I know that the title is clunky.  The problem is that every alternate headline that I came up with made it sound like Hillary Clinton raped a twelve year old girl.  Which is not true.

Well, possibly for a given value of ‘not true.’

Hillary Clinton is known as a champion of women and girls, but one woman who says she was raped as a 12-year-old in Arkansas doesn’t think Hillary deserves that honor. This woman says Hillary smeared her and used dishonest tactics to successfully get her attacker off with a light sentence — even though, she claims, Clinton knew he was guilty.

The victim in the 1975 sexual abuse case that became Clinton’s first criminal defense case as a 27-year-old lawyer has only spoken to the media once since her attack, a contested, short interaction with a reporter in 2008, during Clinton’s last presidential campaign run. Now 52, she wants to speak out after hearing Clinton talk about her case on newly discovered audio recordings from the 1980s, unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon[*] and made public this week.

Quick background, for people who don’t know: twelve year old was raped in Arkansas. At the 1975 trial, Hillary Clinton (defense attorney) made various claims about the victim, played a bunch of procedural games with the physical evidence, and managed to get her client a plea on a lesser charge that ended up with him in jail for a year, with two months time served.  The victim? …Had and has a hard life.

I know, I know: horrible people deserve lawyers, too.  Certainly Hillary Clinton’s defenders have been quick on the draw with that excuse**.  But it is an awkwardness for the Democratic party that most people don’t really agree that horrible people deserve lawyers who will push the edges of professional ethics while literally laughing it up, which is pretty much what the aforementioned audio recordings demonstrate Hillary Clinton did. We expect more delicacy from a defense attorney in a rape case involving children.  We also expect more than ten months in jail for somebody who’d rape a kid. And while you can maybe see how a desperate public defender might feel obligated to go this distance, the truth of the matter is that Hillary Clinton did not have to take this case. It’s fair to say that she had agency.

Note, by the way, that I do not claim that Hillary Clinton broke the law; I’m even willing to believe that a truly impartial investigation might show that she didn’t even quite break any code of professional ethics that Clinton might have perfunctorily signed off on. What I will say, however, is that Hillary Clinton apparently is remarkably lacking shame for doing something that would probably have kept me up at night for a decade. I marvel at such a… resilient… conscience – while at the same time wanting to keep the owner of it far, far away from the Oval Office.  The last six years have shown us what happens when you have a President who is truly indifferent to any suffering resulting from his actions.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*The Washington Free Beacon has since been ‘banned’ from those archives.  I say ‘banned’ because WFB Editor in Chief Matt Continetti pretty much told the University of Arkansas Friend Of Hillary that engineered said ‘banning’ Catch us if you can.  While their lawyer said I will destroy you!  …The Washington Free Beacon will end up on my Christmas card list, at this rate.

**Presumably said defenders are waiting to see whether this story takes off before they go after the victim’s life since her traumatic childhood rape and betrayal by the American criminal justice system.