RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous.

The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so.

Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election.

He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings around Stormy Daniels.

If this is the standard by which we judge elections, we need to go back and conclude that Bill Clinton wasn’t elected legitimately in 1992, either. The Arkansas governor’s political operation was, in part, an elaborate conspiracy to keep women who alleged to have had affairs with Clinton quiet. Hillary Clinton was an active participant in the schemes. And so, by Bragg’s logic, this Democratic power couple — dominant in the party for a decade or more and still honored today — comprises election thieves.

Clinton had the same underlying problem as Trump — namely, women with embarrassing stories to tell — but the opposite tabloid dynamic; the tabloids were trying to get Clinton, whereas the National Enquirer was trying to protect Trump.

The Clinton campaign fought to silence or discredit women as necessary. Clinton’s operatives had the foresight — there’s nothing like planning ahead — to secure affidavits of denial from women rumored to have had affairs with Clinton. The truth didn’t matter here, of course. They just wanted the exculpatory statements, and the women were usually happy to sign them. Who wants the embarrassment of such matters being aired in public?

So, when the Star tabloid reported that five Arkansas women, including one named Gennifer Flowers, had had affairs with Clinton, the campaign was ready. According to George Stephanopoulos, the campaign’s strategy initially was to attack the tabloid messenger and use previously signed affidavits to undermine the story.

Then, Flowers shifted from denying the affair to confirming it in detail. Her story had to be destroyed, and her background and appearance would provide one hook for the campaign’s effort. Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, “Gennifer’s red suit and dark-rooted hair sent exactly the right message.”

Again, everyone knew what they were doing, which was keeping the truth from the voters in the service of what they considered a higher good. “I couldn’t bear the thought that an old dalliance dredged up by a tabloid would curtail the professional experience of my life, or the promise I saw in Clinton,” Stephanopoulos wrote.

Asked about the claim by Flowers that they had had a twelve-year affair, Clinton said in his famous 60 Minutes interview in 1992, “That allegation is false,” which, of course, probably meant that the dalliance was shorter — or perhaps longer — in duration. (Clinton later admitted to one assignation in 1977.)

Regardless, clearly the Clinton campaign was engaged in what is now called “election interference.”

There was much more. State troopers were involved in procuring women for Clinton and had been pressured prior to the 1992 campaign not to talk. A Clinton loyalist named Buddy Young told one of the troopers during the campaign, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

Central to the operation to suppress damaging allegations was the private detective Jack Palladino. He would contact women and either get them to sign affidavits denying everything or find a way to attack their credibility.

He convinced the National Enquirer to take a pass on a story about a former Miss Arkansas by providing the publication with affidavits questioning her reliability.

None of this was free. The campaign considered the payments to Palladino election expenses, and made them from its own funds, but hid them. As Michael Isikoff relates in his book Uncovering Clinton, the campaign sent the initial $28,000 to a Denver law firm, which passed along the payment to Palladino’s agency. This assured that only the Denver law firm showed up in disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. How was the payment categorized? As legal fees (reminder: Trump is getting prosecuted because he booked his payments to Michael Cohen, his equivalent of Palladino, as legal fees rather than reimbursement of a loan).

As Isikoff writes, “Every trivial expenditure for postage and catering, was routinely reported on Clinton’s FEC report. But something truly worth knowing — the campaign’s retention of a high-powered private detective — had been concealed.”

Isikoff’s report at the time forced the campaign to acknowledge the payments to Palladino during the campaign. After it was all over, Isikoff figured out by looking through the FEC filings that the campaign had spent more than $100,000 on Palladino, “with a large chunk of the payments delayed until after the election, one final layer of subterfuge.”

Needless to say, pointing to Bill Clinton’s conduct as a precedent isn’t much of a defense.

The point is that campaigns always try to keep unwelcome information from voters (the Biden campaign and the Hunter laptop is a more recent example). And, certainly, amid all the threats, job offers, payments, and mixing of private and official matters entailed by Clinton’s extensive damage-control operation in 1992, a politically motivated local prosecutor could have found some sort of misdemeanor to use against him.

The list of Bill Clinton’s ethical lapses is long. Now, if we take Alvin Bragg seriously, stealing the 1992 election has to be added to the list.