Another smear: Did Hillary try to block Nixon's impeachment?

Did a young Hillary Clinton try to block the impeachment of Richard Nixon?

That's what the progblogs say -- see DU here and Kos here. The controversy derives from this piece, which in turn comes from this report "exclusive to Accuracy in Media." AIM now has credibility on the left, it seems.

Here are a few typical prog-mob reactions:

Hillary has always been a GOP mole in the Democratic Party. She's sided so often with Republicans on issues I can think of no other rational explanation.

it does indicate that she had already developed her dishonest political hack streak by that time.

Naturally, these people didn't read the pieces closely.

In them, we find that Hillary (allegedly) acted as part of a group. Neither she nor any other members of this group were asked for a response to the current allegations. This fact tells you that we are dealing with propaganda.

A single source -- Jerry Zeifman -- is cited. This source does not say what the prog-bloggers think he says.

Even if we take this source at face value, he does not at any point indicate that Hillary had hoped to derail the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

To the contrary.

The piece says that Hillary was a low-level legal student working for her former law professor Burke Marshall (a man with a commanding reputation), special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Compared to those guys, Hillary was a go-fer.

These men (note the gender) argued that the constitution permitted denying Nixon legal counsel during House impeachment hearings.

A dubious argument? You bet. But how the hell does it constitute "derailing" impeachment?

It looks to me like Marshall and company were so anxious to drive the Trickster out of town that they were willing to convene a kangaroo court.

Oh, but it gets worse. The article twists the situation in order to smear not just Hillary, but JFK. Check it out:

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

It's amazing to me that progressives can unthinkingly accept nonsense of this sort.

Think about it: Even if Nixon were allowed no counsel, Hunt surely would have a lawyer during questioning. Regardless of which lawyers might have been in that room, Republican members of the committee could -- and probably would -- have attempted to ask Hunt embarrassing questions about other presidents.

If the Republicans sought such an opening, what might have happened next? In all likelihood, the committee chairman would have shut down that line of questioning as irrelevant.

Now presume that Nixon did have a lawyer present (as surely would have been the case, had impeachment gone forward). Presume that this lawyer tried to ask Hunt questions about JFK. What would have occurred? Same thing. The chairman would have banged a gavel, shouted "Irrelevant!" -- and everyone would have been forced to talk about Dick Nixon.

Everyone knows that E. Howard Hunt always despised JFK. If he had some grand, embarrassing revelation about the man, he would have unveiled it during his long retirement.

Not only that. At the time of the Watergate hearings, the assassination plots were already known. They had been exposed by a Drew Pearson column some six years earlier.

The Pearson leak prompted the CIA Inspector General to put together a report on CIA/Mafia collusion to kill Fidel Castro. Originally, only four men were allowed to read this report -- the IG, the two men who wrote it, and the ultimate client, Lyndon Johnson. LBJ also hated the Kennedys and had no desire to protect their legacy. In 1994, I came to know this report intimately because I was once involved with an attempt to publish it. Eventually, that publishing house folded and another concern put it out.

I include here the CIA's "bottom line" conclusions, taken directly from the published version. (The original document is typewritten -- pica, as I recall -- but the formatting resembles what you see here.) If you cannot read the words, click to enlarge.

Robert Kennedy did not know about the plots until after the fact.

Such was the Agency's internal conclusion, as conveyed in secret to Johnson: The Kennedys were innocent of the Castro assassination plans. Rest assured that this conclusion was reached with great reluctance -- the CIA always prefers to convey the image that they are simply the instrument of the President's will. In fact, they went "off the reservation" in their efforts to get Castro.

In more recent years, CIA personnel and Republican propagandists have twisted evidence in order to portray the Kennedys as the instigators of the assassination plans. Gus Russo -- the most deceptive bastard I have ever encountered -- wrote an entire book dedicated to presenting a thesis contrary to the one found in the 1967 IG report. He did not let his readers know what I knew -- that, during the writing of this book, he functioned at the behest of Richard Helms and other CIA veterans of the '60s, with whom he secretly met. ("They call me Gus!" he would gush to his friends.)

The smarmy purveyors of fake history have long targeted JFK and RFK. Now they smear Hillary Clinton -- picturing her as the woman who tried to "derail" the Nixon impeachment, even though she did no such thing.

And historically illiterate progs keep gobbling up these lies.