Julie Hiatt Steele

[pat_k]

It's the late 90's all over again. Let's take a minute to remember Julie Hyatt Steele -- the woman who Ken Starr went after because she had the courage to stick by the truth.

Willey told Starr's prosecutors -- and later, a national television audience -- that she was groped by the president in the Oval Office in November 1993. She said she told Steele about it the day it happened. But Steele says she first heard about it four years later when Willey asked her to lie and corroborate Willey's version to a Newsweek reporter. link

The Paula Jones case, the wellspring from out of which Willey and Broaddrick sprung. Among other problems, perhaps the most problematic is that Jones' description of what she was exposed to turned out to be a fiction. (Guess she didn't count on anyone taking a look see.)

Juanita Broaddrick. I am mystified by the number of so called "reporters" who characterize her accusation as credible. How does the fact that she is unable to name the date -- or even the month -- the alleged rape occurred fit with the notion of "credibility"? The friends -- a pair of sister's who admit they hate Clinton because he commuted the death sentence of the man convicted of murdering their father -- who say Broaddrick told them what happened at the time, aren't exactly trustworthy. (And they couldn't say what month "at the time" was either).

At least Paula Jones managed to name a date, which enabled investigators to confirm that Clinton was in the vicinity. Given the vigor with which Starr sought to substantiate Willey's accusation, don't you think he would have gone after Clinton on Broaddrick's far more serious allegation if he thought there was even the remotest possibility of substantiating it?

One meme that's floating around is that Broaddricks story is "credible" because it's part of a "pattern." The only pattern I see here is a pattern of discredited claims. Unlike the other claims, Broadrick's hasn't been obliterated, but that's because it can't be -- there's nothing to go on. No date, no credible corroborators, nothing, on which to judge the veracity. Once upon a time, we wouldn't see such a story reported at all. Such a grave, unprovable, accusation would be rejected outright by any reputable media source.

The real tragedy of all this is that so many are just plain too young to remember and see Trump's attempt to breathe life into the discredited accusations that came out of the right-wing's "Hunting of the President" for what it is.

[Gabi Hayes]

1. thank you! her life was RUINED by those monsters. I was trying to think of her name when WIlley's

came up

I spent too many hours at the computer during that extended fiasco, reading about the likes of Bossie, the elves, VInce Foster, Rose Law, and all that stuff

susan Schmidt, jeff gerth, and all those other supposed journalists can go rot in hell for the way they so eagerly pushed the wingnut line, accepting outright lies from Floyd Brown, Larry KLayman, Bossie, etal, as gospel. they were so AFTER the Clintons

THOTP, all the way, baby!

[Gabi Hayes]

2. just a snip from a seminal article, from a late, lamented website, where I got lots of the truth,

unavailable most other places at the time. I don't think anyone will care if I exceed the four graph limit. if they do, trump can sue me

http://www.americanpolitics.com/20020311Steele.html

The Office of Independent CounselC only now admits that Kathleen Willey was a liar because they have to explain why, if she had been anything else, they did not indict President Clinton on the "strength" (?) of her testimony and her grope allegation. What they fail to point out is that they were so driven to remove a twice elected President from office that they were covering for her all along. They point out only the tip of the iceberg in terms of her discrepancies. In fact, she was unable to keep any of her long and over-complicated stories straight.

The grope alone was material for a game of Clue. Did it happen in the study, the dining room, the hallway? Take your pick: at one time or another it happened in all three.

Then there was what "he said" or what "she said," never the same thing twice.

And never mind the famous jogger story, that one was right over the edge. We were to believe that pre-dawn, in pouring rain, post surgery, she could not sleep on that early winter morning and went walking with a neck brace and three dogs. There, in that pre-dawn, pouring-rain, January cold, waited a jogger clad in black, face somewhat obscured by pre-dawn light, hopeful she would not be able to sleep and would walk his way with three dogs and a neck brace. There he was, just waiting to scare her.

What a guy, what a story!

Sometimes he was identified as Jack Palladino, other times as Cody Shearer. Sometimes it was Nate Landeau that sent the mysterious jogger, other times it was the Clinton White House. The last time she spoke of this incident we did not get to hear the identity of the jogger, only that "evil Hillary" ("evil," sound familiar?) sent him. Naturally his words varied as well.

Sometimes it was, "You are just not getting the message are you Kathleen?" Other times it was, "Aren't you getting the message?" Sometimes he called her children and the cat by name, sometimes he didn't. One time he threw in her attorney's name along with the names of the attorney's children for good measure. His purpose, in case by now you wonder, was to explain the difference, MATERIAL difference, in testimony in at least four venues.

The first being Jones V Clinton -- where she "didn't know" or "couldn't recall" 63 times and going on through FBI interviews, Grand Jury appearances -- and of course the tearful performance that was 60 Minutes. He scared her into becoming inconsistent!

Naturally she didn't call the police or tell anybody about the mean old jogger, at least not until she was asked about the many differences in her account of events she had alleged as fact(S). But it gets better. Did you know that the jogger is alleged to have killed the missing cat? Well, that is what she said.

Naturally she did not tell anybody at the time about this one either. It seems that the jogger turned up two days before her Jones deposition and the dead cat's skull turned up on her porch one day after the deposition. She did not want to tell anybody it seems because the cat was such a real member of the family that it would be too painful for anybody to hear about. You can just imagine how hurt the police would have been had she called them!

Instead of inflicting that kind of pain, she just bravely, and quietly, buried the skull in her backyard. Wasn't that thoughtful? But no, the FBI would not be able to recover it because the dogs dug it up.

She then had to throw poor old Bullseye's skull over the fence and into the woods. Determined, nevertheless, the FBI dispatched a forensic team (your tax dollar at work) to Richmond to scour the woods. They managed to uncover bones but after hauling them back to Washington, it turned out that they had retrieved raccoon bones and no remnant of the "missing cat" was ever found. Heck, no wonder her testimony was all over the board with terror surrounding her like that!...

[Gabi Hayes]

3. julie's account of what they did to her begins:

Last edited Mon Oct 10, 2016, 04:53 PM - Edit history (1)

The real question for the OIC, and for every news organization in this country, is why was it necessary to nearly destroy my life and that of my son because I dared to dispute the words of a woman they absolutely knew was lying when she alleged that President Clinton had "groped" her. They tore our lives apart all the while knowing that Willey, their star witness, was a liar and that I had told the truth. Of course they don't mention the "star witness" part either. Let me do that for them...

There is no "high road" that Ray wants us to believe he had taken. Are you kidding? What part of that even makes sense?

They admit to more than $65 million of your tax dollars going to the "cause" and then try to tell us that they have grounds for an indictment of the last elected President but are too kind hearted to use them!

I own the Golden Gate Bridge and want to sell you shares if you believe any part of this nonsense! The fact is that they NEVER expected to be able to indict President Clinton on the strength of the Paula Jones civil case deposition. And, for that matter, I have seen the entire Paula Jones case as part of my pre-trial discovery. It was an absolute sham, designed to cripple President Clinton. The grand jury, with its Federal venue, was always their planned and "best odds" ticket to destroying the President. They needed one thing to happen for that to be orchestrated successfully.

They needed to convict me and lock the truth away in prison for forty years. The result would be the raising of Willey's credibility and a chance to indict the President for "perjury" in his August 17, 1998 grand jury testimony regarding Willey. As it stood, the President and I were saying the same thing, "it did not happen, there was no grope". We were saying the same thing because it happened to be the truth. The OIC knew that from day one, and still they threatened, bullied, punished, and ultimately prosecuted me because I dared to stand up to them and to tell the truth despite their best efforts to silence me.

The problem was that they did not get a conviction, not even in the notoriously conservative Fourth Circuit were they able to convict. They could not get a conviction with the Foreman, a Freeper who posted on the Internet via a buddy during the trial (and yes, Pete Yost of the AP, quoted in the report knew that -- and so did Judge Hilton). They could not get a conviction when another juror (as an example of the Fourth Circuit jury pool) was the wife of a CIA attorney, the mother of an intern with Bob Barr, who herself worked for an extreme right wing "right to life" group. They still could not get a conviction -- and the "party" was over as a result. Starr packed it in and Robert Ray was left to explain their overzealous prosecution of me.

[pat_k]

4. Thanks!

[Gabi Hayes]

5. any time....aside from Bill and Hillary, and Vince Foster's wife, this was the saddest story of all.

well, gotta throw Susan MacDougal in there. another hero, who did HARD time for contempt of court!!!!

[Hortensis]

7. Before this even, several coworkers/acquaintances of Willey spoke

up. Apparently she liked to talk about her ambitions to become Bill's mistress and plotted opportunities to put herself in his path. Starr ignored them to push ahead with Willey.

Paula Jones accepted an invitation to go up to Bill's hotel bedroom. According to one of her sisters, she came home and told her Bill propositioned her and she refused, but she was basically pleased and flattered. The sister saw no reason not to believe her, but had a problem when her sister decided to try to mine it for money.

The others are similarly unbelievable and slimy in their after-behavior. I love that they grabbed this chance to endorse pussy-predator Trump and actually, you know, associate with him, as a way of expressing their virtuous outrage against the Clintons. Bet his campaign kept a chaperone by HIM all the time they were there.

[Gabi Hayes]

8. thanks...the unpleasant memories are starting to flood back. I couldn't even finish THOTP because

it made me so mad....gave it to my sister, and she couldn't, either

I knew most of it from following at salon, then DU/AMPOL/Atlantic, and another offshoot that I can't even remember

Denis Wright, the guy who pretty much owned the Klausutis story, posted at that one

[Hortensis]

11. People like that should never be in power. Dreadful.

As for those whose idea of good public servants is this, their malicious eagerness to believe unsupportable lies and willingness to set aside the law in order to get their way shows them to be capable of great evil. I hate for our young people to see this, but better they do than go through the years imagining it couldn't happen here.

[pat_k]

12. THOTP remains a great resource...

It's a who's who. The vast right-wing conspiracy that brought us the attempt to impeach Clinton is alive and well. The same players just keep popping back up.

Ken Starr's witch hunt, Bush's theft of the WH, Congress's failure to impeach Bush/Cheney for torture, and now the rise of Trump. Redemption is always possible, but it's hard not to fall into despair when we look at that trajectory.

[Gabi Hayes]

13. and bossie supposedly is running the day to day garbage they're putting out

Kellyanne is busy with god knows what....thinking up smarmy excuses, and practicing that alligator "smile?"

[madinmaryland]

10. The Arkansas Project funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

Funny but Scaife's wife divorced him and took a good chunk of his fortune after he was caught fooling around with another women.

What goes around comes around.

LOL!!

[lillypaddle]

6. Kick!

[pnwmom]

9. Thank you!