Listen: One Segment
This program details some of the questionable (and probably illegal) activities of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr. In addition to touching on Starr’s relatively well-publicized connections to right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife, the program presents information concerning a shady real estate deal that Starr may have arranged in conjunction with Saudi weapons dealer and Iran-Contra participant Adnan Khashoggi. The broadcast also discusses Starr’s apparent conflict of interest in an aspect of the S & L scandal., intimidation of potential witnesses (including a veiled death threat allegedly made to one figure in the investigation), Starr’s legal work on behalf of the Tobacco Lobby (another conflict of interest) and the white-supremacist heritage of figures involved in the smearing of Clinton.
Scaife died:
Yes, Richard Mellon Scaife is dead, but his spirit lives on...
Check it out: Fox News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have all signed a contract for exclusive agreements with the author of an upcoming book about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It wasn’t surprising that Fox signed up for the deal since the author, Peter Schweizer, runs a right-wing knock off of the Government Accountability Office (called the “Government Accountabiltiy Institute”) and previously served as an adviser to Sarah Palin. For the New York Times and Washington Post, the decision raised a few eyebrows
“Still others defended the agreement, noting that it was no different from using a campaign’s opposition research to inform one’s reporting — so long as that research is fact-checked and vetted. A spokesperson for the Times did not provide comment by press time.” LOL.
So with the New York Times and Washington Post also jumping on board with this book, the question is raised of whether or not we’re about to see a full blown zombie ideas apocalypse of Clinton-era conspiracy theories already or if this is just a teaser for the 2016 zombie invasion?
After all, one of the biggest threats to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is probably some sort of dormant 1990’s PTSD manifesting itself as a vague ‘Clinton Fatigue’. But ‘Clinton Fatigue’ is just not very likely to be a major factor unless the GOP scandal machine can create a new scandal that has some legs (which is what this new book seems to be attempting). But if they can’t dig up a new scandal with teeth, the obvious back up plan is to just throwing everything at the fan and hope the splatter ends up making Hillary unelectable and that’s obviously going to include a big rehashing of the scandals, real and otherwise, from the 90’s. Will The New York Times and Washington Post be on board for a full fledged 90’s rehash? Based on signing up for exclusive deals with a former Palin adviser it seems like the answer is a ‘maybe’.
But just throwing old s@#t at the Hillary-fan doesn’t come without enormous risks that don’t exist for most other politicians. Why? Because the other side of a story from the 90’s, the Clintons’ side, is that a vast right-wing conspiracy spent eight years doing everything they could to destroy the Clintons and it didn’t work. And it’s not some casual risk for the GOP that the ‘right-wing conspiracy’ historical interpretation wins the day because we’ve just spent the eight years watching the GOP go even crazier than they were were in the 90’s while operating in ‘Taliban’ mode.
That’s all why, in a strange way, Hillary Clinton is a kind of nightmare candidate for the contemporary GOP specifically because getting attacked by a vast right-wing conspiracy is sort of her ‘brand’ at this point and the GOP has spent the last 6 1/2 years blatantly behaving like a vast right-wing conspiracy against Barack Obama. Granted, it was pretty blatant in the 90’s too, but this is now fresh in people’s minds. And don’t forget: the GOP’s crazy far right “firebrand“s from from the 90’s are now the moderates of a party that publicly acts like a vast right-wing conspiracy. The party has just gotten so much crazier over the past two decades and anyone like Hillary that prompts a ‘then and now’ comparison of the 90’s GOP with today’s GOP just invites a very unfavorable comparison because the GOP of the 90’s was totally insane by objective standards and yet so much more sane then than it is today.
So, the way the political chess board is set at this point, just as the Clinton-era 90’s scandals are bound to be targets of media focus, the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ itself, which was always in part a media-based phenomena, is also guaranteed to be part of the discussion. It’s really just a question of whether or not Fox News and the traditional right-wing mediasphere compromise the bulk of the vast right-wing conspiracy this time around or whether or not the mainstream media institutions like The New York Times and Washington Post decide to jump on board too. This recent decision by the New York Times and Washington Post may not bode well but there’s a lot of time between now and the 2016 elections with many, many more zombie ideas that they’ll get to choose to promote or ignore. A Clinton-conspiracy zombie apocalypse takes a while to play out. Whether it involves or few missteps or one long shamble remains to be seen.
Guess where Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash”, gave one of the featured speeches last summer. Hint: the folks putting on the event are just a pair of citizens that plan to spend almost a billion dollars from their personal cash piles on uniting the country in 2016. It’s a pretty big hint:
As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Brace yourselves. An abundance of horrible historical rhyming is on the way...
Is it already time to start speculating about who Billary will bump off next? Yes. It is time:
LOL! Yeah, the vast right-wing conspiracy has spent the last two and an half decades super concerned about getting ‘Vince Fostered’. Under that premise, one wonders what kind of acrobatics the right-wing ‘journalists’ must be going through to avoid an inevitable Obama ‘hit’. Presumably they just lived every day like it’s their last which might help explain why the US right-wing has gone even more insane and more nihilistic than they were during the post-Clinton era: they all assumed someone’s hitmen were just around the corner because and it drove them all mad! That’s Clinton Derangement Syndrome for you. You try so hard to get the public to believe it all that you and up believing it too and now you’re all paranoid. There are some types of self-deluding fire you really don’t want to play with.
Given the alarming levels of Hillary Derangement Syndrome already afflicting much of the US media establishment, you have to wonder if Steve Burke, the Comcast executive who oversees the NBCUniversal TV and entertainment unit (and who also happens to have been a major George W. Bush fundraiser), is in any way trying to ensure stuff like this happens, or if he even has to bother at this point:
As we can see,
the truththe truthiness can be deafening:That’s one more for the truthiness pile.
What do you get when you combined the GOP’s presumed “Taliban-like insurgency from day one” plan to undermine a future Hillary Clinton administration, should she become the next president, with a hefty dose of Clinton Derangement Syndrome? Well, if Representative Mo Brooks is any indication of what to expect, it’s probably something like this:
Keep in mind that this may not be solely due to a case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome impacting Representative Brooks’s judgement on such matters. It’s more of a general derangement syndrome.
What motivated Ken Starr to wage a “scorched-earth” campaign — a highly successful scorched-earth campaign that involved the demonization of the lead prosecutor on the case — in the defense of Jeffrey Epstein back in 2008, resulting in Epstein’s kid-glove deal with federal prosecutors? That’s the question raised by a new book by Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown that adds new details to Starr’s previously known involvement in Epstein’s defense. In particular, Brown reveals a previously known eight-page letter that was sent by Starr to Mark Filip, who had just been confirmed as deputy US attorney general, making him the second most powerful federal prosecutor in the country. Filip also happened to be a former colleague of Starr’s at Kirkland & Ellis. Starr’s letter to Ellis is described as using the same kind of “dramatic language” that was found in the Starr report investigation of Bill Clinton. And it’s in this letter that Starr charges the lead federal prosecutor in the case, Marie Villafaña, of distorting negotiations to benefit a friend of her boyfriend. Villafaña denied the allegations. And while Starr’s request to the court in this eight-page letter was ultimately denied, the secret sweetheart deal Epstein did eventually secure was reportedly started by this letter.
Beyond that, it doesn’t sound like Starr’s attacks against Villafaña were what caused her to ultimately agree to the lenient deal. Instead, an unnamed prosecutor linked to the 2008 case against Epstein alleges that someone in Washington was “calling the shots on the case” and telling her to back off. Villafaña even warned fellow prosecutors at the time that Epstein was probably still abusing underage girls at the time, and yet “it was clear that she had to find a way to strike a deal because a decision had already been made not to prosecute Epstein.” So while these explosive revelations raise all sorts of questions about what was motivating Ken Starr to wage this unprecedented scorched-earth campaign in defense of Epstein, those questions are eclipsed by the much bigger question of who in Washington was “calling the shots” that Starr seemed to be following and why:
“Though Starr’s role in securing the Epstein deal was public knowledge, Brown’s book reveals the lengths that the lawyer was prepared to go to in order to protect from federal justice an accused sexual predator and pedophile. The extent of his involvement is all the more striking given the equally passionate lengths that Starr went to in 1998 to pursue Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, given the much less serious sexual activity that sparked that investigation.”
Like of bottomless pit of scandal and scum, the Epstein case just keeps spewing up new revelations. It just keeps getting worse. We already knew about Ken Starr’s involvement in Epstein’s defense. And we, eventually. knew Epstein got a sweetheart deal. But we didn’t know how that all happened. And while we still don’t know how exactly it happened, we got some significant clues: we’re learning that Ken Starr was brought onto the defense team because of his connections to Washington and the Bush administration and someone in DC was “calling the shots on the case”. And whoever was calling those shots was effectively ordering the lead prosecutor on the case, Marie Villafaña, to cut the sweetheart deal. This was all happening at the same time Starr was waging his “scorch-earth” campaign against Villafaña. And while the requests in Starr’s eight-page letter where he made these allegations were denied, that letter is also described as being the start of the process that led to the secret agreement. Starr was effectively acting as the informal attack dog for this still unnamed shot-caller in DC. At least that’s the picture that emerges in Brown’s book. Starr’s threats, combined with this unnamed shot-caller, made the sweetheart deal the only option. And this was despite the fact that Villafaña thought Epstein was still abusing underage girls:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Starr’s gross hypocrisy here when juxtaposed with his zealous pursuit of Bill Clinton over sexual activity doesn’t just raise questions about Starr’s character. It also raises some interesting questions about whether or not Starr had any ties or awareness of Epstein’s actual underage sex trafficking activities while he was pursuing Bill Clinton in the 90s. Because we still don’t really know about the nature of Epstein’s operation. Was this a government-connected intelligence operation? A private intelligence operation? Some sort of private elite blackmail operation? We don’t know. What we do know is that someone in DC went to awfully great lengths to protect Epstein in 2008 and Starr appears to be part of that operation. And we also know that Clinton and Epstein knew each other, like many in DC knew Epstein at the time. So we have to ask: was Ken Starr quietly aware of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring that was operating at the same time he was zealously pursuing Bill Clinton for any sex-related scandal he could in the 90s? Projection is like a pathological GOP imperative, in part because it really is effective from a psychological warfare perspective, and it’s not hard to imagine that the existence of a GOP-connected elite sex-trafficking ring would have created an extremely strong desire to find Democratic sex scandals of any type. It’s almost what we would have to expect given the GOP’s moral track-record. And don’t forget that the 1990s was like the golden age of Epstein’s elite sex trafficking operation. We’re told that Starr didn’t formally associate with Epstein until 2007 when he joined Epstein’s defense team. But all sorts of people had to know about this in the 90s when it was happening who won’t admit it today. Was Starr one of those people? Just asking questions. Because at the end of the day, the question of motive looms large in the story. Why did Ken Starr pull out all the stops to save Jeffrey Epstein? Was it purely done at the behest of the mystery “shot-caller” in DC? Or did he have another motive for waging that scorched-earth campaign? We don’t know but it’s hard to think of an answer that isn’t awful. Which means this is a question of what kind of awful we’re looking at here.
@Pterrafractyl–
When pondering (NOT “pandering”) the parameters of the Jeffrey Epstein case, remember that Epstein got his job teaching at The Dalton School courtesy of ex-OSS agent Donald Barr, the father of Trump Attorney General William Barr.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-1150-the-space-plane-and-covid-19-the-paperclip-legacy-part‑5/
Keep up the great work!
Dave