by WorldTribune Staff, October 30, 2016
Hillary Clinton has characterized the FBI’s decision to re-open the investigation into her private email server as an “unprecedented” move so close to a presidential election day.
Not true.
In fact, Bill and Hillary Clinton gleefully cheered when a special prosecutor raised new charges against President George H.W. Bush in the Iran-Contra probe, which helped to derail Bush’s re-election bid in 1992, opening the White House to the Clinton cartel.
Bush was “surging back” in the contest against Bill Clinton when the new charges were made the weekend before the election, prompting the Clintons to claim they were running against a “culture of corruption.”
“Many Republicans claimed that the indictment made by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh against former Reagan-era Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger … cost Bush a second term,” Paul Bedard wrote for the Washington Examiner on Oct. 30. “The indictment, later thrown out, challenged Bush’s claim that he did not know about a controversial arms-for-hostages deal that dogged the Reagan-Bush administration.”
Bill Clinton said at the time that “Secretary Weinberger’s note clearly shows that President Bush has not been telling the truth when he says he was out of the loop. It demonstrates that President Bush knew and approved of President Reagan’s secret deal to swap arms for hostages.”
Fast forward to 2016, and Hillary Clinton is now ripping FBI Director James Comey for re-opening the investigation into her emails and the mishandling of classified information.
“What goes around comes around,” Powerline blogger Paul Mirengoff wrote.
In 1992, “the Clintons seized on the new indictment, howling about a ‘culture of corruption’ that supposedly pervaded the (Bush) administration. Bush’s poll numbers declined and Bill Clinton won the election.
“Shortly after the election, a federal judge threw out the new indictment because it violated the five-year statute of limitations and improperly broadened the original charges. President Bush then pardoned Weinberger.
“Keep this history in mind during the coming days when you hear Democratic hacks talking about how awful it is for law enforcement officials and/or prosecutors to ‘interfere’ in the presidential election process.”