Several weeks ago, the Washington Free Beacon unearthed the following audio of Hillary Clinton discussing a rape case she defended in 1975:

It’s only taken her expert team of PR pros a few weeks to come up with a halfhearted excuse for the Hillary Tapes. Apparently, they just lifted it from her Twitter feed.

Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon:

Hillary Clinton weighed in on her 1975 legal defense of an accused child rapist on Saturday, her first comments on the case since it came under scrutiny following a Washington Free Beacon report last month.

Clinton spoke in clinical, legal terms while explaining her defense of the rapist, who Clinton helped to avoid a lengthy prison term by relying on a technicality relating to the chain of evidence of his blood-soaked underwear, as well as arguing at the time that the 12-year-old victim may have exaggerated or encouraged the attack.

“When you are a lawyer, you often don’t have the choice as to who you will represent, and by the very nature of criminal law there will be those who you represent that you don’t approve of,” said Clinton in an interview published on Friday with Mumsnet, an online forum for parents in the UK.

There’s some question about whether or not Clinton actually had a choice. But then, there’s some question about everything Hillary Clinton says.

And despite the strawman Hillary sets up and knocks down here, the same one her defenders have been pummeling for weeks, the issue here isn’t the concept of legal defense. The issue is her conduct, both during the trial and in talking about it for attribution years later.

Josh Rogin at the Daily Beast interviewed the unnamed victim, now 52. She hadn’t heard the audio until the rest of us did, and here was her reaction:

“When I heard that tape I was pretty upset, I went back to the room and was talking to my two cousins and I cried a little bit. I ain’t gonna lie, some of this has got me pretty down,” she said. “But I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to stand up to her. I’m going to stand up for what I’ve got to stand up for, you know?”…

“[Clinton] owes me a big apology, [but] I’ll probably never get anything from her.”

“Never” seems like a fair estimate.

This is just a little something to remember the next time a lefty starts babbling about “the Republican War on Women.”

Hillary Clinton is a defender of women, you see. Just not literally.