How Hillary Clinton Freed an Alleged Child Rapist

Hillary Clinton is in the spotlight right now, thanks to her new book and will-she-or-won't-she 2016 speculation, and it sure looks like someone's using the opportunity to roll out some opposition research. The right-leaning Washington Free Beacon yesterday released newly discovered recordings from the 1980s in which Clinton boasts about a 1975 case in which she served as a public defender for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old, and "got him off with time served in the county jail." The recordings are of interviews intended for a never-published Esquire profile.

Clinton makes clear that she believes the man did the deed. "I had him take a polygraph, which he passed," she recalls in the recording, "which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs." But she managed to destroy the prosecution's case because the crime lab made the odd decision to slice out a key part of the defendant's bloody underwear for testing and then discard it. This left the prosecution without evidence, so Clinton got them to agree to let the man plead to a lesser crime. The case itself has been reported before—Newsday revealed in 2008 that Clinton had attacked the victim's credibility, saying the girl had a "tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing." (More Hillary Clinton stories.)