‘Clinton Cash’: The Same Old GOP Smoke and Mirrors

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By now you’ve probably heard that a right-wing partisan hack named Peter Schweizer has written a book about the Clinton Foundation titled “Clinton Cash” in which he suggests that Bill and Hillary have been operating their foundation as a giant slush fund, and that Bill has been whoring himself out to moneyed interests who pay him “speaking fees” in exchange for favors delivered by Hillary when she was secretary of state.

You’ve probably also heard about Schweizer’s deep ties to the extreme right. He is a former Bush speechwriter, foreign-affairs adviser to Sarah Palin and blogger for Breitbart.com, the legacy website of the late serial liar and notorious racist, Andrew Breitbart. His work is riddled with mistakes and falsehoods. Fact-checkers and legit reporters have used words like these to describe his work in the past: “incorrect,” “inaccurate,” “bogus,” “a fatal shortcoming in Journalism 101,” “the facts didn’t stand up,” “unfair and inaccurate,” “specious argument,” “there was nothing there,” “suspicious,” “the facts don’t fit,” facts “do not check out,” sources “do not exist or cannot be tracked down,” “confusion and contradiction,” “discrepancies,” “admitted a mistake,” “neither journalism nor history,” “a polemic so unchecked … that we can’t tell the fact from the fiction,” sources “have clearly used him,” and “tacitly conced[ed] he was wrong.”

Despite Schweizer’s shady background, however, “Clinton Cash” has been taken seriously by “liberal media” outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and others, who have lent it legitimacy by using it as a source for their reporting.

So — where there’s smoke there’s fire. Right?

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