Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (33673)	10/10/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 132070

Speaking of Bill . . . forbes.com Privacy and Piracy By Thomas Sowell PERHAPS NO IMAGE better captures the duplicity of Bill Clinton than the videotape of him emerging from church services on Easter Sunday, carrying a Bible—on his way back to the White House and a rendezvous with Monica Lewinsky. Such duplicity has been the hallmark of both Clintons, whether in Arkansas or in Washington, and whether the issue concerned sex, money or anything else. Just as Bill Clinton has tried to escape a perjury charge by redefining "sex" and "alone," so Hillary Clinton sought to escape a perjury charge in connection with a fraudulent land deal known as Castle Grande by saying, "the term 'Castle Grande' was not defined" after she had denied under oath that she knew anything about it—and after evidence later surfaced, showing that she did. Castle Grande was a highly publicized land deal in Arkansas—perhaps not as highly publicized as sex, but equally unmistakable. Moreover, Castle Grande was part of a much larger series of frauds connected with Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan that caused an experienced federal bank examiner to rate this institution among the 5 worst frauds he had seen in 20 years. It had everything, including tricky accounting, back-dated documents, altered minutes, non-recourse loans to insiders, and false transfers of land and money. It also had Hillary Clinton as its attorney. After Mrs. Clinton's "lost" billing records were discovered by a White House employee, there was now hard evidence that she prepared one of the documents used in the Castle Grande fraud. How much deeper her involvement was in this and other illegal activities at Madison Guaranty may never be known, because she ordered her records destroyed at the Rose Law Firm in 1988, while the case was under investigation. Her story was that she just needed more storage space, but the law firm offered microfilming and Hillary specified destruction without microfilming. In Arkansas as in Washington, the powers of government were repeatedly used by both Clintons for private benefit. The clever wording that long ago earned her husband the title of "slick Willie" was equally exhibited by Mrs. Clinton when she said, "I don't know how the records came to be found where they were found" in the White House. But the real issue was wholly different—how subpoenaed documents become "lost" in the first place. How they came to be found where they were found is at most a footnote to history—or perhaps an indictment. In Arkansas, as in Washington, the powers of government were repeatedly used by both Clintons for private benefit. Jim McDougal, who ran Madison Guaranty—and who was a business partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater Development Corporation—was allowed to select individuals that Governor Clinton appointed to the state agency regulating savings and loan associations, such as his own. Then Hillary Clinton, as attorney for Madison Guaranty, appeared before these officials that her husband had appointed. When health officials moved to sanction McDougal for failing to honor repeated agreements and warnings to put adequate sewage facilities in some property he was developing, those officials and their superiors were summoned to the governor's office and told that McDougal was "a friend of mine." Later, three of these health officials were fired. This was a foretaste of a later unexplained furloughing of a trio of federal investigators who insisted on looking into the Whitewater-Madison frauds, despite warnings from their superiors, after the Clintons were in the White House. Throughout their whole careers, both Clintons have treated rules and laws as not applying to them. When an official of Madison Guaranty warned Mrs. Clinton that what they were planning violated state regulations, his concerns were "summarily dismissed," he said. When a Certified Public Accountant warned Bill Clinton and Jim McDougal about the tax laws in one of their transactions, the governor told him "to back off and leave the issue alone." None of this had anything to do with sex or with the Clintons' "private" lives that were "nobody's business but ours." Yet, during his Aug.17 speech, the President referred to a "private" business deal that Kenneth Starr was inexplicably looking into—that is, Whitewater. The failure to distinguish what is public from what is private has been a recurring pattern with the Clintons. Claiming an attorney-client privilege for government-paid lawyers—whose clients are the taxpayers—was typical. Using the powers of government to corrupt the laws and functions of government is not private conduct. It is one of the high crimes and misdemeanors.