Scarborough: Bill Clinton’s the last man to complain about a “post-fact” world

Bill Clinton has lots of targets for his ire over the failure of Hillary Clinton to get another gig in the White House. Those include the FBI, the media, “angry white men,” and the existence of a “post-fact” world in which all of these combined to deny Bill another four-year lease in his old residence. Joe Scarborough couldn’t even read the quote out loud without laughing on today’s Morning Joe, and felt so strongly about Bill’s lack of credibility that he posted the lengthy clip to his Facebook page earlier today.Frank Bruni challenges Scarborough as to whether any of Bill’s lies were as “corrosive” as Trump’s tweets regarding the popular vote and other issues. Perhaps not, but they were a lot more dangerous, as Scarborough recalls from his days on the House Oversight Committee:

BRUNI: Did the lies reach that magnitude and have those sorts of implications in terms of faith in public institutions?

SCARBOROUGH: I would say — well, because the media didn’t cover in a real and meaningful way the most significant lies, I would say no, because they weren’t focusing on — for instance, when the largest contributor to the DNC had missile technology that he wanted to transfer to China. And Bill Clinton couldn’t get any of the — couldn’t get the DoD to approve it, he couldn’t get State to approve it, he couldn’t get the NSA to approve it, he couldn’t get anyone to approve it. So he went to Ron Brown at Commerce, who approved the transfer of advanced missile technology for his top donor to the DNC to China! I bet you, around this table and across America, there may be three people who remember that.

MIKE BARNICLE: Boy, I want to know if the statute of limitations has run on that.

SCARBOROUGH: But that’s the thing! This happened every week. And nobody gave a damn. That’s why, when I hear that ‘this is the first time this has ever happened,’ I sit there going, ‘Where were you from 1993 to 2001?’

Matthew Vadum and David Horowitz certainly recall that, as do a number of us who paid attention to the Clintons’ activities with China during that period. Vadum reminds his readers at Front Page of the machinations that gave China a 20-year boost in its military technology while putting cash into the pockets of Democrats:

Back in the 1990s, as longtime Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, now governor of Virginia, set records raising money for the Clintons. In that era congressional investigators unearthed an elaborate Communist Chinese money-laundering scheme.

Under it money was funneled to the Clinton organization through businesspeople, including Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie. In that case, 94 individuals either refused questioning, pled the Fifth Amendment, or fled the country. Trie accepted a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in 1999 in exchange for providing information about questionable campaign contributions from China.

McAuliffe helped a company called Loral Space get seats on official trade missions. He reportedly convinced the Clinton administration to overrule national security officials in order win approval for a Loral deal that gave Red China critical missile technology. Loral’s chief executive officer became the Democratic National Committee’s largest donor and McAuliffe became DNC chairman.

According to a Wall Street Journal account from Clinton days, a bipartisan congressional inquiry “found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles, and guidance systems. Targets of the spying ranged from an Army anti-tank weapon to nearly all modern fighter jets. Most wasn’t done by professionals, but by visitors or front companies. Lax security by the Clinton Administration is blamed in part, and satellite makers Hughes and Loral are criticized.”

McAuliffe found himself in the middle of another fundraising scandal a decade later, once again for the Clintons:

Eyebrows were raised in 2007 when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, chaired by McAuliffe, raised $380,000 at a single dinner event in New York City’s Chinatown.

A Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that most of the attendees at the $1,000-a-plate dinner were not registered to vote and listed low-paying jobs such as dishwasher on campaign filings, leading to the conclusion that restaurant workers were being “used as proxies by other big donors.”

DOJ started contacting attendees to inquire whether they were coerced into giving money or did it on their own volition. Many said they were pressured to attend the event by Chinatown neighborhood associations controlled by powerful Chinese families associated with criminal enterprises such as gambling rings and human trafficking.

Shortly after the campaign, McAuliffe became involved in GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company that relied on Chinese investors that were using a government program to receive visas in return for their investment.

The media paid some attention to all of these developments, but hardly with the same amount of righteous indignation that they are demonstrating over Trump’s tweets. Joe’s right about the differences in media coverage, and one can draw their own conclusions as to why it exists.