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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cuemaster who wrote (2037)	1/27/1998 3:15:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

See Huffington's Fri January 23 column: "The President, Women and Payoffs" excerpt: Now, Jones' lawyers have subpoenaed a key player from a different scandal -- Shelia Lawrence, Larry Lawrence's merry widow. Suddenly, two widely divergent scandals are converging. The new story involves allegations about an affair, which was supposed to have begun in 1992. Rumors about this have been widely circulating both among media folk in Washington and social folk in San Diego. But, of course, allegations of a mere affair are of no interest in the Jones case. What is of interest, however, is the question: Was there a payoff? Shelia Lawrence was named the U.S. special representative to the World Conservation Union, clearly not on the strength of her resume. The real political payoff, however, was not her appointment but her husband's nomination as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland. And that's where the Lawrences catch up with the Joneses. Since I first started delving into the Lawrence saga, scarcely a day has gone by that I haven't been given more reasons to ask: Why did the president go so far out on a limb to ensure that Larry Lawrence was appointed ambassador to Switzerland? Presidents of both parties -- sad to say -- have from time to time appointed unqualified men and women to diplomatic and other posts, mostly as a fund-raising payoff. But lack of qualifications was the least of Lawrence's problems: From 1989 to 1991, Larry Lawrence had two dozen disputes with the Internal Revenue Service, more than all but three other taxpayers during that period. In IRS settlements, he conceded that he under-reported income by as much as $13 million and over-reported deductions by as much as $5 million. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an unusual tie vote, refused to recommend Lawrence for ambassador. Both the American Foreign Service Association and the American Senior Foreign Service Association expressed unprecedented opposition to the Lawrence nomination. The State Department had in its files information about Lawrence attending college in Chicago at the time he claimed he was serving in the merchant marines during World War II. Norma Nicolls, Lawrence's longtime assistant, will testify under oath next Wednesday at a congressional Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee hearing that she told an FBI investigator, interviewing her as part of Lawrence's background check, that she had helped research the merchant marine information that Lawrence used to fabricate his military record. Sources close to the congressional investigation told me that given all this evidence, they will be looking at whether there was criminal intent to sanitize Lawrence's vetting files. "Lawrence wanted Switzerland," a close friend of Lawrence's told me, "not just any ambassadorship, but Switzerland. And he pressured Clinton until he got it. His greatest leverage was having turned a blind eye toward Clinton's affair with his own wife." If we ever find out exactly what financial dealings our man in Bern engaged in while ambassador, we'll know why he wanted Switzerland instead of Fiji or even the Court of St. James. Part of the answer to what Lawrence was up to in Bern is in three full boxes that Christina Marie Alexandre, then a State Department employee assigned to the Lawrences, handed over to the investigators when she charged Lawrence under the Fraud, Waste and Mismanagement Act. Clearly, access to these papers is critical to bringing the Lawrence scandal to closure. www2.uniontrib.com