Richard Clarke is running out of people who will listen to him.  That’s a problem when you run a consulting business.  Clarke, as you may recall, was the counter-terrorism czar under several presidents immediately prior to 9/11 (his tenure ended badly under Bush ’43, who he then proceeded to blast in a tell-all book).

One certainly hopes he took more care with the facts when he was helping to run counter-terrorism operations because he seems to be getting awfully sloppy. With his access to credible news outlets clearly running thin, Clarke recently did an interview with ThinkProgress (which subscribes to the “if you can’t beat them in the public policy arena try to discredit them in the public one” school of thought) where he irresponsibly and recklessly accuses the Chamber of committing a felony. There’s a word for this: defamation.

In more than 70,000 hacked e-mails, not one shred of evidence was found demonstrating that the U.S. Chamber ever hired or solicited proposals from any of these security companies. No evidence was found because it doesn’t exist—it never happened.

Already in for a penny, Clarke went in for a pound, repeating the thoroughly discredited canard that the Chamber used foreign money to pay for campaign ads in the last election.

We wouldn’t know, but we’d assume that counter-terrorism involves the meticulous gathering of facts and evidence and its thorough examination for accuracy. It’s unfortunate Mr. Clarke didn’t bring the same zeal for facts, accuracy, and truth to his discussion of the Chamber.

There are two lessons to be learned here. First, ThinkProgress should take a break from its own anti-Chamber jihad to do a little fact-checking and give this circular self-promotion cycle a rest. Second, given Richard Clarke’s background at the highest levels of government, he should know better than to just hop on-board with the rantings of a known anti-business activist group.