Hillary's plan to silence Internet journalists
Posted: July 6, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening sneak preview of New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.
If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on.
By Richard Poe
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
On Feb. 11, 1998, Hillary Clinton told reporters that the Internet needed an "editing" or "gatekeeping" function. The World Wide Web was out of control, she said. It needed to be reined in. Five years later, Hillary's dream is on the verge of being realized.
The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 empowers federal judges and Federal Election Commissioners to determine who is allowed to say what about political candidates in all electronic media. On Sept. 18, 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to extend its enforcement of McCain-Feingold to the Internet.
In the face of a massive outcry from bloggers, the FEC backed down from fully implementing Judge Kollar-Kotelly's order. However, the order stands. Sooner or later, it will be enforced.
Proposals are already on the table to require bloggers to register with the government and to report to the FEC any election-related blogging they undertake as "political contributions" subject to campaign finance law.
How did we get to this point?
The simple answer is that we failed to treat the Clinton threat as seriously as we once treated the Nixon threat. Nixon's abuses were aggressively investigated and punished. The Clintons' abuses were swept under the carpet.
Nixon's political machine evaporated following his resignation. The Clinton machine has only grown stronger with each passing year. Today, the Clintons effectively control the Democratic Party. The McCain-Feingold Act is largely their handiwork.
You won't hear about any of this from major media.
The Watergate myth
The recent emergence from anonymity of "Deep Throat" (aka former FBI Assistant Director W. Mark Felt) has brought forth an outpouring of nostalgia from major media. Their nostalgia is understandable. History has not been kind to the generation of journalists that brought us Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. A series of media scandals from Easongate to Rathergate has deflated its pretensions to objectivity and noble purpose. Of its former glory, only the Watergate Myth remains – the claim that major news media once saved our nation from dictatorship. Sadly for the Woodward and Bernstein generation, even the Watergate Myth has begun melting away under history's corrosive gaze.
The truth about Watergate is more nuanced than we were led to believe. We now know that Nixon's abuses, while real, were hardly unprecedented. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations abused the police powers of government on a grander scale than Nixon, most infamously in their surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King. Even worse, the same news organizations which thump their chests over Nixon's ouster now collude unashamedly in the promotion and whitewashing of Hillary Rodham Clinton – a would-be president whose abuses of power arguably exceed Richard Nixon's.
"[M]ost people are afraid of invoking the wrath of Hillary Clinton, and so they will talk about her only on condition of anonymity ..." author Edward Klein recently told the National Review. "Like Nixon, Hillary is paranoid and has an enemies list. Like Nixon, Hillary has used FBI files against her enemies. Like Nixon, Hillary believes the ends justify the means. Like Nixon, Hillary has a penchant for doing illegal things."
Klein's heresy has aroused savage denouncements from Big Media, not least because they view Klein as a turncoat. He is one of their own. Having served more than ten years as editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, from 1977 to 1987, Klein is a pillar of the Old Media establishment. But he has broken ranks with his colleagues. His book provides a refreshing break from the Hillarymania (Klein's word) which afflicts so many in the media world.
Yet even Klein's book reveals only a narrow sliver of the truth.
The whole truth about Hillary
The rise and fall of the Clinton co-presidency presents a parable of good vs. evil more dramatic, in some ways, than Nixon's ouster. Its heroes were real-life Davids facing a real-life Goliath – unlike Woodward and Bernstein, who represented a mighty media empire in the full flush of its power.
The heroes of the Clinton drama did not succeed in forcing their adversaries from office. But they saved America – at least temporarily – from a 16-year Clinton co-presidency. Hillary Clinton was registered with the FEC as a presidential candidate for the 2000 race. The outpouring of Clinton scandal coverage from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet forced her to back down from this plan.
Today, as Mrs. Clinton prepares to retake the White House in 2008, it is more vital than ever to clarify who she is and how she behaved the last time she occupied the West Wing.
It is also past time to give credit where it is due – to honor the New Media heroes who did what Woodward and Bernstein only pretended to do; who rose from the grass roots, with limited resources, and without Woodward and Bernstein's high-level connections; who defied an outlaw White House, endured government repression, and rescued our Republic from a fatal corruption.
These are the men and women of what I call the Web Underground – pioneers of Web news who began their work years before anyone heard of the blogosphere, dissident voices who got their message out through online subscription services such as Prodigy; newsgroups such as alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater; and later through websites such as WorldNetDaily.com, NewsMax.com, Townhall.com and FrontPageMagazine.com, as well as activist message boards such as FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne.com.
My book, "Hillary's Secret War," tells their story. No one else has told it before.
An "All the President's Men" for the Internet generation
After Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story, Big Media lionized them. Simon & Schuster signed them to tell their story in the critically-acclaimed 1974 best-seller "All the President's Men." Warner Studios released a star-studded film version of the book in 1976, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein, respectively.
The book and film inspired a generation of young idealists to enroll in journalism school, hoping that they too could become crusaders for justice, as they imagined Woodward and Bernstein to have been.
I like to think of "Hillary's Secret War" as an "All the President's Men" for the Internet generation. It is my personal answer to Woodward and Bernstein.
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A seemingly unbridgeable gap divides those who place their trust in New Media from those who rely on Old Media for their news. They may walk the same streets and inhabit the same neighborhoods, yet their beliefs about current events differ so sharply, they might as well live in parallel universes.
Those who rely on Old Media believe that Nixon posed a threat to our freedom, while the Clintons were guilty of nothing more than a bad marriage. The Web Underground and its audience know better. We know that the Clintons were caught red-handed in a raft of abuses as grave as those for which Nixon was driven from office. Yet, unlike Nixon, the Clintons were never held to account.
For instance, Nixon's articles of impeachment accused him of attempting (but failing) to persuade the Internal Revenue Service to audit hostile journalists and political foes. By contrast, the Clinton IRS freely audited scores of White House critics, including prominent journalists. When the political nature of the audits became impossible to deny, IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson – a friend of Hillary who had worked on the Clinton campaign – resigned, but never faced charges.
Nixon aide Charles Colson went to jail for leaking secret FBI background data to a reporter, in an effort to discredit Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. By contrast, Clinton operatives commandeered over 1,000 FBI background files and got off scot-free. According to sworn witness testimony, Clinton aides entered the data from these files into a computer database. This information presumably remains in Clinton hands to this day. No one knows – nor seems to care – how they have used that data through the years.
Thanks to a veritable mass-media blackout, most Americans have no idea that such allegations were ever raised against the Clintons.
In a May 22, 2004, broadcast, Rush Limbaugh offered these thoughts on the war between Old and New Media – a war between rival storytellers whose outcome will largely determine what future generations know and believe about our time. Limbaugh said:
We're not going to win this in my lifetime ... [T]he history of this is going to be written long after all of us are buried and in heaven, because the people alive now who are writing about it are the people who are losing. They are not getting it right ... But at some point, folks ... we on the right, in the New Media, Internet, talk radio, Fox News ... we're going to become the majority, and the seismic shift, whenever that happens, let's just say 50 years from now or 75 ... it is those people who are not even born yet, who are going to look back and they're going to research this, without any bias of having been involved in it, and they're going to write the history of what's going on now. And it will be the accurate history.
In "Hillary's Secret War," I tried to begin the long, slow process of restoring to our national memory what really happened during the Clinton years. Perhaps I began the process too soon. Mighty forces guard the vaults where those memories lie hidden. They will not yield without a fight.
Spiked by Big Media
The Brahmins of Big Media, needless to say, extended a cooler reception to "Hillary's Secret War" than they had to Woodward and Bernstein – and not, I suspect, solely because I happen to be a much smaller fish. Granted, I barely rise to the level of plankton in the media food chain, but the people whose stories appear in "Hillary's Secret War" are killer whales. Their tale should have been told years ago – if not by me, then by others more worthy. Yet no one bothered. The difficulties I encountered in publishing "Hillary's Secret War" may help explain why.
After compelling me to perform several rewrites – during which process I was told, among other things, that my book contained too much "Hillary-bashing" – my publisher suddenly announced that it would not publish my book at all. The publisher was Crown Forum, a division of Random House.
What a strange time that was. The events that followed bore an eerie similarity to many of the stories recounted in "Hillary's Secret War." Like the dissident journalists profiled in my book, I suddenly found myself shut out of Big Media. Like the characters I had been writing about, I was now forced to seek help from the Web Underground.
Thank God for them. Had it not been for the direct intervention of some of the founding fathers of Web media, I daresay "Hillary's Secret War" would have faded into the very oblivion that Big Media had intended for it.
Joseph Farah published my book through his WND Books division (it is now published by Nelson Current). David Horowitz gave me a full-length author interview in FrontPageMagazine.com. NewsMax founder Christopher Ruddy published a ringing endorsement of "Hillary's Secret War" in NewsMax Magazine and in the online and print editions of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
FreeRepublic founder Jim Robinson honored me by writing the Foreword to "Hillary's Secret War." He also took the unprecedented step of posting an official call to his membership to, "Freep this Book," asking all Freepers who were able to purchase a copy of "Hillary's Secret War" or request that their local libraries purchase it.
Hillary's secret police
As mentioned earlier, Hillary Clinton told reporters on Feb. 11, 1998, that the Internet needed an "editing" or "gatekeeping" function. She neglected to mention at the press conference that she was already working on the problem. Indeed, she had been waging a secret war to silence Internet dissidents for the last four years. She continues waging it today.
In the Clinton White House, Hillary played the role of enforcer. She commanded what came to be known as the Clinton "secret police," a covert operation comparable to Nixon's Plumbers, dedicated to suppressing evidence of Clinton crimes. "Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer," wrote the late Barbara Olson in her 1999 book "Hell to Pay."
Mrs. Olson was in a position to know. A former federal prosecutor, she served as chief investigative counsel for Congressman William F. Clinger Jr.'s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which probed Hillary's role in the Travelgate and Filegate scandals in 1995 and 1996.
During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals walked a dangerous path. At the very least, they would be pulled from the Clinton beat, their stories discredited and their careers tarnished. In some cases, they were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits.
Some of the White House "secret police" were private detectives, such as Terry Lenzner, Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano. Others were Clinton loyalists embedded in federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the National Transportation Safety Board and so on. Many of these people are still in place, and still doing the Clintons' dirty work. I call them the Shadow Team.
In their effort to suppress negative press coverage, the Clintons encountered little resistance from Big Media. Major news organizations were easily brought to heel, their parent companies being acutely vulnerable to federal regulatory action. Even Fox News and talk radio had to tread lightly on some issues, lest their FCC licenses receive unwelcome scrutiny.
The Internet, however, lay beyond Hillary's control.
Hillary's Shadow Team issued a secret report in 1995 titled "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce." It characterized the Internet as a dangerously "unregulated" medium, potentially devastating in its ability to bypass the controlled, corporate newspapers and networks. In Hillary's view, the Internet presented a grave threat to Clinton power. For that reason, her secret police persecuted Internet dissidents with special ferocity.
And so the Web Underground arose, taking up the mantle of crusading journalism which Big Media had forfeited, exposing wrongdoing that mainstream journalists dared not acknowledge.
Hillary's shadow government
The struggle continues today. The Clintons may be out of the White House, but Hillary's covert network remains powerfully alive.
In October 2004, David Horowitz and I published a three-part expose at FrontPageMagazine.com called, "The Shadow Party." It revealed how Hillary Clinton and George Soros had joined forces to create a network of radical billionaires, non-profit foundations, 527 committees, public employee unions and leftwing nongovernmental organization's.
This "Shadow Party" has evolved into a veritable government-in-exile, with enormous influence in every sector of corporate, cultural, political, academic, financial and public life. Its most successful project to date has been the suppression of free speech through the McCain-Feingold Act.
On Nov. 30, 1994 , three weeks after Republicans swept Congress in the mid-term elections, George Soros announced in a speech that he wished to "do something about ... the distortion of our electoral process by the excessive use of TV advertising."
Eight months later, Democrat Sen. Russ Feingold obligingly rose on the Senate floor to denounce soft-money abuses, thus setting in motion the juggernaut that would ultimately give us the McCain-Feingold Act of March 27, 2002.
Also in 1994, Republican Sen. John McCain set up the Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues, which is heavily funded by Soros' Open Society Institute. This non-profit think-tank would become a nerve center for the campaign finance reform lobby.
Perhaps most significantly, 1994 marked the beginning of a $140-million scheme which would eventually become known as the "Pewgate" scandal. That year, a group of non-profit foundations associated with the Soros network began bankrolling "experts" and front groups whose purpose was to bamboozle Congress into thinking that millions of Americans were clamoring for "campaign finance reform" – even though they were not.
Ten years later, in March 2004, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts named Sean P. Treglia spilled the beans on the conspiracy to an appreciative audience of leftwing reporters and academics at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager obtained a videotape of the speech and broke the Pewgate story on March 17, 2005.
Campaign finance reform "didn't have a constituency," Treglia admitted on the tape. So the Pewgate conspirators set out to create one. Says Treglia,
The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot – that everywhere they [politicians] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.
To this end, a network of foundations – which included, among others, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers' Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and George Soros' Open Society Institute – dispensed $140 million between 1994 and 2004. Millions went to self-styled "good government" groups such as the Center for Public Integrity, Democracy 21 and John McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues.
Pewgate's tentacles reached even to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many of the legal arguments upon which the court based its Dec. 10, 2003, decision to uphold McCain-Feingold derived from data now deemed to have been fraudulent – data cooked up by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a Soros-funded operation which received millions in Pewgate lucre.
"[A]lmost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding [McCain-Feingold] are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Treglia crows in the videotape. Treglia currently sits on the board of the Pew-funded Institute for Policy, Democracy & the Internet, which seeks to tighten regulation of political speech on the Web.
Why Hillary matters
With the passage of McCain-Feingold, Soros' Shadow Party scored its first great victory. Now that same network busies itself grooming Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
For a first-term junior senator, Hillary has acquired extraordinary power on Capitol Hill. She can make or break virtually any of her fellow Democrats. As chairwoman of the Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee, she can block or approve her colleagues' committee assignments. More important, her political machine exercises de facto control over the party's purse strings. The Shadow Party raised some $300 million for Democrats during the 2004 election.
Regarding the Democratic Party, MoveOn PAC director and Soros operative Eli Pariser boasted after the last election, "Now it's our party. We bought it, we own it."
"Hillary Rodham Clinton has ... utterly [taken] over the Senate Democrats and the party itself – inside and out – and she has done it in a mere two years," marvels R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. in his 2004 book "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to Power."
Hillary's secret police will no doubt play a role in smoothing the way for her planned return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Likewise, the Internet will figure prominently in the effort to stop her.