Reid Smear Letter

The Harry Reid Letter to Clear Channel is a letter written by United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Mark P. Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications, in regard to a statement from Rush Limbaugh allegedly referring to Iraq war veterans critical of the war as "phony soldiers". The letter of complaint, which requested that Mays publicly repudiate Limbaugh’s comments, was signed by 41 Democratic senators.

Limbaugh, who argued that the comment was not in reference to Iraq war veterens but to persons falsely claiming to be such veterens, obtained the letter and sold it on eBay for $2,100,100, the record for a charitable auction on that site, which he donated to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation (MC-LEF) with a matching donation of his own.

Overview
September 21, 2007, The Associated Press releases a story that used the term "Phony Soldiers" entitled "Phony soldiers cost VA, tarnished medals". In this story, Doug Carver from the Office of the Inspector General of the VA called individuals who never served in the military and attempted to defraud the government of veteran benefits "Phony War Heros".

On September 26, 2007, Rush Limbaugh picked up the Associated Press story about one man convicted of lying about his military service named Jesse MacBeth. During the program Rush took a call from a listener who complained that the media seemed to give press coverage to people like MacBeth but never talked to "real soldiers" like himself.

The unedited transcript of the conversation is as follows:

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I have a retort to Mike in Chicago, because I am serving in the American military, in the Army. I've been serving for 14 years, very proudly.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I'm one of the few that joined the Army to serve my country, I'm proud to say, not for the money or anything like that. What I would like to retort to is that, what these people don't understand, is if we pull out of Iraq right now, which is not possible because of all the stuff that's over there, it would take us at least a year to pull everything back out of Iraq, then Iraq itself would collapse and we'd have to go right back over there within a year or so.

RUSH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. The next guy that calls here I'm going to ask them, "What is the imperative of pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out?" I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "When's he going to bring the troops home? Keep the troops safe," whatever.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: It's not possible intellectually to follow these people.

CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.

RUSH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.

RUSH: They joined to be in Iraq.

CALLER: A lot of people.

RUSH: You know where you're going these days, the last four years, if you sign up. The odds are you're going there or Afghanistan, or somewhere.

CALLER: Exactly, sir. My other comment, my original comment, was a retort to Jill about the fact we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. Actually, we have found weapons of mass destruction in chemical agents that terrorists have been using against us for a while now. I've done two tours in Iraq, I just got back in June, and there are many instances of insurgents not knowing what they're using in their IEDs. They're using mustard artillery rounds, VX artillery rounds in their IEDs. Because they didn't know what they were using, they didn't do it right, and so it didn't really hurt anybody. But those munitions are over there. It's a huge desert. If they bury it somewhere, we're never going to find it.

RUSH: Well, that's a moot point for me right now.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: The weapons of mass destruction. We gotta get beyond that. We're there. We all know they were there, and Mahmoud even admitted it in one of his speeches here talking about Saddam using the poison mustard gas or whatever it is on his own people. But that's moot. What's more important is all this is taking place now in the midst of the surge working, and all of these anti-war Democrats are getting even more hell-bent on pulling out of there, which means that success on the part of you and your colleagues over there is a great threat to them. It's frustrating and maddening, and why they must be kept in the minority. I want to thank you, Mike, for calling. I appreciate it very much.

Here is a Morning Update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. They have their celebrities and one of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth. Now, he was a "corporal." I say in quotes. Twenty-three years old. What made Jesse Macbeth a hero to the anti-war crowd wasn't his Purple Heart; it wasn't his being affiliated with post-traumatic stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. No. What made Jesse Macbeth, Army Ranger, a hero to the left was his courage, in their view, off the battlefield, without regard to consequences. He told the world the abuses he had witnessed in Iraq, American soldiers killing unarmed civilians, hundreds of men, women, even children. In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth describes the horrors this way: "We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque."

Now, recently, Jesse Macbeth, poster boy for the anti-war left, had his day in court. And you know what? He was sentenced to five months in jail and three years probation for falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim and his Army discharge record. He was in the Army. Jesse Macbeth was in the Army, folks, briefly. Forty-four days before he washed out of boot camp. Jesse Macbeth isn't an Army Ranger, never was. He isn't a corporal, never was. He never won the Purple Heart, and he was never in combat to witness the horrors he claimed to have seen. You probably haven't even heard about this. And, if you have, you haven't heard much about it. This doesn't fit the narrative and the template in the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party as to who is a genuine war hero. Don't look for any retractions, by the way. Not from the anti-war left, the anti-military Drive-By Media, or the Arabic websites that spread Jesse Macbeth's lies about our troops, because the truth for the left is fiction that serves their purpose. They have to lie about such atrocities because they can't find any that fit the template of the way they see the US military. In other words, for the American anti-war left, the greatest inconvenience they face is the truth.

The above is all part of one conversation.

Media Matters response
On September 27, 2007, Media Matters for America published a report headlined "Limbaugh: Service members who support U.S. withdrawal are "phony soldiers", touching off a series of rebukes from Democrats demanding that Limbaugh apologize.

The Senate rebuke drew criticism from Congressional Republicans like Congressman Doug Lamborn of Colorado who said on the floor of the House of Representatives, "Mr. Speaker, I rise today to denounce the liberals’ fraudulent attacks on Rush Limbaugh. Anyone who reads the widely available transcript, as I have done, sees that Mr. Limbaugh was appropriately referring to the pretenders who pose as medal winners, or who falsely claim to have committed atrocities in Iraq, when he used the phrase “phony soldiers.” No, the real scandal here is that liberals in America and here in this Congress are willing to manipulate facts to smear those they disagree with. But there’s an even more insidious agenda by liberals going on, and that is to reinstitute the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which is actually a way to silence conservatives on the radio waves. Mr. Limbaugh deserves mega kudos for being a forceful and effective voice on the side of common sense and for being an example of the First Amendment in action. After all, isn’t that what our country is supposed to be about?"

During the weeks leading up to the initial "phony soldier" controversy there were indeed several articles referencing "phony soldiers" like MacBeth including a May 28th Article in Starts and Stripes, a June 7th article in the Seattle Times, and eventually the relevant September 21st article in the Seattle Times announcing MacBeth's fate. MacBeth had been arrested for and convicted of attempting to cheat the government out of benefits for service which they had not served.

Media Matters for America is a liberal activist group that describes itself as, "a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." In May 2004, the New York Times reported that Media Matters has received "more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals" and "was developed with help from the newly formed Center for American Progress". According to the Cybercast News Service, Media Matters has received financial support from MoveOn.org, Peter Lewis, and the New Democratic Network.

Drafting of the letter
On October 2, 2007, Harry Reid authored a two page letter to Mark Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications (the radio company which broadcasts the Rush Limbaugh show) requesting that he 'publicly repudiate these comments and ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize.'

Forty-one U.S. Senators, all of the Democratic Party, signed the letter, three of which were running for the Democrat nomination for President: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Chris Dodd. The other signatories are Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Richard Durbin, Kent Conrad, Bob Menendez, Charles Schumer, Barbara Mikulski, Patty Murray, Byron Dorgan, Bill Nelson, Daniel Akaka, Dianne Feinstein, Max Baucus, Tom Harkin, Jack Reed, Joseph Biden, Daniel Inouye, Jay Rockefeller, Barbara Boxer, Edward M. Kennedy, Ken Salazar, Sherrod Brown, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Robert Byrd, Amy Klobuchar, Debbie Stabenow, Benjamin Cardin, Mary Landrieu, Jon Tester, Tom Carper, Frank Lautenberg, Jim Webb, Bob Casey, Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Carl Levin, and Ron Wyden.

Auction
Mark Mays turned this letter over to Rush Limbaugh. On October 11, 2007, on his Rush To Excellence tour in Philadelphia, he announced that he would be putting the letter on eBay to sell to the highest bidder, the resulting revenue to be turned over to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, a charity which provides scholarships and assistance to the children of servicemen and police officers killed in the line of duty and an organization for which Limbaugh is a Director and one of the chief fundraisers.

On October 19, 2007, the letter sold for a record $2,100,100 to Betty Casey, Director of the Eugene B. Casey Foundation. Mr. Limbaugh matched the donation with his own money bringing the total donation to the Foundation to $4,200,200. Betty Casey remarked, "The Eugene B. Casey Foundation believes freedom of speech is a basic right of every citizen of this country. Their purchase of the smear letter was to demonstrate their belief in this right and to support Rush Limbaugh, his views and his continued education of us."

Limbaugh had argued all along that when he referred to "phony soldiers" he was specifically referring to Jesse MacBeth, whom he mentioned by name, and those like him who never actually served. Macbeth claimed at the onset of the Iraq War that he had personally witnessed attacks on Arabs in mosques and abuses of civilians, when in reality he hadn't even graduated from army boot camp. In an article in Stars and Stripes Magazine MacBeth was asked why they could find no record of his service to which he replied, “They did the same thing to John Kerry.”

On October 19, 2007, under mounting pressure from the press and fellow Congressional Leaders for using the forum of the floor of the Senate to pass a non-binding resolution to censure a private citizen exercising his right to free speech, a more contrite Senator Reid addressed the issue again on the floor of the Senate stating, "I strongly believe when we can put our differences aside".

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