Hillary Clinton watchers agree: If she’s cackling, she’s lying.

Hillary cackled this week in response to a comment by Brett Kavanaugh. Accused of being an attempted rapist or perhaps a serial gang-rapist, Kavanaugh called the charges “a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” fueled in part by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Predictably, opponents cited his remarks as evidence of Kavanaugh’s paranoia and lousy temperament. Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert mocked the nominee, translating his comment as conspiracy theory: “I will be a non-biased and impartial judge, just an umpire calling balls and strikes being secretly thrown by George Soros and Hillary Clinton.”

“Call it the Manchurian Victim conspiracy theory,” wrote Amanda Marcotte of Salon.

Hillary weighed in during a forum sponsored by The Atlantic. Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg noted that, “In his extraordinary presentation in the Senate, Brett Kavanaugh said that the, quote, political hit job, end quote, directed at him was being done on behalf of the Clintons, among other people. Your response?”

As the audience chortled, Clinton burst out in her trademark guffaw or, as The Atlantic reported, “a deep belly laugh.”

“I mean, really, yes. It deserves a lot of laughter,” she said. “. . . I told someone later, ‘Boy, I’ll tell you, they give us a lot of credit.’ Thirty-six years ago, we started this against him . . . in high school apparently.”

Get it? For the Clintons to have had a role in framing Kavanaugh, they would have had to start when he was in high school. Never mind, according to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s account, she never mentioned the Kavanaugh accusation, even in private conversations, until 2012. That’s the year in which Kavanaugh was put forth by The New Yorker and Planned Parenthood as the top Republican contender for a Supreme Court seat.

There does seem to be an element of Clinton revenge in these proceedings. As a prosecutor in the 1990s, Kavanaugh helped lead the effort to expose Bill Clinton’s abuse of women. Today, two Clinton operatives are key figures in the anti-Kavanaugh campaign: Brian Fallon and Ricki Seidman.

Fallon worked previously for Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, for Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and for Hillary Clinton as her 2016 presidential campaign press secretary. Fallon in April pitched the idea for Demand Justice, which fights Trump judicial appointments, at a meeting of the Democracy Alliance, an organization funded by mega-rich donors such as George Soros and Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis.

Fallon said he expected Demand Justice to raise over $10 million this year. This summer, the group aired a reported 3,200 ads opposing Kavanaugh.

Last week, Fallon tweeted: “If Senate GOP ignores Dr. Blasey Ford and tries to muscle an attempted rapist onto the Supreme Court . . . [t]hey will pay dearly this November.” He added, ominously: “Kavanaugh will not serve for life.”

Demand Justice is funded by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, founded by former Clinton Administration staffer Eric Kessler. Kessler heads Arabella Advisors, which, as I previously reported, will manage half of the national portion of the settlement between the NFL and protesting players. Between 2012 and 2016, Sixteen Thirty Fund received over $2 million from Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.

Then there’s Seidman, who’s coaching Ford. Seidman was a top Justice Department official in the Clinton Administration. She was a senior investigator for Investigative Group International, founded by Terry Lenzner, chief private eye for the Clinton political machine. Dick Morris, once Bill Clinton’s chief strategist, called efforts at political espionage by Lenzner and the Clintons “a kind of secret police going on here,” “absolutely chilling.”

Seidman worked on the 1987 effort to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork, who was defamed by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) as a would-be segregationist and killer of women and by Senator Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) as a possible atheist and near-communist and person with a “strange” lifestyle.

In 1991, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then, at the last instant, out of the blue, accused of sexual misconduct. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Safire described her role:

Ricki Seidman, aide to that defender of womanhood, Senator Ted Kennedy, and James Brudney, aide to Senator Howard Metzenbaum, were tipped off by the legion of liberal activists digging for dirt that Professor Hill harbored a secret grudge against Judge Thomas. They called her and persuaded her to file the accusation that the reassembled Bork Brigade thought would surely bring him down. As the chosen instrument of the conspiracy to scare the nominee into withdrawing, Ms. Hill was assured by new and old friends that it could all be done from ambush; that her name would never be used publicly, or even made known to her target. . . . Thus was she manipulated into presenting a series of stories, each more vile and specific than the last, with the extensive help of some of the highest-priced legal talent and advocacy groups in Washington.

Safire noted that Hill was caught lying repeatedly. To back up her claims, she relied on a sham polygraph examination. Thomas supporters produced a “parade of former aides showing that the pattern of the accused’s life runs to the contrary.”

History repeats itself as tragedy, then as farce, or maybe the other way around. What has happened to Kavanaugh is farce. We’ll see if it ends in tragedy.

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