It involves a man named David Rosen, who was Hillary's campaign finance manager for her 2000 Senate run. And it concerns deliberate efforts by Rosen to cook the Hillary campaign's books and hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in regulated "hard money" campaign contributions. Michelle Malkin and Powerline both have good summaries of the story.
The real wild-card in this affair is a man named Ray Reggie, a long-time Democrat operative and Ted Kennedy's brother-in-law. In exchange for a plea bargain, Reggie agreed to testify against Rosen and to release dozens of hours of tape recordings of conversations between himself and numerous Democrat power players. Here's a sample of what's in those tapes.
According to insiders, when the contents of those tapes are released things are really going to hit the fan. Realistically though, I remember the same things being said about White Water documents a decade ago. The combination of the Clinton White House spin machine and its Clinton-friendly partisanship with the Mainstream Media kept that story pretty much under wraps. So my hopes aren't high.
The MSM is still in bed with the Democrats, and the last thing they want to see is a HUGE story of corruption that takes Hillary out of the '08 presidential race, or damages the Democrats so severely that they lose more seats in next year's elections. And right now the Democrats are trying to pile financial ethics violations on Tom Delay, which means that they must look squeaky clean themselves. The MSM has a very poor track record of pursuing stories that damage Democrats unless they are under the threat of being scooped by someone else.
But of course this is 2005, and that "someone else" will be bloggers like PowerLine and Michelle Malkin who won't let the story die. Nor will the other blogs (like mine) who will keep tabs on the story and comment on it. The Dems can't sweep this one under the rug like they did with their 1996 campaign finance scandal. So we'll see what happens.
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