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“By 2003, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress was preparing a daily news summary promoting the organization’s left-leaning agenda. Every morning, officials from the center would apprise Sakol of their daily message. With the help of outside advisers and Daschle’s aides, she would then prepare the rapid-response message of the day for Senate Democrats. Sakol found it odd— “almost backwards”—that outsiders, many of whom were loyal Clintonites, were quietly framing the messages on issues for all the Democrats in the Senate. Hillary had no such reservations, for obvious reasons.

Concurrently, and on her own time, Sakol was involved in discussions about the formation of another nonprofit, left-leaning group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which focused on government corruption. It was Hillary’s “proactive” efforts in this area and her desire to “beat the GOP at their own game” that prompted CREW’s founder, Melanie Sloan, a former prosecutor, to invite Sakol to the initial brainstorming sessions in 2003 where CREW was born. CREW was organized as a tax-exempt nonpartisan group, and on occasion, it has taken on Democratic targets. But since the Congress and the executive branch were in Republican hands at the time of its founding, its investigations were bound to focus on Republicans.

Sakol alerted Hillary and her staff about the newly forming group and its need for “Democratic progressive money.” The hope was that CREW would prove to be a perfect counterbalance to Judicial Watch, the corruption watchdog that had tormented the Clintons with lawsuits and press conferences throughout the 1990s. Hillary’s pollster and strategist Mark Penn became a director and vice president of CREW. “CREW could do things the senators couldn’t do,” Sakol said. And once CREW’s charges “were out in the press,” Sakol noted, other people could cite the findings of the group, which was usually portrayed as nonpartisan in news accounts. CREW played a significant role in unearthing several congressional scandals, including helping a retiring Democratic congressman from Texas to file a complaint against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.”

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/her-way-on-hillary-crew-and-media-matters

Muckety is your friend. Podesta showed up........