June 6-7, 2016 – EARLY EDITION. “Barney the Hustler” blackmailing Democratic super-delegates
Sources with the Bernie Sanders campaign report to WMR that former Representative Barney Frank has been ensuring that Democratic National Convention super-delegates commit their votes to Hillary Clinton or face public “outing” of their sexual orientation. Sanders is reportedly livid over the degree to which Hillary and Bill Clinton have relied on Frank to blackmail super-delegates into supporting the former Secretary of State.
The Sanders campaign recently sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee chastising Frank, a co-chair of the convention’s rules committee, as an “aggressive attack surrogate” for Hillary Clinton. Sanders has sought to have Frank and his co-chair, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy, removed as chairs of the rules committee because of their aggressive pro-Clinton activities.
Although the Sanders campaign did not specifically mention Frank’s hustling of super-delegate votes by threatening to reveal their sexual orientation, the letter stated that the Clinton campaign officials had “gone beyond dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the senator and his campaign.”
Frank has called Sanders’s attacks on Frank’s role in the 2008 banking crisis as the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee as “McCarthyite.” However, it is Frank’s blackmail threats against super-delegates that evoke memories of the “Red-baiting” blackmail tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s gay special counsel, Roy Cohn.
Sanders campaign sources are well aware of Frank’s past blackmail activities on behalf of the Clintons. WMR has been told by Democratic sources that during President Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999, Frank threatened to reveal the homosexuality of a few Republican senators unless they voted to acquit Clinton. Apparently, in a few cases, the blackmail worked. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is strongly rumored to be a lesbian, voted to acquit Clinton on two charges, perjury and obstruction of justice. Republican senators Richard Shelby of Alabama, Ted Stevens of Alaska, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and Slade Gorton of Washington shocked their GOP colleagues by voting “not guilty” on the perjury charge against Clinton. Last minute changes in votes by members of Congress have often been preceded by various forms of blackmail, many financial but some sexual in nature.
In 1989, Frank admitted to have hired a male prostitute as his personal aide. Frank also put the man, Paul Gobie, on his congressional staff payroll. Frank later said Gobie was a very good “con man” who “suckered” Frank. There were several reports that Gobie used Frank’s Capitol Hill townhouse to run a male prostitution service with additional charges that some of the males trafficked from Frank’s residence were “underage.”
Barney Frank, the Clintons' blackmailer-in-chief
The House Ethics Committee voted to “reprimand” Frank for his activities, avoiding the more severe actions of censure or expulsion from the House. Frank let it be known if the Ethics Committee and full House opted for censuring or expelling him, he was prepared to name the names of at least a quarter of the House, including many Republicans, who were gay. The tactic worked. The full House voted 408-18 to merely reprimand Frank. Republican Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, who originally tried to censure Frank, called the entire proceeding “tragic” against “one of our brightest and most energetic members.”
| In "Confessions of a D.C. Madam,” a memoir by Henry Vinson of his time in Washington spent as a male prostitute "madam," Vinson cites Frank's activities on five pages. These include a personal sexual encounter as a prostitute that Vinson regarded as especially distasteful because the request for a “hairless” young male with a swimmer’s body seemed like a veiled request for an underage escort. |
Frank’s more recent abilities at blackmailing Democratic super-delegates were honed in his earlier blackmailing of members of the House of Representatives against voting to censure or expel him. In 2010, New York Democratic Representative Eric Massa, an opponent of “Obamacare” because it lacked a public option, resigned from the House. Massa had been charged by his own chief of staff, a former driver for Frank, with sexual improprieties among male members of his staff. Frank’s “lavender mafia” succeeded in engineering a House ethics committee investigation of Massa. The committee later absolved Massa of any wrongdoing.
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