Crooked Claims About Clinton

The Crimes That Weren't

armorIn the video, John Armor, who is identified as a "constitutional law specialist," makes several false claims against Hillary Clinton. They're based on a five-minute videotape of a phone conversation between Paul, Hillary Clinton, Stan Lee and others in Paul's office, which he says provides smoking-gun evidence of Clinton's involvement in "a number of violations of the law" in connection with the fundraising event. Armor's is not a familiar name to campaign finance experts. He says on his Web site that he has represented the campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, John Anderson and Ross Perot, mainly on ballot-access matters, and that he has argued cases before the Supreme Court. He is a sometime-counsel to the American Civil Rights Union, a group set up at least in part to counter the American Civil Liberties Union and whose policy board includes former Attorney General Edwin Meese, former Judge Robert Bork and the former independent counsel who spent years looking into various allegations against Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr.

    Armor: First of all, it shows that she had personal involvement and personal knowledge of the details of this gala, whereas she has had her representatives, in the criminal court, in the civil case and before the FEC, represent that she had no knowledge of this. So that is suborning perjury. That is obstructing justice.
    You hear her describing how she solicited a contribution by Cher, who was to be one of the main performers at this gala. Now, what she did there would be legal only if the services of Cher to come and sing at a concert are worth less than $2,000. Therefore she was soliciting an illegal contribution. So that, too, is a violation of the law. ...
    She says on this tape that Kelly [Craighead, a Clinton staffer] ... had fully briefed her, quote unquote, up to the point of the phone call, and furthermore that she would keep her informed after that. So there's the connection of the candidate to this allegedly independent program. And the FEC law is quite clear, it is a felony, punishable by up to five years in jail, for a candidate to be directly involved in this sort of fundraising activity if it exceeds $25,000. And the FEC found that it exceeded $1.2 million. It's crime on tape, very simple.

Let's start by saying the fundraiser itself was perfectly legal, and these kinds of events – albeit usually with less star power – took place frequently before passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 . Now we'll take Armor's charges in turn. First, he says the videotape shows Clinton "had personal involvement and personal knowledge of the details of this gala," contrary to the representations of her lawyers. That's false. Clinton was certainly aware of the upcoming fundraiser, but all we hear in this phone call is a politician's routine call scratching under the chin those who are knocking themselves out for her. The videotape doesn't show that she knew the kind of "details," such as how much it cost to fly Cher in and how that was being paid for, that would show that she might have known about underreporting of expenses. What Clinton's lawyers have maintained is that "she didn't know about the disclosure issues," says Ken Gross, a former FEC enforcement chief who practices campaign finance law and isn't involved in this case. "There's a big difference between knowing some things about the fundraiser and knowing what was disclosed on the forms. The former is not legally relevant to whether she's culpable." Although Clinton does say that her aide gave her "a full report" on the event, there's no evidence the aide shared with her detailed breakdowns of cost.

Next, Armor says that Clinton was soliciting an illegal contribution because a performance by Cher is worth more than $2,000, which was the most an individual could contribute to a candidate in 2000. That's false in two ways. One, the video provides no evidence that Clinton solicited anything. She does mention having talked to Cher:

    Hillary Clinton: I talked with Cher, and she was just great. She said she really was excited. And I hadn't talked to her, so you had to have really done a good job selling it to her.