I have posted several times my suspicions that Leopold was "Rathered" or "Hatfielded". I was researching Hatfield to refresh my memories, and ran across several opinions that are similar to mine, i.e. that Leopold was used as a target to feed misinformation to by his 'sources', and was so chosen because he, like Hatfield, had a dubious past. His past could thus be used to discredit him, even though his sources may have given him the truth, the partial truth, or outright lies. It is of extreme interest to note that Rove was presumably one of Hatfield's sources, and chillingly, one of his sources threatened Hatfield's family members prior to the publication of his book! Wouldn't this be so ironic and Roveian; to find another Progressive author with a past, who this time writes to expose Rove.
There are two recent links below which compare the circumstances of Hatfield and Leopold. Following this are links and snips from articles about Hatfield. Apparently, he never divulged his sources for his book Fortunate Son, but strongly hinted that one of the sources was none other than Rove himself. Also ironic, is the fact that Hatfield repeatedly states that there was never denial or refutation of the facts in his B* biography.
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2006/05/rove-hatfield-leop... <snip>
I don’t want to dump all over Leopold, as, unlike everybody else, he seems to be trying. On the other hand, his background makes him, exactly like James Hatfield, an excellent target for Rovean disinformation. The Rove pattern is to pick somebody with an iffy history to spread rumors about a touchy topic, rumors which have a basis in truth but which are technically wrong, and then use the character of the person reporting the rumors to deflect attention from the real issues. They used the same method in dealing with Bush’s military service, or lack thereof.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=... This Google page contains numerous links strongly suggesting that Rove himself was one of Hatfield's Sources
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=3... <snip>
Jason Leopold -Truthout vs. Karl Rove- White House
by JOSHUA FRANK (EDITOR'S NOTE: Did Jason Leopold & Truthout.org get bushwhacked by the Karl Rove Spin-Lie Machine for the "Karl Rove Indicted" story? It happened to J.H. Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son, who was fed the story of George Bush Jr.'s cocaine conviction, then discredited publicly when it was revealed that Hatfield had done time for an unrelated fraud charge. Thus the Bush cocaine story was also discredited just in time for the 2000 presidential election. Later Hatfield was either suicided or committed suicide himself.)
Jason Leopold should be used to it. He's been the target of media assaults for years now, really ever since he began breaking stories about Enron’s fiascos and the California energy crisis as a writer for Dow Jones Newswire. .....
tp://www.lovearth.net/fortunateson.htm
Bush Accuser Dies Of Drug Overdose
<snip>
Was This A Payback Murder For His Writing Fortunate Son, Or Did
He Really Commit Suicide By Overdosing On Prescription Drugs?
by Irene Noguchi
The troubled author of a biography accusing President Bush of hiding a three-decade-old cocaine arrest committed suicide Wednesday. James Howard Hatfield, 43, was found in a hotel room in Springdale, Ark., and appeared to have died from a overdose of prescription drugs, police said. Hatfield wrote Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President in 1999. The book cited unnamed sources in claiming that Bush was arrested in 1972 but that his case was expunged. Bush, who was campaigning for president when the book was published, denied the allegations.
Soon after Fortunate Son was released by St. Martin's Press, the company discovered that Hatfield had been convicted in 1988 of attempted murder of his former supervisor. It recalled 70,000 copies in October 1999 and left an additional 20,000 books in storage.
**********
"He did have a past that he was working very hard to put behind him," Hicks said.
In "Fortunate Son," Hatfield said three unnamed sources claimed a judge had expunged Bush's case and given him community service as a favor to his father, who was ambassador to the United Nations at the time. The incident raised questions of how well publishers screen the credentials of authors and check facts in their books. Hatfield was convicted in 1988 of paying a hit man $5,000 to murder his former boss with a car bomb. Both passengers in the vehicle, the intended victim and a colleague, escaped unharmed when the bomb malfunctioned. After news of that conviction surfaced, it was also discovered that Hatfield had pleaded guilty to embezzlement in 1992. (Original article in Washington Post July 20, 2001; link doesn't work)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/19/fortunate /
The biography, which was supposed to debut next January, was hastened out the door three months early by its publisher St. Martin's on account of startling allegations: that Bush was arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession and had his record expunged with the help of family connections.
...Hatfield relies on three unnamed sources to nail down his disturbing allegations about Bush's supposed cocaine arrest.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/2001/05/Jim_Hatfiel... BUZZFLASH.COM INTERVIEW WITH JIM HATFIELD:
BuzzFlash: Why was the Bush Campaign so scared of Fortunate Son being published? Hatfield: For the obvious reason--everything contained between its covers is the truth. Pure and simple. Here it is a year-and-a-half later and no one has ever disproved anything in "Fortunate Son." The biography has withstood the test of time and, trust me, there has been an army of conservatives who would have given up their first born to destroy this book. But they had to settle with trying to destroy me instead. But to their absolute utter dismay, I'm still standing. My e-mail signature is from writer Langston Hughes and it fits me like a glove: "I've been insulted, eliminated, locked in, locked out, and left holding the bag. But I am still here."
**********************
BuzzFlash: Do you expect the White House to unleash a counterattack against you and your book? Hatfield: You betcha! It's Bush and his gang's modus operandi. Usually when a hard-hitting biography of someone is published, the subject ignores it and refuses to comment on the book because discussing or refuting it or even calling the author horse hockey, only draws more attention to the book--the opposite of what the biographical subject wants. When "Fortunate Son" was first published in October 1999, there was an orchestrated plan to discredit me on a daily basis publicly, while the Bush lawyers were privately pressuring Saint Martin's Press to take the unusual step of recalling all copies. While George W. was calling the cocaine arrest allegation "science fiction" and "ridiculous" (but never denying it), his father gave Fox News an exclusive interview and bold-faced lied. He claimed his lawyers had been in contact with me and was threatening to sue (neither I nor my attorney ever heard from any legal representative of the Bush family). The elder Bush also said I alleged in the book that he "bribed a judge" to insure his son's cocaine arrest was expunged. Using my sources' own words, I detail how he used his political influence with a judge friend in Houston to make sure George W. got community service and the record expunged. The Bush campaign also drafted former Harris County (Houston) District Attorney Carol S. Vance to issue a statement debunking the allegations that the charges against Bush were expunged by a GOP judge, claiming that they could not be true because no Republicans served as judges in the county at the time. Vance's statement does not prove that what I asserted was false. Actually, it validates my procedural process of corroboration when dealing with anonymous sources. Two of the three stated it was simply a "state judge" who expunged Bush's cocaine arrest, while only one of them said, "Republican." By late 1999, all 59 state district judges were Republicans, whereas in 1972 they were all Democrats. Was it a simple mistake on the part of one of my sources, or purposely planned to discredit me at a later date, as my publisher, Sander Hicks, believes (as do quite a few others). And then, of course, the final nail in the coffin during that week in October 1999 was the eventual front page story in the Dallas Morning News that I had a checkered past. Suddenly the media was more obsessed with the life of the biographer than the subject of an even-balanced but unflinching biography of a man that eventually became president. Confederate General Robert E. Lee once said, "When you're too weak to defend, you must attack." And that's exactly what the Bush campaign did. This time it will be the White House. Actually, they've thrown everything at me but the kitchen sink, both personally and professionally. Also, like I said earlier, not one single statement in "Fortunate Son" has been disproved during the past year and a half. What truly worries me and wakes me up in a cold sweat during the middle of the night, is what one of my confidential sources for the cocaine arrest told me when it was announced that Soft Skull Press was going to re-publish the book less than 3 months after St. Martin's Press recalled it: "Jim, we're not done discrediting you. The wheels are already in motion for more of the same." Then he went on to say if I "valued the lives" of my wife and baby daughter (whom he called by their first names), "then you'll cancel this publishing deal right now, today." It makes you wonder why the Bushes so desperately want this book suppressed. What's contained in its 400+ pages that scares the hell out of them?
http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000058.shtm... According to Hatfield, during the writing of Fortunate Son he had contacted Rove and Johnson and interviewed them at length. Hatfield mistakenly assumed that Johnson and Rove weren't aware of his 1988 conviction for solicitation of capital murder. Rove and Johnson realised that, in Hatfield, they had found their solution to Bush's drug problem. A flawed author.
**********
He had, he claimed, received death threats levelled at him and his family from prominent and important right wingers.
**********
He was clearly taken by surprise when the press turned against him and when his criminal record was unearthed and used to discredit the work he did on the biography
I think he was naive enough to believe what most Americans like to believe about America, that democracy still means something here, that the truth will get a hearing, that evil when exposed will be brought down."
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