Politics & Power Quote by Paul Begala

Begala’s line is courtroom rhetoric dressed up as cable-news zinger: it takes the exhausting sprawl of Clinton-era scandal culture and flips it into a badge of honor. “Most investigated” concedes the premise that there’s been an extraordinary amount of smoke around Bill and Hillary Clinton. The pivot - “now the most thoroughly exonerated” - tries to turn that smoke into proof that there was never fire, and it does so by borrowing the language of legal finality. Not “cleared,” not “vindicated,” but “thoroughly exonerated,” a phrase engineered to sound like the case is closed and the jury is bored.

The intent is defensive but also preemptive. Begala isn’t just rebutting a particular allegation; he’s attempting to change the frame through which future allegations will be processed. If the Clintons have already been investigated more than anyone, then the next investigation can be cast as redundant, obsessive, even politically perverse. The subtext: this isn’t accountability, it’s persecution; the real scandal is the scandal machine.

Context matters. Begala came up as a Clinton war-room loyalist in an era when partisan media accelerated and the independent counsel became a kind of permanent weather system. “Most investigated couple” nods to Whitewater, Travelgate, Lewinsky, campaign finance, Benghazi-era echoes - a whole genre of inquiry as political strategy. The line works because it compresses decades of controversy into a neat, almost statistical claim, inviting listeners to confuse quantity of scrutiny with quality of innocence. It’s a persuasive move, not a neutral one: it asks you to treat exhaustion as evidence.