RED MEAT FOR RUBES:

Much of the most damning material in Clinton Cash, however, turned out to be either factually inaccurate, melodramatically exaggerated, or both. Within weeks after publication, major media outlets reported significant errors discovered in its pages.

Time magazine debunked Schweizer's chapter on the Uranium One deal, noting that his book had mustered "little evidence" of outside in- fluence on government decision-making, and offered "no indication of Hillary Clinton's personal involvement in, or even knowledge of, the [CFIUS] deliberations."

According to ABC News' investigative team, its "independent review of source material . . . uncovered errors in the book, including an instance where paid and unpaid speaking appearances were conflated," although "those same records supported the premise that former President Clinton accepted speaking fees from numerous companies and individuals with interests pending before the State Department." Yet ABC also found that the book "offers no proof that Hillary Clinton took any direct action to benefit the groups and interests that were paying her husband [for speeches]."

NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell poked gaping holes in a section that implied Hillary had promoted Boeing's multibillion-dollar sale of aircraft to Russia, in exchange for the company's $900,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation two months later.

As Mitchell pointed out, the aviation giant had donated to the foundation's Haiti projects for years, and the State Department had been promoting Boeing interests abroad long before Hillary took over. On camera, the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison said, "There's no--there's no evidence that she changed the policy based on, you know, the donations to the foundation."

BuzzFeed found five major errors in a chapter on Haiti, which purported to show that Digicel entrepreneur Denis O'Brien had received a large State Department contract after arranging hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees for Bill Clinton. But the dates were wrong, the State Department project had been funded mostly by the Gates Foundation, and it turned out that Clinton had delivered most of the listed speeches for free--except one that earned a donation to the foundation.

Yahoo News derided as "circumstantial" a chapter claiming that the mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson had been exempted from Iran sanctions by the State Department, after paying Bill Clinton $750,000 to deliver a speech at a Hong Kong telecom conference. The Obama White House, not State, had made the sanctions decision.

Perhaps the ugliest distortion involved Schweizer's misuse of two truncated quotes from Clinton's own colleagues to minimize the role he had played in combating the AIDS pandemic. To suggest slyly that Clinton "may take a little more credit than he is due," the author plucked that phrase out of a much longer quote from former State Department official Princeton Lyman, who had praised Clinton effusively and felt outraged by the misrepresentation of his words.

Schweizer played a similar trick with a quote he lifted from a long statement by World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, a founder of Partners in Health. His aim was to portray Clinton as a mere "middle- man"--when in fact Kim declared the former president "absolutely one of the most important people in the global response to HIV/AIDS."

Beyond the most hostile political circles, the verdict on Clinton Cash was that Schweizer had failed to prove the corrupting influence of speaking fees or foundation contributions on Hillary's decisions as secretary of state. "We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately prove the links between the money they took in and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their associates," his book conceded in the end. Instead, he urged authorities with more investigative power than a mere journalist could muster to bring the Clintons to justice. But no prosecutor, and not even a Republican-led congressional committee, showed any inclination to accept that challenge.

If Schweizer was not the world's most competent journalist, however, he was prolific and ideologically reliable, as indicated by the tendentious titles of his previous books listed on Amazon: Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (Doubleday, 2005); Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy-- And How They Will Do It Again if No One Stops Them (Harper, 2009); and Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More than Liberals (Doubleday, 2008). For several years he had written agitprop for the extreme right-wing Breitbart News websites.

For conservative funders seeking to take down the most formidable Democratic presidential contender, Schweizer offered not just audacity and experience but his own nonprofit. As president of the Government Accountability Institute in Tallahassee, Florida, he could accept millions of dollars in tax-exempt funds for research, promotion, and expenses (including his $200,000 annual salary) from foundations and individuals.

And unlike the Clintons, who had disclosed decades of tax returns and more than 300,000 foundation donors, Schweizer didn't have to reveal any of his funders.

When the Government Accountability Institute first appeared on the scene during the 2012 election cycle, the new "nonpartisan" entity almost immediately launched a series of harsh attacks on President Obama that were later determined to be inaccurate by the Washington Post fact-checkers. Eventually, researchers uncovered at least one important source of the money behind the "institute"--an eccentric right-wing hedge-fund executive named Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, based in New York, whose family foundation had given millions of dollars to Schweizer in 2013 and 2014.

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