CLINTON: No. I really don't believe that. I don't think there's any evidence of that.
On that night’s NBC newscast, anchorman Tom Brokaw pronounced "She was cool, articulate, and for the most part very responsive to all questions." Mitchell noted the obvious, that Hillary didn't fully answer the media questions, but then gushed “I think you saw the talent of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a politician.”
