Hillary and Brian slide down the ladder Simon says: It's time to ponder the question of trust.

All Americans face a lot of questions each day, but one really intrigues me.

Who do you trust?


A. Brian Williams

B. Hillary Clinton

Both are important public figures. Both have been accused of deception. Both admit they made mistakes. Both now ask for your forgiveness and your trust.

But does either one deserve it?

On several occasions, Williams, the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” said he was riding in a U.S. helicopter when it was forced down by enemy fire over Iraq in 2003.

This was not true, however. Crew members who were aboard the downed helicopter got tired of hearing the story and told Stars and Stripes that Williams “was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire.”

Williams then made an oddly worded recantation. “I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” he said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another. … I want to apologize.”

Williams had just signed a five-year extension of his $10 million per year contract and was not terribly worried. The network had made a huge investment in him, and he paid that back by earning the public’s trust.

On television, trust is a commodity. Find a news anchor whom viewers will trust and viewers will watch that person night after night. Sponsors like that. If people trust the anchors and trust their shows, maybe people will trust the products the sponsors are selling.

Some think news anchors are more powerful than elected officials because news anchors are not seen as having a partisan agenda. So people trust them even more.

And when Williams extended his contract for that dazzling amount of money, Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, said he was one of “the most trusted journalists of our time.”

True, NBC was forced to suspend him without pay for six months, a suspension that is due to expire in August.

But in the suspension announcement, Steve Burke, the CEO of NBCUniversal, said Williams “deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him. Brian has shared his deep remorse with me and he is committed to winning back everyone’s trust.”

Trust. Trust. Trust. There’s that word again.

But NBC has launched an investigation into other “embellishments” Williams may have made over the years and, according to one account, some members of the NBC News Washington bureau have said they do not want him back as anchor because they do not trust him.

As a friend once told me about an ambitious colleague, “He doesn’t think he has to be nice to people when he is going up the ladder because he doesn’t intend ever to go back down the ladder.”

Down the ladder for Williams would be the loss of his anchor chair. For Hillary Clinton it could mean the loss of the presidency.

There was her own helicopter ride in Bosnia in 1996. (I don’t know what it is about helicopter rides and fibbing. Maybe the vibrations scramble people’s brains.) In 2008, she said: “I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia. There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the first lady.

“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Uh … no. That never happened.

There was no sniper fire at the airport during her visit. In fact, Clinton went through a reception line and took pictures with people. She never ran anyplace with her head down because there were no snipers firing at her.

Her public schedule indicates she was greeted by the president of Bosnia, the United States ambassador, two senior United States military officials, an 8-year-old girl and a seventh-grade class.

When the truth was revealed, Clinton was forced to say she “misspoke.”

A minor matter, perhaps. But, as with Williams, it raised questions about how much she could be trusted.

Today’s New Hillary is supposed to be “just plain folks.” She is not supposed to act like she is “entitled” or is playing by a different set of rules.

But a recent editorial in The New York Times described a possibly hinky uranium deal in which the Clinton Foundation got a $2.35 million donation but did not publicly disclose it “even though Mrs. Clinton had signed an agreement with the Obama administration requiring the foundation to disclose all donors as a condition of her becoming secretary of state.”

“This failure,” the editorial said, “is an inexcusable violation of her pledge.”

There have been other incidents including Hillary’s hilarious claim that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House — they were multimillionaires — that has chipped away at her “truthiness.”

The public is now judging both Clinton and Williams.

I began this column with a choice:

Who do you trust?

A. Brian Williams

B. Hillary Clinton

Maybe I should add:

C. None of the above

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.