Buzzfeed is reporting that after an extensive search of documents from the Clinton White House, Hillary Clinton’s claim that her husband’s anti-gay legislation was to stave off an even worse fate for LGBT is unsubstantiated.
Last week, in her first interview after her triumphant 11-hour Benghazi hearing testimony, Hillary Clinton sat down with Rachel Maddow for an interview. The MSNBC anchor asked Clinton about former president Bill Clinton’s anti-gay legislation, including DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, noting that much of the civil rights advances under the Obama administration has been achieved by getting rid of those laws.
Clinton said she saw it a bit differently, and made a claim that for a week now has increasingly angered LGBT activists.
“On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband believed — and there was certainly evidence to support it — is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States of America, and that there had to be some way to stop that,” the Democratic frontrunner told Maddow.
“And there wasn’t any rational argument — because I was in on some of those discussions, on both Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and on DOMA, where both the president, his advisers and occasionally I would — you know, chime in and talk about, ‘You can’t be serious. You can’t be serious.’ But they were. And so, in a lot of ways, DOMA was a line that was drawn that was to prevent going further. It was a defensive action,” she insisted.
“A defensive action”?
Chris Geidner, Buzzfeed’s Legal Editor, today reports that Hillary Clinton’s claim is just not true, “based on a BuzzFeed News review of the thousands of documents released earlier this year by the Clinton Presidential Library about same-sex couples’ marriage rights and the Defense of Marriage Act.”
Geidner reports there is “no contemporaneous evidence… to support the claim that the Clinton White House considered a possible federal constitutional amendment to be a concern.”
And here’s the damning line: “There was no documented discussion in 1996 within the White House or Justice Department about any momentum for a federal constitutional amendment that DOMA was intended to prevent.”
Geidner’s report is extensive, some 4500 words, give or take, and sure to pose concerns for the Clinton campaign.
On Twitter (below), Geidner makes clear that his report is only based on the Clinton administration’s White House documents, and not conversations with lawmakers or policy analysts who might support Clinton’s claims.
A few responses via Twitter:
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Image: Screenshot via MSNBCÂ