The speech Clinton didn’t give on Sept. 11

June 15, 2007

Drudge has been touting his latest Clinton “scandal,” this time accusing the former president of giving a for-profit speech for Asian investors on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Like far too many Drudge “scoops,” this one’s false.

Drudge told readers:

FORMS REVEAL: Bill Clinton commemorated the 5th anniversary of 9/11with a paid $100,000 speech [via satellite] to a group of investors in Hong Kong attending a forum about personal wealth….

Not surprisingly, this just isn’t true. It’s all about different time zones.

Clinton’s press office now says that although it was Sept. 11 in Hong Kong, he gave the speech from his home in Chappaqua on Sept. 10 at 8:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time. According to Jay Carson, Clinton’s spokesman, the former president’s entire public schedule on Sept. 11 was as follows:

In the morning, he flew from Chappaqua to Washington DC, where, from 9:15 AM to about 12:00 pm, he gave a free speech to a charity called the United Jewish Communities Conference.

He then flew back to Newark, and from 2:15 pm to 3:30 pm, he attended the Struggle Against Terrorism Monument unveiling in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he delivered the keynote speech.

Drudge was still pushing the story, more than 12 hours after it had been debunked.

As for how this bogus story got circulated in the first place, that’s an even bigger disappointment.

Greg Sargent explains.

We’ve just obtained an email that shows that the Obama campaign yesterday circulated a negative, and ultimately false, story about Bill Clinton — that he allegedly made money giving a speech on September 11, 2006.

Campaigns, of course, circulate negative stuff about each other all the time. This email is unusual in that it is flagging something potentially negative not about a primary rival but about the former President — one who obviously isn’t running in the Democratic primary and who remains popular with Dem primary voters. […]

The email, which was sent out by Jen Psaki of the Obama campaign and circulated to reporters (not us) on an off-the-record basis late yesterday, details some things that the Obama campaign found in Hillary’s financial disclosure documents, which were released yesterday…. One of the things the email points to was the fact that Bill Clinton allegedly gave a for-profit speech on Sept. 11 — something that presumably would be likely seen as controversial.

If it were true. Which it is not.

Now, I don’t mind that top-tier presidential campaigns are going to scrutinize rivals’ disclosure forms; that’s pretty normal. I’m less comfortable with top-tier presidential campaigns going after a rival candidate’s spouse, though with the Clintons, the circumstances are a little unorthodox.

But what really bugs me is that the Obama team got the story wrong. They dug up some dirt, dished it, but screwed it up and hit a very popular former president for something he did not do.

I seriously doubt Barack Obama personally signed off on this kind of thing — no candidate can micromanage that kind of operation — but it’s up to the candidate to establish a style for his or her campaign. During the unproductive Geffen flap a couple of months ago, Obama said he’d direct his campaign not to engage in these kinds of political games anymore.

Note to Obama: it might be time for another chat with the team. This one was cheap and ugly.

Good Lord, even if it had been on September 11th, it isn’t as if he was giving a speech to the Taliban at the Afghan Hilton. Isn’t this story ethereal enough to just dissipate? Drudge will send any scurrilous story up the flagpole.

  • And never, never, NEVER enable a Republican operative like Drudge. Obama stop that buck!

  • OK, lemonade from lemons: as frequently (or infrequently) as this happens, the forensic pathology is becoming as important as the act itself – who said what to whom, and when?

    Now I’ve got a specific person to whom I can direct inquires – Ms Psaki, why did you send this out? Who told you it was a good idea? Mr Fundraiser, I’d love to give you some $, but can you tell me why this occurred? And who thought this was a good thing to do?

    A chat with the team, indeed. Catching these things and exposing for what they are has two consequences – better-managed campaigns, and further marginalization of Drudge. Slow but sure, like water on the rocks, the rocks always lose in the end.

    -GFO

  • One might expect Edwards to benefit from ‘the rule of three’ in this case, except for the falsehood of the claim, and the fact Bill and Hillary are not the same person. My analysis- This helps Hillary.

    Obama’s candidacy, like Guiliani’s already has one huge problem- a last name ending with a vowel, and a vowel that isn’t e. Make no mistake, there’s a reason ambitious young William Blythe changed his name to Clinton.

    Can somebody explain to me why Obama is supposed to be so awesome? What has he done that makes him so great? Beat Allen Keyes?

  • It’ll be surprising if this kind of bullshit will still fly among people who can think for themselves. As for myself, invoking 9/11 has lost the patriotic feeling I had for several months after that day. Anymore when I hear 9/11 all it means to me is that the Bush misadministration used that fateful day to further their corrupt and incompetent political agenda resulting in the ruination of America. The flag I flew in front of my house after 9/11 came down in March 2003 on the day W invaded Iraq and will not fly again until Bush, Cheney, and all the garbage that goes with them are out of power and this country can start moving in the right direction once again. So really who cares if Clinton or anyone else goes out on 9/11 to make themselves a few bucks, play 18 holes, or even spend the day at the local tavern?

  • Bill Clinton, for all practical purposes, is a private citizen and what he does to earn a living on any given day is not of any great import.

    Whipping on Bill Clinton for his speech-making fees has been a favorite of the right for a while; when I heard this I had to ask myself how much another former President made on 9/11 with his position in the Carlyle Group?

  • I strongly suspect this didn’t come from anyone at Obama’s team either, precisely because of how “cheap and ugly” it is. It sounds exactly like a conservative smear job and that’s probably exactly what it is. Haven’t we seen this once before recently, where conservatives produced a false and defamatory story about one of the Dem candidates, and when the story was exposed as false and defamatory, said it was circulated by another Dem candidate?

    And not only is it cheap and ugly, but isn’t it incredibly irrelevant? I mean, if someone dug through all of the Clintons’ finances and the worst they could come up with is this, shouldn’t they be keeping their traps shut? This says far more about the true motivations of the people doing the investigating than it does about the Clintons.

  • Oh, and if this did come from some misguided Obama campaign staffer, it’s probably a good idea for the Democrats to adopt their own version of Reagan’s 11th commandment: don’t speak ill of other Democrats. I’m all for diversity of ideas but this is petty character assassination, and worse, as SKNM said, it enables the GOP mud-slingers. We shouldn’t be going after our own like that, it’s incredibly debased and unprincipled.

  • Well, given that the counsel for the Obama campaign came out in favor of a pardon for Libby, and even though he backpedaled and said this was his personal view and he was not speaking for Obama, you have to wonder why someone in the campaign is running at the mouth like that. Where’s the discipline? Why aren’t the campaign staff hewing to the candidate’s position, instead of going public with their own opinions – opinions I really don’t care about? If Obama expects to be taken seriously that he wants to elevate the tone of the race, and stick to the real issues, he needs to make sure that message has filtered all the way down to the person who puts the new rolls of toilet paper on.

    I understand that the Obama campaign must be frustrated at not being able to overtake Hillary among the Dems running, while at the same time, seeing polls that show she can’t beat the GOP in a head-to-head and he can – but that’s not going to hold up if he doesn’t get it together with his staff.

  • Obama’s stock has fallen precipitously in my book. Between this and his no show on the Gonzo no-con vote, he’s gone from one of my top picks to crowding Biden for hold the nose support.

    He claims to be a leader, then fails to show up for a vote on a measure he co-sponsored. He claims to want to run a different kind of campaign, then goes for smear by association. There’s plenty of time for him to turn things around, but for right now, my feelings toward him are somewhere between disappointed and disgusted.

  • Can somebody explain to me why Obama is supposed to be so awesome? What has he done that makes him so great? Beat Allen Keyes?

    I’ve asked this before myself, and from the reports his speeches are some kind of super-awesome, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. People actually appreciated that he went to Detroit and gave them a bitter pill. In another speech people actually appreciated that he demanded their donations – the point of that being that their individual donations frees him from needing to take money from special interests. He has asks people to sacrifice for the good of their country, something Bush failed to do utterly, and he sells hope so well He’s a populist, kind of like Dean in 2004, but way better, and inspires the Democratic base far more than the other candidates. YouTube his 2004 convention keynote, you’ll get an idea.

  • I just heard Senator Obama at a fundraiser in San Francisco, and he is a great speaker. The main thing that attracts me to him is the same thing that made Dean attractive: He says what he means, and he means what he says. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I’d give a lot to have an honest man of conviction as President. He’s also hell’a smart (although not as smart, I think, as Bill Clinton.)

  • What Walt said. Who cares if he gave the speech in September 11 or on Bloomsday? The wonder isn’t that Drudge lied but that he’s so desperate that he’d lie about this. No sane person cares about this kind of triviality.

  • Reminds me a bit of the 1992 campaign documentary “The War Room.” One sequence has Carville & Stephanopolous salivating over the revelation that Bush senior had some signs printed overseas… or something. The whole “controversy” amounted to nothing. It would be completely forgotten today except that the movie preserved it as an example of how campaigns seize on trivial nonsense.

  • I know I’m old-fashioned, but I’d give a lot to have an honest man of conviction as President.

    We’ve had a “man of conviction” for President since 2000 and that’s done nothing but make things worse, since for all his conviction he’s an inexperience incompetent. I want somone whose staff isn’t a gaggle of incompetent halfwitted assholes, which Obama’s staff certainly closely resembles right now, if they aren’t that exactly.

    All this shows is that the man should have waited until he’d at least gotten himself re-elected to the Senate and had some actual experience in doing things. He talks the talk, but with things like the no-show on Gonzales (among others) along with this sort of mismanagement of his team, he certainly demonstrates an inability to walk the walk. Obama is coming closer and closer to looking like the Democratic equivalent of Fred Thompson (“I can certainly play the role of President.”)

    As a famous Democrat said 23 years ago: “Where’s the beef?”

    I take no pleasure in coming to this conclusion, because I wanted to support this man at the outset.

  • I know I’m old-fashioned, but I’d give a lot to have an honest man of conviction as President.

    We’ve had a “man of conviction” for President since 2000 and that’s done nothing but make things worse, since for all his conviction he’s an inexperienced incompetent. I want somone whose staff isn’t a gaggle of incompetent halfwitted assholes, which Obama’s staff certainly closely resembles right now, if they aren’t that exactly.

    All this shows is that the man should have waited until he’d at least gotten himself re-elected to the Senate and had some actual experience in doing things. He talks the talk, but with things like the no-show on Gonzales (among others) along with this sort of mismanagement of his team, he certainly demonstrates an inability to walk the walk. Obama is coming closer and closer to looking like the Democratic equivalent of Fred Thompson (“I can certainly play the role of President.”)

    As a famous Democrat said 23 years ago: “Where’s the beef?”

    I take no pleasure in coming to this conclusion, because I wanted to support this man at the outset.

  • Reminds me a bit of the 1992 campaign documentary “The War Room.” One sequence has Carville & Stephanopolous salivating over the revelation that Bush senior had some signs printed overseas… or something. The whole “controversy” amounted to nothing. It would be completely forgotten today except that the movie preserved it as an example of how campaigns seize on trivial nonsense.
    The Bush campaign had been pounding its chest about protecting American workers, but outsourced its campaign materials. Hardly a trivial issue. In fact, look closely at the materials of the current crop of candidates. You’ll see that they all have a tiny ‘bug’ somewhere, proving that it was produced not only in the US, but by a union shop.

    This Clinton thing is lame and cheap, but “The War Room” scene is the wrong comparison.

  • WTF? Why would it even matter if the story were true? So what if Clinton gave a speech on 9/11? What’s the difference if the speech had been on 12/7, Pearl Harbor Day?

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