MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE (HOST): Vince Foster. Last night, you tweeted that, I said “seriously, Vince Foster?” Those of us who have been around for awhile know these names, but one reason why I wanted to do this was a lot of younger people don't know how crazy some of this is and how some of it may not be crazy, they were allegations that you should take seriously, but that have been completely refuted, right? So, I mean, on the one hand, it doesn't matter, on the other hand, he is trying to get to people who might not know much about it, certainly younger people, right?
BOEHLERT: Yeah, I think there's an idea that people who didn't live through the 90's, or weren't politically active or politically conscious during the 90's, he can rebrand the Clintons, right? So, if you lived through the 90's, even conservatives, even people who were in those battles, in the decades since there's sort of been a collective conventional wisdom of, “boy, that was weird, what exactly did we do, why did we waste or time and effort, let's never do that again.” Clinton left office with a 67 percent approval rating after he was officially impeached. And so, even within the Republican Party, even within kind of the “responsible elements” of the right-wing media, there was an idea that the Clinton scandals were essentially a colossal waste of time and we should probably learn from the mistakes. But, what Trump is trying to do, and he's trying to do it obviously now through the far-right-wing media and the mainstream media, is he's trying to rebrand the whole thing, he's trying to say “oh you think you know the Clintons, but they were really crooks, and there were all these scandals.” I mean, Roger Stone, his kind of under-the-rock adviser who dwells sort of in the gutter of American politics, he was quoted in The Washington Post basically saying, well the Clintons -- no one really paid attention to this stuff in the 90's. I mean, that was literally Roger Stone's pitch. The Clintons were able to suppress a lot of these scandal stories during the 90's, but today we have social media, so they won't be able to suppress all these stories.
Now, Ken Starr spent $40 million in 1990 dollars looking into every conceivable Clinton scandal. The idea that the Trump campaign is going to pretend all this stuff got swept under the rug and we're going to shine a light on it, ignores 8 years of the Clinton presidency when the conservative media kind of teamed up with the DC press and, for long stretches, almost did nothing but chase Clinton scandals.
