There's been much well-deserved disgust in these circles lately regarding the National Enquirer's baseless and slanderous assertions of infidelity against John Edwards.
And also some speculation regarding which of Edwards' competitors might be behind this crap.
Well, surprise surprise, according to Politico.com, here, all roads lead to HRC.
The relevant passages are as follows:
What the tabloid's readers, in politics and out, may not know is that a key owner of the Enquirer is a prominent New York investment banker and one of Hillary Clinton's key backers, Roger Altman. Altman was an official in the first Clinton administration, and his name is often mentioned as a possible Clinton Treasury Secretary.
The investment boutique which Altman founded and chairs, Evercore Partners, bought a controlling stake in American Media, which publishes the Enquirer, in 1999, which it still holds with a partner. Evercore's president, Austin Beutner, sits on American Media's Board of Directors, according to Evercore's website.
Also, as you may remember, the Clintons' longtime lawyer, David Kendall, also represents the National Enquirer, for whom part of his responsibilities include supervising pre-publication copy. His law firm bio includes the following:
He has represented a number of individual and corporate media clients over the years, defending libel, privacy invasion, and copyright suits, fighting subpoenas to news gatherers, and prosecuting FOIA actions (arguing Department of State v. Washington Post Co., 456 U.S. 595 (1982) in the Supreme Court). His clients have included The Washington Post, Newsweek, National Enquirer (where he supervised prepublication copy review for over a decade and a half), Playboy, Discovery Communications, U.S. Medicine, National Review, local television stations, and individual writers and journalists.
Who else could it be? Simply being logical, if this was a republican hit job, it would have emerged after an Edwards nomination. No, this is clearly being pushed by HRC, sensing correctly the threat Edwards represents to her in the Iowa primary.