Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has branded the Trump administration “the porn star presidency” but once questioned whether Bill Clinton should have been impeached for his scandals, calling a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton “frivolous” and “instigated by his opponents.”
Buttigieg, a millennial Indiana town mayor and the rising star of the Democratic presidential primary who already has drawn comparisons to former President Barack Obama, is expected to appear at the party’s debates after getting donations from 65,000 donors.
Earlier this month Buttigieg received media coverage after he blasted Vice President Mike Pence, saying Pence became a “cheerleader for the porn star presidency” and questioning whether Pence “stopped believing in scripture” and started to believe in Trump.
But during his days as a columnist for a Harvard University student paper, Buttgieg urged Americans to ignore presidential scandals involving “sexual excitement” and went great lengths to defend Clinton.
“And, in a formative moment for us all, the nation’s political life ground to a halt while President Clinton was impeached for having obfuscated about his sexual activities to a lawyer in a frivolous sexual harassment suit instigated by his opponents,” Buttgieg wrote in a 2004 Harvard Crimson column.
"... President Clinton was impeached for having obfuscated about his sexual activities to a lawyer in a frivolous sexual harassment suit instigated by his opponents."
He refers to a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, then a government employee in Arkansas, who claimed that Clinton, then-governor of Arkansas, propositioned her for sex.
Clinton ended up paying Jones $850,000 in an out-of-court settlement so she drops her sexual harassment charges against him.
In an email to Fox News, Buttgieg’s spokeswoman, Elisabeth Smith, didn’t address the content of the columns and said that “even in college, Pete understood the moral hypocrisy of the far right and politicians like Mike Pence. That's the point he made in 2004 and it's the point that he made regarding Mike Pence's support for Donald Trump.”
The 2020 candidate went on to write in 2004 that Republican scandals, unlike Democrats, are “devoid of sexual excitement” and instead “packed with violence” – giving the example of the Iran-Contra controversy.
Buttgieg, who after Harvard became a Rhodes scholar and later served a tour in Afghanistan in 2014, said that both the Left and Americans should pay less attention to sexual scandals.
“The Left needs to hope for — and, if possible, help — Americans to acknowledge that what happens in the war room (and, for that matter, the board room) is more important than what happens in the bedroom,” he wrote.
This wasn’t the only time Buttgieg questioned whether Democrats should have ostracized Clinton immediately after the impeachment. In a 2003 column, he compared Clinton’s behavior to former Rep. Dan Burton’s conspiracy theories surrounding the death of a White House staffer.
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“If Burton could be taken seriously after his watermelon episode, are we really sure the Democrats had no choice but to drop Bill Clinton like a political hot potato rather than use him in the 2000 campaign?” Buttgieg asked.
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