A Journalistic Lynch Mob
Sometimes the news just makes itself.
Breitbart.com, which has been known to spread fact-bereft, right-wing nonsense all over the Internet, just made news, while it thought it was reporting it.
“Obama’s attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch represented Clintons during Whitewater,” said their overly-long headline atop an article the day before Lynch was officially nominated by President Obama.
To most people, the fact that she’d supposedly been part of Clinton’s Whitewater defense team back in 1992, would have little relevance today.
To Breitbart.com, and to its reporter – Warner Todd Huston – that represented a bombshell.
He also claimed that Lynch had been a Clinton “campaign aide.”
Huston was implying that working on a presidential candidate’s campaign, and then becoming a U.S. Attorney General is some kind of political sin.
If that’s the case, then Robert Kennedy, who worked on his older brother’s campaign, and John Mitchell, who worked on Richard Nixon’s campaign were sinners.
For the record, they were not – at least for working on presidential campaigns, then becoming the nation’s top attorney.
The day following Breitbart.com’s supposed revelation that Obama’s selection for attorney general had been a closet Clintonite, its senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollak, excitedly wrote, “The connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch’s confirmation hearings.”
There was a distinct problem with Breitbart.com’s “scoop.”
Loretta Lynch may have been a vital part of the Clinton brain trust in the early 1990s, but that Loretta Lynch, isn’t the one Obama nominated.
Clinton’s Loretta Lynch is white. The woman Obama wants to become the nation’s next Attorney General is an African-American.
Unless she’s had some kind of race-change (I’m pretty sure that’s not medically possible) Loretta Lynch has no connection to Whitewater.
So, when Breitbart.com discovered it made a huge mistake by sullying the image of the wrong person, you’d think they would have cleared it up.
That is, they’d remove the entire online article as if it had never existed.
They didn’t.
Oh, they added the word “(CORRECTED)” to the end of that original headline. And they added this at the bottom of the article: “Correction: The Loretta Lynch identified earlier as the Whitewater attorney was, in fact a different attorney.”
Yet, they left the entire body of the story intact, without making any changes to it, before it was eventually removed.
Until then, right wingers, eager to find any bad Obama news, could revel in another (supposed) Obama blunder.
It was posted long enough for another right wing “news” site, World Net Daily, to pick it up and run with it.
“Obama AG pick was a Clinton ‘bimbo eruption’ fixer,” said the headline atop World Net Daily’s story about the WRONG Loretta Lynch.
According to World Net Daily reporter Aaron Klein’s story, “Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to become the next attorney general, once worked for Bill Clinton’s campaign, where it turns out she co-authored a memo aimed at discrediting alleged mistress Gennifer Flowers, and stopping any news of her claims.”
For the record, the Obama’s Loretta Lynch had been nominated by Clinton to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1999.
She sailed through confirmation by a unanimous voice-vote, and served until 2001.
She was nominated again by President Obama for the same position in 2010, and, once again, she was confirmed by a unanimous voice-vote.
During both of her terms, she was known as a tough prosecutor, who earned a number of high-profile convictions.
She’d successfully prosecuted members of the notorious MS-13 gang, and, if you’ll remember the movie “Goodfellas,” she reopened the case of five suspects in the 1978 Lufthansa heist, which was chronicled in that movie.
If she’s confirmed, she’ll be the first African American woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General.
She’ll also be only the second woman to serve in that capacity.
Given the state of today’s politics, she could have a difficult time getting Senate approval.
She’ll most likely have to face stiff questioning in the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee – where somebody might ask her about her work on the Clinton campaigns.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net