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  • 2017-08-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Was Hillary Clinton Offered a Plea Deal in August 2017? (en)
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  • On 8 August 2017, NewsMax author Ed Klein published an article (Hillary's Plea Bargain) heavily insinuating that Hillary Clinton had been quietly offered a plea bargain due to the Justice Department's belief that the former candidate was prosecutable on a number of counts. That claim rested on a solitary anonymous source, purportedly a Clinton lawyer. That designator was not further qualified or explained, and it seems contradictory that a lawyer purportedly working on Clinton's behalf would leak such a potentially damaging tidbit about his client to the author of several anti-Clinton books. Klein claimed that discussion of a plea took place in July 2017 between the unnamed lawyer and a high-ranking Justice Department official: The article concluded with a stipulation that the source had cautioned that normally a plea is offered by a prosecutor only upon arraignment, whereas Clinton had not been charged with any crime. No other news reports we located carried a version of the claim that was not sourced from Klein's article, and his Twitter header suggests that he is perhaps emotionally invested in the prospect of Clinton's theoretical indictment: The outlet was far from the first to take issue with Klein's sourcing and attribution. In 2012, Politico reported: Of the same tome, conservative New York Post columnist John Podhoretz said in 2005: Coupled with the claim was a second assertion that Clinton never bothered to inform her husband she was pregnant. In 2005, Klein (in his own words) dial[ed] back during an interview about the passage on C-SPAN2, essentially retracting the claim in its entirety: In 2014, The Guardian reviewed a subsequent Clinton book, Blood Feud: Klein's suggestion that Hillary Clinton was to be indicted and had already been offered a plea deal quickly travelled through hyperpartisan corners of the Internet, but a number of criticisms of Klein's relationships with facts and sources have dogged his work from at least 2005, with numerous prominent conservative journalists among his most vocal critics. (en)
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