The Clinton Campaign Elbows for an Advantage

Ahead of the first Presidential Debate approaches, the Clinton campaign is working the ref.

Clinton campaign head Robbie Mook tells reporters that NBC’s Lester Holt, the debate moderator, must fact check Donald Trump, as Mrs. Clinton might not have the stamina to both present her own vision of an America moving forward into the future by being stronger together AND respond to Trump’s challenges to her.

Ironically, it can be a little hard to fact check the Clintons.

They’ve been in politics for so long that, as conspiracy theorists often point out, an unusually large number of their past associates are no longer alive. And of course, many of the documents one might use to fact check them have been destroyed.

This election that would include Hillary’s emails and her phones. (And the people managing her emails are all now pleading the Fifth Amendment or asking for immunity from prosecution, so they are legally the equivalent of deleted documents). But it also includes archival government videos and transcripts, which we now know have had patches erased under President Obama, particularly videos and transcripts of briefings at Hillary’s State Department.

Even pre-internet the Clintons were destroying documents.

Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger (who passed away last December) was reprimanded for stuffing the original and only copies of documents related to 9/11 down his pants legs to remove them from the National Archives in 2003 and then, presumably, destroy them.

Reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “recklessness” with classified documents, Berger claimed he was just “sloppy.” Berger was fined $50,000, gave up his law license, and given two years probation. It’s probably good that Berger’s wife, Susan Berger, a Washington, D.C. real estate agent had helped the Clinton’s buy their $3 million D.C. home on Whitehaven Street in Embassy row (its backyard shares a property line with the Vice President’s mansion at Observatory Circle) in January of 2001 – before 9/11 and before her husband absconded with the 9/11 documents.

Mr. Berger was originally from Millerton, New York, in Duchess County, slightly farther from New York City than the Westchester town of Chappaqua where the Clinton’s own their two other multi-million dollar homes. One Clinton fact that can be checked is one of Hillary’s campaign promises when she ran for and was elected to Senate to represent New York state. She promised to bring 200,000 jobs to upstate New York but instead the region lost 26,500 jobs during her first Senate term.

Hillary’s failure to deliver jobs came up in her 2008 campaign for the White House. She pointed out she had induced one Indian technology company, Tata Consultancy, to open an office in Buffalo, New York. But when reporters investigated further, Tata had only hired 10 employees in Buffalo, and it could not say how many of them were U.S. citizens. Clinton has, however, held several Indian American community fundraisers, one of which produced $3 million for her 2008 presidential campaign.

This isn’t the first time Clinton has been on a now unpopular side of outsourcing jobs to Asia.

Mrs. Clinton, as a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, was appointed to the Board of Directors of WalMart, partly because the CEO’s wife was campaigning for more women on the Board, and no doubt partly because the Board thought it would be useful for that woman to be the wife of the governor of the state where Walmart is headquartered on (the) board.

Hillary served on the Board of Directors from 1986 to 1992, only leaving when Bill Clinton decided to run for President. While Hillary was on the Board of Directors, WalMart dropped its official Buy American policy, widely criticized by Walmart critics on the left as merely marketing strategy, and began importing cheaper goods from Asia.

A source, gagged by non-disclosure agreements, who says he was in the room when the votes were taken, says Hillary Clinton was the swing vote in abandoning WalMart’s Buy American policy. Hillary has been collecting donations from WalMart executives and its PAC in all her races since.

However, if you’d like to see the minutes of the Board meetings where the vote was taken you can’t. They are as good as Bergered. WalMart doesn’t allow journalists or the public to see its corporate minutes.

So we won’t be seeing them during this election. Or at least, not unless WikiLeaks gets hold of them.