by Frank Holmes, reporter
As Democrats accuse President Donald Trump of criminal corruption over paying “hush money” to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, it seems they have forgotten their own history: Nearly every Democratic president, and at least one vice presidential candidate, has admitted paying people for silence.
Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation centered on Trump’s decision to settle a lawsuit by paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels just before his upset election nearly eight years ago. The two-year statute of limitations on that misdemeanor bookkeeping may have run out long ago, but Bragg seems ready to charge it as a felony because of it’s link to former lawyer Michael Cohen’s federal conviction.
But Democrats don’t seem to remember doing much of the same thing.
President Bill Clinton had an entire team of employees who tried to quash “bimbo eruptions,” including Dolly Kyle Browning, who swore that she and “Billy” had an on-again, off-again affair for 33 years…until he sent his goons to silence her.
Clinton had her own brother, who worked for his 1992 campaign, tell her, “If you cooperate with the media we will destroy you.”
Finally, she knuckled under and buckled her lip.
“In the fall of 1994…Billy and I reached a ‘deal,’” she wrote in an affidavit: she’d be quiet if he’d agree not to slander her publicly. “I agreed not to use, in public, the ‘A words’ which were defined as ‘adultery’ and ‘affair.’ I was allowed to say that we had a thirty-three year relationship that, from time to time, included sex.”
At least Stormy Daniels got a pay off: Clinton handed his 33-year girlfriend nothing but fear and intimidation.
Of course, in 1998 Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle a court case—just like Trump—in this case, over sexual harassment.
But Clinton isn’t even the only middle-aged Southern Democrat on a national presidential ticket with well-documented issues involving sex and dirty campaign dealings.
Former senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards paid Rielle Hunter $114,000 in 2006-7, ostensibly to produce four YouTube videos totaling 2.5 minutes. It turned out they not only had an affair, but Edwards fathered a child with her—facts that would not have set well on the campaign trail.
The left-leaning Business Insider called the payments “hush money”; so did CBS News. The Obama administration prosecuted him for six felonies—but a jury found Edwards not guilty on one count and a hung jury let him off the hook for the other five charges.
Democrats mostly ignored Edwards getting off scot-free, while they’re calling for Trump’s head.
Not all Democrats’ campaign deals involve sex scandals. Before the 2008 election, Barack Obama offered his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, literal hush money. After the media aired excerpts of Wright’s hate-filled sermons, where he screamed “God damn America,” the Marxist minister said one of Obama’s “closest friends” offered him $150,000 not to preach again until after the election—and then Obama asked him personally to shut up.
“After the media went ballistic on me, I received an email offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election,” Wright told. When Obama met with Wright inside his church parsonage, Wright said, “One of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.’”
Not only did all of these Democrats walk, but the same D.A.’s office—probably involving the same staff—already investigated Trump…and they didn’t bring charges.
Bragg’s predecessor in the D.A.’s office, Cyrus Vance Jr., explored charging Trump over the Stormy Daniels check…and the case folded. The Federal Election Commission investigated but the vote to charge Trump failed.
Bragg’s partisan statements—and the office’s history of bringing flimsy charges against the Trump family—earned the 45th president support from an unexpected source: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his biggest opponent in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.
“The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor and so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” said DeSantis Monday morning.
He accused Bragg, who is soft on crime, of “ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments. That’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.”
Conservatives warn that sending your political opponents to prison over phony charges—while your allies skate for committing the same crimes—would destroy our criminal justice system and American democracy.
“If the Democratic Party is allowed to do this,” Tucker Carlson warned on Monday, “voters will never again determine the outcome of a presidential election.”
“Democracy cannot exist if we criminalize politics,” wrote Northwestern University law professor Steven Calabresi when the Left previewed the first attempt at charging Trump in 2018. “We need a federal statute formally making it a crime punishable by five years in prison for any federal, state or local government attorney to initiate any criminal or civil case — or investigation — for partisan or political reasons.”
Who do you think should be locked up: Donald Trump or his prosecutors?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”