After the Washington Post last week published a glossed-over history of how Hillary Clinton “wrestled with” allegations of her husband Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs in the run-up to his 1992 run for president, our own Andrew Ferguson tried to fill in the gaps in the Post‘s story. Here’s an excerpt:
“By July 1992, the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations.” Interesting, no? But then the Post article drops the story. Palladino vanishes, never to be mentioned again. Yet he is too interesting a character for a mere walk-on. It was Hillary, says Sheehy, who got the idea to hire Palladino. She had known him during law school, from her brief internship in a left-wing law firm in San Francisco, where he had worked for the Black Panthers and other prominent clients.
Following Ferguson’s lead, a New York Times piece from this weekend delves deeper into Palladino, and Hillary’s role in hiring him. Here’s Times reporter Megan Twohey describing the decision by the Clinton campaign, in the wake of allegations from Gennifer Flowers that the former Arkansas governor had carried on an affair with her:
Weeks later, a small group of campaign aides, along with Mrs. Clinton, met at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, and they made a pivotal decision: They would hire Jack Palladino, a private investigator known for tactics such as making surreptitious recordings and deploying attractive women to extract information. An aide to the campaign, who declined to be publicly identified because the aide had not been authorized to speak for the Clintons, said Mrs. Clinton was among those who had discussed and approved the hiring, which shifted the campaign to a more aggressive posture. Mr. Kantor, the campaign chairman, said he did not know whether Mrs. Clinton had specifically approved Mr. Palladino’s employment as the other aide recalled. But he said that she had seen a need for outside help. “She believed we had to deal with the issue directly,” Mr. Kantor said.
Read the whole thing here.
