Matt Lauer is not the first alleged rapist NBC has been accused of shielding. Back in 1999, there was President Bill Clinton.

The dates here are important.

On February 12, 1999, Clinton’s U.S. Senate impeachment trial concluded with his acquittal. After a grueling scandal that began with Clinton’s appalling affair with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which led to him committing perjury, it was finally over and behind him.

On February 24, twelve days after Clinton had been safely acquitted, Dateline NBC finally ran the story of Juanita Broaddrick’s credible rape allegation against the president.

In April of 1978, Broaddrick was a registered nurse who owned a successful nursing home in Van Buren, Arkansas. Broaddrick says, Clinton (who was then the attorney general of Arkansas and running for governor) used the pretext of a busy coffee shop to move their scheduled business meeting to Broaddrick’s hotel room.

It was there, according to Broaddrick, that Clinton brutally raped her.

Although she never reported the rape, there were people she confided in at the time, which is probably how Broaddrick became Jane Doe #5 in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit.

Jones had claimed she was harassed by then Gov. Clinton in May of 1991, when he exposed himself to her and demanded sex. She had never met him before. Jones said nothing publicly about the incident at the time, but like Broaddrick, was dragged into it. In her specific case, it was a media report where an Arkansas state trooper said that, among other women they procured for Clinton, “Paula told [the trooper] she was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired.”

Jones says she came forward to demand a retraction and to clear her name. From there, she felt it was necessary to tell her story publicly, and after Clinton denied her allegation, she made history by successfully filing a $700,000 suit against a sitting president (he eventually settled for $850,000).

To back up Jones’ allegation, her attorneys felt it was necessary to document a pattern of Clinton’s behavior, which is how Broaddrick became Jane Doe #5.

Not wanting any part of his, not wanting to relive what she says put her in a state of shock for “months,” Broaddrick signed an affidavit in the Jones’ case denying Bill Clinton had made unwanted sexual advances.

It was around this time that Lisa Myers of NBC News figured out who Jane Doe #5 was, and began to pursue the story.

In the 2018 docu-series The Clinton Affair, Myers said of Broaddrick’s reluctance to come forward, “We spoke for almost a year before she actually sat down and did an interview.”

She added, “I think she just decided that the story was going to come out and she didn’t want other people distorting it, and so she was going to be the one to tell it.”

According to Broaddrick, after two decades of not wanting to relive this, what forced her hand was a tabloid report that claimed she had been bought off in exchange for her silence.

And so, on January 20, while the Senate was still deciding whether or not to remove Clinton from office, and some 22 days before his acquittal, Broaddrick sat down and taped her interview with Myers for Dateline NBC.

In The Clinton Affair, Myers explained what happened next…

“When I brought back the tapes from Arkansas, there was a great deal of pushback within NBC,” she says, adding this bombshell, “A lot of people just wanted to kill the interview without even looking at it.”

Hoping for some help to get the story aired, Myers enlisted the late Tim Russert.

“Tim Russert took the tapes home, and he watched it, and he just felt that Juanita was very credible. So basically for the next month, he fought side by side with me to help get it on the air.”

Via email, Broaddrick told Breitbart News what it was like for her as NBC News stalled the story.

“I can remember so many things, like Lisa Myers calling me during the delay and telling me the good news bad news cliché. She said to me, ‘Good news is you are credible… bad news is you are very credible.’”

“Of course [NBC] purposely held it until after the impeachment vote,” Broaddrick adds.

At first Broaddrick says she was angry with Myers, and said so, until one of Myers’ colleagues at NBC told her how hard Myers was working to get the story on the air. Broaddrick says she was told by this staffer that “[NBC News President Andrew] Lack and Bill Clinton were friends and even golfed together.”

“In other words,” she said she was being told, “don’t plan on it running during impeachment.”

And it didn’t. And to her everlasting credit, Myers says she used this time to firm up her reporting.

“Juanita answered every single question we asked,” Myers explains, “She gave us access to her financial records, her nursing home records [and] history, everything. We did everything possible to scrub her and she was a pretty good sport about it considering how unpleasant it had to be.”

What is especially interesting about Myers’ reporting is how the Clinton White House responded — which was to not respond at all.

“[W]e couldn’t get the Clinton White House to tell us anything,” Myers says. “They wouldn’t tell us where he was that day [of the alleged rape]. They wouldn’t give us any access to his records as attorney general, or his schedule as a gubernatorial candidate… They gave us nothing.”

Even with all of this, according to Broaddrick, NBC’s hand was only forced after the Wall Street Journal published Dorothy Rabinowitz’s story about Broaddrick on February 19.

It was “her article which ultimately forced NBC to air it, but conveniently after the [impeachment] vote,” Broaddrick told Breitbart News.

Andrew Lack was president of NBC News during this time, and would remain in that position until 2001.

In 2015, Lack returned to NBC as the chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, and here we go again…

Along with his protégé Noah Oppenheim, who is scheduled to take Lack’s job next year after the 72-year-old retires, Lack is currently under fire over allegations of shielding disgraced former Today Show anchor Matt Lauer from a rape allegation, as well as accused-serial predator Harvey Weinstein.

According to Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill, Lack (who is also facing allegations of misconduct) and Oppenheim killed his reporting on Weinstein because both executives were friendly with the mogul and wanted to do business with him.

In their defense, Lack and Oppenheim say Farrow hadn’t nailed down the story, a ridiculous claim when you learn that 1) NBC News ordered him to stop his reporting on Weinstein, 2) Farrow had audio tape from a police sting of Weinstein admitting he groped a model, 3) just a few weeks after NBC sent him down the road, the New Yorker ran the story, and 4) Farrow won a Pulitzer for that story.

Farrow and others also claim Lack covered up for his longtime pal Matt Lauer. As Breitbart News reported earlier:

Even when Lauer was fired in late 2017, NBC tried to protect him (and NBC) by spinning a credible allegation of anal rape into something as innocuous as “sexual misconduct.” What’s more, the idea NBC did not know about Lauer’s alleged predations prior to his firing is disputed by a number of on-the-record sources who not only claim they knew about Lauer’s behavior, they complained to management about it.

Lack and Oppenheim deny any and all wrongdoing, but adamantly refuse to back that up with an outside, objective investigation — the kind CBS and Fox News agreed to during their own sexual harassment scandals.

Nevertheless, despite what is now an apparent 20 year history and pattern of shielding accused rapists and abusers, there is no serious pressure from the rest of the corporate media for NBC to allow for an outside investigation, and the full Democrat presidential field has still agreed to allow NBC to host their next debate.

Broaddrick (who has written a book about her ordeal), told Breitbart News that NBC’s attempt to kill her story has “always been the most disturbing incident regarding my allegations.”

P.S. The Clinton Affair is worth your time. Broaddrick, Jones, Lewinsky, and Kathleen Willey are interviewed extensively and treated with respect as credible accusers, even as the Rosa Parkses of the #MeToo movement. And other than unforgivably ignoring Hillary Clinton’s role in attempting to personally destroy her husband’s accusers, and glossing over the Clinton White House campaign to discredit Lewinsky as a crazed stalker (until she produced the DNA-stained dress), it is surprisingly even-handed.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.