| | | I've never felt pity for her - not for a second.
As a lawyer in the 1970s, Hillary Clinton defended a child rapist. Is it disturbing that in a taped interview recorded years later she is heard laughing over how she succeeded in securing a more lenient sentence for him? It’s hardly unusual for a criminal trial lawyer to gossip about a courtroom triumph on behalf of a less than admirable client, often with gallows humor and over drinks after a hard day’s work.
But it’s highly unusual for a lawyer to boast and laugh about such a circumstance in an on-the-record interview with a journalist—and pretty much jaw-dropping when the lawyer is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
According to a report in the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon—which includes six minutes of audio of Clinton’s interview with veteran Arkansas journalist Roy Reed—the once and probably future presidential candidate does just that, laughing at times in her account of a 1975 case in which she used a technicality to get a lenient sentence for her client, a 41-year-old accused rapist of a 12-year-old girl.
Clinton’s client, a factory worker, was facing a 30-year prison sentence if convicted of luring the girl into his automobile, plying her with alcohol and sexually assaulting her. Instead, he was able to cop a plea, admitting to the unlawful fondling of a child, and ended up being sentenced to a year behind bars, with two months reduced for time served, the Free Beacon reported, noting that he died in 1992.
At various points on the tape—which the Free Beacon says it unearthed from newly discovered archives of Clinton-related recordings housed at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville—Arkansas’ then-first lady is heard laughing about the police investigators’ incompetent mishandling of bloody underwear, potential evidence that the prosecutor was forced to discard. The interview was conducted for an Esquire magazine profile that never saw print, the Free Beacon reported.
For a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state who touts her decades-long record of championing women and children, this snapshot of her legal career is—to put it mildly— way off-message. A Clinton spokesman offered no comment concerning the Free Beacon’s report.
But on Facebook, where Washington Post political and cultural reporter Melinda Henneberger posted the Free Beacon story, the response to the Clinton tape has been overwhelmingly negative, suggesting that the revelation is potentially damaging to Clinton’s finely crafted image.
“This is beyond disturbing,” wrote veteran GQ magazine political correspondent Lisa DePaulo. |
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