TEL AVIV – Bill Clinton rape accuser Juanita Broaddrick has said that NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell told her by phone that the network would not conduct a new interview with Broaddrick “because you have nothing new to add” since Broaddrick first went public in an NBC interview in 1999.
Let’s put aside the awkwardness of Mitchell judging the newsworthiness of the recently rehashed and newsmaking accusations based on whether there is anything “new” about a rape that allegedly transpired in 1978. In dismissing Broaddrick’s freshly relevant narrative now that Hillary is running for office and she is accused of attempting to silence Bill’s accusers), Mitchell actually missed several major “new” details about Broaddrick’s dealings with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
I’m intimately familiar with those details because each one was disclosed in numerous interviews with Broaddrick on my weekend talk radio program and right here at Breitbart News. It speaks volumes about the sorry state of affairs of the news media today that it takes a reporter based 5,000 miles away in Tel Aviv to conduct these interviews and to provide a forum for Broaddrick to first go public after nearly a decade of silence. This while the New York Times spent six weeks conducting 50 interviews probing Donald Trump’s alleged past treatment of women while largely ignoring the far more serious accusations against both Bill and Hillary.
In January, after Broaddrick returned to the headlines, an NBC spokesperson stated the network pursued an interview with Broaddrick, but decided against it after determining there was nothing “new.”
“When Juanita Broaddrick went public last week, NBC News sent an associate producer to Arkansas to see if there was anything new in her story. We established there was not, and decided not to pursue it any further,” the NBC spokesperson said.
So I dedicate this list of “new” details about Broaddrick’s story to NBC News in general and to fellow intrepid investigative reporter Mitchell, including one troubling tidbit involving NBC News itself. None of these details were covered in NBC’s original “Dateline” interview with Broaddrick in 1999; indeed, Broaddrick says that one of the accusations below was scrubbed from that very interview.
1 – Broaddrick says Bill repeatedly called her after the alleged rape.
In January, Broaddrick told me that within a few weeks after Clinton allegedly raped her, he started to call her repeatedly with the aim of meeting again.
“I was shocked to say the least that he would have the audacity to call me after what he did to me,” Broaddrick said.
She said that just a few weeks after the 1978 alleged sexual assault, “He called the nursing home that I owned and they patched the call through to my office and I didn’t know that it was him. And he immediately said, ‘Hi, this is Bill Clinton. I was just wondering when you were coming back to Little Rock again.’
“This just caught me so off guard. I had not expected anything like this at all. And I told him I would not be coming back to Little Rock again and definitely would not ever be seeing him again. And I hung up.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Broaddrick recalled that Clinton, at the time the attorney general of Arkansas and candidate for governor, called the nursing home where she worked on numerous occasions over the next six months.
And you would think that would have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. About two or three weeks later, I was in a meeting and my administrator came into the meeting and she said, “You are wanted on the phone.” And she said it was Mr. Clinton. And I told her, I said, “please tell him I’m not here.” She wasn’t aware of what had happened to me. Nor were the nurses. The two directors of nursings [sic] were the only two who had known what he had done to me. So she wasn’t aware, but she was very caught off guard why I wouldn’t speak to him.
And I went into her office later and I said if there are ever any phone calls from him, I can’t explain but I do not want to have any phone calls from him. Whenever he calls please tell him that I’m not here.
And then it happened a couple of more times. The board secretary answered the phone. And she said, “Mr. Clinton is on the phone.” And I just looked at her and I said please tell him that I’m not here.
And I think there was probably a total of maybe four or five calls within a six-month period after the assault. And I think he finally figured out I wasn’t going to talk to him again.
Broaddrick was asked what she thought Clinton wanted from her.
She replied: “I think he thought, well this is just a usual occurrence. I probably was with him and I am wondering whether I can get with this woman again. I was shocked to say the least that he would have the audacity to call me after what he did to me.”
2 – Broaddrick says Hillary tried to silence her.
This is a serious and newsworthy accusation against the Democratic Party’s frontrunner for president.
Three weeks after the incident, Broaddrick says she was still in a state of shock and denial about what she said had transpired. She said she attended a private Clinton fundraiser at the home of a local dentist, where she had an encounter with the Clintons and was directly approached by Hillary.
Broaddrick said a friend of hers who had driven the Clintons to the fundraiser from a local airport informed her that “the whole conversation was about you coming from the airport. Mostly from Mrs. Clinton.”
She recalled: “And so then about that time, I see them coming through the kitchen area. And some people there are pointing to me. He goes one direction and she comes directly to me. Then panic sort of started to set in with me. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what do I do now?’”
Broaddrick told me that Hillary approached her “and said ‘It’s so nice to meet you’ and all of the niceties she was trying to say at the time.”
“And said, ‘I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things you do for him.’ And I just stood there, Aaron. I was sort of you might say shell-shocked.”
“And she said, ‘Do you understand? Everything you do.’’’
“She tried to take a hold of my hand and I left. I told the girls I can’t take this. I’m leaving. So I immediately left.”
Broaddrick said that “what really went through my mind at that time is ‘She knows. She knew. She’s covering it up and she expects me to do the very same thing.’”
3 – Broaddrick says NBC removed the bombshell charge that Hillary tried to silence her.
When Broaddrick originally broke her silence by speaking to NBC’s Dateline in 1999, Clinton’s rape accuser says she told the network’s reporter, Lisa Myers, on camera that she believed Hillary tried to silence her.
In January, Broaddrick recalled to me that during the pre-taped interview, she began to tell Myers about the personal meeting with Hillary described above in which, Broaddrick believes, the future First Lady strongly implied the alleged rape victim had to stay silent about her traumatic experience.
Broaddrick says that an NBC staffer present for the 1999 filming rushed in front of the camera, interrupted the prerecorded session, and declared that the allegations against Hillary could not be included in the interview.
She charges that NBC went so far as to re-film that portion of the interview, with Myers asking the same question anew and Broaddrick sidestepping the Hillary meeting in the new response.
“We were sitting on my couch,” Broaddrick recalled of the interview. “All the cameras were behind me. She asked some question about whether I was intimidated or threatened by anyone, and I started right in with the meeting with Hillary while we were filming the interview.
“And almost as soon as I started to explain, one of the staffers, I believe he was a producer, came rushing in and said, ‘No, no. We can’t go there.’”
Broaddrick said Myers re-asked the question for the camera and the following exchange, which made the final cut, took place:
Lisa Myers: Did Bill Clinton or anyone near him ever threaten you, try to intimidate you, do anything to keep you silent?
Juanita Broaddrick: No.
Myers: This has been strictly your choice.
Broaddrick: Yes.
Broaddrick, inexperienced in media relations, explained to Breitbart News why she gave an altered answer the second time around.
“I didn’t do interviews before and I’m not a lawyer. I thought from the sound of what the NBC staffer was saying that there was some legal reason why we couldn’t talk about Hillary and that we just couldn’t go there for legal reasons.”
When the story broke in January, NBC News did not provide Breitbart News with a statement about Broaddrick’s accusations despite being given five business days to do so. It has yet to reply to that request for comment.
After filming the 1999 interview, NBC waited 35 days until finally airing the exclusive. The timeline is critical. The Senate voted to acquit Clinton in the impeachment case on Feb. 12. NBC’s interview, conducted January 20, 1999, did not run until Feb. 24, and the network placed it opposite the highly-rated Grammy Awards.
Some have questioned NBC’s motivation in waiting to air Broaddrick’s charge of rape. “The 35-day interval between tape and air is now one of the legends of the impeachment process. Why didn’t the American public get to hear Mrs. Broaddrick before the Senate voted to acquit Mr. Clinton on Feb. 12?” wrote Philip Weiss in the Observer in 1999.
Speaking in 1999, NBC News vice president Bill Wheatley vehemently denied the network deliberately held the interview until after the Senate vote. He said NBC took the normal period of time for properly vetting stories. “There was no pressure from the White House, period. Nor as some were claiming was there any pressure from NBC or G.E. corporate higher-ups to kill the story,” said Wheatley.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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