Democrats were quite content to look the other way when President Bill Clinton paid $850,000 in hush money to Paula Jones after she accused him of sexually abusing her.
When it's Donald Trump and involved a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels over an alleged consensual sexual encounter in 2006, the same Democrats want the book thrown at the former president and for him to be held in jail without bail.
Clinton, who was also accused of raping Juanita Broaddrick, never faced criminal charges.
If Trump, who leads by wide margins in polling for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, is indicted and booked into jail, he will be the first former president in U.S. history to be arrested after leaving office.
[According to Wikipedia: William Henry West (September 1842 – September 6, 1915) was an African American soldier and police officer in Washington, D.C. said to have arrested United States President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 for speeding in a horse and buggy. This is the only known record of a sitting U.S. president being arrested.]
In 1998, the Washington Post reported, “President Clinton reached an out-of-court settlement with Paula Jones yesterday, agreeing to pay her $850,000 to drop the sexual harassment lawsuit that led to the worst political crisis of his career and only the third presidential impeachment inquiry in American history.”
“Just hours before the settlement was inked yesterday, Starr sent new evidence to the House Judiciary Committee stemming from a witness in the Jones case, Kathleen E. Willey, who also accused Clinton of an unwelcome sexual advance,” the report continued. “The extraordinary case came to an extraordinary finale, with the defendant agreeing to pay $850,000 even though the plaintiff originally only asked for $700,000 when she filed suit — and even though the case was dismissed without a trial.”
The report continued: “The case opened a Pandora’s box of allegations about his past sex life and made him the first president ever interrogated under oath as a defendant in a civil lawsuit or before a grand jury as a possible criminal target. Jones v. Clinton also yielded a historic decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled 9 to 0 last year that even the chief executive can be sued. And it was the resulting search for evidence that led Jones’s lawyers to Monica S. Lewinsky and the chain of events that prompted Starr’s report to Congress alleging that Clinton committed 11 impeachable offenses.”
And the Hillary Campaign was actually fined for hiding the Steele Dossier payment under “legal fees” —essentially the same legal theory on the Stormy Daniels payment the DA is running criminal investigation of Trump. https://t.co/GLur8NWGyA
— Brett L. Tolman (@tolmanbrett) March 18, 2023
Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump.
I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by… https://t.co/elpbh7LeWn — Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) March 18, 2023
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