The media silence is deafening.
There has been much media ado about a jet plane that has been gifted from the government of Qatar to President Donald Trump. The President, he the Commander in Chief, quickly made clear that while he would use it as a previously scheduled new Air Force One is being readied, the plane would eventually be passed on to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Yet there is Hillary Clinton out there saying this:
No one gives someone a $400 million jet for free without expecting anything in return. Be serious.
And the liberal media opens up with a dump-fest on Trump. Samples?
The HuffPost: Hillary Clinton Bludgeons Trump With Pure Truth About Qatar Jet Gift
The Daily Beast: Hillary Clinton Weighs in on Qatar’s ‘Free’ Gift to Trump
The Hill: Hillary Clinton on Trump Qatar jet: ‘Be serious’
And there was, of course, more of this kind of thing. Isn’t that interesting?
It does seem that Hillary has, shall we say, something of a short memory. And, no surprise, so does the liberal media.
Here, for example, is this Fox News headline from 2016: Clinton Foundation admits it didn’t notify State Department of $1 million Qatar gift
Here is another headline from a pillar of the lib media – CBS. This is from a CBS report back there in the Stone Age of 2002. The CBS headline: Clinton Gifts Called ‘Disturbing’
Back then CBS was reporting as follows.
Expensive gifts poured into the Clinton White House in the weeks between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the Senate from New York and her swearing-in last year, according to a new congressional investigation.
The congressman who oversaw the investigation called Sen. Clinton’s acceptance of the gifts “disturbing at best.”
At a Tuesday hearing, Rep. Doug Ose, R-Calif., said, “The current system is broken and needs to be fixed.”
He said his investigators found undervalued gifts, others that were never reported and still more that disappeared.
The examination of gifts to the Clintons also found that 17 separate gifts of china, cutlery and furniture worth more than $75,000 arrived in December 2000 alone, at a time when the Clintons were looking to furnish two newly purchased homes, one each in Washington and Chappaqua, N.Y.
…The Clintons took with them $360,000 worth of large gifts when they left the White House in January 2001, according to the yearlong investigation by a House Government Reform subcommittee. The Clintons also left with additional gifts too small to trigger public disclosure.
Then there was this from Red State:
Hillary Clinton Rips Trump Over Qatar Plane, Gets Slapped With Reminder of the Gifts She Accepted.
The story reports of the gifts to Hillary and presidential hubby Bill:
One such gift came from – you guessed it – Qatar.
Reuters reported on a $1 million donation sent in 2011 by Qatari officials to the Clinton Foundation in honor of her husband’s birthday. The Foundation was forced to confirm that it received the gift from Qatar “without informing the State Department,” while Clinton was Secretary of State, after hacked emails published by Wikileaks years later revealed they wanted to meet Bill in person to hand him the check.
According to the same report, the Qatari government had donated up to $5 million to the foundation over the years, which were significant gifts to a former and, what many thought at the time, future President.”
But then, a light at the end of the media tunnel. Over there was this at MEAWW.COM:
Political strategist Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book, ‘Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich’, dug into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged pay-for-play past during Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department.
The book was filled with eyebrow-raising claims about foreign donations — many of them from the same countries Hillary’s now criticizing Trump over.”
Ahhh yes. News stories on Clinton gifts from 2002 and 2014. Soooo long ago. Other than a reminder at one site of Peter Schweizer’s decade old book on the subject – say again, an entire book! – the subject of Hillary and Bill and gifts are worth our liberal media friends bringing up old news today, right?
Ahhhh, no.
If Hillary Clinton has chosen to go to the media to take a smack at her ex-opponent (and that right there, the Clintons being the Clintons, undoubtedly plays no small part in this small episode of liberal media bias!), then the Clintons’ own record on accepting foreign and other gifts – Qatari very much included – is decidedly necessary to make sure the full story about just how this business of giving gifts to Presidents works.
The story is not complicated.
In fact, a trip to various presidential libraries and one will see that gifts to presidents from foreign leaders are standard stuff.
Since it is Hillary who has jumped on this issue, a trip to the site of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum finds this:
People’s Gifts
Since the earliest days of the United States, Americans have given gifts to Presidents and their families. President Clinton received tens of thousands of gifts during his eight years in office. People gave him a wide variety of gifts, from fancy to ordinary to truly unique. The gifts reflect the President’s personality, his interests, and events that occurred around the time they were given. Some are patriotic. Others reference President Clinton’s home state of Arkansas. Many bear his likeness or those of the First Lady, daughter Chelsea, or pets Buddy and Socks. This exhibit contains some of these gifts given to the Clintons.
Strangely, there has been no liberal media probing of what is described by the Clinton Library itself as the “tens of thousands of gifts” received by the Clintons over the years. One gift from Qatar to Trump – a gift publicly announced as going to the U.S. Department of Defense – and Hillary jumps, with the media lavishing coverage on her remarks.
Hmmmm.
Might this be a tad of a liberal media double standard here?
On the one hand a solitary gift to Trump and a sneer from Hillary gets coverage all over the media. But with that standard suddenly out there, where is the comparable liberal media coverage of what the Clinton Library itself describes as Hillary and hubby receiving “tens of thousands of gifts” to the Clintons.
It’s nowhere.
Imagine that.
