On the February 5 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage played a pre-recorded interview with InsightMag.com editor Jeffrey Kuhner, in which Kuhner discussed the controversy surrounding InsightMag.com's January 17 report claiming that “researchers connected to” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) disclosed that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) “spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.” During the interview, Kuhner asserted that the “Clinton people are livid at the Obama camp” because Obama “has been able to raise money from the Hollywood liberal Jewish set that has been strongly backing the Clintons, and he is tapping into their donor base,” adding that the Clinton camp “know[s] that the Muslim card ... is going to hurt Obama with a lot of these prominent liberal Jews out in Hollywood.” He went on to call Clinton “the most dangerous” and “the most evil politician in America today.”
Kuhner also continued to defend InsightMag.com's January 17 article and claimed that “the people who are close to the Clinton campaign” -- “the best political operators that money can buy” -- were behind the debunked allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, and “they wanted to discredit Insight because they are stunned and amazed how we're able to get this kind of intimate access into the Clinton campaign and their strategy.” Kuhner further claimed that “what we reported at Insight was 110 percent accurate.”
As Media Matters for America documented, the smear against Obama has been discredited, and, as ABC News reported, the accusation that Clinton is responsible for the smear “remains unproven and unsubstantiated” as well.
From the February 5 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:
KUNHER: I think, Michael, what a lot of people are appreciating about Insight -- like us or hate us -- you know -- love us or think ill of us -- we stand our ground, we stand behind our story, and we are not going to kowtow to the liberal media establishment.
And, you know, as I said to [New York Times reporter] David Kirkpatrick at least a half a dozen times over two conversations, and as I mentioned again in the commentary piece, what we reported at Insight was 110 percent accurate, and what we reported was that the Hillary camp was conducting a background investigation into Obama's Muslim background as a young boy in Indonesia and that the Hillary campaign, they had concluded through their investigators that Obama in fact was raised and educated as a Muslim and that the narrative that he has been spinning to the American people now for the last couple years -- that he was raised in a secular household in a non-religious home -- is false.
SAVAGE: Wow, that's something.
[...]
KUNHER: And what our sources have shown to us is -- told us and, through very sort of meticulous work, what our sources have been able to discover, is that really Hillary's people were behind the liberal media's smear campaign against Insight.
[...]
KUHNER: I know the people who are close to the Clinton campaign. They are the best political operators that money can buy, and what you saw with this orchestrated campaign against Insight is classic Clinton at work.
What they did was, they immediately -- once they were pre-empted on the story, once they found out that we had broken the story, and that people like you picked up the story -- they went to their media allies and they constructed this narrative of Obama going to a madrassa -- the story is false.
SAVAGE: That's incredible.
KUNHER: And they did it, really, for three goals in mind -- and it was really a brilliant strategy on their part.
One is, they made sure that the Muslim background madrassa angle to the story was repeated and perpetrated out there. And as my sources have told me -- people close to the Clinton campaign -- the reason why they did that is they still want that question mark about Obama's background out there and, in particular, what the Clinton people are livid at the Obama camp, is that Obama has been able to raise money from the Hollywood liberal Jewish set that has been strongly backing the Clintons, and he is tapping into their donor base. And they know that the Muslim card is going to hurt her -- is going to hurt Obama with a lot of these prominent liberal Jews out in Hollywood.
Secondly, not only did they want to hurt Obama, they wanted also to present Hillary as the victim of a right-wing smear campaign. So, she comes across as the victim in all of this even though it was her group and her operators and her investigators that were digging up dirt on Obama.
And three, they wanted to discredit Insight because they are stunned and amazed how we're able to get this kind of intimate access into the Clinton campaign and their strategy. So, really, what the Clintons did was again -- and you saw this throughout the 1990s with her husband Bill -- is brilliantly orchestrate a media campaign, where literally black becomes white, and they control the spin and the narrative, and it was really a brilliant triple-bumper shot: Obama is damaged; she's presented as the victim; and Insight looks, or at least it's spun, in the liberal media, as being sort of orchestrating a right-wing hit piece on Hillary.
[...]
KUHNER: And what you're now seeing with this attempt to discredit Insight's story is just how devious and how Machiavellian the Clintons can be. And that's why I've been warning my conservative friends and some of my Republican sources on the hill, not to underestimate Hillary Clinton.
She is the most dangerous, and I believe the most evil politician in America today.