Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. has issued the following statement via his personal Facebook account:
Before this critical election, I feel compelled to share a personal experience with Hillary Clinton. The year was 1989. I was serving as general counsel for Liberty University just two years after graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law. This was long before Liberty became one of the largest and most prosperous universities in the nation. In fact, Liberty University was deep in debt in 1989, struggling to make payroll and debt payments every month. Creditors were threatening to foreclose on the campus and the very survival of the university was in jeopardy. My job was to keep the creditors at bay, find badly needed loans and restructure debt.
One of our donors introduced us to Stephens Inc. of Little Rock, Arkansas, which I believe was the largest off-Wall Street investment banking firm in the nation at the time. The bankers felt that Liberty could recover; they did a good job for Liberty but was ultimately unable to find the financing we needed.
The attorneys for Stephens Inc. were a small firm in Little Rock that seemed competent but at the same time were extremely arrogant, condescending and disrespectful to all of us. They had an attitude of superiority like we had never experienced before. They soon began to push Liberty hard to abandon its Christian traditions and doctrinal foundations. Their argument was that Liberty could save a few dollars by issuing tax exempt bonds instead of taxable bonds. At the time, Virginia law did not permit pervasively sectarian universities from issuing tax exempt bonds. Liberty refused to make any changes that were core to our mission and the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Liberty could not issue the cheaper tax exempt bonds because of our Christian mission.
Something about that experience persistently nagged at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not long ago, I was looking through the old files and was shocked to realize that the bond counsel that had attempted to force Liberty to abandon its Christian mission years earlier was none other than the Rose Law Firm! By then, Bill Clinton was president and the Rose Law Firm had become famous from the many Clinton scandals in the 1990s. The names of the law partners on the letterhead I found included Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster (who was mysteriously found dead in a park a few years later) and others who rose to prominence when Bill Clinton was president.
I have no doubt that, if elected, one of Hillary Clinton’s prime targets will be the religious freedoms of all people of faith across our nation. The federal government is already using Title IX to attack the religious freedoms of faith based colleges and universities.
I believe Americans will be wise enough next Tuesday to avoid putting itself through an experience like the one Liberty University was forced to endure in 1989. I believe Americans will elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence and send Hillary Clinton and all her corruption back to the private sector.
The national media, which I consider a wing of the Clinton campaign, recently pushed the false story that a significant number of Liberty University students were opposing Donald Trump. The story was based on a petition signed by a little over a thousand folks, many of whom were not students or faculty of the university (Liberty’s record resident enrollment exceeded 15,000 this year and online enrollment has averaged near 90,000 in recent years). But facts are often inconvenient. A poll taken yesterday of a random sample of 1,500 Liberty residential students revealed that 78 percent are voting for Trump, 4 percent for Hillary and 18 percent for other candidates or who declined to answer.
A friend of mine has coined next week’s election “TREXIT” because he believes the outcome will be a poll-defying victory for Trump and Pence similar to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union. Our nation’s future is truly at stake. Please remember to vote and to pray for our nation!
After several Facebook users accused Falwell of making up the exchange, he published a photo that shows the documentation he says proves it happened.
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