By Rich Lowry
Monday, April 29, 2024
The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial,
but also more ridiculous.
The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records
misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to
defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election
and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so.
Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the
election.
He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have
denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit
not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings around
Stormy Daniels.
If this is the standard by which we judge elections, we
need to go back and conclude that Bill Clinton wasn’t elected legitimately in
1992, either. The Arkansas governor’s political operation was, in part, an
elaborate conspiracy to keep women who alleged to have had affairs with Clinton
quiet. Hillary Clinton was an active participant in the schemes. And so, by
Bragg’s logic, this Democratic power couple — dominant in the party for a
decade or more and still honored today — comprises election thieves.
Clinton had the same underlying problem as Trump —
namely, women with embarrassing stories to tell — but the opposite tabloid
dynamic; the tabloids were trying to get Clinton, whereas the National
Enquirer was trying to protect Trump.
The Clinton campaign fought to silence or discredit women
as necessary. Clinton’s operatives had the foresight — there’s nothing like
planning ahead — to secure affidavits of denial from women rumored to have had
affairs with Clinton. The truth didn’t matter here, of course. They just wanted
the exculpatory statements, and the women were usually happy to sign them. Who
wants the embarrassment of such matters being aired in public?
So, when the Star tabloid reported that
five Arkansas women, including one named Gennifer Flowers, had had affairs with
Clinton, the campaign was ready. According to George Stephanopoulos, the
campaign’s strategy initially was to attack the tabloid messenger and use previously
signed affidavits to undermine the story.
Then, Flowers shifted from denying the affair to
confirming it in detail. Her story had to be destroyed, and her background and
appearance would provide one hook for the campaign’s effort. Stephanopoulos
wrote in his memoir, “Gennifer’s red suit and dark-rooted hair sent exactly the
right message.”
Again, everyone knew what they were doing, which was
keeping the truth from the voters in the service of what they considered a
higher good. “I couldn’t bear the thought that an old dalliance dredged up by a
tabloid would curtail the professional experience of my life, or the promise I
saw in Clinton,” Stephanopoulos wrote.
Asked about the claim by Flowers that they had had a
twelve-year affair, Clinton said in his famous 60 Minutes interview
in 1992, “That allegation is false,” which, of course, probably meant that the
dalliance was shorter — or perhaps longer — in duration. (Clinton later
admitted to one assignation in 1977.)
Regardless, clearly the Clinton campaign was engaged in
what is now called “election interference.”
There was much more. State troopers were involved in
procuring women for Clinton and had been pressured prior to the 1992 campaign
not to talk. A Clinton loyalist named Buddy Young told one of the troopers
during the campaign, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth
shut.”
Central to the operation to suppress damaging allegations
was the private detective Jack Palladino. He would contact women and either get
them to sign affidavits denying everything or find a way to attack their
credibility.
He convinced the National Enquirer to
take a pass on a story about a former Miss Arkansas by providing the
publication with affidavits questioning her reliability.
None of this was free. The campaign considered the
payments to Palladino election expenses, and made them from its own funds, but
hid them. As Michael Isikoff relates in his book Uncovering Clinton, the
campaign sent the initial $28,000 to a Denver law firm, which passed along the
payment to Palladino’s agency. This assured that only the Denver law firm
showed up in disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. How was the
payment categorized? As legal fees (reminder: Trump is getting prosecuted
because he booked his payments to Michael Cohen, his equivalent of Paladino, as
legal fees rather than reimbursement of a loan).
As Isikoff writes, “Every trivial expenditure for postage
and catering, was routinely reported on Clinton’s FEC report. But something
truly worth knowing — the campaign’s retention of a high-powered private
detective — had been concealed.”
Isikoff’s report at the time forced the campaign to
acknowledge the payments to Palladino during the campaign. After it was all
over, Isikoff figured out by looking through the FEC filings that the campaign
had spent more than $100,000 on Palladino, “with a large chunk of the payments
delayed until after the election, one final layer of subterfuge.”
Needless to say, pointing to Bill Clinton’s conduct as a
precedent isn’t much of a defense.
The point is that campaigns always try to keep unwelcome
information from voters (the Biden campaign and the Hunter laptop is a more recent example). And,
certainly, amid all the threats, job offers, payments, and mixing of private
and official matters entailed by Clinton’s extensive damage-control operation
in 1992, a politically motivated local prosecutor could have found some sort of
misdemeanor to use against him.
The list of Bill Clinton’s ethical lapses is long. Now,
if we take Alvin Bragg seriously, stealing the 1992 election has to be added to
the list.
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