Hillary
Clinton Laughs While Discussing Defense of Child
Rapist
Video
Who is the real Hillary Clinton? The former First
Lady and Secretary of State has touted her history
as a champion of women’s rights, but unearthed tapes
(below) tell another story.
June 09, 2016 - Originally Published
Jun, 2014
Full Audio
Tape
Hillary Clinton Laughs While Discussing Defense of
Child Rapist
The facts
are these. In 1975, before she married Bill Clinton,
Hillary Rodham defended a child rapist in Arkansas
court. She was not a public defender. No one ordered
her to take the case. An ambitious young lawyer, she
was asked by a friend if she would represent the
accused, and she agreed. And her defense was
successful. Attacking the credibility of the
12-year-old victim on the one hand, and questioning
the chain of evidence on another, Clinton got a
plea-bargain for her client. He served ten months in
prison, and died in 1992. The victim, now 52, has
had her life irrevocably altered—for the worse.
Sometime in
the mid-1980s, for an Esquire profile of
rising political stars, Hillary Clinton and her
husband agreed to a series of interviews with the
Arkansas journalist Roy Reed. Reed and Hillary
Clinton discussed at some length her defense of the
child rapist, and in the course of that discussion
she bragged and laughed about the case, implied she
had known her client was guilty, and said her “faith
in polygraphs” was forever destroyed when she saw
that her client had taken one and passed. Reed’s
article was never published. His tapes of the
interviews were later donated to the University of
Arkansas. Where they remained, gathering dust.
Contrary to
what you may have heard over the past week,
Clinton’s successful defense of the rapist Thomas
Alfred Taylor is not “old news.” On the contrary:
For a CV that has been scrutinized so closely,
references to the rape case in the public record
have been rather thin. One of those references came
from Clinton herself. In 2003, when she was a
senator from New York, and published her first
memoir, Living History, Clinton included a
brief mention of the case, mainly as a way to take
credit for Arkansas’ first rape crisis hotline. And
in 2008, Glenn Thrush—then at Newsday—wrote a
lengthy article on the subject.
Don’t
remember it? There’s a reason. “My then-editor
appended a meaningless intro to the story, delayed
and buried it because, in his words, ‘It might have
an impact,’” Thrush said
in a June 15 tweet. Well, the editor got his
way. It didn’t have an impact.
The
occasion for Thrush’s tweet was “The
Hillary Tapes” by the Washington Free Beacon’s
Alana Goodman, who obtained
the Reed interview and made it public for the
first time. Goodman is careful to quote a source
saying that, once an attorney takes on a client, he
is required to provide that client with the
strongest possible defense. Yet the same source also
noted that Hillary Clinton’s subsequent narrative of
the case—specifically, her implication to Reed that
her client had been guilty all along—raised serious
questions regarding attorney-client privilege. And
Goodman also notes the casual and complacent manner
in which Clinton treats such a morally fraught
episode, as well as the “parallels between the
tactics Clinton employed to defend Taylor and the
tactics she, her husband, and their allies have used
to defend themselves against accusations of
wrongdoing over the course of their three decades in
public life.” Pretty newsworthy, it seems to me.
And yet,
looking over the treatment of Goodman’s scoop over
the past week, I can’t help thinking that the
reaction to “The
Hillary Tapes” is just as newsworthy as the
tapes themselves. That reaction has been decidedly
mixed. Not long ago, in 2012, the Washington Post
ran an extensive investigation into the “troubling
incidents” of Mitt Romney’s prep-school days,
whereupon the media devoted hour after hour to the
all-important discussion of whether Willard M.
Romney had been something of a child bully. Here,
though, we have a newly unearthed recording of
Hillary Clinton laughing out loud over her defense
of a child rapist—and plenty of outlets have ignored
the story altogether. The difference? As the
Newsday editor said: It might have an impact.
No matter
your view of Hillary Clinton, no matter your
position on legal ethics, the recording of the Reed
interview is news. It tells us something we did not
already know. It tells us that, when her guard was
down, Clinton found the whole disturbing incident a
trifling and joking matter. And the fact that so
many supposedly sophisticated and au courant
journalists and writers have dismissed the story as
nothing more than an attorney “doing her job” is, I
think, equally disturbing.
Dana Bash to the contrary notwithstanding,
Hillary Clinton was not forced to take on Taylor as
a client. It was her choice—and not, for her, a hard
one. Certainly that complicates our understanding of
the former first lady as an unrelenting defender and
advocate of women and girls.
Let’s even
concede that Clinton was just doing her job.
What makes that job exempt from inquiry and
skepticism and criticism? Yes, Mumia, Bill Ayers,
and child rapists have the right to legal
representation. But that does not give the lawyers
who represent them the right—the entitlement—to
public office. If it is fair to attack a candidate
because he used to travel with the family dog on the
roof of his car, because he may have forcibly
subjected a fellow student to a haircut, then it is
entirely fair, it is more than fair, to attack a
candidate for defending the rapist of a 12-year-old
girl, and for laughing about it a decade later.
Lawyers I
can handle. Librarians? They’re trouble. I did not
expect, when I arrived at the office Wednesday, to
find a letter from a dean of the University of
Arkansas sitting on my desk, informing me that the
Free Beacon’s research privileges had been
suspended because we failed to fill out a permission
slip, that we were in violation of the University of
Arkansas’ “intellectual property rights,” and
demanding that we remove
the audio of the Hillary tapes from our website.
(Both the letter from Dean Allen and the response of
the Free Beacon’s lawyers can be read below.)
Now, we
obtained these materials without having to fill out
any forms and without being provided a copy of any
university “policy.” The university has yet to prove
that it owns the copyright to the Reed audio. Nor
has it explained how, exactly, that audio does not
fall under fair use. And remember, too, that the
institution protesting our story is a library—which
ostensibly exists for the sole purpose of spreading
knowledge and literacy and information and print and
audio and visual media. That is what libraries are
for, isn’t it?
Puzzling.
Less puzzling, though, when I discovered that the
author of the letter, Dean Carolyn Henderson Allen,
was a donor to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign,
and that the University of Arkansas Chancellor,
David Gearhart, is a former student of the Clintons,
and that his brother, Van Gearhart, worked at the
same legal aid clinic as Clinton at the time of the
Taylor case.
One would
expect the media to rally behind potential
violations of a publication’s First Amendment
rights—but,
with the exception of this Politico story, the
University of Arkansas’ attempt to suppress the
Hillary tapes has yet to be the subject of extensive
coverage.
I wonder
why.
“Defending
even a child rapist as vigorously as possible might
be a plus if she were running to lead the American
Bar Association,” wrote Melinda Henneberger,
in one of the few stories about the Hillary tapes to
appear in the mainstream media. “But wouldn’t
her apparent willingness to attack a sixth-grader
compromise a presidential run?”
Indeed, I
think it would. Which is why the reaction to Alana
Goodman’s scoop has been so muted and unusual. And
why Hillary’s people must be wondering: What’s next?
Read the University of Arkansas
letter and the Free Beacon response here:
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