“We can’t get distracted. Whether it’s by the latest culture war nonsense or some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook,” two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told a crowd at the 2022 New York State Democratic Convention. “By the way, they’ve been coming after me again in case you might have noticed. It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get.”
Trump’s alleged corruption doesn’t discredit the existence of Hillary’s alleged corruption, or vice versa. We don’t yet know the extent of the dirty tricks Hillary’s 2016 campaign engaged in (though there is plenty we do know). But it’s worth remembering that when Clinton tells us something is a “conspiracy theory,” it usually turns out to be true.
Hillary, of course, famously went on the Today Show and claimed that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — a phrase that was probably cooked up by Democratic consultants — was behind allegations that her husband had been messing around with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Sure, Hillary had known about Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, and scores of others, but the wisest woman to ever have deigned to trod among us argued that the very idea that her husband would have an affair was driven by a “mean-spirited” imagination and her conservative adversaries (among them, apparently, her husband’s attorney general, Janet Reno).
It was all true, of course.
As the Washington Post’s David Maraniss noted in 1998, it was modus operandi for the Clintons to deflect accusations by blaming them on a “reckless conspiracy launched by desperate opponents.”
Again in 2015, Hillary told reporters, even as her staff was trying to get rid of the evidence, that her email scandal was “another conspiracy theory.” Recently, Clinton joked that she had been guilty only of sending notes about “Gefilte fish.” Well, yes, that . . . and also the FBI, that notorious cabal of QAnon foot soldiers, found that she had set up an illegal server to circumvent transparency through which she sent unsecured classified and top-secret documents. Those right-wingers at the New York Times conceded that the communications were almost surely intercepted by foreign powers.
If Hillary’s last name had been Smith, she’d be riding out the parole phase of her felony conviction around now. Actually, if Hillary’s last name was Smith, a qualified woman would have taken her place as 67th secretary of state.