Hillary Planned Bloggergate in 1995

NewsMax ran a slightly edited version of my October 11, 2007 Bloggergate story on October 18, 2007. The NewsMax version appeared here. BLOGGERGATE: A 7-Part Series Hillary, Soros and the Blog-for-Pay Scandal that Never Made the News Bloggers Take Democrat Bribes, October 10, 2003 BLOGGERGATE: Unfolding Scandal or False Alarm?, October 12, 2003 BLOGGERGATE: Media Matters Implicated in Blogger Payoffs, October 10, 2006 The Hillary-Soros Axis, October 5, 2007 BLOGGERGATE: Hillary Leads Army of Paid Bloggers, October 11, 2007 Hillary’s Paid Bloggers, October 22, 2007 Hillary Planned Bloggergate in 1995, October 29, 2007

LAST WEEK this column unveiled Bloggergate, a massive effort by Hillary Clinton to tilt the blogosphere in her favor, by subsidizing leftwing bloggers. Hillary’s ambition to control the Internet did not form overnight. She was already pondering how to do it in 1995.

Of course, no one used the word “blogger” in 1995. In those days, online forums called “newsgroups” provided the medium of choice for anti-Clinton writers.

Hillary formed a special task force within the White House Counsel’s office to fight the New Media. As noted in my 2004 book Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists, the task force compiled a secret report titled, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, written by White House aides Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane.

The report blamed talk radio, online newsgroups and other New Media outlets for spreading “conspiracy theories” about the 1993 death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Hillary viewed these “conspiracy theories” as the number one threat to the Clinton White House at the time.

Her Conspiracy Commerce report accused Pittsburgh newspaper mogul Richard Mellon Scaife of fabricating rumors about Foster’s death, then feeding these stories to conservative publications, whence they filtered into mainstream media.

According to the report, the Internet fueled Scaife’s success. The report complained that the Internet “allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all. The right wing has siezed upon the internet [sic] as a means of communicating its ideas to people”.

After its completion around July 1995, White House operatives began circulating the report among like-minded journalists, to help them smear anti-Clinton researchers as Scaife stooges.

One of their targets was British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, then Washington bureau chief for the London Sunday Telegraph, one of England’s most respected newspapers. Hillary’s report inaccurately called the Sunday Telegraph a “tabloid”, though it is actually printed on broadsheet.

In his 1997 book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Evans-Pritchard writes, “I kept getting calls from reporters asking the same questions: `Did I know Scaife? Had I ever accepted money from Scaife? So who owned the tabloid I worked for? You mean it’s not a tabloid? Oh.'”

The Wall Street Journal finally exposed Hillary’s report on January 6, 1997. The revelation brought mostly yawns from mainstream journalists on the Clinton beat, most of whom already had a copy.

One journalist took special note, however. In a New York Times piece of January 25, 1997, David Sol Bennahum offered the Clintons some fateful advice. Agreeing with the report’s essential claim, Bennahum wrote, “[T]he GOP has made clever use of the Internet, astutely building informal networks of like-minded, interconnected Web sites…” Bennahum then added, “Democrats should learn to build such networks of their own.”

A technology journalist, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, an author of futurist books and a venture capitalist, Bennahum today has become a powerful operative in Hillary’s Bloggergate network.

The Bloggergate scandal erupted when an anonymous video appeared on YouTube on October 2. It showed Hillary speaking at a conference of leftwing bloggers on August 4, 2007.

In it, Hillary declared, “We are… putting together a network in the blogosphere”. She attributed its success to the efforts of “institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress…”

With these words, Hillary confessed to a federal crime. Both groups are supposedly “non-partisan”, 501(c)3 tax-free organizations, strictly prohibited from coordinating efforts with a national political candidate such as Hillary.

More importantly, the two groups Hillary mentioned are deeply implicated in Bloggergate. Democrat billionaire George Soros launched the Center for American Progress in 2003 with a $3 million donation. The Center subsequently launched Media Matters for America in May 2004, which in turn launched the Center for Independent Media (CIM) in April 2006.

CIM tax filings bear the same address as Media Matters in Washington, DC.

The Center for Independent Media awards “fellowships” to leftwing bloggers, including cash subsidies, free legal service, free access to LexisNexis database searches and more. Its founder, President and CEO is none other than David Bennahum.

Bennahum helped found Media Matters, where he served as one of its original senior fellows.

On January 27, 1998 — ten days after Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story — Hillary Clinton told reporters at a White House press conference that the Internet needed an “editing function or gatekeeping function”.

With the help of David Bennahum and others, Hillary may finally achieve her goal.

NewsMax ran a slightly edited version of my October 11, 2007 Bloggergate story on October 18, 2007. The NewsMax version appeared here. BLOGGERGATE: A 7-Part Series Hillary, Soros and the Blog-for-Pay Scandal that Never Made the News Bloggers Take Democrat Bribes, October 10, 2003 BLOGGERGATE: Unfolding Scandal or False Alarm?, October 12, 2003 BLOGGERGATE: Media Matters Implicated in Blogger Payoffs, October 10, 2006 The Hillary-Soros Axis, October 5, 2007 BLOGGERGATE: Hillary Leads Army of Paid Bloggers, October 11, 2007 Hillary’s Paid Bloggers, October 22, 2007 Hillary Planned Bloggergate in 1995, October 29, 2007