Times Touts Fake Right Site
by DCDave

Page A4 of today's Washington Times, in a section labeled "On Media," has this headline: "New Web site focuses on Clinton scandals." What follows is 17 column inches of free, totally uncritical advertising for the new web site nominally attributed to the infamous David Bossie who "...was forced to resign in May after a complex Capitol Hlll flap. Under Chairman Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, the committee publicly released doctored transcripts of Webster Hubbell's jailhouse conversations, which cast the first lady in a poor light, indeed."

"President Clinton called the edited material a 'violation' of Mr. Hubbell's privacy."

"Yet Mr. Bossie has enjoyed a reputation as a straight shooter among many Hill denizens and media members."

Really? Here's what I have to say about him in Part 5 of "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster."

More Spooks?

Before leaving the subject of apparent cloak-and-daggery involved in the Foster "political firestorm," we must mention a couple of very curious organizations showcased by Moldea. Referring to a March 13, 1994, article in The Washington Post, he writes, "(Michael) Isikoff also spotlights Floyd Brown, the chairman of Citizens United, a nonprofit conservative group, which has hired two ‘full-time investigators' to investigate Foster's death. One of the investigators is David Bossie, known by some as a young ‘attack dog' who has been brought on, specifically, to investigate President Clinton in a practice known as ‘opposition research.'" He also reminded us that Brown had been behind the production of the Willie Horton commercials which played on racial fears and made Michael Dukakis, in his presidential campaign against George Bush in 1988, appear to be soft on crime.

That Isikoff article--and particularly that passage-- had jumped out at me when I first read it, but certainly not because I believed it was true. I surmised that what I was witnessing was the propaganda technique that would later reach its finest flower in the Moldea book. The Post, I suspected, was intentionally showcasing Citizens United to give the group free publicity, building them up as legitimate, though unscrupulous, overzealous, and exceptionally-partisan conservative opponents of Bill Clinton. Those thinking of themselves as conservative would then gravitate toward the group rather than form their own groups while everyone else would be given an easy explanation as to where all these scurrilous, irresponsible and unfounded charges against the Clintons might be coming from. For their part, Brown and his group could be counted on the create a lot of sound and fury primarily about minor and complicated Clinton financial shenanigans centered around the joint vacation-home investment with the McDougals known as Whitewater, with perhaps a sexual peccadillo or two thrown in for spice.

These were my suspicions because, active as I was in looking into the Clinton administration misdeeds by this time and although I lived and worked in the Washington area, I had never heard of Citizens United. Most importantly, in the small world of people nosing into the Foster death the paths of the "two full-time investigators" had never crossed mine. Bossie had not been named as one of them, as Moldea implies, and, at any rate, I had not heard of him either. I also wondered how, if they were spending so much time on the case they were yet to come up with anything that had been made public, considering all there was to come up with.. I tracked down a phone number for the group and called them, asking them who the two Foster investigators were. The woman on the other end of the line didn't know what I was talking about and couldn't find anyone there at that moment who did. I requested that she have one of their two investigators call me so we could compare notes should she ever ferret him out and asked her to send me some of the group's material. I never heard from the "investigators," but I did get some material from them although it took at least a month to arrive. The literature was slick and expensive-looking, with a number of boxes to check at the bottom of the last page for how much money I would send them, ending on the top end at some outrageously high figure, but the disclosures of Clinton misdeeds were so bland and the organization had been so languid in responding to my initial inquiry, one had to wonder why anyone would be moved to send them a dime. The distinct impression left with the perceptive reader was that the plea for contributions was there to give the group some visible means of support. To this day I have never read or heard of the first thing with respect to the Foster case that this organization has ever uncovered or publicized.

Later when I learned that Bossie had ended up, in spite of his lack of legal, law-enforcement or even journalistic experience, as Rep. Burton's chief investigator of the Clinton scandals, I was not at all surprised. I was even less surprised when he turned out to be the guy held responsible for the Burton-discrediting selective release of Webb Hubbell's prison tapes. It is no less than what one should expect of a fake-right operative.

You can read all of "Dreyfus" on this site. You will never see that URL given in The Washington Times like the Bossie site that they give us in their article. They tell us further, with breathless enthusiasm, that "With no more publicity than a mention in Roll Call last Friday, his new Web site has already been visited by 500 users."

With this article they are doing their best to elevate that number.

David Martin, September 27, 1998

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