LETTING DEMOCRATS OFF THE HOOK
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
November 7, 2001
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Last month in New York, former Teamster president Ron Carey was found not guilty on all charges stemming from his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that benefitted his campaign for the union’s presidency and the Democratic National Committee’s efforts to get Bill Clinton re-elected in 1996. The indictment was for perjury when he claimed to not know anything about the scheme. The result confirms the fears of many that U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White is still protecting Clinton, who originally appointed her as the top prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
The existence of the scheme has been proven. William Hamilton, the former Teamster political director, was convicted in 1999 of fraud and embezzlement of eight-hundred-eighty-five thousand dollars of union funds to help get Carey re-elected. Carey was clearly the chief beneficiary of the plot, which sent that money to various liberal interest groups, in return for lesser sums paid to Carey’s re-election fund. In one case, a hundred-fifty thousand dollars was sent from the Teamsters to the AFL-CIO, which forwarded the same amount to a group called Citizen Action, which then sent a hundred thousand to cover Carey’s political consulting bill.
The whole sordid mess was laid out in the Hamilton trial. Carey’s campaign manager confessed to his role, and entered a guilty plea. He testified that Carey knew of and approved the plan, despite his image as an anti-corruption reformer. Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, took the fifth amendment. He and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe were both implicated by testimony at the trial but were not prosecuted. A federal oversight board created to help rid the union of mafia influence, overturned Carey’s 1996 re-election and ousted him from the union.
In an editorial on Carey’s trial, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the verdict might have been different if Carey had been tried sooner and the issue had not been limited to having to prove that Carey knew about the money-laundering scheme. The Journal said it should have been approached as "part of a broad conspiracy case sketching out the entire scheme of which he was the principal beneficiary."
Clinton had fired every U.S. Attorney as practically his first act as president, but Bush asked White to stay on to oversee the Carey case, as well as the scandal surrounding Clinton’s last-minute presidential pardons of Marc Rich and others. The New York Times approved of keeping White on, claiming in an article last June that she is above politics with a "lack of regard for bruising others."
She let McAuliffe and Trumka off the hook in the Teamster scandal and mishandled the prosecution of Carey after getting a House committee to hold off hearings that she said would hurt her efforts to convict the accused. It appears increasingly unlikely that she will ever charge anyone with a crime in the pardons-for-money scandal. Bush’s failure to replace this Clinton holdover has been very damaging to the cause of justice. Go to aim.org for a transcript of this commentary. |
