A ‘conservative’ news website in America was so keen to pour scorn on President Barack Obama’s nomination of what would be the nation’s first Black female Attorney-General that they dredged up the misdeeds of the wrong person.
President Obama made some political news over the weekend by nominating federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch to replace outgoing Attorney-General Eric Holder.
The announcement sent media staffers scrambling to better understand Lynch’s political views based on the likelihood that she will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Quick-off-the-mark conservative news website Breitbart.com unearthed a potentially controversial line in Lynch’s biography: “Obama’s new attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch represented Clintons during Whitewater,” read a headline from Breitbart’s Warner Todd Houston. Houston wrote:
“In 1992, the Clintons came under fire for investing in a perennially failing Arkansas real estate company known as Whitewater Development, a venture heavily subsidized by Clinton friend Jim McDougal in an effort to soften the losses the Clintons were experiencing as investors. The probe was widened to look into the failure of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan to which it was connected. Eventually the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission won several convictions handing jail time to the McDougals as well as Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker.
The Clintons escaped any convictions in the probe.
A New York Times article from March of 1992 reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons’ Whitewater defense (sic) attorneys as well as a campaign aide.”
The problem is the Loretta Lynch involved in Whitewater is a law graduate from Yale who worked on several political campaigns, including Clinton’s, according to her biography. She served as president of the California Public Utilities Commission from 2000-02 and as a commissioner until 2005. And she is white.
Breitbart published a brief correction, but initially left the original story up. Later, it deleted the story, though it had already spread to other conspiracy, opinion and conservative news websites like WND, Sodahead.com and the American Thinker.
The Loretta Lynch nominated to replace Holder began working as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York in 1990, so she couldn’t have been part of Clinton’s defense a few years later. According to her official biography, Harvard Law School graduate Lynch was appointed by Obama on May 3, 2010, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, an office she previously led from 1999 to 2001.
