Mark Paoletta, former White House Assistant Counsel for President George H.W. Bush, joined SiriusXM host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily Monday morning, saying a new movie on Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings was made to boost Hillary Clinton’s general election chances.
Paoletta, who worked on the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, discussed the inaccuracies in HBO’s new dramatization of the Thomas-Hill hearings, “Confirmation.”
Paoletta thought it was no coincidence that HBO decided to release a heavily-biased account of the 25-year-old clash between Thomas and Anita Hill during the 2016 presidential election. He saw “Confirmation” as part of a media effort at “rebooting this bogus ‘War on Women’” to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“This movie is an attempt to rewrite the history of those hearings, back in 1991,” he said. “When the American people watched them in 1991, unfiltered by any liberal spin machine, they came to the conclusion after watching Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill that Thomas was telling the truth by a 2-to-1 margin, sometimes 3-to-1 in some polls. It wasn’t a gender issue — only 26 percent of women believed Anita Hill.”
However, Paoletta argued that “one hundred percent” of viewers of HBO’s movie would believe Anita Hill was telling the truth, if the film was their only frame of reference. “It’s just completely dishonest, in so many ways, on so many levels,” he said.
“It’s very sophisticated, the way they just carve out all of the problematic parts of her testimony,” he said. “They only use real testimony from the hearings, but they carve out everything that Anita Hill said that was implausible, that was contradicted by other witnesses. They leave out the part about how she interviewed with the FBI, told the FBI that two women would support her allegations, and when the FBI interviewed them, they disputed her.”
“The Left wanted to destroy Thomas because he’s a black conservative — an independent thinker, a threat to the liberal order,” Paoletta said of the agenda behind the Thomas-Hill hearings. “They threw the kitchen sink at him during the summer of that year, trying to take him down, and they couldn’t. He was headed for confirmation. At the last minute, this rumor that had actually been set in place, set in motion by Anita Hill, back when Thomas was first nominated, sort of finally found its footing up in the Senate. They tried to blow it up in the last minute, days before he was supposed to be confirmed — Anita Hill, a former employee of Clarence Thomas, accused him of sexual harassment.”
“The evidence shows that not a single other woman ever accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment,” he noted. “They like to come up with these other so-called witnesses that were going to do that. None of them did, or were going to. It’s just a flat-out lie, and that’s what happened in those hearings. That’s why they became so controversial.”
Paoletta was so disturbed by HBO’s editing of history that he set up a website, ConfirmationBiased.com, to set the record straight. His site “walks through her inconsistencies,” and “shows the clips from the hearings that the movie left out.”
“I’m just sick of the lies, and the 25-year effort to destroy Thomas,” he said. “I thought, ‘Let’s set up a website. Let’s start to push back on this false narrative that’s been out there for 25 years. When we went through those hearings, people believed Clarence Thomas. Let’s bring those facts back up, let’s do something to sort of push back on those false narratives that are trying to destroy a good man.”
Instead of relying on agenda-driven TV docu-dramas, Paoletta thought the public should go straight to the source documents, for a full and accurate picture of the Thomas-Hill hearings.
“The Judiciary Committee — because of this movie, and because this controversy still keeps percolating — I think they should release all the records and files from those hearings,” he recommended. “They’re sealed for fifty years, but I think given what the Left has been doing to the last 25 years, as evidenced by this movie most recently, to release all the files on what happened in those hearings.”
“Transparency is the best thing in this particular case,” Paoletta declared. He thought the American public would benefit from seeing “the machinations of the Senate Democrats, the committee staff, and how they leaked this information – how they worked with Anita Hill, how they worked with other interest groups. Get some sunshine on this.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
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