Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Jan. 13 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh reads like a primer for students of Clinton Derangement Syndrome, making an effort to touch on as many alleged Clinton scandals as possible while failing to tell the truth about any of them.
Unruh devotes the bulk of his article to uncritically repeating the anti-Clinton bile of Larry Klayman, "a top Washington watchdog who years ago founded the Judicial Watch organization to monitor government activities and pursue prosecution of illegal government behavior." Of course, as we've noted, WND and other conservatives tended to lose interest in Klayman when his attention turned to Republican misbehavior.
Unruh features Klayman's assertion that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is holding hearings on Hillary clinton's nomination as secretary of state "apparently is making a determined effort to prevent any discussion of her 'Chinagate' or 'Filegate' scandals." But neither Unruh or Klayman note that those supposed scandals have already been investigated with no official finding of wrongdoing by Clinton.
Under the so-called "Chinagate" scandal, according to Unruh, "technology companies allegedly made donations of millions of dollars to various Democratic Party entities, including President Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, in return for permission to sell high-tech secrets to China," with a focus on Bernard Schwartz and his Loral Space & Communication Ltd. But according to an investigation, a team of federal prosecutors headed by Charles LaBella turned up "not a scintilla of evidence–or information–that the president was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz."
Under Filegate, Unruh writes, Bill and Hillary Clinton "were accused of violating the privacy rights of their perceived political enemies by wrongly accessing and misusing the FBI files of Reagan and first Bush administration staffers, among others." In fact, independent counsel Kenneth Starr exonerated both of them of complicity in the matter, saying "while there are outstanding issues that we are attempting to resolve with respect to one individual [we] found no evidence that anyone higher [than White House security officials Craig Livingstone or Anthony Marceca] was in any way involved in ordering the files from the FBI. Second, we have found no evidence that information contained in the files of former officials was used for an improper purpose."
Unruh also repeated a previous false claim made by WND:
The chief Republican counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the preparation of impeachment articles against President Richard Nixon has verified allegations by Jerry Zeifman, the general counsel for the committee, about Hillary Clinton.
Franklin Polk backed up claims by Zeifman that Clinton was fired from the committee staff for unethical behavior.
In fact, as we've detailed, Polk did not back up any of Zeifman's "major claims" against Hillary Clinton -- that Clinton's brief was "fraudulent," that "Clinton deliberately ignored the then-recent case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was allowed to have a lawyer during the impeachment attempt against him in 1970," that "Clinton bolstered her fraudulent brief by removing all of the Douglas files from public access and storing them at her office, enabling her to argue as if the case never existed," and that "Clinton was collaborating with allies of the Kennedys to block revelation of Kennedy-administration activities that made Watergate 'look like a day at the beach.'" Indeed, WND itself reported only that "Polk confirmed the Clinton memo ignored the Douglas case, but he could not confirm or dispel the claim that Hillary removed the files," adding that Polk considered Clinton's alleged exclusion of the Douglas precedent "more stupid than sinister."
Again, WND ignores the fact that Zeifman has materially changed his story regarding Clinton. Zeifman now claims he fired Clinton, but 11 years ago he told the Scripps Howard News Service, "If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her."
Unruh also adds: "Then there was Travelgate, when the staff of the White House travel office was fired to make way for Clinton cronies." As we've noted, independent counsel Robert Ray has cleared the Clintons of wrongdoing there too, stating that "The Travel Office employees served at the pleasure of President Bill Clinton, and they were subject to discharge without cause," further adding, "Even were cause a prerequisite for the employees' discharge, there was, at the time the firings occurred, evidence of financial mismanagement in the Travel Office."
Finally, while Unruh notes that the Clinton Foundation "reportedly has taken in at least $46 million from Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments, such as Kuwait, Brunei, Oman and Italy," he fails to note that Judicial Watch, when it was headed by Klayman, accepted millions of dollars from foundations controlled by right-wing moneybags Richard Mellon Scaife. Nor does Unruh state where the funding for Klayman's new organization, Freedom Watch, is coming from (though there's no reason not to assume that Klayman remains on the Scaife teat).
