Forensic Audit Walmart Scandels

Vulcan Lakes, Eminent Domain, and Wal-Mart

http://mchenrycountyblog.com/category/forensic-audit/

http://prorev.com/hillary.htm

I don’t remember – 71
I don’t know – 62
I’m not sure – 17
I have no idea – 10
I don’t believe so – 9
I don’t recall – 8
I don’t think so – 8
I don’t have any specific recollection – 6
I have no recollection – 4
Not to my knowledge – 4
I just don’t remember – 4
I don’t believe – 4
I have no specific recollection – 3
I might have – 3
I don’t have any recollection of that – 2
I don’t have a specific memory – 2
I don’t have any memory of that – 2
I just can’t say – 2
I have no direct knowledge of that – 2
I don’t have any idea – 2
Not that I recall – 2
I don’t believe I did – 2
I can’t remember – 2
I can’t say – 2
I do not remember doing so – 2
Not that I remember – 2
I’m not aware – 1
I honestly don’t know – 1
I don’t believe that I did – 1
I’m fairly sure – 1
I have no other recollection – 1
I’m not positive – 1
I certainly don’t think so – 1
I don’t really remember – 1
I would have no way of remembering that – 1
That’s what I believe happened – 1
To my knowledge, no – 1
To the best of my knowledge – 1
To the best of my memory – 1
I honestly don’t recall – 1
I honestly don’t remember – 1
That’s all I know – 1
I don’t have an independent recollection of that – 1
I don’t actually have an independent memory of that – 1
As far as I know – 1
I don’t believe I ever did that – 1
That’s all I know about that – 1
I’m just not sure – 1
Nothing that I remember – 1
I simply don’t know – 1
I would have no idea – 1
I don’t know anything about that – 1
I don’t have any direct knowledge of that – 1
I just don’t know – 1
I really don’t know – 1
I can’t deny that, I just — I have no memory of that at all – 1

UNDERNEWS	INDEX		E-MAIL US	STATS	BOOKSHOP	LINKS
P R O G R E S S I V E  R E V I E W

Things worth knowing aboutHillary ClintonMOST RECENT HILLARY CLINTON STORIES

THE CLINTON SCANDALS

WHAT YOU WON’T FIND IN THE CLINTON MUSEUM

THE REAL DIVIDE ON HILLARY CLINTON

HILLARY CLINTON, BARACK OBAMA & VANNA WHITE

THE POLITICS OF ETHNICITY, GENDER & ZIPCODE

ARKANSAS CONNECTIONS

HOW TO TELL OBAMA & HILCLIN APART

SUMMARYFIRST FIRST LADY to come under criminal investigationFIRST FIRST LADY to almost be indicted acccording to one of the special prosecutorsNUMBER of Hillary Clinton fundraisers convicted of, or pleading no contest to, crime: 5NUMBER OF TIMES that Hillary Clinton, providing testimony to Congress, said that she didn’t remember, didn’t know, or something similar: 250 NUMBER OF CLOSE BUSINESS partners of Hillary Clinton who ended up in prison: 3. The Clintons’ two partners in Whitewater wereconvicted of 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. Hillary Clinton’s partner and mentor at the Rose law firm, Webster Hubbell, pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges, including defrauding former clients and former partners out of more than $480,000. Hillary Clinton was mentioned 35 times in the indictment. IN THE 1980s, Hillary Clinton made a $44,000 profit on a $2,000 investment in a cellular phone franchise deal took advantage of the FCC’s preference for locals, minorities and women. The franchise was almost immediately flipped to the cellular giant, McCaw. HILLARY CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND set up a resort land scam known as Whitewater in which the unwitting bought third rate property 50 miles from the nearest grocery store and, thanks to the sleazy financing, about half the purchasers, many of them seniors, lost their property. IN 1993 HILLARY CLINTON and David Watkins moved to oust the White House travel office in favor of World Wide Travel, Clinton’s source of $1 million in fly-now-pay-later campaign trips that essentially financed the last stages of the campaign without the bother of reporting a de facto contribution. The White House fired seven long-term employees for alleged mismanagement and kickbacks. The director, Billy Dale, charged with embezzlement, was acquitted in less than two hours by the jury. HRC’S 1994 HEALTH CARE PLAN, according to one account, included fines of up to $5,000 for refusing to join the government-mandated health plan, $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time, 15 years to doctors who received “anything of value” in exchange for helping patients short-circuit the bureaucracy, $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork, $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment, and $100,000 a day for drug companies that messed up federal filings. TWO MONTHS after commencing the Whitewater scheme, Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she had a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million. IN 1996, Hillary Clinton’s Rose law firm billing records, sought for two years by congressional investigators and the special prosecutor were found in the back room of the personal residence at the White House. Clinton said she had no idea how they got there. DRUG DEALER Jorge Cabrera gave enough to the Democrats to have his picture taken with both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. . . Cabrera was arrested in January 1996 inside a cigar warehouse near here in Dade County, where more than 500 pounds of cocaine had been hidden. He and several accomplices were charged with having smuggled 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States through the Keys In 2000, Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign returned $22,000 in soft money to a businesswoman linked to a Democratic campaign contribution from a drug smuggler in Havana. IN AUGUST 2000, Hillary Clinton held a huge Hollywood fundraiser for her Senate campaign. It was very successful. The only problem was that, by a long shot, she didn’t report all the money contributed: $800K by the US government’s ultimate count in a settlement and $2 million according to the key contributor and convicted con Peter Paul. This is, in election law, the moral equivalent of not reporting a similar amount on your income tax. It is a form of fraud. Hillary Clinton’s defense is that she didn’t know about it HILLARY CLINTON’S participation in a Whitewater related land deal became suspicious enough to trigger an investigation by the Arkansas Supreme Court. IN 2007, A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became a target of the FBI allegations that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton’s political action committee and to Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 2004 re-election campaign. Authorities say Northridge, Calif., businessman Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, fled the country shortly after being indicted on charges of engineering more than $50,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic committees. HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTED the appointment of Rudy Giuliani’s buddy, Bernie Kerick, to be Secretary of Homeland Security,. Kerick subsecquently withdrew and not long after was indicted. TALES OF HILLARY Times, UK, 2009 – Hillary Clinton . . . was back in Belfast last week, giving a gentle push to politicians dragging their heels over a final piece in the peace process jigsaw. But according to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament, she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995. The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe’s most bombed hotel, earning the moniker “the Hardboard Hotel”. However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night. The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel. Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: “When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel . . . even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.” During the presidential campaign Mrs Clinton drew on her Bosnia experience, saying: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but we just ran with our heads down to get in the vehicles to get to our base.” After archive news footage was shown of her walking calmly from her plane with her daughter, Chelsea, Ms Clinton admitted: “I did mis-speak the other day. . . OTHER TALES OF HILLLARY – Hillary claimed she played pickup basketball when she was young, presumably to get ready for her race against Obama. – She was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. who climbed Mount Everest. – She was a Yankees fan when she lived in Chicago. – She told upstate New Yorkers she had been a “duck hunter.” – She claimed on Sept. 11 daughter Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center. – Number of times that Hillary Clinton, providing testimony to Congress, said that she didn’t remember, didn’t know, or something similar: 250 AP – Democrat John Edwards said the top strategist for presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton [Mark Penn] has ties to the controversial Blackwater security firm, and warned against installing “a group of corporate Democrats” to replace the Bush White House. Edwards suggested similarities between Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, and the Republican president. Penn, Clinton’s pollster and senior strategist, is the worldwide president of Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm. A subsidiary, BKSH, helped prepare Blackwater founder Erik Prince for a contentious congressional hearing this week, but Burson-Marsteller says the relationship has ended. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said Penn had done no work on the Blackwater account. KATHRYN JOYCE AND JEFF SHARLET, MOTHER JONES – Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. . . Clinton’s prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or “the Family”), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ. . . [the leader’s] friends include former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Reaganite Edwin Meese III, and ultraconservative Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.). The Fellowship’s God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance. JOSHUA GREEN, THE ATLANTIC, 2006 – Clinton’s proficiency in this innermost sanctum has unnerved some of the capital’s most exalted religious conservatives. “You’re not talking about some tree-hugging, Jesus-is-my-Buddha sort of stuff,” says David Kuo, a former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who worked with Clinton to promote joint legislation and who, like Brownback, has apologized to her for past misdeeds. “These are powerful evangelicals she’s meeting with.” MICKEY KAUS – On page 93 of the new Gerth-Van Natta Hillary Clinton book, a sentence describes how, during the ’92 campaign, Hillary herself “listened to a secretly recorded audiotape of a phone conversation of Clinton critics plotting their next attack. The tape contained discussions of another woman who might surface with allegations about an affair with Bill. Bill’s supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones, and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.” SUN SENTINEL, FL – U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Weston, and Alcee Hastings, of Miramar, were appointed national campaign co-chairs on Thursday for U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Democratic presidential effort. “We need a leader with a clear vision and sound judgment, who can work with a Democratic Congress to renew the promise of America. Hillary is that leader,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. . . WIKIPEDIA – In 1981 Judge Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders). CNS – A videotape shows New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. . . should be admitted as new evidence in a California civil case, a forthcoming legal brief to be filed by argues. The tape shows Clinton speaking in 2000 with Peter Paul, a Hollywood mogul, and comic book icon Stan Lee about a massive fundraising event for her 2000 Senate race. Paul spent about $2 million of his own money to produce the event. The legal contribution limit to a candidate then was $2,000. . . A portion of the videotape captures the closing words of a lengthy conversation in which Paul was present. The voice of Hillary Clinton is heard telling Lee that Paul and her chief campaign aide “talk all the time, so she’ll be the person to convey whatever I need.” She is then heard adding, “I wanted to call and personally thank all of you … [and] tell you how much this means to me. It’s going to mean a lot to the president, too.” Clinton and her supporters have maintained that she had no direct knowledge that the event violated campaign finance rules. In a written declaration for the California court filed on April 7, 2006, the senator said only that she didn’t remember discussions with Paul about the fundraiser. DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN, NEWSMAX– Since he left office in 2001, former president Bill Clinton has been paid by $3.3 million by Info USA, an Omaha, Nebraska company that has been identified as a key provider of specially designed databases that have been sold to criminals who use the detailed information to defraud the unsuspecting elderly. . . According to the New York Times, Info USA compiled and sold lists that disclosed the names of elderly men and women who would be likely to respond to unscrupulous scams. The lists left no doubt about the vulnerability of the elderly targets. The Times reported, for example, that Info USA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents MIKE McINTIRE, NY TIMES – When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there. The company, Info USA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, Info USA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events. Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of Info USA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests”t SAM SMITH, ‘SHADOWS OF HOPE,’ 1994 – During the first months of the Clinton administration, one of the biggest national policy changes of the past fifty years was being forged by a secret committee led by Mrs. Clinton under procedures that periodically defied the courts and the Government Accounting Office . . , Despite the contrary evidence of public opinion polls, the concept of Canadian-style single-payer insurance was dismissed early. Tom Hamburger and Ted Marmor in the Washington Monthly tell of a single-payer proponent being invited to the White House in February 1993. It was, he said, a “pseudo-consultation;” the doctor was quickly informed that “single payer is not politically feasible.” When Dr. David Himmelstein of the Harvard Medical School pressed Mrs. Clinton on single payer, she replied, “Tell me something interesting, David.” In other words, write Hamburger and Marmor: “Fewer than six weeks into the Clinton presidency, the White House had made its key policy decision: Before the Health Care Task Force wrote a single page of its 22-volume report to the President, the single payer idea was written off, and “managed competition” was in.”. . . Reported Thomas Bodenehimer in Nation: “Around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health reform table sit the managed-competition winners: big business, hospitals, large (but not small) commercial insurers, the Blues, budget-worried government leaders and the ‘Jackson Hole Group,’ the chief intellectual honchos of the managed competition movement. . . Adherence to the mantra of managed competition appears to be the price of a ticket of admission to this gathering. “ LA TIMES– A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is being sought by the FBI on allegations that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton’s political action committee and to Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 2004 re-election campaign. Authorities say Northridge, Calif., businessman Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, fled the country shortly after being indicted on charges of engineering more than $50,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic committees. A business associate charged as Jinnah’s co-conspirator has entered a guilty plea and is scheduled to be sentenced in Los Angeles next week. A federal law enforcement source said prosecutors had not dealt with the political committees in conducting their investigation and had no evidence that the committees knew the contributions were illegal. DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN, JEWISH WORLD REVIEW – With each new disclosure, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s connection between the emir of Dubai, Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, seems ever more intimate. Last February, Sen. Clinton was out front in condemning DP World, a Dubai government-owned company seeking to take over key operations at American ports. But, at the same time, Bill was advising the emir to hire his former press secretary, Joe Lockhart, to get the deal approved. Back then, Lockhart denied working for the emir. And when Bill’s role became public, Hillary claimed that she had no idea that he had any involvement in the DP World issue. Now, it turns out that the emir’s Dubai International Capital Corp. hired Lockhart’s company, Glover Park Group, by last April to help with another U.S. deal – a takeover of two defense firms. The relationship between the Clintons and the emir has long been too close to avoid scrutiny. Something is driving up Bill and Hillary’s net worth pretty dramatically. In 2003, Sen. Clinton disclosed assets of at least $352,000 but less than $3.8 million. By 2005, she was declaring assets in the $10 million to $50 million range. . . WALL STREET JOURNAL – The core of [HRC’S] team includes several staunch loyalists from her husband’s time in power, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and Samuel “Sandy” Berger, who succeeded Mr. Lake as national security adviser during Mr. Clinton’s second term. . . WIKIPEDIA – In April 2005, Berger plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives in Washington. According to the lead prosecutor in the case Berger only took copies of classified information and that no original material was destroyed, however there is notable controversy and speculation that he might have removed or destroyed originals of other unknown documents as well. HOW TO TELL OBAMA & CLINTON APART2008BACK TO TOPHOW CLINTON AND OBAMA ARE ALIKE Their positions are often barely distinguishable from that of the Republicans They have built their campaigns around genetic identity rather than on political principles and issues. “I would be stunned to find an anti-business [Supreme Court] appointee from either of them,” Cass Sunstein, who is a constitutional adviser to Obama, told me. “There’s not a strong interest on the part of Obama or Clinton in demonizing business, and you wouldn’t expect to see that in their Supreme Court nominees.” – Jeffrey Rosen, NY Times They take multiple positions on individual issues such as NAFTA They have produced no interesting new ideas nor promised to fight for any important new programs They have offered no good idea about how to handle the current economic crisis Neither has ameaningful urban policy Neither are will willing to take on the criminality of Bush’s use of torture. They have gone about their campaigns as though they were leading a cult rather than a political movement Clinton hangs out with a covert group of right wing GOP Christians; Obama would name some of them to his cabinet. They have similar voting records with Progressive Punch ranking Obama 24th and Clinton 19h in Senate The both dissed Nader for daring to run for president again Obama wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare, Clinton supported her husband’s program Hillary Clinton comes in at 38th and Obama at 48th in the ranking of the League of Conservation Voters Both have hawkish foreign policy advisors involved in past US misdeeds and failures Both support Israeli aggression and apartheid. Obama has deserted previous support for two-state solution to Mid East situation Both have voted numerous times to continue funding the war Both support or won’t oppose nuclear power Both support war on drugs Both support Real ID Both support No Child Left Behind Both supported crack-cocaine sentence disparity Both oppose single payer healthcare Both support PATRIOT Act Both support the death penalty Both have no clear plan to leave Iraq and Afghanistan Both support charter schools Both support federally funded ethanol HOW CLINTON AND OBAMA ARE DIFFERENT Obama, unlike Clinton, has no plans to “obliterate:” Iran Clinton would continue the 28 year old Reagan – Bush – Clinton – Bush era; Obama would probably end it. While both have misled voters, Clinton has by far the worst record, witness the cattle futures, Whitewater, travel office and similar scandals as well as the fact that five of her fundraisers have been convicted of, or pleaded no contest to, crimes and one fled the country after being indicted on charges related to raising money. While they both have had seamy friends, so far only one has surfaced for Obama – Rezko – as opposed to a lengthy list for Clinton that begins with three close business partners who ended up in prison. Obama, unlike Clinton, has never been almost indicted. Obama, unlike Clinton, has never been mentioned 35 times in a criminal indictment. Obama, unlike Clinton, has never been involved in a resort land scam in which about half the purchasers, many of them seniors, lost their property. Obama, unlike Clinton, is not currently being sued in a case involving an allegedly massive misreporting of campaign contributions. Obama, unlike Clinton, did not support the appointment of the now indicted Bernie Kerick to be head of Homeland Security Obama would be good at international negotiations; foreign leaders wouldn’t know whether to trust Clinton. Obama is not married to Bill Clinton Obama has revealed his tax returns; Clinton hasn’t Clinton thinks McCain would be better qualified for the White House than Obama; Obama would rather have Clinton than McCain The Clinton administration, according to an HRC ad, wouldn’t answer an emergency White House call until the sixth ring; the Obama administration, it is implied, would wait for the seventh. Obama voted against immunity for telecoms’ illegal spying on Americans; Clinton didn’t show up for the vote. Obama has inspired a lot of young and minority voters to get involved in politics; Clinton has relied upon a traditional and aging constituency. Obama favored cluster bomb ban in civilian areas; Clinton opposed the ban Obama says “everything is on the table” with Social Security. Clinton seems slightly more supportive of the classic Democratic program Obama opposed putting heating fuel assistance for low income in stimulus bill; Clinton supported it OBAMA ALSO. . . Promises not to sign a trade bill without environmental and labor protections. Helped fight for restoration of habeas corpus at Gitmo. Aggressively opposed impeachment action against Bush. Wouldn’t have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage Opposes lowering the drinking age to 18 Supported restricting damage awards in medical malpractices suits Supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts Misled on extent on lobbyist support Called the late Paul Wellstone “something of a gadfly” Voted for a business-friendly “tort reform” bill Voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain. Won’t rule out first strike nuclear attack on Iran Received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006 Went to Connecticut to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against Ned Lamont Refuses to take a position on the anti-constitutional Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act Called Pakistan “the right battlefield … in the war on terrorism.” Threatened to invade Pakistan Sounds sort of like Tony Robbins Uses various evangelical cons to win supporters Has not revealed his proposed policies in many areas and where he has they primarily consist of minor alterations in the status quo Voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards Opposed the war as a state senator, is less certain as a federal one and has voted for full funding of it Wrote critically in his books of the New Deal and the New Left while praising Bill Clinton CLINTON ALSO . . . Favors healthcare individual mandates that would help insurance companies and banks but not citizens Has the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors Is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain Is most popular with K Street lobbyists Is only First Lady to come under criminal investigation Has received the most funds from oil industry Has received the most funds from health industry Gave most number of evasive answers (250) to congressional inquiries Submitted the largest false campaign finance report

DETAILSWHAT JOHN ENSIGN, HILLARY CLINTON & THE HONDURAN RIGHT WING HAVE IN COMMONWHY IS THE MEDIA CONCEALING HILLARY CLINTON’S RIGHT WING RELIGIOUS TIES?Thanks to alternative media coverage – including that of the Progressive Review – there has been a slight increase in corporate press coverage of John McCain’s ties to extremist Christian evangelist John Hagee. But even conventional liberals like Bill Moyers and EJ Dionne, while finally citing the McCain-Hagee connection, still refuse to delve into Hillary Clinton’s ties to The Fellowship, a secret rightwing religious group involving a number of Washington big names like herself.The story has been well documented by such publications as Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones. And it’s not a new tale, but it’s one the Washington media runs away from, in part because it might wreck the journalists’ comfortably servile relationship with some of their sources – with the Clintons near the top of the list. It’s Washington journalism at its worst, the sort of politician-pet relationship that led the media to so badly mislead the public about the Iraq war and, for that matter, many other crucial facts about the Clintons. To this day, for example, the media is tough on Barack Obama’s Tony Resko relationship but doesn’t mention Hillary Clinton’s much deeper relationship with Webster Hubbell. As we noted about a week ago, the two big exceptions to the media cover up of The Fellowship are Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin of NBC, who reported: “In his preaching, [Fellowship leader Douglas] Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion that Adolph Hitler demanded from his followers — a rhetorical technique that now is drawing sharp criticism. “‘Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere,” Coe said. “Later in the sermon, Coe said: “Jesus said, You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.’ Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.” Coe also quoted Jesus and said: “One of the things [Jesus] said is ‘If any man comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can’t be a disciple.’ So I don’t care what other qualifications you have, if you don’t do that you can’t be a disciple of Christ.” The sermons are little surprise to writer Jeff Sharlet. He lived among Coe’s followers six years ago, and came out troubled by their secrecy and rhetoric. “‘We were being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao. And I would say, ‘Isn’t there a problem with that?’ And they seemed perplexed by the question. Hitler’s genocide wasn’t really an issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated,” said Sharlet. . . ‘They’re notoriously secretive,’ Sharlet said. ‘In fact, they jokingly call themselves the Christian Mafia. Which becomes less of a joke when you realize that they really are dedicated to being what they call an invisible organization.'” SOURCE WATCH The Fellowship, headquartered in Washington D.C., is a humanitarian religious-right Christian organization about which very little is known. Their signature event is the annual National Prayer Breakfast but that is only a small part of their activities. They are heavily involved in the political culture of Washington, counting at least a dozen Senators and Congressman as known members. The group has also gone by the names Family, Foundation, C Street Center, and International Christian Leadership. An article published in the March 2003 issue of Harper’s entitled “Jesus Plus Nothing” by Jeffrey Sharlet provides an excellent exposition; however, Sharlet infiltrated only at the lowest level and so his article is woefully short of details concerning the organization, its mission, or who runs it. In a June 12, 2003, followup interview by Anthony Lappé for Guerrilla News Network, Jeffrey Sharlet declares that the group’s goal and aspiration are “an ‘invisible’ world organization led by Christ”; and that in his view, their “core issue is capitalism and power.” In 1972, The Fellowship was reorganized to be even more clandestine, shedding the overhead of a typical high-profile nonprofit so that it was essentially little more than a holding company disbursing cash to dozens of ministries beneath it. By 1985, The Fellowship had 150 individual ministries beneath it. This model continues to this day with countless ministries coming into and going out of existence depending upon the current needs of the organization and the initiatives it wishes to fund. As Sharlet writes in his Harper’s piece, The Foundation believes that its mobile “cell” structure, which it likens to those organized by Lenin, Bin Laden, and Hitler, makes it far more efficient than a hierarchical organization. And just like Enron’s many shell corporations, their cell structure has the additional advantage of being able to move money around very quickly and in a way that makes it difficult to track or audit. . . Those in the Fellowship who are asked about their role either deny its existence or politely refuse to answer questions about it. All have taken a vow of silence not to speak about The Fellowship. http://www.toobeautiful.org/lat_020927.html tp://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525 HILLARY CLINTON HEAVY INTO RIGHTWING RELIGIOUS POWER CULT HILLARY CLINTON’S RIGHTWING RECORD ON INTERNATIONAL LAW STEPHEN ZUNES, FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS – Senator Hillary Clinton has opposed restrictions on U.S. arms transfers and police training to governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights abuses. Indeed, she has supported unconditional U.S. arms transfers and police training to such repressive and autocratic governments as Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, and Chad, just to name a few. She has also refused to join many of her Democratic colleagues in signing a letter endorsing a treaty that would limit arms transfers to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations. Civilian Casualties Not only is she willing to support military assistance to repressive regimes, she has little concern about controlling weapons that primarily target innocent civilians. Senator Clinton has refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines, which are responsible for killing and maiming thousands of civilians worldwide, a disproportionate percentage of whom have been children. She was also among a minority of Democratic Senators to side with the Republican majority last year in voting down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas. Each of these cluster bomb contains hundreds of bomblets that are scattered over an area the size of up to four football fields and, with a failure rate of up to 30%, become de facto land mines. As many as 98% of the casualties caused by these weapons are civilians. Senator Clinton also has a record of dismissing reports by human rights monitors that highlight large-scale attacks against civilians by allied governments. For example, in the face of widespread criticism by reputable human rights organizations over Israel’s systematic assaults against civilian targets in its April 2002 offensive in the West Bank, Senator Clinton co-sponsored a resolution defending the Israeli actions that claimed that they were “necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas.” She opposed UN efforts to investigate alleged war crimes by Israeli occupation forces and criticized President Bush for calling on Israel to pull back from its violent re-conquest of Palestinian cities in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Similarly, when Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other reputable human rights groups issued detailed reports regarding Israeli war crimes during that country’s assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Senator Clinton insisted they were wrong and that Israel’s attacks were legal. Furthermore, though these groups had also criticized the radical Lebanese group Hezbollah for committing war crimes by firing rockets into civilian-populated areas in Israel, exhaustive investigations have revealed absolutely no evidence that they had used the civilian population as “human shields” to protect themselves from Israeli assaults. Despite this, Senator Clinton, without providing any credible evidence to the contrary, still insists that they in fact had used human shields and were therefore responsible for the death of more than 800 Lebanese civilians. Senator Clinton has voted to send tens of billions of dollars unconditionally to Baghdad to prop up that regime, apparently unconcerned about the well-documented reports of death squads being run from the Interior Ministry that have killed many thousands of unarmed Sunni men. In Senator Clinton’s world view, if a country is considered an important strategic ally of the United States, any charges of human rights abuses – no matter how strong the evidence – must be summarily dismissed. Indeed, despite the Israeli government’s widespread and well-documented violations of international humanitarian law, Senator Clinton has praised Israel for its “values that respect the dignity and rights of human beings.” IT’S COST THE TAXPAYERS $2.3 BILLION TO KEEP HILLARY IN THE SENATE LA TIMES – To fuel her rise, Clinton has relied on the controversial funding device known as “earmarking.” The earmarks enabled her to win favor with important constituents, many of whom provided financial support for her campaigns. . . Since taking office in 2001, Clinton has delivered $500 million worth of earmarks that have specifically benefited 59 corporations. About 64% of those corporations provided funds to her campaigns through donations made by employees, executives, board members or lobbyists, a review by the Los Angeles Times shows. All told, Clinton has earmarked more than $2.3 billion in federal appropriations for projects in her state since her election to the Senate, much of it for public works projects funded in conjunction with fellow Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer and others in the New York congressional delegation. CATALOG OF HILLARY CLINTON’S LIES STUART TAYLOR JR, NATIONAL JOURNAL – Let’s take a trip down memory lane — from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years — to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary’s first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie. Gennifer and Monica: Former lounge singer Gennifer Flowers surfaced in early 1992 with claims — corroborated by tapes of phone calls — that she had had a long affair with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had arranged a state job for her. Bill Clinton told the media, falsely, that the woman’s “story is untrue.” Although well aware of her husband’s philandering history, Hillary backed his squishy denials, famously asserting on “60 Minutes” that she was not “some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette.” More deceptively, she suggested to ABC’s Sam Donaldson that Bill’s contacts with Flowers were just an example of how he loved to “help people who are in trouble” and “listen to their problems.” “Hillary’s words uncannily foreshadowed her insistence six years later to … a White House aide that Bill had ‘ministered’ to [Monica] Lewinsky because she was a troubled young woman,” Sally Bedell Smith writes in her fine new book about the Clintons, For Love of Politics. Hillary has continued to insist that she believed what she said about Lewinsky. But friends and former aides have told Smith and others that she knew her husband was lying all along. Travelgate: The first Clinton scandal after Bill became president started in May 1993, when Chief of Staff Mack McLarty fired the seven employees in the White House office that arranges travel for the press corps. The White House cited gross financial mismanagement. (The charge was never substantiated.) The sudden firings created a media uproar, especially when the dismissed employees were quickly replaced by friends and relatives of the Clintons. Hillary later told the General Accounting Office, in a document prepared by her attorney, that she had no role in the decision to fire the employees, did not know the “origin of the decision,” and “did not direct that any action be taken by anyone” other than keeping her informed. But her statements were contradicted by evidence, including a long-concealed memo to McLarty and a written chronology prepared by White House aide David Watkins that came to light years later. Hillary, Watkins wrote, had said that “we need those people out and we need our people in” and had made it clear that “there would be hell to pay” unless she got “immediate action.” Another aide wrote that Hillary intimate Susan Thomases had said, “Hillary wants these people fired.” While saying that no provable crime had been committed, Robert Ray, who had succeeded Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, reported in October 2000 that Hillary’s statements had been “factually false” and that there was “overwhelming evidence that she in fact did have a role in the decision to fire the employees.” Cattle futures: The New York Times revealed in March 1994 that in 1978, just before her husband became governor, Hillary had made a $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in highly speculative cattle-futures contracts in only nine months. Hillary’s first explanation (through aides) of this extraordinary windfall was that she had made the investment after “reading The Wall Street Journal” and placed all the trades herself after seeking advice from “numerous people.” It was so preposterous that she soon had to abandon it. Eventually, she had to admit that longtime Clinton friend James Blair had executed 30 of her 32 trades directly with an Arkansas broker. In an April 1994 press conference, Hillary denied knowing of “any favorable treatment” by Blair. But the astronomical odds against any financial novice making a 10,000 percent profit without the game being rigged led many to believe that Blair, the outside counsel to Arkansas-based poultry giant Tyson Foods, must have put only profitable trades in Hillary’s account and absorbed her losses. The heavily regulated Tyson needed friends in high places, and Bill Clinton helped it pass a 1983 state law raising weight limits on chicken trucks. Removal of Vince Foster documents: During the same press conference, Hillary was asked why her then-chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had been involved in removing documents from the office of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster after his suicide. Foster had been a partner of Hillary’s at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. “I don’t know that she did remove any documents,” Hillary said. But it was reported three months later that Hillary had instructed Williams to remove the Foster documents to the White House residence. Then they were turned over to Clinton attorney Bob Barnett. Castle Grande: In the summer of 1995, the Resolution Trust Corp. reported that Hillary had been one of 11 Rose Law Firm lawyers who had done work in the mid-1980s on an Arkansas real estate development, widely known as Castle Grande, promoted by James McDougal and Seth Ward. McDougal headed a troubled thrift, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and had given Hillary legal business as a favor to Bill. McDougal and his wife, Susan, were the Clintons’ partners in their Whitewater real estate investment. Ward was father-in-law to Webb Hubbell, another former Rose Law Firm partner, who was briefly Clinton’s associate attorney general in 1993. Later, Hubbell went to prison for fraud, as did James McDougal. Castle Grande was a sewer of sham transactions, some used to funnel cash into Madison Guaranty. Castle Grande’s ultimate collapse contributed to that of the thrift, which cost taxpayers millions. Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to “deceive federal bank examiners.” Prosecutors later came to believe that Hillary had padded her bills; she “wasn’t guilty of [knowingly] facilitating nefarious transactions — she was guilty of doing less work than she took credit for,” Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. explain in their 2007 biography, Her Way. Hillary herself never took refuge in this explanation. Billing records: Hillary’s billing records for Castle Grande were in a 116-page, 5-inch-thick computer printout that came to light under mysterious circumstances on January 4, 1996 — 19 months after Starr’s investigators had subpoenaed it and amid prosecutorial pressure on Clinton aides who had been strikingly forgetful. For most of that time, Hillary claimed that the billing records had vanished. But a longtime Hillary assistant named Carolyn Huber later admitted coming across the printout in August 1995 on a table in a storage area next to Hillary’s office; Huber said she had put it into a box in her own office, without realizing for five more months that these were the subpoenaed billing records. This implausible tale, on top of other deceptions, prompted New York Times columnist William Safire to write on January 8, 1996, that “our first lady … is a congenital liar.” The next day, the White House press secretary said that the president wanted to punch Safire in the nose for insulting his wife. Five days later, the president invited Monica Lewinsky to the Oval Office for what turned out to be one of their 10 oral-sex sessions. Two years and 13 days after that, Hillary was on the “Today” show suggesting that her husband’s Lewinsky affair was a lie concocted by “this vast right-wing conspiracy.” http://nationaljournal.com/taylor.htm HILLARY CLINTON claims she played pickup basketball when she was young, presumably to get ready for her race against Obama. Newsmax has compiled a list of other little known facts about HRC, an obscurity some feel is due to their non-existence:– She was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. who climbed Mount Everest.– She was a Yankees fan when she lived in Chicago.– She told upstate New Yorkers she had been a “duck hunter.”– She claimed on Sept. 11 daughter Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center. HRC AND WEBSTER HUBBELL SUSAN SCHMIDT, WASH POST, 1998 – Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr yesterday secured a new federal indictment of Webster L. Hubbell, alleging that the former top Justice Department official lied to Congress and federal banking regulators to conceal work that he, Hillary Rodham Clinton and their law firm did in the mid-1980s for a rogue savings and loan. The 15-count indictment alleges that Hubbell covered up the Rose Law Firm’s involvement in a phony multimillion-dollar land deal that caused losses big enough to bankrupt Madison Guaranty S&L, the thrift owned by the late James B. McDougal, the Clintons’ Whitewater business partner. Hillary Clinton’s legal work for Madison in the mid-1980s is referred to throughout the indictment but she is accused of no wrongdoing. . . Hubbell pleaded guilty in 1994 to charges lodged by the independent counsel that he bilked Rose Law Firm clients and partners. . . The independent counsel lodged no Whitewater charges in his impeachment report to Congress on President Clinton and closed down his Arkansas office months ago without bringing charges against Hillary Clinton. The Hubbell indictment was issued by a grand jury here. . . While Hillary Clinton’s name is not mentioned in the indictment, her actions are described, albeit obliquely. She is mentioned some 35 times throughout the indictment, but only as Rose’s “1985-86 billing partner” for the Madison account. The document describes some of her work on Madison’s ill-fated Castle Grande project, an 1,100-acre industrial and trailer park development south of Little Rock. Some of the loans that the accountants were blamed for allowing Madison to make were Castle Grande transactions that Hillary Clinton and Hubbell worked on for his father-in-law, Seth Ward. The indictment charges that Hubbell falsely told regulators and Congress he did no work on Castle Grande matters and was not aware of what work Rose did for Madison. LYING FOR HILLARY One of the issues that came up in a lengthy suit (American Physicians and Surgeons, Inc, et al. v. Hillary Rodham Clinton, et al.) was whether White House aide Ira Magaziner, speaking on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s health task force, told the truth when he claimed that only federal employees were members of the group. This was found to be false and Judge Royce Lamberth issued an opinion, part of which follows: “[I]t is clear that the decisions here were made at the highest levels of government, and that the government itself is–and should be–accountable when its officials run amok. . . The court agrees with plaintiffs that these were not reckless and inept errors taken by bewildered counsel. The Executive Branch of the government, working in tandem, was dishonest with this court. . . . “The Department of Justice has a long tradition of setting the highest standards of conduct for all lawyers, and it is a sad day when this court must conclude, as did the United States Attorney in his investigation, that the Department of Justice succumbed to pressure from White House attorneys and others to provide this court with “strained interpretations” that were “ultimately unconvincing.” “It seems that some government officials never learn that the cover-up can be worse than the underlying conduct. Most shocking to this court, and deeply disappointing, is that the Department of Justice would participate in such conduct. This was not an issue of good faith word games being played with the Court. . . . The United States Attorney found that the most controversial sentence of the Magaziner declaration–“Only federal government employees serve as members of the interdepartmental working group”–could not be prosecuted under the perjury statute because the issue of “membership” within the working group was a fuzzy one, and no generally agreed upon “membership” criteria were ever written down. Therefore, the Magaziner declaration was actually false because of the implication of the declaration that “membership” was a meaningful concept and that one could determine who was and was not a “member” of the working group. . . “ PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1997 – It was just symbolic and, in the end, the money comes out of our pockets but at least one judge has called the White House for lying, assessing a fine of over a quarter of a million dollars. As the above excerpt from Judge Lamberth’s opinion indicates, this was no minor peccadillo but rather, “The Executive Branch of the government, working in tandem, was dishonest with this court.” At issue was the composition of Hillary Clinton’s health task force, a body stacked with those from the medical industry who would gain most from the faux reforms of the Clintonistas. You might think a federal judge calling one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides a liar would be big news, but the Washington Post found room on its front page for “Seniors Strut Their Stuff in Pool Pageant” while burying the health care story on page 21 under a boring headline. That was nine pages better than the New York Times, which ran the story under “Judge Rules Government Covered Up Lies on Panel,” hardly descriptive of the story’s significance. ATTORNEY CLINTON During the 1992 campaign, Hillary Clinton defended her role in the Madison Guarantee S&L scandal by saying, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Forgotten, however, is what inspired this homily: accusations that Ms. Clinton had represented Whitewater business partner Jim McDougal’s S&L before her husband’s government. Here’s what the New York Times reported on March 17, 1992: “Hillary Clinton said today that she did not earn ‘a penny’ from state business conducted by her Little Rock law firm and that she never intervened with state regulators on behalf of a failed Arkansas savings and loan association. . . “ Records would show that she did, in fact, represent Madison before the state securities department. After the revelation, she says, “For goodness sakes, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.” Susan McDougal recalled Ms. Clinton coming in and drumming up the business. Ms. McDougal told the Washington Post: “The problem was finances, her finances.” The Washington Times quoted an unnamed Clinton business associate who claimed the governor used to “jog over to McDougal’s office about once a month to pick up the [retainer] check for his wife.” Jim McDougal’s version of the story, according to the LA Times, was that Clinton asked him to throw some legal work his wife’s way to help the Clintons out of a financial crunch: “I hired Hillary because Bill came in whimpering that they needed help.” Hillary Clinton wrote Jim McDougal enclosing a power of attorney for him to sign “authorizing me to act on your behalf with respect to matters concerning Whitewater Development Corporation.” Another power of attorney was enclosed for Susan McDougal. The power of attorney included the right to endorse, sign and execute “checks, notes, deeds, agreements, certificates, receipts or any other instruments in writing of all matters related to Whitewater Development Corporation.” This letter, uncovered in 1993 by Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, directly contradicted the claim of the Clintons that they were “passive shareholders” in Whitewater. From a 1996 Chicago Tribune editorial: “The legal issues will sort themselves out in time. But one thing has become all too clear. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their aides have made a concerted effort to deceive official investigators and the American public with half truths and outright lies . . . It’s not clear what the Clintons want to conceal, but it’s clear that they have made extraordinary efforts to do so.” WHITEWATER WHAT WHITEWATER WAS ALL ABOUT: Almost totally lost in the Clinton saga known as Whitewater is what Whitewater was originally all about. It was basically a land resort scam of the sort that local TV stations win awards for exposing. Here’s how it happened: In the late 1970s, the Clintons and McDougals buy land in the Ozarks with mostly borrowed funds. The Clintons get 50% interest with no cash down. The plot, known as Whitewater, is fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. The Washington Post will report later that some purchasers of lots, many of them retirees, “put up houses or cabins, others slept in vans or tents, hoping to be able to live off the land.” HRC writes Jim McDougal, said that “If Reagonomics works at all, Whitewater could become the Western Hemisphere’s Mecca.” More than half of the purchasers will lose their plots thanks to the sleazy form of financing used. The McDougals will be among a number of close HRC’s friends and business associates who will end up in jail.. HRC AND ETHNIC SLURS Virtually no attention has been given to Hillary’s Clinton’s reported anti-Jewish statements. This is another example of the impenetrable media bubble placed around HRC since her husband first ran for president. There have been a few exceptions. For example, in August 2000, the NY Post reported: “The Arkansas man who accused Hillary Rodham Clinton last month of uttering an anti-Semitic slur in 1974 has passed a lie-detector test arranged by The Post. Paul Fray, who has charged Mrs. Clinton called him a “f- – -ing Jew bastard” after Bill Clinton lost his race for Congress, cleared the polygraph exam administered Sunday near his home here. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Mr. Fray is truthful,” concluded state-licensed Arkansas polygrapher Jeff Hubanks, who gave the three-hour test. . . The findings were reviewed yesterday by another expert, Richard Keifer, a former head of the FBI’s polygraph unit who has 20 years of experience. Keifer judged the results “inconclusive” because they didn’t meet the high federal polygraph standards – but said he found nothing to indicate Fray was lying. Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said, “Paul Fray is an admitted liar, and we’re not going to be responding to his lies anymore.” That same year former Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson claimed that in their frequent arguments, Bill and Hillary Clinton would use such expressions as “Jew motherf*cker,” “Jew Boy” and “Jew Bastard.” That same year, the Review discussed the issue of how the media handles these matters: PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 2000 – The kid gloves treatment of Hillary Clinton’s alleged ethnic slurs is, of course, in marked contrast to the media handling of, say, John Rocker, Louis Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson. But she is not the only one who has been give a pass. A reader sends along a 1997 issue of the Progressive with an article by Susan Douglas that includes this: “As ABC News reminded us over and over, the lesson from Tiger Woods’s victory is ‘that anyone can make it to the top.’ Woods was immediately canonized by every news outlet in the land as a breakthrough, trans-racial saint, an agent of integration and goodwill. The newscasters genuflected. Once again, the future of western civilization was freighted onto the shoulders of the latest guy who can throw/hit/kick a ball. The media pilloried pro-golfer Fuzzy Zoeller for making racist remarks about fried chicken and collard greens. But they have virtually ignored Woods’s own racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. “In the April issue of GQ, Woods speculated that ‘good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball’ because ‘black guys have big dicks.’ And he asks: Why do lesbians always get to their destination so quickly? He answers: ‘Because lesbians are always going sixty-nine.’ This doesn’t fit into the pack journalism “new-messiah” image, now does it? So just let it slide.” But the current masters of applying multiple standards to matters claimed to be worthy of zero tolerance may well be the Blair government. Not only was Tony Blair’s campaign to end under-aged drinking in bars celebrated by his son turning up dead drunk on a London sidewalk, but Home Secretary Jack Straw, riding in a car driven by a special branch officer, was pulled over for doing 103 mph on a motorway. The incident occurred at 8:55 am as Straw was rushing to a meeting with Blair, perhaps to discuss new measures to make the British behave. Straw, hit man for Blair’s zero tolerance policies, also has a son who got into trouble with the police after selling ten pounds (sterling) of marijuana to an undercover reporter. Whatever the facts of the matter, the accusation in a new book that Hillary Clinton called one of her staffers a “Jew bastard” in 1974 adds a significant new problem to her already troubled effort. Clinton flatly denied the incident ever happened and quoted her husband as saying, “I was there on election night in 1974 and this charge is simply not true.” The campaign also produced a 1997 handwritten letter from the man allegedly excoriated, Paul Fray, to Hillary Clinton in which he says, “I have wronged you. I ask for your forgiveness because I did say things against you, and called you names, not only to your face — but behind your back . . . names that are unmentionable.” The circumstances under which Fray allegedly wrote the letter are not clear but the document is reminiscent of the affidavits signed by various women denying being sexually involved with Clinton’s husband. The Clintons have the largest collection of affidavits and letters attesting to alleged non-events to be found in contemporary politics. Fray’s comments, quoted in Jerry Oppenheimer’s new book, “State of a Union,” have been verified not only by his wife but by another Clinton aide at the time, Neill McDonald. According to Michael Kramer in the NY Daily News: “The slur allegedly was uttered at a heated, finger-pointing session at Bill Clinton’s Fayetteville, Ark., campaign headquarters on election night in 1974, following his defeat in his first try for political office, a run for Congress in Arkansas’ 3rd Congressional District. In the room that night were Bill Clinton; his then-girlfriend, Hillary Rodham; Paul Fray, Clinton’s campaign manager, and Fray’s wife, Mary Lee. Another campaign worker, Neill McDonald, was just outside the door and says he heard everything. The story of that encounter has been widely reported before, but without any charge that Hillary Rodham ripped into Paul Fray using an anti-Semitic slur. In interviews with The News on Friday and Saturday, the Frays and McDonald all confirmed that Hillary uttered the slur. McDonald said Hillary was speaking in the “heat of battle” and that he doesn’t believe she is an anti-Semite. McDonald added that he is and has always been a supporter of the Clintons.”. . . Dick Morris has joined the fracas, repeating his previous claims that on one occasion HR Clinton said to him, “Money, that’s all you people care about is money.” Morris says he responded, “By money, Hillary, by you people, I assume you mean political consultants?” And she said, ‘Oh yes, of course that’s what I mean.’ But it wasn’t what I thought she meant.” The president had risen to HR Clinton’s defense but his credentials are more than a little suspect ever since the tapes of his conversations with Gennifer Flowers, which included this Flowers comment on Mario Cuomo: “Well, he seems like he could get real mean . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have some mafioso major connections.” And Clinton replies, “Well, he acts like one.” And then there’s that police sting video of Roger Clinton saying he has to get some cocaine for his brother who has a nose like a vacumn cleaner, in which Roger makes free use of the word nigger, a term trooper Patterson says he also heard from WJ Clinton when talking about Jesse Jackson and prominent Little Rock black figure, Robert ‘Say’ McIntosh. CATTLE FUTURES TWO MONTHS after commencing the Whitewater scheme, Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she has a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million. AGBIZ TILLER – Mrs. Clinton’s ability to turn $1000 into a near $100,000 in ten months of futures trading, a congressional study would learn, coincided with a period of time that a select group of executives from packing houses, grain companies, feedlot operators and commodity brokers reaped tens of millions of dollars in an “insider” trading scheme in the cattle futures market. . . Between February, 1978 and April, 1979 some 32 cattle industry insiders made profits of $110 million by selling cattle futures after they received some 15 “secret signals,” which was followed within an average two and one half day period, by a marked drop in cattle future prices. Then Rep. Neal Smith (Dem.-Iowa), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which released the report in February, 1981 noted that in all a total of some 1027 individuals made total net profits of approximately $156 million. Thus, three percent of the large traders — those with 50 contracts or more — with correlated trading activity and/or common business affiliations accounted for 70% of the total net profits of this group of traders. Mrs. Clinton traded 50 or more contracts three times . . . A previous USDA study in 1979, for example, pointed out that during 20 of the 21 months preceding October, 1979 there was not a single day in which a farmer-feeder could have used the futures market to hedge in a profit and only five days in the remaining month that the farmer-feeder could have broken even . . . Meanwhile, the eight largest packers, who at the time were slaughtering 44% of the nation’s beef, held over one-half of the futures contracts and made twice as much money in the futures market as they did in trading cattle . . . In all, between February, 1978 and December, 1980, some 29 “secret signals” were given although Smith’s Committee staff made no estimates on the profits earned after April, 1979 . . . There are estimates that 75% to 95% of individual investors lose money in commodity futures markets. WASHINGTON TIMES, 2007 – Mrs. Clinton initially explained her success by claiming to have done all her own research studying the Wall Street Journal. Then she admitted that Jim Blair, the outside counsel for Tyson Foods, advised her and placed most of her trades. Mr. Blair helped her open her trading account in mid-October 1978. That was three weeks before her husband rode to certain victory (63 percent of the vote) in his race for Arkansas governor, a position from which he would enforce the state’s environmental policies affecting chicken waste and appoint numerous regulatory officials overseeing Tyson. The odds of a retail trader executing the intraday transactions that generated a 530 percent overnight return, which Mrs. Clinton achieved on her first day, “are about the same as [the odds] of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls on the steps of the State House in Little Rock,” according to estimates by Wall Street Journal financial columnist Caroline Baum and commodities speculator Victor Niederhoffer in their devastating account of Mrs. Clinton’s trading activity. HRC AND WAL-MART WARD HARKAVY, VILLAGE VOICE 2000 – Twice in three days last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton basked in the adulation of cheering union . . . They would have dropped their forks if they had heard that Hillary served for six years on the board of the dreaded Wal-Mart, a union-busting behemoth. If they had learned the details of her friendship with Wal-Mart, they might have lost their lunches. . . As she was leaving the dais, she ignored a reporter’s question about Wal-Mart, and she ignored it again when she strode by reporters in the hotel lobby. But there are questions. In 1986, when Hillary was first lady of Arkansas, she was put on the board of Wal-Mart. Officials at the time said she wasn’t filling a vacancy. In May 1992, as Hubby’s presidential campaign heated up, she resigned from the board of Wal-Mart. Company officials said at the time that they weren’t going to fill her vacancy. So what the hell was she doing on the Wal-Mart board? According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company’s annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bused in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in Arkansas, one of the country’s poorest states. According to published reports, she was placed in charge of the company’s “green” program to protect the environment. But nobody got greener than Sam Walton and his family. For several years in the ’80s, he was judged the richest man in America by Forbes magazine; his fortune zoomed into the billions until he split it up among relatives. It’s no surprise that Hillary is a strong supporter of free trade with China. Wal-Mart, despite its “Buy American” advertising campaign, is the single largest U.S. importer, and half of its imports come from China. Was Hillary the voice of conscience on the board for American and foreign workers? Contemporary accounts make no mention of that. They do describe her as a “corporate litigator” in those days, and they mention, speaking of environmental matters, that she also served on the board of Lafarge, a company that, according to a press account, once burned hazardous fuels to run its cement plants. . . And the Clintons depended on Wal-Mart’s largesse not only for Hillary’s regular payments as a board member but for travel expenses on Wal-Mart planes and for heavy campaign contributions to Bill’s campaigns there and nationally. . . MOTHER JONES, 2003 – More than two-thirds of all Wal-Mart employees are women — yet women make up less than 10 percent of top store managers. Back when she was first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton became the first woman appointed to the Wal-Mart board, and tried to get the company to hire more women managers, but that effort apparently went the way of national health insurance. Wal-Mart today has the same percentage of women in management that the average company had in 1975. LISA FEATHERSTONE, NATION, 2005 – Unlike so many horrible things, Wal-Mart cannot be blamed on George W. Bush. The Arkansas-based company prospered under the state’s native son Bill Clinton when he was governor and President. Sam Walton and his wife, Helen, were close to the Clintons, and for several years Hillary Clinton, whose law firm represented Wal-Mart, served on the company’s board of directors. Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” has provided Wal-Mart with a ready workforce of women who have no choice but to accept its poverty wages and discriminatory policies. FLAG BURNING ST PETERSBURG TIMES EDITORIAL, 2005 – Sen. Hillary Clinton’s decision to co-sponsor a bill to make it a crime to burn the American flag amounts to political pandering of the worst kind. She was against outlawing flag-burning before she was for it. The New York Democrat says she opposes a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning but has signed on to a bill that would ostensibly accomplish the same thing by federal statute. Her position is unprincipled. Clinton may think this is a middle-ground position with broad political appeal, but most people will see it for what it is. . . JOHNNY CHUNG CNN, MARCH 1998 – Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung has agreed to plead guilty to election law violations and cooperate in the ongoing Justice Department investigation into illegal campaign fund-raising in the 1996 elections. . . Chung became a major figure in the Democratic fund-raising scandal when it was learned he made almost 50 visits to the White House. During one visit, Chung gave first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s then-chief of staff, Maggie Williams, a $50,000 check for the Democratic National Committee. The check was delivered inside the White House. Two days later Chung was able to bring a group of Chinese businessmen to watch President Bill Clinton deliver a radio address in the Oval Office. They then had their picture taken with the president. The DNC returned more than $300,000 that Chung raised because of questions about the source of the money. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/03/05/chung.pleads/ MANA FROM HAVANA NY POST, 2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate campaign returned $22,000 in “soft money” to a businesswoman linked to a Democratic campaign contribution from a drug smuggler in Havana. The donation by Vivian Mannerud Verble, first reported by The Post, was the largest single contribution received by Clinton’s soft-money committee. Verble, whose company runs charter flights between Cuba and Miami, also served as the fund-raising intermediary between Jorge Cabrera and the Democratic National Committee in 1995, according to congressional investigators. The probers reportedly learned that Cabrera cut a $20,000 check to the DNC from a bank account in which he also kept profits from his lucrative cocaine trade. The DNC eventually returned the money, while Cabrera pleaded guilty to importing 6,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States. He is serving a 19-year federal prison sentence in Florida . . . Although Verble was never charged with any criminal wrongdoing, she was at the center of one of the most embarrassing fund-raising scandals in the Clinton administration.. ANOTHER LAND DEAL JERRY SEPER, WASHINGTON TIMES, 2000 – The Arkansas Supreme Court, which is considering disbarment proceedings against President Clinton, yesterday said it also is investigating whether first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in fraud in a questionable Whitewater-related land deal. The probe, confirmed by the court’s Committee of Professional Conduct, has focused on accusations about Mrs. Clinton’s legal representation of a failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association real estate venture, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. called a “sham.” A major area of concern is an option agreement that facilitated a $300,000 payment to Seth Ward, father-in-law of Mrs. Clinton’s law partner, Webster L. Hubbell. The option, written by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Hubbell while they were at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, guaranteed Mr. Ward a payoff and negated his liability in the project. HILLARY CLINTON SAYS SOME TORTURE ACCEPTABLE BEN SMITH, NY DAILY NEWS – Despite her apparent opposition to torture, Hillary Clinton said in a Daily News editorial board meeting yesterday that the practice is acceptable in some circumstances. . At yesterday’s Daily News editorial board meeting, it emerged that she’s not actually against torture in all instances, and that her dispute with McCain and Bush is largely procedural. She was asked about the “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which you’ve captured the terrorist and don’t have time for a normal interrogation, and said that there is a place for what she called “severity,” in a conversation that included mentioning water-boarding, hypothermia, and other techniques commonly described as torture. “I have said that those are very rare but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that,” she responded. “Again, I think the President has to take responsibility. There has to be some check and balance, some reporting. I don’t mind if it’s reporting in a top secret context. But that shouldn’t be the tail that wags the dog, that should be the exception to the rule.” TO INDICT OR NOT TO INDICT ON APRIL 27, 1998, deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing met with his prosecutors to decide on whether to indict Hillary Clinton. Here’s what happened as reported by Sue Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf in their book, “Truth at Any Cost:” “[Ewing] paced the room for more than three hours, recalling facts from memory in his distinctive Memphis twang. He spoke passionately, laying out a case that the first lady had obstructed government investigators and made false statements about her legal work for McDougal’s S & L, particularly the thrift’s notorious multimillion-dollar Castle Grande real estate project. . .The biggest problem was the death a month earlier of Jim McDougal. . . Without him, prosecutors would have a hard time describing the S & L dealings they suspected Hillary Clinton had lied about.” CNN, MAR 18, 1999 – Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing testified at the Susan McDougal trial Thursday that he had written a “rough draft indictment” of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after he doubted her truthfulness in a deposition. Ewing, who questioned Mrs. Clinton in a deposition at the White House on April 22, 1995, said, “I had questions about whether what she was saying were accurate. We had no records. She was in conflict with a number of interviews.” Ewing said those interviews by investigators were primarily with other people in the Rose Law Firm. Ewing said he had questioned Mrs. Clinton about her representation of Jim McDougal’s Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan when she was at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock. “I don’t know if she was telling the truth. I did not circulate the draft. I showed it to one lawyer (in the independent counsel’s office) who said he didn’t want to see it,” Ewing said, under questioning from McDougal attorney Mark Geragos. . . Ewing also testified that in a later deposition with both the president and first lady on July 22, 1995, he had questions about the truthfulness of both Clintons. McDougal’s attorney Mark Geragos asked Ewing: “Did you say the Clintons were liars?” “I don’t know if I used the ‘L-word’ but I expressed internally that I was concerned,” Ewing said. LINCOLN BEDROOM FOX NEWS, 2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton denied allegations that she or her fund-raisers offered overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and Camp David to supporters of her Senate campaign. “We have friends and supporters come and spend time with us and spend the night with us that we are getting to know and who like spending time with us,” Clinton said when questioned at a campaign stop at a western New York diner. “I don’t see what’s news about that.” . . . White House staffers said that since the summer of 1999 there have been at least 26 instances in which people, mainly couples, were overnight guests after donating to the first lady’s campaign or promising to do so. . . “The Lincoln Bedroom was never sold,” Clinton said in 1997, when the White House released a list of 938 guests who had spent the night at the executive mansion up to that point in the Clinton presidency. The list included the names of political supporters, as well as entertainment luminaries and old Clinton friends CASTLE GRANDE 1999 Mrs. Clinton is mentioned 36 times in the fraud indictment against Webster Hubbell. Writes the AP’s Peter Yost: “Starr alleges Hubbell concealed his own and Mrs. Clinton’s work during the 1980s on a failed Arkansas land deal, known as Castle Grande, that federal regulators say was riddled with ‘insider dealing, fictitious sales and land flips.'” Yost notes the criminal contempt trial of Susan McDougal: “The indictment against Mrs. McDougal details a series of grand jury questions about Mrs. Clinton and Castle Grande that Mrs. McDougal refused to answer.” The Castle Grande project involved a baroque set of deals aimed at least in part in shoring up the McDougal’s failing savings and loan. Not until the immaculate reconception of Mrs. Clinton’s billing records in 1996 did her extensive role in the matter come to light. Billing records documenting HRC’s work on the Castle Grande development scam were discovered in the family quarters of the White House. HRC said she has no idea how they got there. She also claimed that she could not remember her work on the project nor 15 conversations with Hubbell’s wheeler-dealer father-in-law, Seth Ward. In the end, Castle Grande cost the S&L nearly $4 million in unpaid principal and interest. THE TRAVEL OFFICE CASE 1993 – HILLARY CLINTON and David Watkins move to oust the White House travel office in favor of World Wide Travel, Clinton’s source of $1 million in fly-now-pay-later campaign trips that essentially financed the last stages of the campaign without the bother of reporting a de facto contribution. The White House fires seven long-term employees for alleged mismanagement and kickbacks. The director, Billy Dale, charged with embezzlement, will be acquitted in less than two hours by the jury. An FBI agent involved in the case, IC Smith, will write later, “The White House Travel Office matter sent a clear message to the Congress as well as independent counsels that this White House would be different. Lying, withholding evidence, and considering – even expecting – underlings to be expendable so the Clintons could avoid accountability for their actins would become the norm.” CNN OCT 18 2000 – Independent Counsel Robert Ray’s final report on the White House travel office case found first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony in the matter was “factually false,” but concluded there were no grounds to prosecute her. The special prosecutor determined the first lady did play a role in the 1993 dismissal of the travel office’s staff, contrary to her testimony in the matter. But Ray said he would not prosecute Clinton for those false statements because “the evidence was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that she knew her statements were false or understood that they may have prompted the firings. . . The final report concludes that “despite that falsity, no prosecution of Mrs. Clinton is warranted.” TPR, 2000 – Here is what Ray said, which we were only able to find buried in the NY Times and not at all in the Washington Post (which played the story on A6): “It is, in the independent counsel’s judgment beyond peradventure, that as a matter of historical fact, Mrs. Clinton’s input into the process was a significant – if not the significant – factor influencing the pace of events in the travel office firings and the ultimate decision to fire the employees. Accordingly, the independent counsel concludes that Mr. Clinton’s sworn testimony that she had no input into Watkins’s decision or role in the travel office firings is factually inaccurate.” In other words, she lied. Robert Ray, the prosecutor may not be able to say this, but we, as citizens, can. Just as we can say with enough certainty for electoral purposes that she lied about Whitewater, her legal activities in Arkansas, her investment in cattle futures, her missing file boxes, and her activities in the wake of Vince Foster’s death. We may be wrong about any or all of these, but if so it is only because Mrs. Clinton herself has deliberately, cynically, and deceitfully attempted to conceal matters from us. We may be wrong, but we are entitled to make the judgment. It is worth recalling that Mrs. Clinton was mentioned 36 times in the fraud indictment against Webster Hubbell. She also said “I don’t recall” or its equivalent 50 times in a statement to a House investigating committee that was only 42 paragraphs long. Mrs. Clinton’s victim, Bill Dale, put it this way: “Everyone, especially Robert Ray, knows Hillary Clinton lied under oath about her key role in firing me and my colleagues . . . Of course, the Clinton Justice Department prosecuted me with no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. Despite my 38 years of government service, Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to destroy my good name. They put my wife and me through pure hell.“ Number of times Hillary Clinton said “I don’t recall” or its equivalent in a statement to a House investigating committee: 50. Number of paragraphs in this statement: 42 IT TAKES MORE THAN A VILLAGE TO GET CREDIT FROM CLINTON Things that happened to Barbara Feinman after becoming ghostwriter for “It Takes a Village,” Hillary Clinton’s book-like substance: — She got no acknowledgement in the book by HR Clinton, contrary to what was stipulated in the contract. — A reporter asked her how much she had written and she replied, “All I can say is they didn’t pay me $120,000 to spell-check it.” — The White House spread rumors that Feinman had been fired. — Simon & Schuster refused to pay the last $30,000 of her fee. Asked why, Feinman was told that the White House didn’t want her paid. [Reported by William Triplett in Capital Style]  From a 1996 Chicago Tribune editorial: “The legal issues will sort themselves out in time. But one thing has become all too clear. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their aides have made a concerted effort to deceive official investigators and the American public with half truths and outright lies . . . It’s not clear what the Clintons want to conceal, but it’s clear that they have made extraordinary efforts to do so.” WIKIPEDIA – Clinton’s acknowledgment section began: “It takes a village to bring a book into the world, as everyone who has written one knows. Many people have helped me to complete this one, sometimes without even knowing it. They are so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually, for fear that I might leave one out.” . THE PETER PAUL FUNDRAISER Three days after telling the Washington Post that Peter Paul made no contribution to her August 12, 2000 gala and that her campaign would not accept contributions from him, Hillary sent this letter [The story that follows has many loose ends, but one thing is certain, and eerily typical of the Clinton saga: the extraordinary number of criminals, con artists and other low life the Clintons have had as friends, employees, business partners, and supporters. This story involves just one fundraising event yet the cast of Clinton connected criminals include Peter Paul, Aaron Tonkin, Jim Levin, and Raymond Reggie. Add the McDougals, Web Hubbell, Dan Lasater, Jorge Cabrera, and the more than 40 other convicted individuals and companies connected to the Clinton machine and you have to start wondering when the Democrats discover this may not be the best they can do.] IN AUGUST 2000 Hillary Clinton held a huge Hollywood fundraiser for her Senate campaign. It was very successful. The only problem was that, by a long shot, she didn’t report all the money contributed: $800K by the US government’s ultimate count in a settlement and $2 million according to the key contributor and convicted con Peter Paul. This is, in election law, the moral equivalent of not reporting a similar amount on your income tax. It is a form of fraud. Hillary Clinton’s defense is that she didn’t know about it. That has so far worked in court but whether it will meet similar approbation in 2008 among the media, opponents and the general public remains to be seen. To some it is what some lawyers call the ostrich defense: I had my head in the sand while everything was going on or, yes, I signed the letter but I never actually read it. It’s not working too well in the Enron case. Reports Carrie Johnson of the Washington Post, “Former Enron Corp. executives Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay say they held their heads high when they led the energy company. But jurors will be allowed to consider whether they intentionally buried their heads in the sand to avoid blame for fraud. U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III this week granted the government’s bid for a controversial jury instruction known as ‘deliberate indifference’ or ‘willful blindness.’ The language allows jurors to consider whether Skilling and Lay averted their eyes from fraud within Enron’s ranks to deny responsibility for it later. . .Defense lawyers argue that the jury charge, also known as an ostrich instruction, will prejudice their clients and improperly lower the government’s burden of proof to a ‘should have known’ standard common in civil cases where financial damages — not prison time — is at stake.” Whether Hillary Clinton engaged in ‘deliberate indifference’ or ‘willful blindness’ remains to be determined by the voters but you can almost guarantee it will become a matter of interest to them. The initial reaction was reported by Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post on August 15 2000: “Is Hillary Clinton soft on crime? We certainly hope not, even though convicted felon Peter Paul–who served three years in prison two decades ago after pleading guilty to cocaine possession and trying to swindle $8.7 million out of the Cuban government– helped organize Saturday’s star-glutted $1 million fundraising gala for Clinton’s Senate race at businessman Ken Roberts’s Brentwood estate. . . [Paul] added that he only produced the gala and hasn’t given or raised money for the first lady’s New York campaign. “And we will not be accepting any contributions from him,” Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson vowed. Later, Paul would change his story claiming that his involvement stemmed from his desire to hire ex-president Bill Clinton, a deal he claimed became contingent on his not only producing but funding the HRC gala, costing him $2 million in kind and in cash. The Clinton campaign would also have to change its story: by September, Paul’s Stan Lee Media had contributed $100,000 to HRC’s campaign despite Wolfson’s protest. According to Salon, “Bill Clinton was reportedly promised an additional $15 million in Stan Lee stock to join the board. . . Paul also says then-DNC Chairman Ed Rendell said it would be ‘nice’ if Paul gave $150,000 to the DNC after Paul sought a presidential pardon for his two prior convictions.” The man with whom Clinton was allegedly going into business had a known criminal past. According to Worldnet Daily, “Paul has pleaded guilty to a 10(b)5 violation of the Securities and Exchange Commission for not publicly disclosing control of Merrill Lynch margin accounts that held stocks in his company, Stan Lee Media. . . Under the Carter administration, he was convicted for cocaine possession and an attempt to confiscate more than $8 million from Fidel Castro in a black market coffee transaction the Cuban dictator was using to defraud the Soviet Union.” The Washington Post reported that “In 1983, Paul violated parole by traveling to Canada under a false identity and ended up pleading guilty in federal court to making false statements to customs inspectors. Paul went to prison in California. When paroled, he stayed in California.” The Post also noted that, “In 1998, Paul co-founded Stan Lee Media, a Hollywood-based Internet animation studio. The company was named for Paul’s business partner, Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. Almost from the start, prosecutors alleged, Paul and a few co-conspirators manipulated the market for the stock of Stan Lee Media: They artificially inflated the stock to a peak value of $350 million, creating a false appearance of demand by making transactions through and between accounts that Paul controlled but maintained in the names of others. Paul and his co-conspirators misused the brokerage account to borrow more than $4 million from Merrill Lynch, money prosecutors say they used to buy real estate, travel and make political contributions. Stan Lee was never implicated in the scheme.” After the indictment and the collapse of his firm Paul filed suit arguing that Hillary Clinton had never properly reported his $2 million contribution to the campaign. The suit was thrown out because Paul had become a fugitive under arrest in Brazil. On his return, however the suit was refiled. A Clinton fundraiser, David Rosen, was acquitted of three counts of election fraud but last December his superior, Andrew Grossman, admitted responsibility for three false FEC reports for which the campaign paid a fine of only $35,000. There is one other thing, as Worldnet Daily reports: “Bill and Hillary Clinton head an all-star cast of witnesses in a lawsuit by business mogul Peter Franklin Paul that alleges the former president reneged on a $17 million deal in which he promised to promote a business in exchange for massive contributions to his wife’s Senate campaign. “The potential witness list includes celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Brad Pitt, Barbra Streisand, James Brolin, Cher, Whoopi Goldberg, George Hamilton, Olivia Newton John, John Travolta, Diana Ross, Shirley McLaine, Michael Bolton, Toni Braxton, Paul Anka and Larry King. “Also on the list are former Vice President Al Gore, the Clinton’s daughter Chelsea Clinton, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, former California Gov. Gray Davis, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terrence McAuliffe, CBS News reporter Mike Wallace and ABC News reporter Brian Ross. “Paul told WND these people, and many others, have direct knowledge of the alleged frauds. He says he explained, for example, in person to actors Pitt and Travolta that his personal contribution of some $2 million for a Hollywood gala and fund-raiser for Sen. Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2000 was done in exchange for Bill Clinton promoting Paul’s Internet business, Stan Lee Media, after leaving office. “Clinton was promised an additional $15 million in stock to join the board of the company, which Paul formed in partnership with famed Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee.”. . . On April 7, a judge in Los Angeles dismissed Sen. Clinton as a defendant in the civil lawsuit, but she will be deposed as a material witness in preparation for a trial set for March, 27, 2007.” The story – and not just the characters behind it – is a remarkable one, making all the more incredible the failure of the establishment media to report it in more than a perfunctory manner. Two excerpts from a sworn statement of Paul give the flavor: – “While attending the August 13, 2000, brunch at Barbra Streisand’s house, Chelsea Clinton came up and spent approximately 25 minutes with my wife, Mr. Oto, and myself, recapping the events of the day before, and narrating what her parents did after they left the Gala VIP Dinner at 2:30 a.m. the night before. Chelsea related that she and her parents had stayed up playing scrabble, discussing the Gala and the prospect of her father�s working with the creator of Spider Man when he left the White House. . .” – “Through the Secret Service, I arranged for a private meeting with the Clintons at the National Italian American Dinner in Washington in 1994, where my then-client, ‘Fabio,’ chased Hillary Clinton around a conference table and then physically lifted the First Lady, from her sitting position on the floor, for a series of romance-pose photographs.” Clearly, ex-con Paul is not someone to trust easily. But the same is true of Hillary Clinton, the only first lady to come under criminal investigation, who once told a House committee “I don’t recall” or its equivalent 50 times in 42 paragraphs. But a real press would be out covering this story, not sweeping it under the rug. THE ROSEN TRIAL PROGRESSIVE REVIEW 2005 – The acquittal of Hillary Clinton’s former fundraiser David Rosen follows a bizarre trial in which a Clinton-appointed judge announced Mrs. Clinton not culpable before any evidence had been presented and a prosecutor concealed from the jury a damaging tape astounding even the judge. As Newsmax reported on May 18: Prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg announced yesterday that he would not introduce the government’s strongest evidence that Rosen is guilty . . . ‘The government does not intend to introduce the tape or elicit any testimony from the witness about that conversation,’ Zeidenberg told Judge A. Howard Matz. Judge Matz was stunned by Zeidenberg’s announcement, and hinted that the Bush prosecutor was throwing away his case. ‘You couldn’t keep [the tape] out,’ an incredulous Matz protested. ‘I wouldn’t let you keep it out.'” But eventually the Clinton appointed judge relented, saying he said he would allow Zeidenberg to file a ‘real pithy’ argument in lieu of introducing the Rosen tape. The Bush prosecutor went so far as to trash the Rosen audiotape, arguing that it was ‘hearsay,’ and requesting that Judge Matz bar even the defense from referencing it. The recording, made by Kennedy in-law Raymond Reggie during a September 2002 meeting with Rosen at a Chicago steakhouse, was believed to offer evidence supportive of the prosecution’s argument that Rosen had deliberately understated the costs of an August 2000 gala fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton. . . On May 20, Martha Carr in the New Orleans Times Picayune – the only major paper to give the story serious coverage – reported: A transcript of the tape obtained by The Times-Picayune shows that while some parts could have helped bolster the government’s case, others contained potentially embarrassing details about the fast-and-loose practices of top Democratic fund raisers and party officials. The judge ultimately agreed to exclude its contents. . . While Reggie agreed to help the feds almost three years ago, his role as government informant was kept secret until recently in an effort to conceal his cooperation in at least two other unrelated investigations, one involving a state senator, and the other, a prominent political figure who may have been illegally soliciting national campaign donations from foreign nationals, according to an FBI affidavit. The government has agreed to recommend that Reggie’s sentence not exceed five years in return for his cooperation, he testified Thursday. Like several other actors in the political drama being played out in the Los Angeles courtroom, Reggie, who was invited to state dinners and even slept at the White House, watched his high-powered world come crashing down after his wheeling and dealing got out of control. . . The underwriter of the Hollywood gala, Peter Paul, is a three-time convicted felon who built an Internet company with Spider-man creator Stan Lee. He awaits sentencing for bilking investors out of $25 million. His former company, Stan Lee Media, is now defunct. [Aaron] Tonken, who organized the gala, is serving five years in prison for defrauding charities out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, after years of consorting with the rich and famous in Los Angeles, driving luxury vehicles and living off borrowed money. Lastly, there is Jim Levin, a Chicago businessman and Clinton confidant who has pleaded guilty to federal bribery, fraud and conspiracy charges in connection with the awarding of public contracts to his family’s fencing company. The judge – a Clinton patronage pick pushed by Barbara Boxer – not only didn’t recuse himself as a more cautious jurist might have under the circumstances, he was unusually loquacious. In a NY Sun story he was quoted as saying that Paul was “a thoroughly discredited, corrupt individual” and “a con artist.” Metz also said, “This isn’t a trial about Senator Clinton. Senator Clinton has no stake in this trial as a party or a principal. She’s not in the loop in any direct way, and that’s something the jury will be told.” What’s curious about this is that at least two witnesses had told investigators that they had informed Mrs. Clinton about the hidden campaign cash. Prsecutor Zeidenberg was equally anxious to exonerate Hillary Clinton, telling Matz, “You will hear no evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in any way, shape or form. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The evidence will show that David Rosen was trying to keep this evidence from the campaign.” . . . It helps to remember that the Clinton-Bush coziness goes back to the days of Iran-Contra, when Papa Bush was supervising covert arms shipments to Latin America out of Arkansas (with drugs making the return trip) and Governor Clinton was busy looking the other way. Further, as was clear during abortive Republican investigations into various Clinton scandals, in the culture of impunity of Washington, politics stops at corruption’s edge. Almost all major corruption is either bipartisan or common enough that one side can effectively blackmail the other. THE PELLICANO CONNECTION JOSEPH FARRAH, WORLDNET DAILY, JULY 2005 – A significant portion of the [Clinton’s] Shadow Team’s operations were carried out by private investigators, among them: Terry Lenzner, founder and chairman of the powerful Washington, D.C., detective firm Investigative Group International; high-ticket San Francisco private eye Jack Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland; and Hollywood sleuth Anthony J. Pellicano. . . Hillary’s detectives engaged in “a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public,” former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998. Hillary’s secret police tend to be a tight-lipped bunch, professionally skilled at keeping a low profile. However, we know more about Anthony “The Pelican” Pellicano than about most Hillary operatives, thanks to his boastfulness and taste for the limelight. Pellicano’s violent career as a private investigator reveals much about the sorts of qualifications Hillary sought in her Shadow Team. In the January 1992 issue of GQ magazine, Pellicano boasted of the dirty work he had performed for his clients, including blackmail and physical assault. He claimed to have beaten one of his client’s enemies with a baseball bat. “I’m an expert with a knife,” said Pellicano. “I can shred your face with a knife.” FBI agents raided Pellicano’s West Hollywood office on Nov. 22, 2002, and arrested him on federal weapons charges. In his office, they found gold, jewelry, and about $200,000 in cash – most of it bundled in $10,000 wrappers – thousands of pages of transcripts of illegal wiretaps; two handguns; and various explosive devices stored in safes, including two live hand grenades and a pile of C4 plastic explosive, complete with blasting cap and detonation cord. C4 is a military explosive that cannot be sold legally to civilians. Pellicano had a surprisingly large quantity in his safe. “The explosive could easily be used to blow up a car, and was in fact strong enough to bring down an airplane,” noted Special Agent Stanley Ornellas in a sworn affidavit. The FBI raided Pellicano’s office after an accomplice ratted him out. Ex-convict Alexander Proctor told the FBI that Pellicano had hired him to threaten and intimidate Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had been poking her nose a little too deeply into a feud between Mafia kingpins and actor Steven Seagal. It seems that Seagal’s former friend and production partner, Julius R. Nasso, was tied to the Gambino crime family. When Seagal and Nasso quarreled, the dispute got ugly. On the morning of June 20, 2002, reporter Anita Busch approached her car, which was parked near her home. To her horror, she saw a bullet-hole in her windshield. A cardboard sign taped to the glass bore one word: “Stop.” A dead fish with a long-stemmed rose in its mouth lay on the hood. Busch took the hint. She immediately went into hiding, staying in a series of hotels at her paper’s expense, while the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Deprtment’s organized-crime division investigated. A break in the case seemed to come when ex-convict Alexander Proctor spilled the beans to an undercover FBI informant. Proctor reportedly told the informant, on tape, that it was not the Mafia who were harassing Anita Busch – it was Steven Seagal! Proctor said that Seagal hired detective Anthony Pellicano to intimidate the woman into silence. Pellicano, in turn, had subcontracted Proctor to do the dirty work. “He wanted to make it look like the Italians were putting the hit on her, so it wouldn’t reflect on Seagal,” Proctor told the informant. Proctor accused Pellicano of ordering him to “blow up” or set fire to Busch’s car to frighten her. However, Proctor said he got cold feet and merely damaged the car, leaving the dead fish and “Stop” sign as calling cards. A federal judge sentenced Pellicano to 30 months in prison for possession of the hand grenades and C4. Later, on June 17, 2005, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley charged him with conspiracy and making threats against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. He will likely face prosecution for illegal wiretapping. Pellicano’s 2002 arrest was big news in Hollywood. Article after article touted Pellicano as a “celebrity sleuth” and a “private detective to the stars,” whose client list had included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Roseanne Barr, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson (whose chronic problem with child molestation charges provided Pellicano with plenty of damage-control work). Despite the sensational coverage, few mainstream news organizations uttered the name of Pellicano’s most famous client: Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano’s Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine,” reported NewsMax on Nov. 23, 2002.” [The dead fish with a rose in its mouth brought to mind this] PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1998 – Kathleen Willey had the tires on her car mysteriously punctured with dozens of nails and her cat suddenly disappeared. Subsequently, Willey was out jogging near her home when a stranger approached and asked if the tires had been fixed and if the cat had been found. The man then asked Willey, “Don’t you get the message?” and jogged off. Willey also found an animal skull on her porch the day after she testified in the Paula Jones case. WASHINGTON POST, FEB 22,1998 – [Sidney] Blumenthal was also asked [in the grand jury] about any contacts he may have had with three private investigators: Terry F. Lenzner, who heads the Investigative Group Inc. and who has been hired by the law firm of Williams & Connolly, Clinton’s private attorneys in the broad Whitewater investigation; Jack Palladino, who is based in San Francisco; and Anthony J. Pellicano, who is based in Los Angeles . . .In an interview this week, Pellicano denied he has been doing background investigations on Starr or his staff. He refused to say whether he is doing other work on the Lewinsky investigation. CARL LIMBACHER, NEWSMAX, 2003 – Though the American press insists on not reporting this inconvenient detail, Anthony Pellicano was first hired by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992 in a bid to discredit Gennifer Flowers’ steamy tape recordings of conversations with Mr. Clinton.. . . In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos – along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton – based on their attempts to use Pellicano’s analysis to discredit her. Arguing before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, Flowers’ Judicial Watch attorneys tied Pellicano directly to the first lady-turned-New York senator, telling the court: “Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he’s the one who did the analysis of the tapes.” e court ruled in Flowers’ favor, allowing the lawsuit to proceed. But that isn’t the only time Pellicano has been linked to the Clintons. Four days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in January 1998, ex-Lewinsky boyfriend Andy Bleiler came forward with the claim that she had stalked him. The Washington state school teacher also contended that Lewinsky wanted to become a White House intern so she could perform oral sex on then-President Clinton. “I’m going to Washington to get my presidential knee pads,” Bleiler’s lawyer, Terry Giles, quoted Lewinsky as saying. “Anthony Pellicano, the L.A.-based private investigator and O.J. defense team veteran [was] responsible for digging up Andy Bleiler,” the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser reported at the time. Sexgate provocateur Lucianne Goldberg told Peyser that Pellicano’s services were bought and paid for by the Clinton White House. When Peyser confronted the “investigator to the stars” with Goldberg’s claim, he didn’t deny it. “You’re a smart girl. No comment,” Pellicano told the Post reporter. Indeed, the tough-talking private eye makes no bones about his hardball tactics. He claimed to carry a baseball bat, not a gun, as his weapon of choice and once told the Los Angeles Times, “I only use intimidation and fear when I absolutely have to.” Interestingly enough, some of Pellicano’s targets, like former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch and one-time “Hard Copy” correspondent Dina Dimond, report break-ins and property vandalism, the kind of problems encountered by Clinton accusers like Flowers, Sally Perdue, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick. CARL LIMBACHER JR, NEWSMAX, FEBRUARY 2, 1999 – The very hour before Clinton entered the well of the House to speak to Congress and the nation, Andy Bleiler took center stage 3,000 miles away. Bleiler’s account of his five-year affair with a teenage Monica, delivered from his Oregon home in a full-blown, nationally broadcast press conference, was the Clinton attack machine’s boldest foray into “nuts and sluts” territory. It was at that press conference that America learned for the first time that Monica had traveled to Washington intent on earning her “presidential kneepads.” . . . In the aftermath of Bleiler’s press conference, only the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser was eagle-eyed enough to notice that Bleiler had not just appeared out of thin air. In an interview with Lucianne Goldberg, Peyser learned that, “Anthony Pellicano, the L.A.-based private investigator and O.J. defense team veteran [was] responsible for digging up Andy Bleiler.” Pellicano’s services, Goldberg claimed, were bought and paid for by the White House. . . NEWSMAX, June 22, 2000 – U.S. Senate hopeful Rick Lazio alleged yesterday that his opponent Hillary Clinton hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him as soon as he announced he would run against her. The New York congressman said the development is an indication of the kind of dirty tricks campaign he expects Mrs. Clinton to wage in her bid for elected office. . . NEWSMAX, 2002 – When Peyser confronted the Los Angeles private detective with Goldberg’s claim, he didn’t deny it. “You’re a smart girl. No comment,” Pellicano told the Post reporter. Digging up Bleiler’s “presidential kneepads” story wasn’t the first time Pellicano had gone to bat for the Clintons. According to Ron Kessler’s 1995 best-seller, “Inside the White House,” Clinton’s first presidential campaign relied on Pellicano’s expertise in the field of audio analysis to discredit Gennifer Flowers’ smoking gun tapes. The Clinton camp made much of the fact that Anthony J. Pellicano, an expert on audio recording analysis, had told the press that a twelve-minute portion of the tape of conversations between Flowers and Clinton had been ‘selectively edited’ at two points,” Kessler reported. To counter Pellicano’s claims, Flowers submitted her recordings to Truth Verification Labs, which found them to be 100 percent authentic. In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos – along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton – based on their attempts to use Pellicano’s analysis to discredit her. During a February court appearance, the head of Flowers’ legal team, Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman, told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, “Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he’s the one who did the analysis of the tapes.” Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano’s Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine. AMERICAN THINKER – Two LA Times reporters today used almost 2800 words to examine the highly questionable background of Hollywood celebrity sleuth/audio expert/guest of the federal penal system Anthony Pellicano. Although the major focus was on his career as a “forensic audio” expert, not once did they manage to mention his most prominent gig: “analyzing” the Gennifer Flowers tapes of her conversations with Bill Clinton, and declaring them “doctored” during the 1992 Presidential campaign. Readers with long memories will recall that Pellicano’s “discrediting” of the tapes, on which then-candidate Clinton was heard disparaging Mario’s Cuomo’s ethnicity and possible ties to the underworld, as well as making colorful comments of a sexual nature, led the press to immediately drop the matter, and treat the tapes as a gigantic fraud. Credit where it is due: reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait do raise many questions about the validity of Pellicano’s “expert” testimony as an audio analyst. They point out that he has a record of hearing things no one else can, that he doesn’t understand the science supposedly underlying his analytical techniques, and that occasional judges have thrown out his opinions as valueless. . . CARL LIMBACHER NEWSMAX – New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s Washington scandal attorney David Kendall is denying that recently jailed tough guy-investigator Anthony Pellicano ever worked for the Clintons, a claim directly contradicted by senior Bush White House advisor Mary Matalin – and not even denied by Pellicano himself. Kendall told the New York Daily News on Friday that reports linking the former first lady with the controversial gumshoe, who was jailed last Monday on weapons and explosives charges, are “politically motivated and utterly false.”. . . When Newsweek asked Pellicano directly whether he was working for the Clinton White House, his denial was significantly less forceful than Mr. Kendall’s. “I have no comment,” he told the newsmagazine. CARL LIMBACHER, NEWSMAX – [Mary] Matalin, now a senior White House advisor, discussed the episode in 1997 during a stint as a talk radio host on CBS’s Washington, D.C. affiliate. “I got the letters from Pellicano to these women intimidating them,” Matalin told her audience. “I had tapes of conversations from Pellicano to the women. I got handwritten letters from the women.”. . . “I controlled the money in the [1992 Bush] campaign,” Matalin explained. “And [Clinton damage controller] Betsy Wright announced that she was putting $28,000 on the ‘bimbo’ patrol and on Jack Palladino and Pellicano, the other guy. “And $28,000 to me, the political director, was four states in the Rocky Mountains. You had a limited budget. I said, how could they spend this much money? How could they basically give up four states to track down ‘bimbos’? “That’s why it was kind of shocking to me that it must have been a bigger priority than putting money into states for the purpose of winning and that’s why I flagged it at the time.” NY POST – Court TV anchor Diane Dimond, who reported on the first days of the Michael Jackson sex case a decade ago, is the latest to be caught up in a Hollywood phone-bugging scandal. Dimond said yesterday that authorities have informed her that wiretaps on her phone from 1994 are part of evidence seized by the FBI last year from the computer of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano. Dimond was a reporter for “Hard Copy” in 1993 in the first days after the story broke of a youngster accusing Jackson of sexually molesting him. Pellicano worked for Jackson’s attorney, Harold Weitzman. “I [was] positive my phones were tapped – I heard lots of clicking and crackling noises on the line and then my words started coming back to me through others,” Dimond told The Post. “I would call new sources and they would tell me, ‘We understand you’ve heard X, Y and Z’ so I knew my phone had to be tapped. . . “My house was vandalized. My car was broken into on the Paramount lot [where ‘Hard Copy’ was taped]. “I had documents underneath an expensive leather coat – the coat wasn’t taken, but the documents were stolen from my car,” Dimond said. “My mailbox was mowed over. They gave me armed guards to go to and from work – nothing was safe,” she says. TOO IMPORTANT TO BE SUED 1999 – Fighting a subpoena by Judicial Watch in a $90 million lawsuit on behalf of GOP officials and others whose FBI files were abused by the Clinton White House, HRC, in her brief, declares that “as a general proposition, high-ranking government officials are not subject to depositions” and she shouldn’t have to testify so she can “have time to dedicate to the performance of [her] government functions.” One problem: Mrs. Clinton was not a government official. She was, however, a defendant in the suit. THE CLINTON HEALTH PLAN FIASCO TONY SNOW, 1999: In 1994, [HRC] set out to redesign the American health-care system and convened a panel that drafted its plan secretly — in violation of federal law . . . The plan prescribed some eye- popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government- mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years to doctors who received “anything of value” in exchange for helping patients short-circuit the bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment; and $100,000 a day for drug companies that messed up federal filings . . . When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton sighed, “I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America.” When a woman complained that she didn’t want to get shoved into a plan not of her choosing, the first lady lectured, “It’s time to put the common good, the national interest, ahead of individuals.” As for privacy, forget it: Her plan would have required people to carry national identification cards that embedded confidential patient information on computer chips. SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994 – During the first months of the Clinton administration, one of the biggest national policy changes of the past fifty years was being forged by a secret committee led by Mrs. Clinton under procedures that periodically defied the courts and the Government Accounting Office and whose public manifestations consisted of highly contrived media opportunities, carefully staged “town meetings,” and similar artifices. Despite the contrary evidence of public opinion polls, the concept of Canadian-style single-payer insurance was dismissed early. Tom Hamburger and Ted Marmor in the Washington Monthly tell of a single-payer proponent being invited to the White House in February 1993. It was, he said, a “pseudo-consultation;” the doctor was quickly informed that “single payer is not politically feasible.” When Dr. David Himmelstein of the Harvard Medical School pressed Mrs. Clinton on single payer, she replied, “Tell me something interesting, David.” In other words, write Hamburger and Marmor: “Fewer than six weeks into the Clinton presidency, the White House had made its key policy decision: Before the Health Care Task Force wrote a single page of its 22-volume report to the President, the single payer idea was written off, and ‘managed competition’ was in.” If there was any popular, grassroots demand for “managed competition” it never appeared. Managed competition had not been tested anywhere. Nonetheless, reported Thomas Bodenehimer in Nation: “Around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health reform table sit the managed-competition winners: big business, hospitals, large (but not small) commercial insurers, the Blues, budget-worried government leaders and the ‘Jackson Hole Group,’ the chief intellectual honchos of the managed competition movement. . . Adherence to the mantra of managed competition appears to be the price of a ticket of admission to this gathering. “ What was finally proposed involved a massive transfer of the American health industry — by some accounts now larger than the military-industrial complex — to a small number of the largest insurance companies and other major corporations. These were companies that had the assets to play the game being offered — a medical oligopoly that would dispense health-care under the rules of the Fortune 500 rather than according to those of Hipprocrates. Clinton’s position on health care had bounced around in the early months of the campaign, finally settling on a policy that would leave the big health insurers largely unscathed. It was not particularly surprising. Max Brantley, columnist for the Arkansas Times, noted that “Blue Cross owns Arkansas, and [Clinton] never did much to fight them.” The stakes would eventually become so high that a number of the biggest insurers — including CIGNA, Aetna and Metropolitan Life — would leave the industry-wide Health Insurance Association of America. Five of the largest insurance companies formed something called the Alliance for Managed Competition. In this new game one of the first targets of ‘managed competition’ was the smaller insurance companies that now account for nearly half of the health underwriting business. Said managed competition advocate Lynn Etheridge, “Ninety-nine percent of the insurance companies are going to be wiped out because they’re only prepared to be insurance companies.” Mrs. Clinton, sounding like a 1980s takeover lawyer, said, “It’s going to be a Darwinian struggle. Only the best and fittest of them will survive.” Similarly, when asked how small businesses were meant to cope with the added costs of her plan, Mrs. Clinton replied, “I can’t go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.” Her interest lay with the largest companies, i.e. the ones with the ability to purchase or create the health maintenance organizations that would become de rigeur under the Clinton scheme. The new HMOs would be major profit-centers for companies, simultaneously subsidized by federal payments for the ailments of the poor, elderly and those without conventional insurance. THE WATERGATE INVESTIGATION PROGRESSIVE REVIEW 1999 – Jerry Zeifman was the Democrats’ general counsel chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation. In an article for the Wall Street Journal he reviews HRC’s performance as a staff member: — She violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons. — A number of the legal procedures she recommended were ethically flawed — In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. — She proposed that the committee should neither 1) hold any hearings with or take the depositions of any live witnesses, nor 2) conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon. Instead, the committee should rely on prior investigations conducted by other committees and agencies. — She advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. — Zeifman decided that he could not recommend her for any position of public or private trust. THE PHOTOS There’s been a lot of talk about photos of Jack Abramoff and George Bush, but Hillary Clinton has her own photo problems. For example, there’s the photo of Bill and her standing next to illegal fundraiser Johnny Chung signed by HRC, “To Johnny Chung with best wishes and appreciation.” Chung reportedly funneled several hundred thousand dollas from Chinese military intelligence to Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign. As Chung put it once, “I see the White House is like a subway — you have to put in coins to open the gates.” He was talking about the $50,000 he gave Hillary Clinton’s top aide while seeking VIP treatment at the White House. And then there’s Jorge Cabrera – the drug dealer who gave enough to the Democrats to have his picture taken with both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. In a 1997 story, Don Van Natta Jr. of the NY Times reported, “Jorge Cabrera, a drug smuggler who has emerged as one of the most notorious supporters of President Clinton’s re-election campaign, was asked for a campaign contribution in the unlikely locale of a hotel in Havana by a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, congressional investigators have learned. . . On his return to the United States several days after that meeting, in November 1995, Cabrera wrote a check for $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee from an account that included the proceeds from smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the United States, said the investigators, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Within two weeks of the contribution, Cabrera met Gore at the dinner in Miami. Ten days later, Cabrera attended a Christmas reception at the White House hosted by Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the events, Gore and Mrs. Clinton posed for photographs with Cabrera, who has two felony convictions dating from the 1980s and is now in a prison here on a drug-smuggling conviction. . . “A Cuban-born American, Cabrera was arrested two times on serious drug charges in the 1980s. Both times he pleaded guilty to nondrug felony charges. In 1983, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for conspiring to bribe a grand jury witness and served 42 months in prison. In 1988, he pleaded guilty to filing a false income-tax return and served one year in prison. After his brief brush with presidential politics, Cabrera was arrested in January 1996 inside a cigar warehouse near here in Dade County, where more than 500 pounds of cocaine had been hidden. He and several accomplices were charged with having smuggled 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States through the Keys. . . In January, Cabrera received an invitation to Clinton’s inauguration. THE BILLING RECORDS 1996 – Hillary Clinton’s Rose law firm billing records, sought for two years by congressional investigators and the special prosecutor are found in the back room of the personal residence at the White House. Clinton say she has no idea how they got there. THE JOHN HUANG CONNECTION In 1994 John Huang quits the Lippo Group — with a golden parachute of around $800,000 — and goes to work for the Commerce Department. Some believe the move is instigated by his friend, Hillary Clinton. The Indonesia-based Lippo Group was headed by Mochtar Riady, a central character in the Clinton scandals. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown ordered a top secret clearance for Huang. While at Commerce, Huang visits the White House about 70 times, is briefed 37 times by the CIA, views about 500 intelligence reports, and makes 281 calls to Lippo banks. In 1999 Huang was sentenced for campaign finance violations. Also in 1994, Webster Hubbell is convicted of tax evasion and mail fraud involving the theft of nearly a half million dollars from his partners at the Rose firm and failing to pay nearly $150,000 in taxes. After quitting the Justice Department and before going to jail, Hubbell is a busy man. He meets with Hillary Clinton, and follows up by getting together with major scandal figures John Huang, James Riady, and Ng Lapseng. Riady and Huang go to the White House every day from June 21 to June 25, 1994 according to White House records. Hubbell had breakfast and lunch with Riady on June 23. Four days later — and one week after Hubbell’s meeting with Hillary — the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, jointly owed by Lippo and the Chinese intelligence services, sends $100,000 to Hubbell.