New details suggest the methods Hillary Rodham used to maneuver around procedural norms in the Kathy Shelton rape case bear striking similarities to her actions in her email scandal.

The FBI’s new investigation (or reopened investigation, depending on which version of the Washington Post you happened to see first) turns the floodlights on Hillary Clinton’s decisions to use a private email server for government business and to delete tens of thousands of emails while under congressional subpoena.

The Kathy Shelton rape case may not appear to have much in common with Hillary’s email woes, but new details suggest the methods Hillary Rodham used to maneuver around procedural norms in that criminal case bear striking similarities to her actions in her email scandal.

In May 1975, at the very start of her legal career, Hillary volunteered to defend child rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor, but only after guaranteeing herself a “win” by working closely on the case with the judge and his son, who happened to be early public supporters and donors for Bill Clinton’s congressional bid.

The Only Sexual Assault Case the Media Doesn’t Care About

New facts cast doubt on Hillary Clinton’s statements about how and why she defended Taylor and handled physical evidence that has disappeared in that case. Hillary’s own descriptions of this case, presented in her autobiography “Living History” and in an audiotaped interview with journalist Roy Reed in the 1980s, have gone largely unchallenged until now.

Self-described “hack” for the Clinton campaign Glenn Thrush did a hatchet job on the Shelton rape case writing for Newsday in 2008, and the press since then has largely done a poor job exposing the injustice Hillary Clinton wrought for the child rape victim, but a very good job excusing Hillary’s hard work getting this child rapist off with time served.

Alana Goodman with the Daily Mail wrote the first decent piece of journalism delving into the Shelton case in August 2016, but to date the media has largely ignored the actual facts and evidence surrounding Hillary Clinton’s involvement, preferring instead to take Hillary’s own descriptions at face value.

After Donald Trump recently invited Shelton to attend the second presidential debate as his guest, Shelton publicly described what it was like being 12 years old and raped and beaten by Taylor so viciously that she spent five days in a coma and was told by doctors she would never have children—and then hearing Hillary Clinton on tape laughing about putting Taylor back on the streets in a plea bargain for which he served only a couple of months in jail when Hillary knew he was guilty of this horrific crime. Could Thomas Alfred Taylor be Hillary Clinton’s Willie Horton?

Two (or More) Tales to Tell

Hillary tells two tales of why she took this case. In her audiotaped interview in the 1980s, she told Reed that the prosecutor (Mahlon Gibson) called her and said he had a defendant accused of rape and the guy “wanted a woman lawyer and would I do it as a favor to him” and substitute for the male public defender.

In her book “Living History,” however, Clinton states Gibson called to tell her that an indigent prisoner accused of raping a 12-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer and that Gibson had recommended that the judge appoint Hillary. She says she told Gibson she didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but that Gibson “gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.”

More recently, Hillary and her spokespeople have insisted she was “court-appointed,” implying that she was required to accept the case, and Gibson has publicly backed-up Hillary’s claim that she tried to get out of the appointment, adding that Hillary shouldn’t be criticized for representing this client to the best of her ability.

Significant questions exist on all of Hillary’s explanations. If Hillary’s initial version is true and the prosecutor asked Hillary to accept the case as a favor, this implies Hillary was never under any judicial order or even direct pressure to take the case. If Hillary’s autobiography version is true, then even if the prosecutor had recommended that the judge “appoint” her, any attorney knows that while it may feel awkward to annoy a judge by refusing, she was perfectly free to refuse the appointment because she was not a public defender.

Additionally, the judge in question, Judge Maupin Cummings, was the criminal court judge for the county, and Hillary was not doing criminal work at the time. So refusing the judge’s request would not have unduly pressured Hillary by placing her in fear of offending a judge before whom she regularly practiced.

Whether or not Hillary was “court-appointed,” it was still fully her decision to voluntarily accept the case knowing the savagely beaten and raped victim was a young girl. This decision goes against Hillary’s proclamations of being a champion for women and defender of children.

Newly discovered facts suggest Hillary took this case knowing that she had three allies to assist her: the prosecutor, Judge Cummings, and the judge’s son, all of whom were Democrats pushing a liberal agenda of “rehabilitation, not punishment” for criminals. Cummings and his son, Gordon Cummings, had become early, public supporters and donors of Bill Clinton’s fledgling congressional campaign in 1974, especially supportive of early release and work release for prisoners, policies Bill Clinton promoted in his 1976 run for Arkansas attorney general after losing his 1974 bid for Congress.

New Information Indicates Corruption

Several examples of Hillary’s off-the-books, contrary-to-policy (and possibly illegal) actions in this case have come to light. Gordon Cummings signed the arraignment order filed May 21, 1975, crossing out “denied” to a preliminary hearing requested by the defendant and writing in “granted” after scratching out the name of the initial public defender and writing in “Rodham” as the defendant’s attorney.

The dates don’t match up with the court docket recently discovered in this case, and it suggests that while the public defender represented Taylor, the judge had denied a preliminary hearing, but when Hillary took the case, the judge’s son went back and granted the hearing instead.

The glaring problem with this is that the judge’s son had only graduated law school in spring 1975, and wasn’t a licensed attorney until September 1975. I’ve been an attorney for 14 years, and I’ve never seen a court order signed by a non-judicial officer, much less a person who wasn’t even a licensed attorney. The judge and his son appear to have colluded to provide Hillary with insider assistance to ensure she accomplished the liberal agenda of favoring criminal restitution over punishment.

Next, Hillary requested reduction of the $50,000 bail bond. The prosecutor raised no argument, and the judge dropped bail to a mere $2,500. A $2,500 bond for raping and nearly murdering a 12-year-old girl hardly seems proportionate to the crime. Worse yet, Hillary requested and the judge granted “work release,” meaning Taylor was permitted to go to work each day at the Northwest Arkansas Paper Company, returning to county jail only at night even though Taylor’s workplace was a mere five-minute walk from Kathy’s home, leaving her in constant fear of being attacked again.

Hillary Blames a Little Girl for Her Own Rape

Hillary then challenged her client Taylor’s guilt by blaming sixth-grader Kathy for her own rape. Hillary Rodham personally, coldly interrogated Kathy, leaving the young girl wondering why “this woman lawyer doesn’t like me at all.”

There were plenty of avenues for zealous representation of this criminal defendant without attacking the young victim.

Hillary required Kathy to take a lie detector test, then argued Kathy had “failed” because Kathy’s test showed lack of truthfulness on one question: this girl, a virgin at the time of the rape, failed to accurately answer whether “full penetration” had occurred.

Hillary then submitted an affidavit to the court with a motion to force Kathy to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, manufacturing lie after lie including accusing Kathy of exaggerating, seeking out older men like Thomas (then age 41), previously accusing a person of attacking her, fantasizing and romanticizing sexual encounters like this, and being prone to all of this because she came from a “disorganized family” (that is, she was being raised by a single mom).

When an attorney agrees to defend a client—even a guilty client—she still has complete control over whether to employ defense strategies that qualify as unethical, immoral, or illegal. The anti-feminist, blame-the-rape-victim tactics Clinton chose to employ against Shelton were not, at that time in Arkansas, illegal (although they are now outlawed under rape shield laws), but feminists and fair-minded jurists certainly recognized such tactics as unethical and immoral. There were plenty of avenues for zealous representation of this criminal defendant without attacking the young victim.

Get This: Tampering with Evidence

Hillary’s final step in freeing Willie Horton—oops, I mean Thomas Taylor—was to counteract the physical evidence. The defendant’s semen and the victim’s blood had been confirmed on the defendant’s underpants. Hillary tells the tale in her autobiography and audio interview of taking the underpants to be examined by a blood expert.

There’s no indication whatsoever that Hillary was given a ‘special court order,’ as she claimed, to take the physical evidence out of state.

In “Living History” she says she “obtained expert testimony from an eminent scientist from New York, who cast doubt on the evidentiary value of the blood and semen[.]” To Reed she said, “I happened to be going to New York and I took the underpants with me. I got a special court order. And I went to Brooklyn, where this man whose name I now cannot remember who had shared in the Nobel Prize for his work the Rh factor” gave her an appointment to discuss her evidence.

So, as she tells it, Clinton showed up at the scientist’s house and “pulled out my underpants you know, gave it to him and he started analyzing, looking for fibers, you know, magnifying glass and all that stuff. He said, you know, ‘Can’t prove anything!’ Can see a slight trace but it wouldn’t be enough to test, all that.” She then informed the prosecutor this expert was “ready to come from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice!” This ironic statement is one of several times in the audio interview where Hillary laughs.

Based on the details Hillary recounts about this blood expert, the scientist in question was Alexander Wiener, who indeed co-discovered the Rh factor in human blood in the 1930s. Hillary is wrong about Wiener receiving the Nobel Prize, although he did receive the prestigious Lasker Award in 1946. There is zero evidence in the court records that Hillary ever obtained “testimony” from Wiener, or any kind of pretrial expert report or formal opinion at all.

It does appear that Hillary violated the court’s June 9, 1975 order that the defense could only independently examine the physical evidence if a method was agreed upon that would “not interrupt the plaintiff’s claim of custody” over the evidence. There’s no indication whatsoever that Hillary was given a “special court order,” as she claimed, to take the physical evidence out of state.

Nothing would “interrupt” the prosecution’s chain of custody more than having the defense attorney personally throw some “evidence underwear” in her handbag or suitcase and jet off on a “long trip back to Chicago and the East Coast to visit friends and people who had offered me jobs” while she pondered whether to marry Bill (the trip Hillary describes in her autobiography, the dates of which line up with this trip to New York meeting with Wiener). Then, as she details on audiotape, she gets to Wiener’s house in Brooklyn and “pulls out her underwear” for him to visually inspect in his basement.

The whole scene she paints is bizarrely out of line with proper procedure and the court’s order in the Taylor case. But the judge and prosecutor didn’t question Hillary’s “blood expert” story or her personal handling of physical evidence in such a casual, irregular manner. Wiener served as a useful cover for Hillary to plea bargain violent rapist Taylor down to a minor charge and let him off with time served.

Not surprisingly, Taylor is reported to have served time for other crimes after raping and beating Shelton. Relatives confirm that he “moved around a lot” to hide his activities and died suddenly of unknown causes in 1992.

If political or legal consequences flow from the current investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, one middle-aged woman in a small Arkansas town won’t see Hillary as a victim of anything other than her own choices. Kathy Shelton just might feel that some of the justice Hillary denied her 41 years ago has finally been served.