Video: Dick Morris Drops a Bomb On Hannity – Janet Reno Blackmailed Clinton Over Waco

I watched this astounding interview live, and now the video is up.

Dick Morris, in discussing Bill Clinton’s attempt to smear the tea party movement on the 15th  anniversary of Waco, claimed that on the eve of Inauguration Day, 1996, Janet Reno told Bill Clinton that either she stayed on as Attorney General or “she’d drop the bomb on Waco”:

Video via Gateway Pundit.

My reaction was the same as Sean’s; “Whoa whoa whoa…back up! What did you just say, there?”

Clinton may have been concerned about this:

The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it “is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours”. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.

The effect of CS gas on an unprotected infant exposed for only two to three hours is discussed in the report; in that case report, dating from the early 1970s, the child’s symptoms during the first twenty-four hours were upper respiratory; but, within forty-eight hours his face showed evidence of first degree burns, and he was in severe respiratory distress typical of chemical pneumonia. The infant had cyanosis, required urgent positive pressure pulmonary care, and was hospitalized for twenty– eight days. Other signs of toxicity appeared, including an enlarged liver.

Professor Stone’s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann’s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.

I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

Perhaps Reno  advised against this, but Clinton authorized it, anyway.

It should be noted that before Dick Morris’s conversion to the conservative side, he was a real dirtbag.

Yesterday, Byron York reported on his role in the demonization of rightwing talk radio, after OK City,  in his piece at The WA Examiner: How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain.

What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton’s presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.)  In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress.

Clinton was in deep political trouble in April 1995.  Six months earlier, voters had resoundingly rejected Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, giving the GOP control of both House and Senate.  Polls showed the public viewed Clinton as weak, incompetent and ineffective.  House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his GOP forces seized the initiative on virtually every significant issue, while Clinton appeared to be politically dead.  The worst moment may have come on April 18, the day before the bombing, when Clinton plaintively told reporters, “The president is still relevant here.”

And then came the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building.  In addition to seeing a criminal act and human loss, Clinton and Morris saw opportunity.  If the White House could tie Gingrich, congressional Republicans and conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh to the attack, then Clinton might gain the edge in the fight against the GOP.

Morris began polling about Oklahoma City almost immediately after the bombing.  On April 23, four days after the attack, Clinton appeared to point the finger straight at his political opponents during a speech in Minneapolis.  “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” he said.  “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

At a White House meeting four days later, on April 27, Morris presented Clinton with a comeback strategy based on his polling.  Morris prepared an extensive agenda for the session, a copy of which he would include in the paperback version of his 1999 memoir, Behind the Oval Office.

I was an avid listener of talk radio at the time, and I still remember the shock and outrage I felt watching an American President target a private citizen (Rush) by name, when he had nothing whatsoever to do with fomenting the sort of murderous rage that possessed Timothy McVeigh

We can thank Dick Morris for encouraging this abominable ploy back in the nineties, as we watch the Obama administration continue the trend by taking every opportunity to demonize talk radio, and Fox News.

UPDATE:

Morris comments on Clinton’s smear of the tea parties on his latest post at DickMorris.com:

It was not anti-government rhetoric that inspired McVeigh to do his dastardly deed. According to the killer himself, it was the action of the federal government during the Waco raid that incited him to violence. That the attack on the Federal Office Building took place on the anniversary of the Waco raid underscores the connection.

Bill Clinton was far from blameless in the Waco attack. While he sought to shift the responsibility to Attorney General Janet Reno, acting as if he were merely a by-stander, subsequent histories make it clear that he was smarting from criticism that the failure of the feds to act and their continued toleration of the siege showed him to be too weak to be a good president. He would often complain about the unfairness of this coverage to me as he recounted the events leading up to the Waco raid.

The Obama strategy of vilifying the tea party protesters and trying to link them to the violence of Oklahoma City is cynical and ridiculous. The tea party protesters are, in many cases, decorated war veterans and can, in the main, only be described as patriots. That Obama needs to paint them as violence prone extremists who are fanning flames that could lead to Oklahoma City-style bombings is offensive and vile in the extreme.

It is as vile now, as it was when he was doing it to smear talk radio.

Dick Morris had nothing to say in his piece about the allegation he made on Hannity’s show, last night.