Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists. By Richard Poe. Nashville: WND Books, 2004.

Bill and Hillary Clinton rose to power first in Arkansas and then in Washington, D.C., through ruthless destruction of those who stood in their way and effective suppression of unfavorable information. In the mid-1990s, however, their power was met and checked by Americans using the Internet to spread just the sort of information that the Clintons had always previously been able to stifle. As Richard Poe reveals in this fascinating book, the free flow of information via the World Wide Web was what finally placed a limit on the damage the Clintons were able to do to the republic and persuaded Hillary to postpone her planned triumphal march to the presidency.

While Bill Clinton was an instinctive politician and border-line sociopath, Hillary was the evil genius of the couple’s relentless pursuit of power. An anti-American ideologue with great cunning and not the slightest hint of a scruple, Hillary employed shady private investigators and hired thugs to silence—one way or another—those who possessed knowledge not only of Bill’s serial adulteries but also of the Clintons’ drug-running, money-laundering, connections to Chinese intelligence, and other crimes. Once the Clintons entered the White House, she had the additional resources of the federal government, including the FBI and the IRS, as well as the tacit aid of the establishment news media in controlling the information that was allowed to reach the American people.

What she had not counted on, however, was the way in which the new technology of the Internet would become a tool in the hands of courageous and innovative patriots to by-pass the major media and shine the light of truth on the Clinton crimes. Beginning with the strange case of White House counsel Vincent Foster and the attempted cover-up of events surrounding his alleged suicide, Internet journalists began exposing the Clintons’ darkest secrets. Richard Poe offers insightful accounts of the background and accomplishments of these pioneers and their websites, including Christopher Ruddy of Newsmax.com, Joseph Farrah of Worldnetdaily.com, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and such forum sites as FreeRepublic.com and TownHall.com.

Of course, Hillary fought back with all the resources at her disposal, and they were considerable. Most of those who in any way aided the dissemination of information that Hillary wanted suppressed soon found themselves the subjects of IRS audits, spurious lawsuits, or even blatant attempts at intimidation by federal agents. Yet Hillary proved unable to silence them nor to impose the Internet “gatekeeper” function that she ominously advocated. Poe credits the new medium of communication with short-circuiting Hillary’s plans for a 2000 presidential run and thus helping to change the course of American history. Just as the Committees of Correspondence provided the information necessary for Americans to resist tyranny in the 1760s and 1770s, so the Internet became the means by which courageous journalists provided the information Americans needed to defend their freedoms in the 1990s.

Steven E. Woodworth teaches history at Texas Christian University.