Former Secret Service Agent Gary Byrne during his White House service. (Courtesy — Gary Byrne)
NEW YORK — The public’s appetite for all things critical of Hillary Clinton is showing no signs of slowing down, and for the first time, three of the top four nonfiction titles on the New York Times’ bestseller list constitute page-turning exposes focusing squarely on the former secretary of state and first lady.
This week, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann’s Armageddon and Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America joined top bestseller Crisis of Character, the tell-all account penned by a former secret service agent assigned to protect the White House under former President Bill Clinton, on the Times’ top four list.
Crisis of Character has spent four weeks on the bestseller list, while Armageddon and Hillary’s America are new entries.
The news comes on the heels of last week’s Democratic National Convention, an event pundits likened to an opportunity for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to re-introduce herself to the American public. The boom in sales of books critical of Clinton show that plenty of voters remain highly curious of her despite a public presence that dates back several decades.
The Drudge Report, the news aggregation website that exploded onto the American media scene in 1996 when as a subscriber-based email service it became the first outlet to break the story about Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, reported last month that Clinton’s campaign was “working overtime” to keep Crisis of Character author Gary Byrne from promoting his tell-all on major news networks.
“POLITICO plans an early morning attack on Byrne’s credibility, sources claim, despite his having served in federal law enforcement for nearly thirty years,” Drudge alleged, a claim that turned out to be true when the news site published a report in which several fellow Secret Service officers slammed Byrne’s account in a Politico.com report.
“Meanwhile, Hillary’s campaign has won assurances that he (Byrne) will not be invited to spread ‘lies’ on any of the nation’s broadcast networks,” Drudge claimed. “’It’s trash for cash,’ a campaign official warned one producer.”
Coincidentally, Politico made several appearances in the Wikileaks dump of internal Democratic National Committee emails released last month. In one instance, it was revealed that a Politico reporter agreed to send an advanced copy of a Clinton-related story to DNC officials prior to publication.
Google’s site-search function meanwhile shows that the Big Three — ABC, CBS and NBC — have largely ignored Byrne. The first six ‘hits’ from a Byrne site-search of CBS News actually turned up stories dating back to 1998, the height of the investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs when Byrne and other officers were testifying.
Meanwhile, the top hits from an ABC News site-search of Byrne yielded links to the website MediaMatters.org, the organization launched in 2004 which bills itself as “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
Former Secret Service Agent Gary Byrne during his White House service. (Courtesy — Gary Byrne) 
