pmward wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 4:19 pm
Would Republicans like it if all a Democrat had to do was make an allegation against a Republican with no proof to get their role altered in any way? Like what if during the Trump impeachment fiasco they removed Trump from power until it was all over? Would that have been fair? Of course not. An accusation is not enough, and should not ever be enough, to change anything.
This HAS been the Republican playbook for quite some time now. From the book on Hillary I'd prior referenced today...
Vinny
The most effective anti-Clinton book of the campaign season was Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer. Years of effort and $1.7 million of Mercer family money went into the book, which was published by HarperCollins, which was owned by longtime Clinton antagonist Rupert Murdoch. In its tone, reporting, and writing quality, Clinton Cash would not have passed muster with many editors, but HarperCollins released it as if it were a worthy work. After complaints were lodged, the publisher acknowledged that the book contained errors that required “seven or eight passages” be corrected and retailer Amazon.com contacted its customers to tell them “significant revisions have been made” and they could access the new version of the electronic book for free. Though an embarrassment for HarperCollins, these troubles didn’t change the fact that a book bearing the imprimatur of a mainstream publisher could be cited by those who needed arguments to use against Hillary Clinton.
Clinton Cash argued that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had secretly encouraged powerful foreigners and others to make donations to the Clinton Foundation and to pay six-figure speaking fees to her husband. In exchange, Schweizer implied, she used her office, in one way or another, to benefit the donors. (Engaged in health, education, and economic development around the world, the foundation earned top ratings from charity analysts.)8
Much of Schweizer’s argument involved inference based on the timing of events that only seemed suspect to a researcher who failed to complete an investigation. For example, Schweizer made much of a U.S. funding paid to an Irish company that worked in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Bill Clinton was invited to speak in Ireland by the firm’s owner. Schweizer presumed he had been paid handsomely. He had, in fact, earned nothing personally, as the host made a donation to the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer made a different kind of error when it came to his claim that some sort of funny business had transpired when TD Bank began selling shares of a pipeline project after it paid Bill Clinton for speeches. In fact, the share sale announcement, which Schweizer used as a source, was a fake. No such divestment had occurred.9
The TD Bank and Irish speech tales were stricken from the electronic version of his book soon after it was published, but the most widely reported claim in the book remained. This bit focused on the sale of a Canadian-based company called Uranium One. The firm owned some uranium mines in Wyoming, which meant that federal approval was required when it was acquired in 2010 by a state-owned company in Russia. Schweizer’s supposed smoking gun was the fact that the Clinton Foundation had received more than $130 million in donations from a major Uranium One investor named Frank Giustra. The problem, for Schweizer, was that Giustra sold his interest in Uranium One three years before the Russian deal. Also, Schweizer’s Clinton Cash claim that Hillary Clinton either approved or could have stopped the sale was simply false. The State Department did have a vote on the committee that considered the sale, but eight other agencies had equal say. Finally, Clinton Cash asserted that control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium, a metal essential to energy production and the manufacture of nuclear weapons, was transferred to Russia in the sale. In fact, the Wyoming facilities had the potential to produce 20 percent of U.S. uranium, but experts said this shouldn’t be considered a measure of its actual share. Besides, 90 percent of the uranium used in the United States came from abroad.10
Despite the flaws in his argument, Schweizer received invaluable press attention for his book as its release approached. From those who were reliably anti-Hillary Clinton, he got breathless excitement.
Skeptics like George Stephanopoulos of ABC News (who had worked in the Clinton White House) were much less friendly. When Schweizer sat for a prepublication interview, Stephanopoulos outlined the problems in the Uranium One story and listened as Schweizer offered the circular argument that the issue “deserves further scrutiny” because of the claims in his book. Stephanopoulos then asked, “But based on what? Based on what?”
Schweizer struggled to reply, saying, “Well, I think based on her…”
As Schweizer’s voice faltered, Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you have any evidence that she actually intervened in this issue?”
“No, we don’t have direct evidence,” confessed Schweizer. “But it warrants further investigation because, again, George, this is part of the broader pattern. You either have to come to the conclusion that these are all coincidences or something else is afoot.”11
The “pattern” Schweizer referenced was to be found in his book, but so many of his examples would be discredited that the notion that something nefarious could be concluded fell apart. However, even a casual survey of Schweizer’s background would uncover an actual pattern of flawed reporting and misrepresentations in his previous work:
• In 1993, claims in Schweizer’s debut book, Friendly Spies, were debunked by reporters for The Times of London, who found “checkable facts do not check out” and “individuals credited for supplying information do not exist or cannot be tracked down.” Years later, the book did not appear on Schweizer’s website, where other books were listed.12
• In 2005, comedian Al Franken caught Schweizer’s erroneous claim that he had neglected minorities by hiring just 1 black worker out of 112 people he had employed over the years. Schweizer was wrong when it came to Franken’s hiring authority (he never had the chance to employ so many folks) and wrong about the number of minority candidates he hired when he could make the choice.13
• In 2007, USA Today editors corrected a Schweizer claim that, despite his concern for the environment, Al Gore was collecting royalties on a zinc mine. The mine had been closed for years.14
• In 2011, Schweizer retracted a claim that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island used “insider information” he learned as a public official to profit in the stock market.15
• In 2011, Schweizer also made false claims of insider trading against Representative Jim McDermott. The claim didn’t match either the facts of the stock trading or the timing of government action.16
• In 2013, Schweizer falsely claimed that as president, Barack Obama had only met once with the Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As Time debunked this claim, it documented numerous meetings and explained that in using White House public logs and presidential calendars as his sources, Schweizer overlooked the fact that visits with cabinet secretaries are often not included in these reports.17
By the time Clinton Cash was published in 2015, Schweizer had been caught in so many distortions of fact that no reputable newspaper would have employed him as a cub reporter. His employment history, his benefactors, and
the fact that the victims of his acts were all Democrats left little doubt about his agenda. However, just as the schemers behind the Arkansas Project had enticed mainstream reporters to take up the nonissue of Whitewater, with the aid of Bannon’s Breitbart, Fox News, and his Murdoch-owned publisher HarperCollins, Schweizer seeded the press with tantalizing hints of what Clinton Cash revealed.
Long before its publication, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News committed to reporting on the book in exchange for early access to its contents.18
Some mainstream outlets presented the claims in Clinton Cash with many caveats and dashes of skepticism. The editorial board of The New York Times, for example, followed the paper’s report on the Uranium One tale with a piece that noted its complexity and that “there is no indication that Mrs. Clinton played a role in the uranium deal’s eventual approval by a cabinet-level committee.” The same editorial observed that Hillary Clinton had resigned from the Clinton Foundation board to prevent conflicts of interest, and the foundation had begun to reveal more data about its operations than required by law. Nevertheless, the editorial board wrote, “the foundation’s role in the lives of the Clintons is inevitably becoming a subject of political concern.”19
Separate from the editorial, The Times’s Schweizer-inspired news report on Uranium One, which bore the headline CASH FLOWED TO CLINTON FOUNDATION AMID RUSSIAN URANIUM DEAL, explained, “Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown.” However, the overall thrust of the article made it clear that something suspicious and perhaps dangerous had occurred. The piece noted that Uranium One lands held 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserve but not that the law barred the sale of American uranium abroad. Under the subheading “The Power to Say No,” the article explained that a Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which included a representative of the Department of State, could have stopped the Uranium One sale. Actually, the committee could only make a recommendation to the president, who had the power to say no. Although the committee’s work was generally kept confidential, the department’s man on the panel said he had never been contacted by Hillary Clinton to discuss any matter under consideration. Finally, the writers described donations to the Clinton Foundation as a matter of Hillary Clinton’s husband “collecting millions in donations from people associated with Uranium One.” It was, of course, the charity that “collected” the donation, and as oversight groups had documented, more than 86 percent of the money the Clinton Foundation raised was spent on programs, with less than 11 percent going to administration.20
When the nonpartisan PolitiFact website looked into Uranium One, it concluded that the secretary of state was not authorized to stop the deal and that “there is no evidence that donations to the Clinton Foundation from people with ties to Uranium One or Bill Clinton’s speaking fee influenced Hillary Clinton’s official actions.”
PolitiFact was one of many mainstream news operations that were both derided and courted by the Right. When its findings were supportive, archconservatives deemed PolitiFact authoritative. When they were not, they said that the fact-checkers were unfair.
Unfortunately for Clinton, the online fact-checkers worked in a slow and piecemeal fashion, and even when they reached conclusions, they couldn’t match the effect of the coverage the issue, and Clinton Cash, received in the early days of the 2016 campaign.
The key was the tactic Schweizer’s Breitbart colleague Wynton Hall termed anchor left, pivot right. This meant enticing one big mainstream media outlet like The Times to legitimize a narrative and then using that imprimatur to expand its effectiveness. (Former Arkansas Project conspirator David Brock offered a variation on this idea, suggesting that Schweizer needed a “host body” to nourish his claims long enough for them to gain strength.)21
As ideal host bodies, The Times and The Post energized the arguments in Clinton Cash and disseminated them to other outlets, where they were reprinted. Their distillations of Schweizer became fodder for broadcasters, including the New York public radio station WNYC, which devoted more than half an hour to a conversation with one of the authors of its first big news report about Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation. From this point forward, those who would defend Schweizer and his book could point to the paper of record and note that it had seemingly certified that a genuine controversy had been revealed. Eventually, the weaknesses in the book, and the press accounts about the Uranium One story, would be revealed by many journalists, including Shepard Smith of Fox News, who would spark outrage among viewers by declaring that Hillary Clinton had not approved the sale of the mines and that the owner’s donations preceded the deal by three years.22
Shepard Smith wouldn’t reach his conclusion about the Clinton Foundation until a year after the 2016 election. The lag between fiction and fact was something that Steve Bannon and his chosen candidate, Republican front-runner Donald Trump, had always planned to exploit. Both men were first-rate propagandists with deep experience manipulating both the press and public perception. Trump had first peddled his fake biography—young real estate mogul—to The New York Times in 1976. The result was a lengthy profile that announced that a trust fund baby who had never begun, let alone finished, a project was a visionary with movie star looks who was worth $200 million. The most prestigious media source in the country even let his father declare, as if a proud papa’s evaluation meant anything, that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
talk about a conspiracy theory!