Milbank: Being kind to a Canadian latest claim against Hillary

Sometimes they are sinister (she murdered Vince Foster!), sometimes they are nonsensical (she ordered the military not to rescue those Americans in Benghazi!), sometimes they are legitimate (her boneheaded use of a private email server as secretary of state) and sometimes they are silly (her staff sold a T-shirt to a foreigner!). It doesn’t matter. The constant production of scandal accusations — facilitated by Clinton’s reflexive secrecy — is successful. A poll by Quinnipiac University released last week found that the top three words voters associate with Clinton are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.”

Clinton scandal industry

Even in the anything-goes world of the Clinton scandal industry, though, O’Keefe’s latest exercise suggests that her accusers are running out of ammunition. O’Keefe’s video did show evidence of law-breaking — by his own organization. In the brief clip, an unidentified woman who calls herself a Canadian tries to buy Clinton merchandise at a campaign event tent and is told that foreign nationals can’t contribute. O’Keefe’s videographer then steps in and offers to buy the merchandise for the Canadian, who would pay her back. “It was a conduit donation, which was a crime,” O’Keefe proclaimed to his press club audience.

Umm. So if it was a crime for the Clinton campaign to receive this “contribution,” wasn’t it also a crime for O’Keefe’s “journalist” to take a foreigner’s cash and hand it over to the campaign?

I put the question to O’Keefe, who called his lawyer to the microphone. “It’s a technical violation of the law,” the lawyer, Benjamin Barr, admitted. “It’s akin to jaywalking.” (O’Keefe’s methods have been in doubt before: He paid $100,000 to settle a lawsuit by an ACORN worker years after that expos?.)

It’s unclear whether a purchase of campaign swag by a foreign national would violate campaign-finance laws under any circumstance. But it’s absolutely clear that the sort of violation alleged by O’Keefe would never be enforced.

In the video, O’Keefe’s group asserts that its undercover videographer just happened to meet a Canadian in line at a Clinton event, and that this Canadian just happened to volunteer her nationality before asking if she could buy merchandise. The video makes the point that “just minutes after this illegal exchange” involving the T-shirt, Clinton was on stage talking about “the endless flow of secret unaccountable money that is distorting our elections.” There is indeed too much money corrupting politics — but a $75 campaign-swag purchase by a person who may or may not be Canadian would not seem to be high on the list of abuses.

But O’Keefe had achieved his purpose. “It’s going viral,” he said, noting that “it’s in the Washington Post right now.”

It was, under this headline at that time: “New James O’Keefe video sting catches Clinton campaign being kind to a Canadian.”