Right wing on the march against Hillary eavesdropping allegations Nick Juliano

Published: Tuesday October 16, 2007



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Print This Email This After spending two minutes vamping on Hillary Clinton in a diatribe that couldn't have made GOP candidates smile more if they'd written it themselves, Fox News hosts told their viewers that Republicans are planning to dredge up newly noticed scandals from Hillary Clinton's past to smear the Democratic frontrunner. Tuesday's Fox & Friends discussed an article in The Hill about Republicans' plans to paint Clinton as a hypocrite in the ongoing congressional debate over how to best legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program because she is alleged to have listened in on secretly taped phone calls. Clinton voted against a temporary measure in August that would have granted the president and National Security Agency sweeping new authority to eavesdrop on Americans' conversations with limited oversight. Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy introduced the story by misrepresenting that vote then pivoted to reminders of decade-old allegations of Bill Clinton's infidelities. "She has refused to allow our intelligence agencies to listen in on conversations being conducted by terrorists as a plot to blow us up," Doocy said, repeating attacks aired by Republicans that critics of the administration's surveillance are hindering the war on terror. Democrats and Republicans agree that the NSA should have free reign in monitoring foreign-to-foreign terrorists' conversations. Clinton voted against the hastily passed Protect America Act, which critics said did not contain adequate judicial oversight of domestic surveillance. But she voted for a narrower measure that would have addressed immediate "fixes" the administration said was needed to close a loophole in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Senate is expected to introduce a new FISA update proposal this week, and the House is set to consider a measure that is sure to provoke a showdown with President Bush because it does not grant immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated warrantless spying on Americans. According to The Hill, Republicans are planning to push the story that Hillary is hypocritical for not bowing to Bush's demands for vast spy powers because she allegedly listened to surreptitious recording of political opponents during husband Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The claim was aired in a recent book by two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters. Her Way, by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth, former New York Times reporters, says that Bill Clinton's supporters would monitor cell phone frequencies and record conversations of political opponents. The authors said Hillary Clinton listened to one of these apparently illegal intercepts, and so far her campaign has not denied the allegation. Conservative blog Sweetness and Light reported the anecdote earlier this month. "We don't comment on books that are utter and complete failures," Clinton's Senate spokesman, Phillipe Reines, told The Hill, referring to Her Way's low sales. Doocy referred to the "illegally obtained" recording as "essentially a wiretap," before diving in to the contents of the call. "Apparently on the tape some people were talking about how there was another woman out there who may have had an affair with Bill Clinton," Doocy said. "There were probably a lot of those phone calls back then, in 1992," co-host Gretchen Carlson couldn't resist chiming in. "Yeeaaahh," Doocy says (emphasis his). "You're probably right." The following video is from Fox's Fox & Friends, broadcast on October 16, 2007.



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