In Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, husband Bill was once thought to be her ace in the hole. Now he’s starting to seem more like a shovel used to dig her into a deeper hole. And this reality was on stark display Wednesday night when presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump raised the matter of the rape accusations that have long dogged Bill Clinton — and that have been used to paint Hillary as a sexual predator’s enabler.
Trump’s latest comments were made on Fox News’ program Hannity. During a discussion concerning a debunked Saturday New York Times story about “how Donald Trump behaved with women in private,” host Sean Hannity brought up media double standards; he wondered if the women from Bill’s past, such as Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, would also be interviewed. Then, referring to their accusations against the 42nd president, he said “In one case, it’s about exposure. In another case, it’s about groping and fondling and touching against a woman’s will.” This prompted Trump to add “And rape.” Hannity then repeated, “And rape.”
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This is not the first time Trump has cited the Clintons’ sordid past. After Hillary accused the billionaire real-estate mogul in December of having a “penchant for sexism,” his campaign responded by stating “that the Democratic front-runner bullied women to hide her husband’s ‘sexist secrets,’” reported the Hill at the time. And in January, Trump said that Hillary was “not a victim” but “an enabler” of her husband.
And whether or not Bill is, as Trump has put it, “the worst abuser of women in the history of politics,” there certainly has been much to enable. As Fox News reports:
Allegations of womanizing, extramarital affairs and abuse have trickled out over the course of Bill Clinton’s political life, including what his campaign referred to as “bimbo eruptions” when he first ran for president in 1992.
More allegations of misbehavior emerged after investigators in 1997 started looking into Clinton’s sexual encounters with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was impeached over the Lewinsky affair.
In 1998, he agreed to an $850,000 settlement with [Paula] Jones, an Arkansas state worker, who had accused Clinton of exposing himself and making indecent propositions when Clinton was the state’s governor. The settlement included no apology or admission of guilt.
[Juanita] Broaddrick, a nurse, in 1999 claimed she was raped by then-state Attorney General Clinton at a Little Rock hotel in 1978. Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer, claimed Clinton fondled her when she met privately with him at the White House in 1993 to seek a job.
More recently, there was Bill’s relationship with known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a story that reporters say will “blow up” in the coming weeks. As to this bombshell, Inquisitr.com reported Wednesday:
Registered sex offender and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 is so notorious that it earned the nickname the “Lolita Express.” And flight logs now reveal that former President Bill Clinton took 26 trips on his jet — double the amount previously reported.
The infamous jet reportedly came with a bed on which his passengers could engage in group sex with young women. The billionaire allegedly employed a team of traffickers to find underage girls, some as young as 12, for him and his high-profile friends, Fox News reported.
He even designated a 72-acre island called Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands “Orgy Island,” where Jeffrey and his pals had sex with trafficked girls.
… Further, trips taken between 2001 and 2003, when his wife and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was a U.S. Senator, indicate Bill enjoyed “extended junkets” worldwide with the pedophile, RT [Russia Today] added.
Bill’s sexual trespasses have been an issue for Hillary not just because he has been such a visible part of her life and campaign, but because she has worked hard to make his victims invisible. She hypocritically says today, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported,” as she put it in a November 2015 tweet. But in the 1990s, “when she was doing her best to run interference for Bill, Hillary most certainly did not believe that sexual assault survivors should be ‘heard and believed.’ Oh, no. The policy back then was that women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault were to be immediately slimed and shamed,” opined the Federalist in 2015.
The Federalist then pointed out that Hillary once referred to Monica Lewinsky, “Bill Clinton’s intern paramour … as a ‘narcissistic loony toon.’” Next we have the Daily Mail, which reported on remarks made by Kathleen Willey in 2015:
“[Hillary] enabled his [Bill’s] behavior. It’s as simple as that. She looks the other way,” Willey told radio host Aaron Klein on Sunday.
“She might throw a tantrum, but she enabled it to happen again and again and again and again. And then she chooses to go after the women that he hooks up with, to ruin them again and again and again and again. And that’s how it works.”
As for Broaddrick, she related in a 2000 open letter a 1978 encounter she had with Hillary shortly after the alleged rape by Bill:
As soon as you [Hillary] entered the room, you came directly to me and grabbed my hand. Do you remember how you thanked me, saying “we want to thank you for everything that you do for Bill” [sic]. At that point, I was pretty shaken and started to walk off. Remember how you kept a tight grip on my hand and drew closer to me? You repeated your statement, but this time with a coldness and look that I have seen many times on television in the last eight years. You said, “Everything you do for Bill.”
Broaddrick strongly believes Hillary was warning her to keep quiet about the alleged rape.
And then there’s the following from left-wing site Slate in 2008: “According to Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge, as her husband prepared to run for president, she [Hillary] pushed to get sworn statements from women he’d been rumored to have been involved with, statements in which they were supposed to say they’d had no relationship with him. She even interviewed one of these women herself, at her law firm. She also led efforts to undermine [ex-Clinton mistress] Gennifer Flowers, whom she referred to as ‘trailer trash.’”
None of this is surprising, however, as Hillary’s attitude toward trash has varied depending on whether she was playing garbage man or junk man. Just consider her time working as a defense attorney in 1975 for 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor, accused of brutally raping a 12-year-old girl. While Hillary believed he was guilty, she enabled Taylor to avoid a lengthy prison sentence — impugning the child’s character in the process. Of course, Taylor had the legal right to a defense, so in that respect Hillary was just doing her job. But she had no legal obligation to strike “a casual and complacent attitude,” to quote journalist Alana Goodman, toward the child rapist when discussing the matter a decade later. Yet she did.
But Hillary is a woman of the moment. As she says in this viral video — which illustrates her history of lying and flip-flopping — “Like most people that I know, I have a range of views.” This includes a view for every situation, political imperative, and audience. As far as Bill’s “bimbo eruptions” go, perhaps she’ll take a leaf from his book and simply explain that it all depends on what your definition of rape is.
Photo of Hillary and Bill Clinton: AP Images
(The New American never endorses candidates. Our purpose is to inform the electorate and enable them to draw their own conclusions.)
