As you know the Weather Underground, the somewhat hapless but definitely violent 60s and 70s radical group, has bubbled up into the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s come up against Obama for his association with Bill Ayers and then Obama brought it up in response because Bill Clinton pardoned two former Weathermen in his end of presidency pardons.
Inside Edition of all places asked Hillary about the pardons and her response was that “Well, I didn’t know anything about it.”
Now, we’ve gotten a lot of emails from readers asking for us to follow up on this. And we ask for clarification from the Clinton campaign about just what she meant because I found her statement ambiguous. Did she mean she didn’t knowing anything about it at the time? Or that she didn’t know about it until Barack Obama brought it up in the debate. And Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told Greg Sargent that she was “unaware before it was done,” which I take to mean that she wasn’t privy to any of the discussions about it before the pardon and basically only heard about it in the newspapers like the rest of us.
But as New York Newsday points out, the murders in question (the crime the two individuals were in prison for) took place in New York. And the campaign to get them pardons and the opposition to it got a lot of publicity in New York in the summer and fall of 2000, when Clinton was initially running for senate. Newsday’s blog has a chronology of who was doing what, including Sen. Schumer’s lobbying against the pardon. So take a look and let us know what you think. For my part I think it makes her claim not to have known anything about this seem a bit dubious.
