Over the past few days, Dick Morris has returned to one of his least-credible allegations against Hillary Clinton: that during her husband's presidential campaign, she used “private detectives to unearth negative information on those who were politically inconvenient during the husband's campaigns for president and his White House tenure” in order to “provide blackmail material to cow them into silence.”

Morris offered this claim both in his syndicated column and on Fox News:

Note how Morris doesn't even attempt to provide evidence that this “blackmail” actually happened, while calling it “a matter of documented fact.”

This claim has been floating around since 1998, ever since it was first raised by... Dick Morris!

During a March 31, 1998 appearance on CNBC (accessed from Nexis), Morris first dropped the bombshell, claiming that in 1992, the Clinton campaign “hired detectives to snoop around the personal lives of the women who they asked to come up with blackmail material to force them to do that, even if they felt at the time that those women were lying,” specifically citing the supposed efforts of private investigator Jack Palladino. Morris claimed that he had “personal knowledge that this happened. Betsey Wright, who coordinated it, told me that it happened.”

The next week, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee announced that they would be investigating Morris' allegations. But they also pointed out a glaring discrepancy in Morris' claim: he had previously given a deposition denying knowledge of Palladino's activities. From an April 8, 1998 article in The Hill:

After seeing the CNBC broadcast, “We recalled that here was a question that he had been asked, and he gave a flat denial,” said Will Dwyer, the committee spokesman. “We called (him) to see if he wanted to refresh anything that he had told us in his deposition.”

Morris had denied knowledge of Palladino's activities when deposed by committee lawyers on Aug. 21, 1997.

[...]

In Morris's conversation with committee lawyers in August, the following exchange took place:

Q. Do you know a gentleman named Jack Palladino? A. No. I think he is some way involved with the DNC (Democratic National Committee), but I don't know who or what.

Asked about this inconsistency, Morris changed his story. Despite saying on CNBC that he had “personal knowledge that this happened” and that Betsey Wright had told him about it, he told The Hill that “he has no first-hand knowledge of the events and based his comments on previously published press reports.”

The Clinton campaign did investigate the allegations made against Bill Clinton, and the credibility of those making the claims. Given the complete lack of credibility of many of the accusers and the media's willingness to nonetheless run with their claims, that was both prudent and necessary.

But no credible allegation of blackmail has ever been made. Given the tremendous scrutiny levied against the Clintons over the past decades, I think it's fair to say that the reason is that it never happened.

And let's keep in mind, especially given his backtrack on where this claim comes from, that Morris himself is in no way a credible source. He is the one, after all, who invented and then retracted the claim that in 1997, then-Attorney General Janet Reno threatened President Clinton by saying that if he did not reappoint her as attorney general, she was “gonna tell the truth about Waco.”