Rachel Maddow spent about 15 minutes laying out the background of David Bossie - and it ain't pretty. I'm sure there will be much more to come. Trump's mafia is evil. Even Wikipedia is bad enough:
Congressional investigator
After the Republicans won control of the
United States House of Representatives in the
1994 elections Dan Burton, (R-IN), became
chairman of the
House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. In 1997, he hired Mr. Bossie as chief investigator to look into a possible campaign finance abuses by U.S. President
Bill Clinton.
[4] By May 1998, Burton came under intense partisan pressure; even fellow Republicans complained that committee staff had published redacted tapes and transcripts of former
United States Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell's
prison telephone calls omitting some exculpatory passages.
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich pressed Burton to seek Bossie's resignation.
[5] Shortly thereafter, Burton accepted Bossie's resignation.
[6]
- During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bossie got into a fistfight with a Little Rock, Ark., private investigator, Larry Case, who said he had damaging information on Clinton. Bossie told police that Case had punched him after Bossie refused to pay Case a $10,000 advance as they were preparing to board a flight at Little Rock National Airport.
- That same year, Bossie set out to prove that a young pregnant woman named Susan Coleman had committed suicide in 1977 after having an affair with Clinton. Coleman's mother told CBS that Bossie hounded her relentlessly with his false story, even following her to an Army hospital in Georgia, where she was visiting her husband, in recovery from a stroke. Bossie and another man "burst into the sick man's room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide," CBS reported.
- Also in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, repudiating Bossie's tactics, filed an FEC complaint against Bossie's group after it produced a TV ad inviting voters to call a hot line to hear (almost certainly doctored) tape-recorded conversations between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.
- In 1994, Bossie traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., with an NBC producer, where the two allegedly "stalked" and "ambushed" Beverly Bassett Schaffer, a former state regulatory officer and a lawyer who had played a small role in the so-called Whitewater conspiracy. The two confronted Schaffer outside her office and, after she refused an on-camera interview, reportedly chased her across town, until she found refuge in the lobby of an office building.
- In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had "dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater." Another mailing reported that Bossie was "on the inside directing the probe." Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D'Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.
- In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie's deceptive presence to "Ollie North running around the House."
- In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of "unrelenting" self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible "to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney's Office." (Bossie's habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)
... When the Clintons exited the White House, Bossie seemed rudderless as he jumped from one political target to the next. During the 2000 presidential campaign he coauthored another quickie attack book, "Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore," but it didn't seem to play much of a role in the disputed election. During the summer of 2001, Bossie played the Gary Condit game, going on cable TV to tie the Democratic congressman to a dead intern. ("Gary Condit doesn't have much credibility left," Bossie said.) No evidence linking Condit to the murder ever emerged, and he was never charged. The next year, when the Enron scandal broke, Bossie appeared on Fox News and repeated GOP talking points that both political parties deserved blame because, after all, Enron's former CEO, Kenneth Lay, slept in the Lincoln bedroom once while Clinton was in office. But that in fact never happened. Also that year, Bossie appeared on TNN'S late-night show, "Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon," where he dissected, yet again, the supposed mysteries surrounding the suicide of Clinton aide Foster. Plus, Bossie guaranteed that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2004.
David Bossie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
