The Real Clinton Scandals
Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Courting the presidential con
By Anne Williamson
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© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
It's over a week since Bill Clinton copped a plea before relinquishing the White House to George W. Bush, and yet the stench of his occupancy still lingers. Certainly the former president's interminable farewell, meant to upstage the new president on his inauguration day, will long be remembered as the ne plus ultra of boorish political leave-taking. But other facts emerged last week that justify the investigation by Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee Dan Burton into Clinton's last presidential deeds.
The whirlwind of revelations regarding the Clintons' final, self-serving days include a hefty haul of presidential gifts the Clintons themselves selected for wealthy supporters to donate before Jan. 3 when Hillary Clinton's lust to have others furnish her newly-purchased mansions would become severely constricted by Senate ethics rules.
The next assault upon citizens' sensitivities involved the former president's questionable pardons of some mighty curious folks in contradiction to the wishes of prosecutors from their own Justice Department, and who were largely bypassed in the process.
And, finally, taxpayers learned of one last mugging when reports emerged detailing the Clinton entourage's looting aboard a presidential aircraft for the Saturday flight to New York from D.C., and their underlings' extensive vandalism in both the White House's West Wing and the vice president's offices in the Old Executive Office Building.
The thefts and the vandalism speak to the character of a group of people who did not believe that they served at the people's pleasure, but rather thought of their political power as an entitlement. The other revelations speak not only to the ways in which both Clintons and their minions intend to reclaim that imagined entitlement, but also how they intend to cover up while enjoying the fruits of their many felonies.
Felonies? Yes, felonies.
Trillions are missing from federal agencies. That's right, gone. Poof! As in, "Nowhere to be found." People familiar with government accounts have charged off the record that in 1996 a concerted and intentional effort began with the support of the Office of Management and Budget and Treasury to strip agencies of honest officials and internal financial controls.
Allegedly, the reports of missing money at the various agencies started rising exponentially in 1998 and 1999, but the actual problem began with Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative. It was in the Clinton administration's first term that inspector generals and their staffs (each federal agency is assigned an inspector general who audits and monitors each agency's accounts and activities) were instructed to begin collaborating with their agencies -- a most peculiar instruction. As one frustrated inspector general remarked, "How can I collaborate with the very people I am meant to police?"
Unsurprisingly, during the Clintons' time in office the ranks of the inspector generals were demoralized, and, in some cases, corrupted.
This background is what made Robert Pear's Jan. 18 New York Times article, "Financial Problems in Government Are Rife, Nation's Top Auditor Says," so very timely. The comptroller general, David M. Walker, reported that "the Pentagon's financial statements are in such poor condition they cannot be audited, and that most other agencies do not comply with federal accounting standards." The result is that the comptroller general "cannot certify the accuracy of consolidated financial statements for the government as a whole."
The report added, "Federal auditors have been complaining about this problem for several years."
In other words, the Clintonista's looting did not begin or end with the purloining of cutlery, china, linen and other items bearing the presidential seal aboard the Boeing 747 President Bush made available to the Clintons and their guests for their departure from Washington on Inauguration Day. It began on the 20th of January, 1993, continued throughout their administration in a bewildering number of financial games involving domestic agencies, foreign-aid agencies, development agencies and multilateral lenders, and has not yet ended.
The presidential looting has not ended, because the pardons of Patty Hearst, insider trader Salim ("Sandy") Lewis, commodities outlaw Marc Rich and his partner Pincus Green, money-launderer Harvey Weinig, and questionable others all speak to the future, not the past. Sandy Lewis, Patty Hearst, Marc Rich and his former wife, Denise Rich, will all be expected to play a significant support role in Hillary Clinton's political future. And that means moola. Piles of it.
I am not alone in suspecting that Marc Rich has already ponied up plenty beyond his lawyer's (former White House Counsel Jack Quinn) likely $5 to $10 million fee. After all, outlaw commodities trader Marc Rich is a man whose greed and guile, among other adventures, delivered him control of the Russian metals sector in the late 1980s to the early 1990s, and then led him to collapse the world market for aluminum in an orgy of wanton selling.
After first denying any role in her former husband's pardon, Denise Rich later admitted that not only was she involved, but she also became the intermediary between the Clintons and her former husband's lawyers. Todd Venezia reported in last Wednesday's New York Post that rumors are rampant Mrs. Rich received a $900 million payoff for her assistance, and the speculation in New York commodity circles is that Bill Clinton trousered no less than $100 million of Rich's cash. Cooler heads estimate "more than $25 million, but less than $50 million."
No matter the exact source or amount of the money, the Clintons were hardly dependent upon recently pardoned billionaires, or even a gasbag billionaire like George Soros whom former Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott described in Connie Bruck's Jan. 23, 1995, New Yorker story, "The World According To Soros," as his "secret weapon." On offer throughout the Clintons' tenure in the White House were IMF-funded, high-yielding foreign bonds for purchase by designated straw investors, easy cuts of various foreign pirate's swag from the looting of their own nations' natural resources , handsome pieces of particularly lucrative privatizations, kickbacks on multilateral loans for billions, easy pilfering of HUD grants and a zillion other government giveaways. All of these gambits were -- as I detail them in my soon-to-be-published book, "Contagion" -- truly endless, so big and unaccountable is the U.S. federal government.
Lesser administration lights, like the bushy-tailed graduate student types working for Steven Solarz's U.S.-Central Asian Enterprise Fund, claimed enough in inflated equipment costs that they were able to wire themselves a $10 million "bonus" to a newly-opened Swiss account, according to the Dec. 27, 2000, Wall Street Journal article, "Probe Begun of U.S. Fund In Central Asia."
A 1997 story in Sweden's principal morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, detailed how Carnegie Endowment Senior Researcher Anders Aslund and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs collaborated with Swedish financiers to establish a non-U.S. reporting investment bank in Moscow, an arrangement ripe with possibilities. So ripe that Aslund and Sachs abused their privileged participation in the design of Russia's voucher privatization in order to scheme successfully against a promising and already established initiative Goldman Sachs had managed with the Russian Federation early in 1992.
Private communications and documents received in the course of my research allege that less well-connected academics filed expense reports as required by the terms of their government grants to cover their own and their foreign mistresses' personal and travel expenses along with the costs of the businesses they invested in illegally using a portion of their government grants.
In short, a thorough investigation by people equipped with subpoena power would demonstrate that the Clintons and a significant number of their cabal have substantial amounts in offshore accounts. And that means they all have the same problem, a problem shared by Russian oligarchs like Anatoly Chubais who also got their start along the road to El Dorado in government "service."
It's one thing to get a large amount of capital into a foreign bank account, but it's quite another for public figures to get even some small part of the money back for personal use undetected in a U.S. banking system which is no longer under their operatives' control. And yet, for ambitious politicians, lavish lifestyles and pricey, multiple residences whose costs exceed post-presidential perks and pensions must be explained in some way. Now, how could that be accomplished?
Use your imagination.
Remember the $8 million book contract? And the $100,000 speaking engagements?
Sumner Redstone, president of the world's second largest media concern (Viacom), may or may not have enjoyed paying $8 million in the form of a book advance for the ear of a U.S. Senator. (And it is the attention that he's buying, because Hillary Clinton's memoir will be a laborious effort by her staff to tell us everything except what we want to know, and will not sell the 2 million copies required to justify the author's fee.) But, dollars to doughnuts, Redstone would have really liked paying Hillary zip from Simon and Schuster's comparatively meager resources while obligingly funneling $8 million from the senator's foreign stash to her U.S. bank account. (And besides, he'd still have the senator's full attention, wouldn't he?)
Ditto Bill's speechifying for cash. I suspect many of Bill's speeches will allegedly be given gratis, and not only for the positive publicity. Government auditors would be wise to be especially attentive to "anonymous donors" who step forward at the last minute to pay the former president's speaking fee.
And now you know why the Clintons, their public service colleagues, spinners, hacks, errand boys, hired thugs and shady lawyers must remain -- for years to come -- people so much in demand across the globe that the rest of us merely mortal untermenschen (that's German for "taxpayers") will continue to part with our cash just to hear them speak, just to read their words, and just to see the sun shine upon their noble faces.
Now you know why there will always be a poll somewhere reporting how large majorities of Americans long for the return to the White House of our beloved Arkansas grifters. And now you know why there will always be a small platoon of dedicated propagandists following in their wake, collecting their droppings and examining each and every one for the wisdom of the ages.
In truth, I suspect that within less than a year's time the public mood will be altogether different. Sometime in the coming year the monstrous, bloated, bubble economy that the "Committee to Save the World" ("Easy Al Greenscam," Robert "Peso Bob" Rubin and Larry "I Am The Walrus" Summers) built by means of the greatest expansion of cash, credit and government favor in world history for the purpose of keeping Bill Clinton in office will have collapsed around our collective ankles.
From the rubble will emerge the details of the dirty deals and cons the Clintonistas engineered for themselves at the citizenry's expense. And when the dust settles, the only venue in which citizens will be demanding to see that crowd will be a court of law.
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Anne Williamson has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Spy magazine, Film Comment and Premiere. An expert on Soviet-Russian affairs, she is currently working on a book, "Contagion: The Betrayal of Liberty; Russia and the United States in the 1990s." Her Sept. 21, 1999, testimony ("The Rape of Russia") to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services can be read online.
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