#3 of the top 50 unethical acts of the Clinton Administration:
On April 3, 1996 U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was killed in a plane crash in Eastern Europe. At the time of his death, Ron Brown was facing a variety of investigations into various illegal activities to which he had been linked. Jus a few years earlier, a Vietnamese official had accused Brown of soliciting a huge bribe of $700,000 to get Clinton to open up Viet Nam to American investments. A federal grand jury had begun hearing evidence for a possible criminal indictment on this case. The grand jury proceedings were supposed to be secret, yet Brown and his confederates were day by day, illegally informed of the proceedings, so they could obstruct justice by bribing or terrorizing grand jury witnesses. Brown was not indicted. At the time of the crash, a federal grand jury in the Southwest was reportedly just a few weeks away from handing up a criminal indictment, charging Commerce Secretary Brown with taking a huge bribe to fix a matter involving a gas pipeline case, implicating Bill Clinton and his circle of big business scoundrels, including Arkansas Natural Gas billionaire Jackson Stephens. Ron Brown was also under scrutiny from Judicial Watch as they were pursuing many alleged abuses in the Commerce Department sponsored trade missions which were said to have been used as a vehicle to raise money for the DNC. The Commerce Department has always had elements of a politicized favor factory, but the Clinton Administration has made it an art form. A DNC brochure obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times offered "managing trustees," who gave donations of $100,000 to the DNC, invitations to "participate in foreign trade missions." Melinda Moss, a former top fund-raiser for the DNC, became the Commerce Department’s director of business liaisons specifically in charge of selecting executives for foreign trade missions. Ms. Moss claimed executives were selected on merit alone, but she resisted responding to the Freedom of Information Act request for files on the trip selection process. When Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch contacted Ms. Moss to inquire about the months-long delay on this request, she refused to turn over the documents. "She called me an ugly word, and later slammed down the phone and hung up on me," Mr. Klayman recalls. Review of the documents that have been reluctantly turned over to Mr. Klayman may explain why Ms. Moss and the Commerce Department don't want to release any more. One such document, a June 1994 memo from Chris Brown, business manager for Entergy Power Development Group, discusses a meeting with Commerce Department officials including Jude Kearney, a former Clinton staffer in Arkansas, where an upcoming trade mission to China was discussed. According to Mr. Brown, Mr Kearny "indicated the competitive nature of being selected to ride on the plane with Secretary Ron Brown. Also indicated that politics of the situation were important and he as a political appointee would push those that were politically connected." This was just one of 35 passengers on just one of dozens of trips, including that fatal last trip to Macedonia. I am sure you can see that this shakedown process was a very lucrative one for President Clinton as he sought funds for his re-election. The reluctance of the Commerce Department to release further documents seems to indicate that indeed bribery and graft were common among those Clinton Administration appointees working in the Commerce Department. Orchestrating and directing this activitywas Ron Brown, but we all know that his strings were pulled by Bill Clinton. |
