11)Hillary’s Incredible Reaction to Defending Child Rapist

In 1975 Hillary Clinton defended Thomas Alfred Taylor, who was accused of raping a 12-year-old Arkansas girl. Clinton was appointed by a local judge, as she did legal aid work at the law school where she taught.

She was interviewed by Mumsnet, an online community of U.K. parents about her part in the case. The interviewer asked her, “As a lawyer, you defended the rapist of a 12-year-old girl, calling the victim ’emotionally unstable’ and saying that girls have a tendency to ‘exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences especially when they come from disorganized families.”

In the discussion that followed, Clinton explained that she represented her client to the best of her ability, as was her duty.

“He later pled guilty to a lesser included offense. When you’re a lawyer you often don’t have the choice as to who you will represent, and by the very nature of criminal law there will be those who you represent you don’t approve of, but at least in our system, you have an obligation and once I was appointed, I fulfilled that obligation.”

What Clinton did not mention was recordings of her discussion of the case in which she describes knowing of her client’s guilt and then laughing about the case.

“It was a fascinating case, it was a very interesting case,” Clinton said on the tape. “This guy was accused of raping a 12-year-old. Course he claimed that he didn’t, and all this stuff. … I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”

Clinton’s defense case used a strategy of attacking the 12-year-old victim, yet in the recording Clinton also laughs when mentioning that the crime lab accidentally destroyed DNA evidence that tied her client to the crime.

This wasn’t Clinton’s only questionable behavior as a lawyer. Next we’ll look at one time she actually ended up in trouble: Next Slide