TOXIC QUESTIONS DOGGING HILLARY
Is Bill a serial sex attacker? Is she a husband-beating lesbian? Is Chelsea really Bill’s daughter? And does a billionaire paedophile have a secret hold over Bill?
FOR all the advice she had received about not looking too imperious and arrogant, at times Hillary Clinton could barely hide her disgust at having to defend her record as U.S. Secretary of State from such a miserable bunch of accusers.
On Thursday, in the most hotly anticipated Washington showdown for years, she was grilled for 11 hours by a Republican- dominated congressional committee investigating the 2012 killings by Islamic extremists of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
Millions of U.S. TV viewers watched agog. It wasn’t so much the answers to the tragedy they were interested in, although those are serious enough as Mrs Clinton is accused of failing to protect the four victims on her watch.
No, the real attention was focused on how Queen Hillary would respond to being hectored by a bunch of Republicans slavering to score political points and damage her standing in the polls.
She resisted the urge to throw anything and even managed the odd smile. But many Americans — even fellow Democrats — remain unconvinced by the famously slippery Hillary’s explanations, particularly over why she broke government rules by using a private email system rather than an official one during her time in office. And why she then deleted more than half of her 60,000 emails, falsely claiming they were all private.
Polls show 50 per cent of Americans do not buy her claim that it was an honest mistake.
Her opponents now see the email scandal as probably their last hope of s t opping Hill ary winning t he Democratic presidential nomination after this week’s decision by Vice-President Joe Biden not to run against her.
They fear that if she has to fight it out with the even more polarising Donald Trump as Republican contender, the U.S. will most likely get another Clinton term at the White House.
There is no doubt that conservative knives are out for Hillary — and they don’t come much sharper than an explosive new book published this week which aims to expose her hypocrisy i n claiming to be a champion for women.
In The Clintons’ War On Women, former senior Republican adviser Roger Stone — until recently a consultant on Donald Trump’s campaign — and historian Robert Morrow examine Mrs Clinton’s response to her priapic husband’s sexual conquests.
They say she masterminded ruthless efforts to silence the long string of women who claimed they were seduced — and even sexually assaulted — by him. And those sexual assault allegations, the book claims, started way back at Oxford University in the Sixties when a fellow student claimed she was attacked by Clinton, then a Rhodes scholar.
The authors also raise questions about Bill Clinton’s controversial post-White House relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile and friend of Prince Andrew.
As well as making new claims about Mrs Clinton’s volcanic temper and violent assaults on her philandering husband, they even sensationally claim that she may be bisexual and that her daughter, Chelsea, may not be Bill’s biological child.
Stone makes no bones about the aim of his book, which is sailing up the Amazon bestseller list. ‘I want to educate the American public before they make an egregious mistake,’ he told me.
While some of the allegations in his book have surfaced before, he says they have been swept under the carpet by a largely liberal U.S. media terrified of invoking the vindictive Clintons’ wrath. ‘People need to know the real Hillary. She’s not some smiling grandma. She’s a vicious, egomaniacal, extremely shorttempered witch,’ Stone said.
Most Americans probably don’t remember the host of scandals that swirled around the Clintons in 1998 as Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern, and her stained dress rocked America during Bill’s presidency. After Clinton brazenly — and falsely — announced on television: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman,’ Lewinsky testified how he had admitted to having hundreds of lovers.
As the new book makes clear, not of all them say they went willingly into Clinton’s clammy embrace.
The first allegation of sexual assault came in 1969 when Clinton was at Oxford, but it was only reported — and even then largely ignored — 30 years later.
A 19- tear- old student claimed Clinton assaulted her after she met him in a pub. Clinton, then 23, insisted they had consensual sex and the girl’s parents declined to pursue the case. It has never been clear why he never finished his degree, but the book claims he was eased out by university officials anxious — along with the U.S. State Department — to avoid a scandal over the alleged assault.
In his 2004 autobiography, Clinton made no mention of the 19-year-old, nor a string of other women who say he sexually assaulted them.
They included Kathleen Willey, a White House aide who claimed Clinton groped her in the Oval Office in 1993 and that he was ‘very forceful’. Clinton denied her accusations and Ms Willey later claimed she was s ubjected t o an i ntimidation campaign to stay quiet.
In a foreword for the new book, Ms Willey says she is disgusted that Mrs Clinton could soon be president, claiming she hired private detectives who burgled her home, threatened her and her children and even killed one of her cats.
Other women have echoed her claims of intimidation or punishment from the Clinton camp, saying they have lost jobs, been targeted by the taxman, received odd phone calls or had passers-by ask curious questions about the health of their children.
‘I was not the only one,’ Ms Willey writes. ‘ Every woman Hillary has found to be a threat to her and her husband’s political capital has been subjected to choreographed investigations and terror campaigns.’
Describing herself as a longtime supporter of the Clintons, she says that Mrs Clinton’s claim to be a champion of women’s rights is as much a sham as the couple’s image as ‘ambassadors of goodwill and progressivism’.
Paula Jones, an Arkansas state worker who won an $ 850,000 (£552,000) payout from Clinton after she accused him of exposing himself to her in a Little Rock motel room, has also criticised his wife’s White House bid.
She says: ‘There is no way that she did not know what was going on, that women were being abused and accosted by her husband. They have both lied.’
Clinton may have dodged a far more serious scandal, however, over his links with Jeffrey Epstein. The multi-millionaire financier, the book argues, was a shady character even without his penchant for underage girls and a man from whom any self-respecting ex-president would surely have run a mile.
In the early 2000s, Clinton took at least 11 trips on Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the Lolita Express for the orgies involving underage girls that reportedly took place on board. Court papers show Clinton gave Epstein 21 ways to contact him, including the mobile phone numbers of everyone close to him — everyone but Hillary.
Meanwhile, Virginia Roberts, the Epstein girl famously pictured with
‘A smiling gran? She’s a short tempered witch!’ ‘Women were being accosted. They both lied’
A date with Streisand sent her into a rage
She beat Bill with the Bible — and drew blood
Prince Andrew, said Epstein once t ol d her t hat Cli nton was a good friend ‘ because he owes me some favours’.
As Republican researchers look for ammunition in the coming election battle, they will no doubt ask why a woman who has spent her career campaigning for women and children’s rights should tolerate a husband who hung around with a paedophile accused of molesting girls as young as 14.
As for Mrs Clinton’s own l ove life, Morrow has claimed for years that her only child, Chelsea Clinton, now 35 and a mother, is not Bill’s daughter at all but the offspring of an affair between Hillary and her former law firm partner, Webster Hubbell.
Hubbell went on to become a key Clinton camp insider in the early years and was rewarded by being appointed Chief Justice of the Arkansas State Supreme Court. He was later jailed for fraud.
The evidence to support this outrageous claim — which originally came from a renegade Clinton associate named Larry Nichols — is not exactly compelling. The authors say she has never looked like Bill and instead looks remarkably like Hubbell. The ‘ genetic giveaway’, the book adds, is the ‘protruding large lower lip that both Hubbell and Chelsea possess’.
Citi ng a New York pl asti c surgeon, the book asserts that Chelsea had extensive cosmetic surgery i n her 20s, not only to make herself more attractive but also to hide the resemblance to Hubbell. It included reducing her ‘large rubbery Hubbell lips’.
As if that isn’ t outrageous enough, the Stone/Morrow book also gives room to rumours — floating around DC for years — that Mrs Clinton is a lesbian, or at least bisexual.
It claims she had several close lesbian friends at university and ci t es Gennifer Flowers, Bil l Clinton’s mistress for 12 years, who said he told her Hillary had always been cold in bed and had affairs with women.
Although Mrs Clinton’s savage temper has been reported previously, the new book provides further detail about a volatility that is said to have terrified her husband.
Even Bill Clinton’s former press officer, Dee Dee Myers, has admitted she used to have to cover for the First Lady, lying to the media in denying reports of domestic fights.
In the early years, when Clinton was governor of Arkansas, the couple’s state police bodyguards witnessed frequent battles. Some occurred after Mrs Clinton caught him going out on late-night drives to see other women.
On one occasion, she was waiting for him in the kitchen on his return. The ‘wild screaming match’ that followed woke up the entire mansion and involved ‘ broken glass, smashed dishes and a cupboard door ripped off its hinges’, the new book relates.
Mrs Clinton would often throw things — anything from notepads and files to car keys and Styrofoam coffee cups — at her husband as they sat in his official limo.
‘They’d be screaming at each other, real blue-in-the-face stuff,’ said one of their drivers. ‘But when the car pulled up to their destination it was all smiles and waving for the crowd.’
Barely a month after they arrived i n the White House i n 1993, a Chicago newspaper reported Mrs Clinton had smashed a lamp ‘during a late night argument with the president’.
In March of that year, when she flew off to be at her father’s deathbed in Little Rock, Arkansas, her husband entertained Barbra Streisand, one of his biggest celebrity admirers, at the White House.
When Hillary heard the singer had stayed the night, she returned home spitting with rage. The president was later seen with a livid scratch on his neck. ‘I’m the idiot who said he cut himself shaving before I’d seen him,’ said Dee Dee Myers. ‘Then I saw him — it was a big scratch, clearly not a shaving cut. Barbra Streisand was clearly around at the time.’
Although Stone and Morrow concentrate on the lesser-known Clinton sex scandals, they do mention Mrs Clinton’s reaction to the Lewinsky affair.
Staff heard the president begging forgiveness and Hillary slapping him so hard she left a red mark clearly visible to Secret Service agents when he left the room.
During the height of the scandal, a White House maid came across signs of another contretemps — blood all over the couple’s presidential bed led staff to conclude she had ‘clocked’ him with a book, possibly the Bible.
Staff—especially the Secret Servicemen, who Chelsea Clinton revealed were called ‘pigs’ by her parents — were also treated to her volcanic temper and surliness.
According to Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who worked in the Clinton White House, Mrs Clinton began hurling profanities at her husband from the day of his first inauguration when she learned she would not get the vice president’s office for herself.
He also documented her abuse of the men who had to be ready to give their lives to protect her.
‘Just stay the **** back, stay the **** away from me!,’ she told her Secret Service detail. ‘Don’t come within ten yards of me or else!’
Mrs Clinton, said Aldrich, was furious because they refused to carry her bags. Lt Col Buzz Patterson, a former Clinton White House military aide, says that foul-mouthed Hillary could be ‘harsh, difficult and unpredictable’ and had such a temper she ‘could rip your heart out’.
The ‘knockdown’ fights continued after the Clintons left the White House in 2001 with Secret Servicemen talking of ‘dreadful altercations’ at least five times in the following four years.
It’s deeply ironic, says Roger Stone, that Mrs Clinton now speaks out against domestic violence.
Stone admits there i s some unsubstantiated Washington gossip in his book, which is already being dismissed by Mrs Clinton’s hardcore supporters — known as Hillaryland — as a vicious and cynical hatchet job.
The Clintons have declined to comment on the book, but it’s obvious that even their political allies are beginning to question Hillary’s presidential suitability.
Only this week, the liberal New York Times ran a prominent story criticising her shifting defence of her email arrangements and another querying the integrity of the family’s philanthropic empire, the Clinton Foundation.
Clinton campaign insiders reportedly say she is keen to distance herself from her loose cannon of a husband, who in 2008 was accused of making racist remarks about his wife’s opponent, Barack Obama.
But i f even a fraction of the contents of the latest book about this scandal-plagued couple is true, perhaps it is her own toxic image she should be worrying about.