JANUARY 2009

GRAPHIC: WHERE BILL CLINTON'S BEEN GETTING HIS MONEY

NOVEMBER 2008

BILL CLINTON'S ROLE IN THE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

Timothy A. Canova, Dissent Magazine - History should deal harshly with Bill Clinton. Throughout his terms, real wages stagnated, manufacturing and service jobs moved overseas in large numbers, and the middle class was squeezed. With the federal government asleep at the wheel, there was a significant rise in predatory lending practices by banks and mortgage companies. By Clinton's final years in office, all of these trends had contributed to an ominous rise in delinquencies and foreclosures on subprime mortgage loans. This was particularly pronounced in urban America. In Chicago, for instance, foreclosures on subprime mortgages rose from 131 in 1993 to more than 5,000 in 1999. . .

It is true that the Bush tax cuts contributed to a rising federal deficit, but the Clinton years were also marked by large public deficits. It was only at the end that Clinton saw any surplus and that was after racking up more than a trillion dollars in federal debt. Moreover, the Clinton surplus was a function of several troubling trends, including the administration's never-ending policy of fiscal austerity. In fact, federal spending fell to about 18 percent of GDP, the lowest level for the end of any presidency since those of Dwight Eisenhower and, before that, of Herbert Hoover.

Another factor that contributed to the final Clinton surplus was the inflated U.S. dollar and huge capital inflows that were attracted to dollar-denominated investments, all of which pumped up economic growth and tax revenues. It was therefore Clinton's commitment to the Washington Consensus platform of free trade and unrestricted capital mobility that made those hot money inflows possible while also setting the stage for the reversal of portfolio capital flows and today's declining dollar.

During Clinton's first three years in office, the federal government borrowed more than $1 trillion, much from abroad. Then between 1996 and 1998, foreign ownership of U.S. government securities rose 26 percent, from $669 billion to $847 billion. Under Bush, foreign ownership of U.S. government securities rose another 88 percent to $1.6 trillion by 2005.

During the Clinton years, mortgage debt grew by nearly two-thirds, from $4.1 trillion to $6.8 trillion. Under Bush, mortgage debt then doubled to $13 trillion in 2006. Likewise, under Clinton, consumer debt doubled from $856 billion to $1.7 trillion. Under Bush, it grew by another one-third to $2.3 trillion in 2006.

Much of this debt was borrowed from foreigners flush with dollars, a result of our huge trade deficits. This was the underside of the Clinton bubble economy, and it set the course for the Bush years. U.S. trade deficits also translated into increased foreign ownership of corporate America. Foreign ownership of U.S. corporate stocks and bonds rose nearly 50 percent in Clinton's final three years, from $1.9 trillion to $2.8 trillion, and then another 53 percent under Bush to $4.3 trillion. . .

Unfortunately, the myth of the Clinton economy has too often served to limit discussion about the political forces behind the present crisis in the Washington Consensus. For instance, Hillary Clinton, in promising a high-level emergency panel to recommend ways to overhaul at-risk mortgages, proposed in March that such a council of wise men should include two of the people most responsible for undermining the integrity of financial markets, former treasury secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan.

JUNE 2008

HOW CLINTON CONNIVED WITH GINGRICH AGAINST HIS OWN PARTY

The author misstates the actuarial status of the Social Security trust fund, fosters the absurd post-partisan notion and thinks Clinton selling out his party and his supporters was a good idea. Nonetheless he provides useful new information on how he did so.

STEVEN M. GILLON, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK - There was a brief moment, however, when the two leading political figures in America formed a secret pact to stop the slide into pointless partisanship and tackle one of the most contentious issues of our time: Social Security. Ironically, the two men behind the effort are often the ones blamed for the culture wars that polarized America in the 1990s - former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton. The story of their unlikely alliance, and its tragic unraveling, has never been told. Until now. In the course of writing a book about the two men I came across the notes of a secret White House meeting. The notes, along with interviews with many of the key players, reveals a hidden world where the two political protagonists were willing to put aside their partisan differences in a genuine effort to achieve meaningful reform.

Shortly after 7:00 pm on Monday, October 28, 1997, Gingrich, accompanied by his chief-of-staff Arnie Christenson, made the brief trip from his Capitol Hill office to the White House. To avoid being spotted by reporters, Gingrich approached by the South Lawn and came in the diplomatic entrance. Once inside the White House, the Speaker and his aide were quickly ushered into the elevator and taken to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the residence. . . Waiting to greet Gingrich were White House chief-of-staff Erskine Bowles, legislative director John Hilley, and the President.

The five men took their seats around a small coffee table as a photographer circled around recording the moment for the history books. . . The 1996 election, which returned both men to power, convinced them they needed to work together in order to secure their place in the history books. "They both knew that their legacies were tied to each other," Bowles later reflected. . .

Gingrich was first to raise directly the issue of cooperation, suggesting that he and the president use their work on North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement and the historic balanced budget bill passed in August 1997 as models for the future. Before Clinton could respond, Gingrich was breaking down the possible areas of agreement into conceptual boxes. One box contained the issues over which they would continue to fight. A second included tactical questions such as appropriations on which they could cooperate. The third box was reserved for "a few big ticket items" they could work on together. Clinton nodded in agreement with each point before interrupting. "This is a great opportunity," he said, "and we need to be prepared to take risks to do something that could be very significant."

They both knew what was in that "third box" - an unprecedented effort to reform Social Security and Medicare. "We had solved the short term problem of the deficit," recalled Bowles, "now it was time to address the long-term structural problems facing social security and Medicare." Both men were ready to take on the political risk of tackling the infamous "third rail" of American politics. Clinton was looking for a bold initiative in his final years that would define his presidency, answer critics who claimed he had failed to make a lasting imprint on the office, and encourage historians to rank him among the nation's "great" presidents. For his part, Gingrich was also thinking about how history would remember him. His idol was Henry Clay, the nineteenth century Whig Speaker of the House who used his influence to expand American power abroad and preserve the Union at home. Gingrich wanted to be remembered as a great statesman, not just as a conservative firebrand rebel and mastermind of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress.

The actuarial steps needed to shore up Social Security and Medicare were straightforward and, with government coffers beginning at last to overflow with revenue, easier to achieve than at any time in the recent past. "We always knew that finding common ground on social security wasn't terribly difficult from a policy standpoint," reflected Bruce Reed, the president's chief domestic policy advisor. "The policy differences were always the easiest to bridge." There was a growing consensus on both sides of the aisle in favor of having Social Security tap into the stock market to increase the rate of return on retirement funds. However, difficult questions remained unanswered: Who would manage the money: individuals or the government? Would private accounts replace checks guaranteed by the government, or would they simply be an add-on to the existing system? Politics, not economics, presented the biggest obstacle. Any long-term solution to solving social security required increasing the age of eligibility and changing the formula used to calculate the annual cost of living increase - two steps guaranteed to arouse powerful opposition from across the political spectrum.

Despite the odds, both men signaled their willingness to build a bipartisan coalition and to challenge the orthodoxy of their own parties. In private conversations with Gingrich and with Texas Republican Bill Archer, powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, the president promised to "provide political cover" for Democrats and Republicans by announcing his support for raising the minimum age required for social security and for reducing the COLA adjustments. The president was willing to oppose the leadership of his own party and support the Republican demand for private accounts. Although most Republicans planned to use the surplus for a massive tax cut, Gingrich privately accepted the administration's position that the surplus should be used first to save social security "for all time," with any remaining amount used for a tax break.

Bowles suggested the President and Speaker were now "partners." Gingrich demurred. "I would prefer to say we are a coalition, not partners," he said. It was an important distinction for Gingrich. "Partners are on the same team," he reflected. "We were never going to be on the same team." The two men were not looking to create a third party, but instead to forge a new center of gravity that would pull together moderates in both parties. "I understood that I would have to fight some of my old guard," Gingrich recalled. "He understood that he would have to fight his hard left. Together we could shape about a 60 to 65 percent majority. I was happy for him to be a successful president. He was comfortable with us being a successful Republican Congress."

Before the meeting ended, the two former adversaries had decided to put the past behind them and create a new center/right political coalition of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats to push their ambitious overhaul of social security and Medicare through Congress. Both men were confident that their new "coalition" would rival the New Deal and the Great Society in terms of the significance of legislation enacted. "There is no question in my mind in October of 1997, that we were looking forward to a period where we would cooperate on a broad range of really big issues," Gingrich recalled. . .

The [Lewinsky] affair destroyed a budding alliance between Clinton and Gingrich that could have, over time, altered the tone and substance of American politics. Instead, the affair, and the endless news coverage that it inspired, polarized the parties and destroyed any hope of forging a centrist coalition. Clinton who had a strained relationship with the liberal wing of his party throughout his presidency, was now dependent on them for his political survival. "All opportunities for accomplishment were killed once the story came out," reflected a senior White House official. "If we cut a deal with the Republicans on social security there was every possibility that the Democrats, who were the only people defending him in the Congress against these charges, could easily get angry and abandon him."

With conservatives in an uproar, Gingrich lost his political wiggle room and was forced to appease his right-wing base. He could have ended the impeachment crusade and forced his party to accept a censure resolution. But he allowed his anger to replace good judgment. When he failed to produce the promised results at the polls in the 1998 congressional midterm elections, party leaders pressed him to step down as Speaker. Gingrich, who has just won election by a wide margin, decided to resign his seat and leave electoral politics.

There was enough blame to go around for the lost opportunity. Through his indiscretions Clinton badly damaged his lifelong effort to blur the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans. A centrist who preached reconciliation and moderation, Clinton left office having aroused the passions of conservatives and liberals. Clinton's actions, and the impeachment process itself, placed values, not policy, at the center of public debate and discussion, and it left partisans on both sides feeling embattled and under assault. At the same time, Gingrich and other leading Republicans convinced themselves they could pursue a two-track policy: holding hearings to destroy Clinton's presidency in one room on Capitol Hill while trying to build a coalition with him in another.

MARCH 2008

WHAT THE ABRAMOFF, BERGER AND CLINTON CASES HAVE IN COMMON

JANUARY 2008

A FEW FACTS ABOUT THE CLINTON YEARS

RALPH NADER - A brainy White House assistant to Mr. Clinton told me in 1997 that the only real achievement his boss could take credit for was passage of legislation allowing 12 weeks family leave, without pay.

He pushed through Congress the NAFTA and the World Trade Organization agreements that represented the greatest surrender in our history of local, state and national sovereignty to an autocratic, secretive system of transnational governance. This system subordinated workers, consumers and the environment to the supremacy of globalized commerce.

That was just for starters. Between 1996 and 2000, he drove legislation through Congress that concentrated more power in the hands of giant agribusiness, large telecommunications companies and the biggest jackpot - opening the doors to gigantic mergers in the financial industry. The latter so-called "financial modernization law" sowed the permissive seeds for taking vast financial risks with other peoples' money (ie. pensioners and investors) that is now shaking the economy to recession.

The man who pulled off this demolition of regulatory experience from the lessons of the Great Depression was Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who went to work for Citigroup - the main pusher of this oligopolistic coup -just before the bill passed and made himself $40 million for a few months of consulting in that same year.

Bill Clinton's presidential resume was full of favors for the rich and powerful. Corporate welfare subsidies, handouts and giveaways flourished, including subsidizing the Big Three Auto companies for a phony research partnership while indicating there would be no new fuel efficiency regulations while he was President.

His regulatory agencies were anesthetized. The veteran watchdog for Public Citizen of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, said that safety was the worst under Clinton in his twenty nine years of oversight.

The auto safety agency abandoned its regulatory oath of office and became a consulting firm to the auto industry. Other agencies were similarly asleep - in job safety railroads, household product safety, antitrust, and corporate crime law enforcement. . .

CLINTON'S TOP GENERAL SAYS WEST MUST BE READY TO USE PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR ATTACKS

CLINTONS INVOLVED WITH FUNNY MONEY AGAIN

ROGER COHEN, INTERNATINAL HERALD TRIBUNE - Raffaello Follieri, from San Giovanni Rotondo on the spur of Italy's boot, is alive and kicking, throwing parties in his $40,000-a-month duplex on Fifth Avenue. Aged 29, he used empty claims of church ties to befriend Douglas Band, a top aide to Bill Clinton. Band then smoothed the way to Clinton's moneyed entourage, including California billionaire Ronald Burkle. That relationship birthed the unhappy union of Burkle's Yucaipa investment operation, of which Clinton is a senior adviser, and the Follieri Group in a venture to acquire Catholic Church property young Raffaello said he'd get on the cheap.

From mid-2005 Burkle plowed $55.6 million into this enterprise, only to conclude Follieri was devoting a chunk of it to good living. A suit filed by Yucaipa in Delaware state court in May contends Follieri has been "systematically misappropriating the assets" to indulge in "massive charges for five-star lodging," as well as "dog care" and "inappropriate jet travel" for himself, his father and "his actress girlfriend." That's Anne Hathaway, star of "The Devil Wears Prada.". . .

Follieri partied with the Clintons in the Dominican Republic in 2006, hung out with Band, and got an on-stage thank-you from Bill Clinton for a preposterous $50-million charity commitment at the 2006 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. Frank Quintero, a spokesman for Yucaipa, said: "The business model was good, but we're unhappy with Follieri's spending habits."

Band, a former White House intern, did not respond to three e-mails. Jay Carson, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton who addressed the Band-Follieri ties in a Wall Street Journal article in September, also avoided comment. Band's presentation of Burkle was one of many favors for Follieri. Other folk presented reflected the rolodex of the globe's affluent compiled under the banners of the Clinton library, foundation and Global Initiative. . .

The Yucaipa-Follieri suit may be near settlement. A draft made available to me sets out a divorce on the basis of a $12.04 million payment from Follieri to Yucaipa. Follieri would obtain "complete ownership." "One of the partners is buying out the other," Follieri said in a brief conversation. He again denied "misappropriation." The hitch is, Follieri doesn't appear to have $12 million. He's in intense talks with Plainfield Asset Management to persuade the Greenwich, Connecticut, company to pay $12 million for land the joint venture owns. That would be the money for Yucaipa. The whole thing's a mess.

No wonder Bill Clinton is eyeing what Band called "an appropriate transition" out of Yucaipa. Band told The Huffington Post this would happen if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. But it might happen earlier. That would be salutary. Band did Burkle and Cooper no favors with Follieri. Clinton is doing his wife no favors where the margins of business, charity, fund-raising and politics blur. As for Follieri, who grotesquely promised the Clintons he could deliver the Catholic vote, he has a new baby: the World Missions Visa Credit Card. Donations go to the Catholic Church with purchases. . .

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/23/opinion/edcohen.php

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION

DAVID MORRIS, ALTERNET - Clinton himself summed up the principle guiding his initiatives in his famous declaration, "The era of big government is over."

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of United States telecommunications law in nearly 62 years. The broadcasting industry couldn't get the legislation through under Reagan or George H.W. Bush, but it succeeded under Clinton. . . The Act removed the legal barriers to local and long distance phone companies acquiring each other. . .

Prior to this law, tightly regulated broadcasters could own just 40 stations nationally, and only two in a given market. Suddenly, without the FCC's input or any public hearings, ownership limits on radio stations was eliminated and a feeding frenzy took place. By 2001, there were 10,000 radio station transactions worth approximately $100 billion. As a result, 1,100 fewer station owners were in the business, down nearly 30 percent since 1996. . .

In 1999, the Financial Services Modernization Act overturned the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The Act effectively barred banks, brokerages and insurance companies from entering each others' industries, and separated investment banking and commercial banking. The law was enacted in response to revelations of gross corruption and manipulation of the market by giant banking houses that organized huge corporate mergers for their own profit, leading to the collapse of the stock market in 1929. The Wall Street Journal celebrated the agreement to end such restrictions with an editorial declaring that the banks had been unfairly scapegoated for the Great Depression. The headline of one Journal article declared, "Finally, 1929 Begins to Fade.". . .

Clintonism never saw a sector it didn't want to deregulate. Wholesale electricity deregulation began under George H.W. Bush, but Clinton worked relentlessly to extend it and bring it to the retail level. We forget that Ken Lay, the founder of Enron and the driving force behind electricity deregulation was a friend of and mentor to Clinton as well as George W. Bush. . .

And then there was welfare reform. During his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it." . . . A 2002 report by the Chicago, Ill.-based Joyce Foundation found that while hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients in the Midwest went to work since 1996, most had "taken jobs that pay low wages, are part-time, or don't last ... As a result, most of those who have made the transition from welfare to work remain poor.". . .

There is no question that welfare reform has succeeded in reducing welfare rolls in the states. But 10 years into welfare reform, "the number of people living in poverty had not," noted Robert Wharton, president and CEO of the Community Economic Development Administration. "At the same time, the safety net of services and support that once protected the poor lies in tatters.". . .

And of course there is NAFTA. . . NAFTA was enacted despite the opposition of Clinton's own party. Two-thirds of House Republicans voted in favor while 60 percent of House Democrats voted against. In the Senate, Republicans voted 4-1 in favor while a slim majority of Democrats voted against. . .

Real wages for most Mexicans are lower than when NAFTA took . . . As NAFTA intended, Mexico became an export-dependent economy. . . The only thing that saved Mexico from collapsing into economic and social chaos was the massive emigration of Mexicans across their northern border. Illegal migration has camouflaged Mexico's economic weakness. Between 1994 and 2004, Mexico's working-age population increased by a little over 1 million per year, but the number of jobs expanded by only half as much. The annual exodus of 500,000 to 1 million Mexicans kept unemployment at least to manageable levels. . .

It was Hillary who concluded that it was politically impossible even to argue for a single-payer system. Whether a single payer initiative would have won is unclear, although the national educational effort around it would have been of unparalleled value. But as it was, Hillary's political miscalculation led not only to the idea of universal health care coverage being taken off the table for the next 13 years, but the loss of the House of Representatives and the coming to power of Newt Gingrich and the Republican right.

http://www.alternet.org/story/72336/

SEPTEMBER 2007

ANOTHER CLINTON PAL PLEADS GUILTY

BILL AINSWORTH, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE - During the peak of his power, William S. Lerach was feared and despised by Silicon Valley executives, not just for his shareholder lawsuits against them but also for his mastery of the political system. The San Diego lawyer did something that high-tech executives didn't: He systematically donated to politicians.

During his more than three decades as a donor, Lerach and members of his two law firms have given millions of dollars to officeholders and candidates, almost all Democrats, including a president, senators, governors and even Assembly members.

Lerach, 61, has helped elect people who share his belief in keeping the courtroom doors open for shareholder lawsuits. But his most important legacy as a political player may be that he spurred his enemies in the high-tech industry to become a political powerhouse in their own right.

Lerach ­ who pleaded guilty in a plaintiff-kickback scheme Tuesday ­ had a deserved reputation for being aggressive not only in court, but also in the political system, where he sought to tilt the rules in favor of his law business. . .

Some technology company leaders trace Silicon Valley's new clout to December 1995, when Lerach was seen talking with President Bill Clinton at the White House.

A few days later, Clinton vetoed legislation that would limit the type of shareholder suits that made Lerach and his former law firm wealthy. . . Lerach and his allies saw Clinton's veto as good policy to help investors battle corporate fraud.But high-tech executives saw the veto as a blunt power play by a lawyer with extraordinary political influence.

"It was an eye-opener for Silicon Valley when they saw that the Clinton administration had good relations with this guy," said Sean Garrett, who works for a high-tech communications company, 463 Communications.

Eventually, Congress overrode the veto, with the support of many Democrats and Republicans.

Last week, Lerach pleaded guilty to conspiracy while at his old firm of Milberg Weiss for participating in a scheme to pay kickbacks to recruit plaintiffs for 150 class-action lawsuits against U.S. companies. He agreed to forfeit $7.75 million in unlawful gains, pay a $250,000 fine and accept a prison sentence ranging between one and two years.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070922-9999-lz1n22lawyer.html

THE CASE AGAINST BILL CLINTON THE DEMOCRATS IGNORE

CHRIS HEDGES, ALTERNET - The misery sweeping across the American landscape may have begun with Ronald Reagan, but it was accelerated and codified by Bill Clinton. He sold out the poor and the working class. And Clinton did it deliberately to feed the pathological hunger he and his wife have for political power. It was the Clintons who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough.

The Clintons argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, the Clintons argued, to take corporate money and use government to service the needs of the corporations. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States. . .

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year.

But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.

The growing desperation provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. And while Clinton was busy selling out the poor, he lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, a reduction that permitted the wealthiest 1 percent of the population to derive 80 percent of the tax savings. Clinton, like George W. Bush, also provided lavish government funding for his corporate backers, including in 1998 a $200-billion highway and transportation package for the big construction companies and a $17-billion increase in the military budget.

This was the largest increase in military spending since the end of the Cold War. Corporations, flush with government aid, saw their taxes dwindle. Amway, for example, had its taxes cut during the Clinton years by an estimated $280 million. The Clinton and Bush administrations, through tax breaks and corporate bailouts, have squandered billions of our tax dollars on corporate welfare.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/62812/

JULY 2007

HIDDEN PAGES OF THE CLINTON STORY

From a long interview with Roger Morris. Morris is a former foreign service officer and has also served on Presidents Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's National Security Council senior staff. He resigned, however, over the invasion of Cambodia. Roger Morris is now a fellow at the Green Institute, a lecturer, and the author of several books]

SUZAN MAZUR, SCOOP, NZ - You suggest in your book, Partners in Power, based on what you describe as "a numbing accumulation" of evidence following numerous trips to Arkansas,100 interviews and the review of thousands of documents - that Bill and Hillary Clinton, as Governor and First Lady of Arkansas, knew about the ongoing CIA drugs and gun running by CIA asset Barry Seal, et al., out of Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport in the Ouachitas in the 1980s. The operation armed the Nicaraguan Contras and delivered $3 billion to $5 billion worth of cocaine for distribution throughout the American homeland - as you note, "the single largest cocaine smuggling operation in US history". . .

Roger Morris: I don't know about Manchurian Candidate, I just think that the Clintons are the quintessential compromised American politicians. That's a tragedy as well as an outrage. These are two people who were young people of promise, and I think for all we know about them, of some initial idealism and some purpose and goals beyond their own ambition, although that ambition was outsized in both cases. We don't know, of course, how much of the detail they were aware of regarding Mena, but I'm convinced they were both aware of what was essentially going on there.

Suzan Mazur: How early did they know?

Roger Morris: My guess is they learned of it very soon after it started, if not at the very inception. . .

This is a seamless web of corruption and compromise in Arkansas. It was part of the job after all to tend to these large corporate interests - Walmart and Tyson's Foods and all of the other big hitters in Arkansas. Hillary was working for a law firm that represented most of those interests in Arkansas and elsewhere throughout the South. I think they simply saw this as part of what one had to do in political life and political office.

Suzan Mazur: But this is something quite serious because it had to do with the poisoning of millions of Americans with drugs smuggled in through Arkansas from Latin America.

Roger Morris: Absolutely. It's not a casual corruption. . .

Suzan Mazur: After Mena came under scrutiny following the October 1986 crash of the CIA's Fat Lady plane over Nicaragua "with a load of arms for the Contras" and CIA asset Eugene Hasenfus' capture - the Colorado City Municipal Airport run by the FLDS polygamists began receiving . . .

Roger Morris: I once interviewed a DEA agent who was retired and was quite cynical about all of this and he compared it to - the whole thing should have been written about by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He said they had the gulags, the archipelago. We have the drug running archipelago. That the map of the United States is a map of leopard spots, of airstrips, of depots, of centers of distribution. And, of course, it tends to be heavier in the Southern states closer to the supply when the supply was mainly the South. But the West is heavily populated with it as well. . .

Mena was one of these marginalized subjects that the American body politic, certainly the culture of media and certainly respectable historians, biographers, etc., people who pretend to write about what's real in American political life - never really wanted to touch.

Suzan Mazur: Sixty Minutes dropped it.

Roger Morris: Oh Sixty Minutes was fascinated initially and wanted to talk about it and when they got a diffident - I don't know - from Congressman Jim Leach, who was in the process of investigating Mena at the time, Sixty Minutes dropped it as well.

Suzan Mazur: It may be time for Sixty Minutes to look at it again.

Roger Morris: You know, it's like so much in foreign policy. We're never going to come to terms with the crises we face in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world until we face the history of our involvement there. We're not going to come to terms with the corruption in American politics as huge as the tyranny of money is until we understand how it works.

Suzan Mazur: Mena is a case study.

Roger Morris: Mena wasn't, as you point out, just a plundering corporation - a health care, an insurance giant, or somebody giving money to protect a venal interest - this was a criminal empire that victimized millions of Americans. That used its money for the most nefarious purposes around the world.

Suzan Mazur: Aside from Mena serving as the air hub for the trafficking of drugs and guns - you report in the book that Nella, Arkansas, just outside Mena, was a training grounds for Contra pilots and guerrillas. And you note that Seal also flew in to Mena Medellin cartel kingpin Jorge Ochoa to show him the operation.

You also describe secretaries from a bank close to the airport telling investigators that couriers from the Mena drugs for arms operation brought bags of money there, and that in order to avoid scrutiny, they purchased cashier checks in amounts just under $10,000. Would you expand on this about the bags of cash?

Roger Morris: We don't know very much about the sheer size of that traffic. We simply know that it happened from time to time - from locals from people who worked in the banks, people who were in local law enforcement and those who worked around the airport. . .

Suzan Mazur: There was a town adjacent to the airport, so it wasn't a secluded airport in a land that time forgot.

Roger Morris: The airport was always incongruous. State of the art. Long runway. Very sophisticated maintenance. For all intents and purposes, it could have been a very advanced Air Force base or government installation with a small town nearby, but of course it wasn't. It was essentially a private airport. The traffic that went in and out of Mena - they weren't resident in the town. These were not people who lived there. They were always on their way somewhere else. They got picked up in limousines or helicopters or whatever and taken off to Little Rock or to other places. . .

Suzan Mazur: You seem to find former Arkansas trooper L.D. Brown's "firsthand evidence" compelling about Bill Clinton pulling some strings to get him into the CIA, about Brown meeting and flying with Seal, and about his being "privy to some of the Clintons' most personal liaisons" - including the "sustained affair", dating from the mid-80s, between Hillary Clinton and Rose [Law Firm] partner Vince Foster. Would you comment on the credibility of LD Brown?

Roger Morris: I thought Brown was a credible witness. I thought most of the other troopers were credible as well. We've gone through a kind of ebb and flow of credibility with the troopers. They were first on the scene with exposes in the American Spectator. We often forget that they also talked to reporters from the Los Angeles Times who did a very similar series. For whatever one thinks of the American Spectator, the LA Times did much the same thing. They were roundly attacked, of course, personally as well as professionally by the Clinton camp. They sort of receded. And they've now reappeared - lately. . .

Let me just say that everything [LD Brown] told me about everything else with the Clintons - details large and small - personal and political - everything checked out. And everything he told me about his experience with the drug running and all the rest checked out similarly as much as I could check it with other sources. You're always up against credibility issues in this world and you make choices. But there was so much other evidence that this was going on.

Sixty Minutes was very interested because they wanted one single talking head, a simple story line to pin on Clinton and those simple story lines are the easiest to knock down as the Clintons have always understood. You destroy the credibility of a Gennifer Flowers or an LD Brown or Paula. . .

Suzan Mazur: Was there a draft of the letter LD Brown sent to the CIA that Clinton made notes on?

Roger Morris: I don't know about the notes. There was a recommendation Clinton made. And as the book explains, Clinton's connections with the Agency go back a long way. Since the book was published, I've had people come forward and tell me that they knew much more than even the informants I was talking to, and I was talking to people who were retired from the Agency, who were quite categorical about Bill Clinton having been a source for Operation Chaos and for informing on American students abroad while he was at Oxford and all the rest.

Since then I've had people come to me and say, well don't you know you missed the story, he was actually recruited at Georgetown. Georgetown was a veritable recruiting center in those days for the CIA - not just for Americans but for the large number of foreign students, the sons of foreign wealthy who were at Georgetown. So Bill's contact with the Agency went back for years and years. . .

Suzan Mazur: You also suggest in your book that Clinton's Uncle Raymond Clinton had his mob connections. And I believe you've said that Raymond may have been Bill's ticket into Georgetown's school of Foreign Service.

Roger Morris: Uncle Raymond was pure and simple mob proconsul for Hot Springs, Arkansas. . .

But coming back to what I was saying earlier, about Hillary and Bill - you can't do business in American politics without coming upon this absolutely shady world that operates in a kind of no-man's land between crime and legality. And of course much of organized crime - billions and billions, now trillions of dollars in profits from gambling and everything else - has been washed clean, as it would, and legalized in all sorts of things - electronics, land, agribusiness, and all the rest. Hillary has an extraordinary number of donors and contributors, supporters, etc., who have dubious records of legality, both here in the US and in the world at large. It's commonly thought that Giuliani has a set of seedy contacts but Hillary can match 'em seedy-for-seedy. . .

Suzan Mazur: Is there anything else you'd like to say about the Clintons?

Roger Morris: It may sound corny but I think it's genuinely an American tragedy. I think this is a woman who is acting out a personal tragedy in the most dramatic and historic political terms. She's going to be obviously the first serious woman contender for the presidency of the United States and it's going to be such a freighted choice, such a fraught campaign, simply because of the character of her background and her own compromise over the years. It may have been inevitable. Being wooed and won by this winning young Southerner, this Sisyphus who kept pushing the rock of his seedy background up the hill only to find it falling back down again. This wanton libido that overtook him.

I really do feel a sense of sorrow and compassion about her tragedy, because I think she loved him. I think this was a devastating blow to her life as well as a great humiliation because she always thought she was smarter, better, more disciplined, etc., more able to lead than he. And it didn't work that way of course. It hasn't worked out. She's trying to salvage it even as we speak.

Suzan Mazur: How powerful do you think organized crime is at this point?

Roger Morris: I think we're in a wholly new era with Iraq and with post 9/11 and the Bush administration. The privatization of armed forces and of national security and of intelligence is absolutely unprecedented. And so too is this open looting of a war. We've always had plunderers and profiteers in war time, but what's gone on in Iraq with cash and suitcases full of it and with the overcharging and the looting by the Halliburtons and others is absolutely unprecedented.

Suzan Mazur: It's dizzying.

Roger Morris: It's absolutely dizzying. And we'll never catch up with it. That looses into the body politics untold amounts of cash and influence so that this stands to be by far the most corrupt political campaign in the history of the republic. And we've had some very corrupt ones. But all of this money you see headlined, $30 million raised here, $27 million raised there. All of this is a fraction of what's really changing hands. . .

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00058.htm

JUNE 2007

WHY DID CLINTONISTA SANDY BERGER GIVE UP HIS LAW LICENSE

RONALD A. CASE, REAL CLEAR POLITICS - On May 17th, Sandy Berger, President Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, voluntarily gave up his law license and with it the right to practice law. That is a stunning move for an accomplished lawyer, one of the nation's most influential public officials. Someone should take note. In fact, everyone should.

Berger previously entered a deal with the Department of Justice after he was caught stealing and destroying highly sensitive classified material regarding the Clinton Administration's handling of terrorism issues. That deal allowed him to avoid jail time, pay a modest fine, and keep his law license. It also allowed him to avoid full explanation of what he had taken and why he had taken it.

What information was worth risking his reputation, his career, and his freedom to keep hidden? And who was he risking that for?

Recently, the Board of the DC Bar, which had granted Berger his license, began asking those questions. There was only one way to stop that investigation, to keep from answering questions about what he did and why he did it, to keep the Bar from questioning his colleagues in the Clinton Administration about what had been in the documents Berger destroyed.

Berger took that step, surrendering his license, and stopping the investigation.

. . . It is clear that there was nothing innocent or inadvertent in Berger's conduct. He has something to hide and, whatever it is, he was terrified that at least some part of it would come out of a non-criminal hearing before the Bar.

. . . Berger had access to Archives documents that could be critical to understanding what information the Clinton Administration had, what options it considered, and what decisions it took on these sensitive subjects. In addition to primary documents, Berger had access to copies, and the only plausible reason for taking five copies of a single memo is that some had original notes on them from key officials, maybe from Berger or President Clinton.

For Berger to risk jail and disgrace, to then give up the right to practice his profession merely in order to avoid having to answer questions, he must be hiding something important. And if it is that important to him, it is also important to us.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/sandy_berger_and_the_clinton_c.html

JANUARY 2007

THE STRANGE CASE OF SANDY BERGER

WALL STREET JOURNAL - The more we learn about Sandy Berger's brilliant career as a document thief, the clearer it becomes that there is plenty we still don't know and may never learn. On Tuesday, the House Government Reform Committee released its report on Mr. Berger's pilfering of classified documents from the National Archives.

The committee's 60-page report makes it clear that Mr. Berger knew exactly what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was wrong. According to interviews with National Archives staff, Mr. Berger repeatedly arranged to be left alone with highly classified documents by feigning the need to make personal phone calls, and he used those moments alone with the files to stuff them in his pockets and briefcase.

One incident is particularly suggestive. By his fourth and final visit to review documents and prepare for testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the Archives staff had grown suspicious of how Mr. Berger was handling the documents, so they numbered each one he was given in pencil on the back of the document. When one of them--No. 217--was apparently removed from the files by Mr. Berger, the staff reprinted a copy and replaced it for his review. According to the report, Mr. Berger then proceeded to slip the second copy "under his portfolio also." In other words, he stole the same document twice. . .

The episode suggests that Mr. Berger had some other motive for removing No. 217, even if he was ultimately unsuccessful in doing so. But neither his April 2005 plea agreement, nor the Congressional report, nor the report of the Archives' Inspector General shed any light on what that motive might have been. . .

As for motive, this remains shrouded in mystery, in part because the documents Mr. Berger has admitted to taking remain highly classified, so the precise nature of his interest is unclear. Thanks to Justice's and the Archives' leniency, or laxity, or both, Mr. Berger's plea deal expires in 2008 just in time, perhaps, for the next Clinton Administration. . .

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009522

[Was Sandy Berger destroying national security material that might have been embarrassing to the Clintons? It's not clear, but what is clear is that a generally pro-Clinton media isn't too interested in finding out]

LARRY MARGASAK, AP - Former national security adviser Sandy Berger removed classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 and hid them under a construction trailer, the Archives inspector general reported Wednesday. The report was issued more than a year after Berger pleaded guilty and received a criminal sentence for removal of the documents.

Inspector General Paul Brachfeld reported that when Berger was confronted by Archives officials about the missing documents, he said it was possible he threw them in his office trash. . .

Berger, who pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing and retaining classified documents, was fined $50,000, ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and was barred from access to classified material for three years. . .

Brachfeld reported that on one visit, Berger took a break to go outside without an escort. "In total, during this visit, he removed four documents . . . "Mr. Berger said he placed the documents under a trailer . . . Berger acknowledged that he later retrieved the documents from the construction area and returned with them to his office.

Berger, with the authorization of former President Clinton, was reviewing National Security Council documents on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, Sudan, and related presidential correspondence. The review was to facilitate Berger's impending testimony before the House and Senate intelligence committees.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20061220-1801-berger-documents.html

WIKIPEDIA - Noel Hillman, chief of the Justice Department's public integrity section, asserted that the documents Berger removed were only copies, and government sources have said that no original material was taken. According to the Wall Street Journal, "After a long investigation, however, Justice says the picture that emerged is of a man who knowingly and recklessly violated the law in handling classified documents, but who was not trying to hide any evidence. Prosecutors believe Mr. Berger genuinely wanted to prepare for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission but felt he was somehow above having to spend numerous hours in the Archives as the rules required, and that he didn't exactly know how to return the documents once he'd taken them out...We called Justice Department Public Integrity chief prosecutor Noel Hillman, who assured us that Mr. Berger did not deny any documents to history. 'There is no evidence that he intended to destroy originals,' said Mr. Hillman. 'There is no evidence that he did destroy originals. We have objectively and affirmatively confirmed that the contents of all the five documents at issue exist today and were made available to the 9/11 Commission.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Berger

ERIC LICHTBLAU, NY TIMES - Still unresolved in the inspector general's report is one lingering mystery in the episode: Whether, as Mr. Berger's critics have charged, he was so cavalier as to stuff classified documents in his socks. The report said one witness at the archives saw Mr. Berger bending down and "fiddling with something white, which could have been paper, around his ankle." But Mr. Berger denied he had ever stuffed documents in his socks, explaining the episode by saying that "his shoes frequently come untied and his socks frequently fall down."

JOSH GERSTEIN, NY SUN - The report from the inspector-general for the National Archives, Paul Brachfeld, said Mr. Berger executed the cloak-and-dagger maneuver in October 2003 while taking a break from reviewing Clinton-era documents in connection with the work of the so-called September 11 commission.

"Mr. Berger exited the archive onto Pennsylvania Avenue," the report says, recounting the story the former national security chief told investigators. "He did not want to run the risk of bringing the documents back in the building. . . He headed toward a construction area on 9th Street. Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the archives and the DOJ, and did not see anyone. He removed the documents from his pockets, folded the notes in a 'V' shape, and inserted the documents in the center. He walked inside the construction fence and slid the documents under a trailer."

According to the report, Mr. Berger said he retrieved the documents after leaving the archives complex for the evening and took the papers to his office. It is not clear how long the documents were unattended at the construction site, but the report suggests it was a few hours, at most.

The former national security chief said he cut three documents up in his office and discarded them in the trash. Mr. Berger returned two other documents after archivists notified him that some records were missing, but his efforts to retrieve the others from the trash collector were unsuccessful.

Last year, Mr. Berger pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information. A magistrate, Deborah Robinson, sentenced the international business consultant to two years' probation and ordered him to surrender his security clearance for three years. Prosecutors and defense lawyers had agreed on a fine of $10,000, but the magistrate boosted it to $50,000. . .

A leading authority on classification policy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, said Mr. Berger's behavior was reminiscent of a "dead drop," when spies leave records in a park or under a mailbox to be retrieved by a handler. "It seems deliberate and calculated," Mr. Aftergood said. "It's impossible to maintain the pretense that this was an act of absentmindedness."

All five documents Mr. Berger removed were versions of an after-action report about the foiled "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport and other sites. The internal review, by a top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, reportedly found that luck was the major factor in disrupting the plot and that more attacks were likely.

Mr. Berger has admitted placing classified documents and his notes, which were also presumed classified pending a review, into his suit pockets to carry them out of the archives. However, the inspector general's report resurrects claims that Mr. Berger may have removed some papers by placing them in his socks. An archives staffer reported that Mr. Berger took frequent bathroom breaks and was seen in a hallway "bent down, fiddling with something white, which could have been paper, around his ankle."

Mr. Berger later told investigators that any fidgeting near his feet was due to difficulties he has keeping his footwear tidy. "He stated his shoes frequently come untied and his socks frequently fall down," the report said. A person close to Mr. Berger said yesterday that the so-called docs-in-the-socks incident never took place. "It simply didn't happen. It was wrong. The Justice Department determined it was wrong," the Berger ally, who asked not to be named, said.

http://www.nysun.com/article/45551

AUGUST 2006

THE STRANGE DEATH OF JERRY PARKS
AND EVEN STRANGER DEATH OF DR DAVID MILLSTEIN

In September 1993, just two months after the death of Vince Foster, Clinton campaign security operative Jerry Parks was shot and killed in Little Rock in a gang style slaying. The story received virtually no attention save for a few journals including the Progressive Review. The murder remains unsolved.

Now word comes that the man whom Park's widow, Lois Jane Parks, later married - Dr David Millstein - has also been murdered by an assailant with a knife and police are investigating.

One might easily jump to certain obvious hypotheses but nothing about this matter is clear cut. For example:

- The local Arkansas police have called in not only the state police but the FBI. They speak of an extensive investigation.

- The children of Jerry Parks are in violent and public disagreement over their father's death. One stepdaughter, for example, believes vehemently that her stepmother and brother Gary are not to be trusted.

- The local police seem to be treating this as something more than a simple homicide.

Should either of these murders be solved it may finally close a chapter of the Arkansas-Clinton sagas or it may become part of the 2008 election. In the meantime, be careful about drawing conclusions. The story is not over.

ARMANDO RIOS, BAXTER BULLETIN - A state medical examiner has ruled Dr. David Millstein died of multiple stab wounds and ruled his death a homicide, police said Wednesday afternoon. In addition, police served a search warrant at an undisclosed location. Police found Millstein's body at his home at 1707 Stephen Court at 9:45 p.m. Sunday after being asked to check on his well-being. Millstein had missed a weekend appointment. . .

Millstein was married and his wife lives in the Little Rock area, Manuel said, adding no one else was at the house when officers arrived Sunday night. . .

The murder investigation has broadened in scope, with additional Arkansas State Police agents in other areas conducting interviews.
"Agents from the Arkansas State Police assigned to areas outside Baxter County are conducting interviews statewide," Manuel added. . .

A massive amount of information is being received, including written documents and electronic information through interviews and phone calls, Manuel said. He declined to specify what type of electronic information investigators were gathering. . .

http://www.baxterbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060622/NEWS01/606220328/1002

RICHARD HESTER, KTLO - Two more search warrants have been served in connection with the murder investigation of Mountain Home physician David Millstein and authorities continue to receive and investigate a large amount of information. During a press conference today, Mountain Home Police Chief Carry Manuel revealed that local police investigators, assisted by the Arkansas State Police from Little Rock, and the FBI searched a residence and a vehicle at undisclosed locations over the long Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Although authorities won't say where the warrants were served, Chief Manuel says the investigation has been confined to Arkansas. . . Manuel declined to comment on how the FBI is involved in the case but said they have expertise in several areas that would be beneficial to investigators. . .

Chief Manuel confirmed there has been some limited conversation between Mountain Home investigators and Little Rock police. Millstein, who moved to Mountain Home seven years ago from Searcy, was married to Lois Parks who lives in the Little Rock area. Parks' previous husband, Luther Gerald "Jerry" Parks Jr., who was shot to death in west Little Rock in 1993 at the age of 47. Parks was driving home to Roland in rural Pulaski County when he was shot twice in the chest and once in the abdomen by someone who pulled up beside him. That murder remains unsolved. Manuel said Little Rock police might be interested in the Millstein case.

http://www.ktlo.com/stories/01969_millstein-second-news-conference_072038.php

AMBROSE EVANS-PRICHARD, THE SECRET LIFE OF BILL CLINTON 1997 - "I'm a dead man," whispered Jerry Parks, pale with shock, as he looked up at the television screen. It was a news bulletin on the local station in Little Rock. Vincent Foster, a childhood friend of the President, had been found dead in a park outside Washington. Apparent suicide.

He never explained to his son Gary what he meant by that remark, but for the next two months the beefy 6' 3" security executive was in a state of permanent fear. He would pack a pistol to fetch the mail. On the way to his offices at American Contract Services in Little Rock he would double back or take strange routes to "dry-clean" the cars that he thought were following him. At night he kept tearing anxiously at his eyebrows, and raiding the valium pills of his wife, Jane, who was battling multiple sclerosis. Once he muttered darkly that Bill Clinton's people were "cleaning house," and he was "next on the list."

Two months later, in September 1993, Jerry and Jane went on a Caribbean cruise. He seemed calmer. At one of the islands he went to take care of some business at a bank. She believed it was Grand Cayman. They returned to their home in the rural suburbs of Little Rock on September 25. The next day Jane was in one of her "down" periods, so Jerry went off on his own for the regular Sunday afternoon supper at El Chico Mexican Restaurant.

On the way back, at about 6:30 PM, a white Chevrolet Caprice pulled up beside him on the Chenal Parkway. Before Parks had time to reach for his .38 caliber "detective special" that he kept tucked between the seats, an assassin let off a volley of semi-automatic fire into his hulking 320 pound frame.

Parks skidded to a halt in the intersection of Highway 10. The stocky middle-aged killer jumped out and finished him off with a 9 mm handgun-- two more shots into the chest at point blank range. Several witnesses watched with astonishment as the nonchalant gunman joined his accomplice in the waiting car and sped away. . .

Gary then said that his father had been collecting files on Bill Clinton. "Working on his infidelities," he said, grinning. "It had been going on for years. He had enough to impeach Bill Clinton on the spot."

At some point in 1988, when he was about 17, he had accompanied Jerry on four or five nocturnal missions. Armed with long range surveillance cameras, they would stake out the haunts of the Governor until the early hours of the morning. Quapaw Towers was one of them, he remembered. That was where Gennifer Flowers lived.

It was a contract job, Gary believed, but he did not know who was paying for the product. Some of the material was kept in two files, stored in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his parents' bedroom. He had sneaked in one day, terrified that his father might catch him, and flicked through the papers just long enough to see photos of women coming and going with Governor Clinton, and pages of notes in his father's handwriting. . .

In late July 1993 the family house on Barrett Road was burgled in a sophisticated operation that involved cutting the telephone lines and disarming the electronic alarm system. The files were stolen. Gary suspected that this was somehow tied to his father's death two months later. . .

[Much more]

[Jane Parks] revealed that Jerry Parks had carried out sensitive assignments for the Clinton circle for almost a decade, and the person who gave him his instructions was Vince Foster. It did not come as a total shock. I already knew that there was some kind of tie between the two men. Foster's brother-in-law, Lee Bowman, told me long ago that Vince had recommended Jerry Parks for security work in the mid-1980s. "I was struck by how insistent he was that Parks was a 'man who could be trusted,'" said Bowman, a wealthy Little Rock stockbroker. . .

Jerry, in turn, "respected Vince Foster more than anybody else in the world." It was a strange, clandestine relationship. Foster called the Parks home more than a hundred times, identifying himself with the code name, "The Congressman." . . .

By the late 1980s Vince trusted Parks enough to ask him to perform discreet surveillance on the Governor. "Jerry asked him why he needed this stuff on Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary," recalled Jane. . .

Later, during the early stages of the presidential campaign, Parks made at least two trips to the town of Mena, in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. Mena had come up in conversations before. Jane told me that Parks had been a friend of Barry Seal, a legendary cocaine smuggler and undercover U.S. operative who had established a base of operations at Mena airport. Parks had even attended Seal's funeral in Baton Rouge after Seal was assassinated by Colombian pistoleros in February 1986.

One of the trips was in 1991, she thought, although it could have been 1992. The morning after Jerry got back from Mena she borrowed his Lincoln to go to the grocery store and discovered what must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk. "It was all in $100 bills, wrapped in string, layer after layer. It was so full I had to sit on the trunk to get it shut again," she said.

"I took a handful of money and threw it in his lap and said, 'Are you running drugs?' Jerry said Vince had paid him $1000 cash for each trip. He didn't know what they were doing, and he didn't want to know either, and nor should I. He told me to forget what I'd seen.". . .

Contact with Foster was rare after he moved to the White House. But he telephoned in mid-July 1993, about a week before his death. He explained that Hillary had worked herself into a state about "the files," worried that there might be something in them that could cause real damage to Bill or herself. The conversation was brief and inconclusive. Jerry told Vince Foster that there was indeed "plenty to hurt both of them. But you can't give her those files, that was the agreement." Jerry did not seem too perturbed at the time.

A few days later Foster called again. . .

"You're not going to use those files!" said Jerry angrily. Foster tried to soothe him. He said he was going to meet Hillary at "the flat" and he was going to give her the files. "You can't do that," said Parks. "My name's all over this stuff. You can't give Hillary those files. You can't! Remember what she did, what you told me she did. She's capable of doing anything!"

"We can trust Hil. Don't worry," said Foster. . .

The rambler-style home of the Parks family was swarming with federal agents on the day after Jerry's assassination. Jane remembers men flashing credentials from the FBI, the Secret Service, the IRS, and, she thought, the CIA. Although the CIA made no sense. Nothing made any sense. The federal government had no jurisdiction over a homicide case, and to this day the FBI denies that it ever set foot in her house.

But the FBI was there, she insisted, with portable X-ray machines and other fancy devices. An IRS computer expert was flown in from Miami to go through Jerry's computers. Some of them stayed until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. The men never spoke to Jane or tried to comfort her. The only conversation was a peremptory request for coffee. . .

With the help of the Little Rock Police Department the FBI ransacked the place, confiscating files, records, and 130 tapes of telephone conversations--without giving a receipt. "I've asked them to give it all back, but the police refuse to relinquish anything. They told me there's nothing they can do about the case as long as Bill Clinton is in office.". . .

I do not pretend to understand why Jerry Parks was murdered. But the indications that the Parks case is somehow intertwined with the death of Vincent Foster is surely compelling enough to warrant a proper investigation. Instead, nobody cares to learn what Mrs. Parks has to say.

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3881be833d65.htm

THE SECRET LIFE OF BILL CLINTON

PHILIP WEISS, MONDO WEISS - In Little Rock in 1996, for the New York Times Magazine, I interviewed a Clinton hater named Gary Parks. Parks was a former auto salesman and something of a troubled youth. He'd kicked around, he'd had physical injury. His dad had been murdered: Luther "Jerry" Parks, a former state cop, who had been head of security for the Clinton headquarters in Little Rock during the presidential campaign in 1992, had been murdered less than a year after the election. This is incredible and true: Two months after Vince Foster dies, Jerry Parks, Clinton's former security aide, is slain gangland style, with a semiautomatic handgun, his car shot up in West Little Rock. The media didn't touch it, and they were allowed to drop it. . .

It was [Gary] Parks' assertion that his late father and Vince Foster had once investigated Clinton's affairs at Hillary's behest. He said that Vince Foster had called up his father, who was working as a private investigator, to look into Clinton's romantic life in about 1980, after Bill Clinton had lost the governor's office following his first term. Parks said Hillary wanted a divorce. It looked like maybe the juggernaut she'd believed in, and married, was over. . . In the early 80s, Parks said, Hillary asked her law partner Vince Foster to prepare a divorce case and Foster called Parks, who compiled a dossier of women's statements. Parks said that Hillary later decided against a divorce, but that his father held on to the dossier. Then in 1993, Parks said, after Vince Foster went to Washington, he demanded the return of the file, and even called Jerry Parks in the days before his, Foster's, death, to demand it. And that two months later his father was murdered, because, Parks said, he had held out on returning the file. . .

Myself, I think I might forgive Hillary her connection to these events. They were so long ago, she was hitched to Bill's horse. She's done a lot on her own since. She's been gutsy and strong on her own two feet. She has great presence. But I don't think we know all the facts about this case, and people are going to bring it up and ask about it. Real baggage.

CHRISTOPHER RUDDY, NEWSMAX, 1998 - The following is the verbatim grand jury testimony of Linda Tripp from her July 28 appearance before the grand jury. . .

Juror: But do you have any examples of violence being done by the administration to people who were a threat to them that allowed you to come to the conclusion that that would happen to you as well?

Tripp: I can go - if you want a specific, a personal specific, the behavior in the West Wing with senior staff to the President during the time the Jerry Parks came over the fax frightened me.

Juror: Excuse me, Jerry Parks?

Tripp: He was one of the - if not the head of his [Clinton's] campaign security detail in Arkansas, then somewhere in the hierarchy of the security arrangements in Arkansas during the '92 campaign. And based on the flurry of activity and the flurry of phone calls and the secrecy, I felt this was somewhat alarming.

Juror: I don't understand.

Tripp: I don't know what else to say.

Juror: Meaning that you were alarmed at his death or at what people [in the White House] said? Or did you have knowledge that he had been killed or -

Tripp: He had been killed. I didn't even at this point remember how but it was the reaction at the White House that caused me concern, as did Vince Foster's suicide. None [sic] of the behavior following Vince Foster's suicide computed to just people mourning Mr. Foster. It was far more ominous than that and it was extremely questionable behavior on the parts of those who were immediately involved in the aftermath of his death. So - I mean I don't know how much more I can be specific except to say I am telling you under oath today that I felt endangered and I was angry and I resented it and I still do. . .

Juror: I'm sorry. We were talking the incident that happened and how the people were acting at the White House and you said they were acting strange. Can you give us some examples of what you saw to draw that conclusion? What are some of the examples? You said they were not acting as if someone had just passed or whatever, something was strange. What were the strange things?

Tripp: It replicated [referring to the Parks murder, apparently] in my mind some of the behavior following the death [sic] of Vince Foster. A fax came across the fax machine in the counsel's office from someone within the White House, and I think it was from Skip Rutherford, who was working in the Chief of Staff's office at the time [September 1994]. At the same time the fax was coming, phone calls were coming up to Bernie Nussbaum which precipitated back and forth meetings behind closed doors, all with - you know, we have to have copies of this fax and it was - an article, it came over the wire, I think, I can't remember now, but I think we actually have that somewhere, of this death, this murder or whatever it was [referring to the Parks death]. And it created a stir, shall we say, in the counsel's office which brought up some senior staff from the Chief of Staff's office up to the counsel's office where they, from all appearances, went into a meeting to discuss this. It was something that they chose not to speak about.

http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=1998/10/8/03541

THE FAMILY DISPUTE
http://www.topix.net/forum/city/mountain-home-ar/TNV8UO5BC6E44MG6H/p2

JANUARY 2006

ALL IN THE FAMILY: THE BUSHES AND THE CLINTON

[For more than a decade, the Review has pointed out the close connection between the Clintons and the Bush, so it's nice to have it confirmed by a member of the family - family in this case being used in its prosecutorial rather than biological sense]

GREG PIERCE, WASHINGTON TIMES - President Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father that the Democratic former president is like a member of the family. Former President George Bush has worked with Mr. Clinton to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami and the hurricane disaster along the Gulf Coast. Asked about his father and Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush quipped, "My new brother." "That's a good relationship. It's a fun relationship to watch," Mr. Bush said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. While attending Pope John Paul II's funeral, Mr. Bush said, "It was fun to see the interplay between Dad and Clinton. One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-presidents' club. . . I'll be looking for something to do." He said ex-presidents share rare experiences that others cannot understand. "And so I can understand why ex-presidents are able to put aside old differences," he said. Mr. Bush said he has checked in with Mr. Clinton occasionally. "And you know, he says things that makes it obvious -- that makes it obvious to me that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. Makes sense, after all, there's this kind of commonality," he said. Mr. Bush jokingly referred to speculation that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former president's wife, will seek the Democratic nomination for president. He had earlier referred to the former first lady as "formidable." "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," he said, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20060131-121849-5568r_page2.htm

[Now some earlier clues. Clinton served as a regional facilitator for the Reagan-Bush administration activities in Latin America including the notorious operation at Mena, from which the CIA shipped arms south with drugs reportedly coming back on the return flights. The job of someone like Clinton was to look the other way and not squeal on Reagan and Bush, especially about the drug trade in Arkansas. The elder Bush has considerable reason to be grateful]

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW- [In 1984] Clinton bodyguard, state trooper LD Brown, applies for a CIA opening. Clinton gives him help on his application essay including making it more Reaganesque on the topic of the Nicaragua. According to Brown, he meets a CIA recruiter in Dallas whom he later identities as former member of Vice President Bush's staff. On the recruiter's instruction, he meets with notorious drug dealer Barry Seal in a Little Rock restaurant. Joins Seal in flight to Honduras with a purported shipment of M16s and a return load of duffel bags. Brown gets $2,500 in small bills for the flight. Brown, concerned about the mission, consults with Clinton who says, "Oh, you can handle it, don't sweat it." On second flight, Brown finds cocaine in a duffel bag and again he seeks Clinton's counsel. Clinton says to the conservative Brown, "Your buddy, Bush, knows about it" and of the cocaine, "that's Lasater's deal."

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - In 1984, Ronald Reagan wants to send the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Contras. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis goes to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons "excess" and leaves them behind for the Contras.

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, In 1985, Terry Reed is asked to take part in Operation Donation, under which planes and boats needed by the Contras "disappear," allowing owners to claim insurance. Reed has been a Contra operative and CIA asset working with Felix Rodriguez, the Contra link to the CIA and then-Vice President Bush's office. Reed later claims he refused, but that his plane was removed while he was away.

In 1987 Terry Reed's plane is returned but, according to his account, he is asked not to report it because it might have to be "borrowed" again. Reed later says that he had become aware that the Contra operation also involved drug running and had gotten cold feet. He also believed that large sums of drug money were being laundered by leading Arkansas financiers. He went to Felix Rodriguez and told him he was quitting. Reed was subsequently charged with mail fraud for having allegedly claimed insurance on a plane that was in fact hidden in a hanger in Little Rock. The head of Clinton's Swiss Guard, Capt. Buddy Young, later assistant FEMA director, will claim to have been walking around the North Little Rock Airport when "by an act of God" a gust of wind blew open the hangar door and revealed the Piper Turbo Arrow.

SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994: [Clinton] appears willing to ignore the great residue of Reagan-Bush offenses, especially those growing out of the war on drugs and attempts to gag and intimidate government and defense workers. And he seems similarly disinterested in unclosed cases of political racketeering such as those involving BCCI and BNL. Said one activist lawyer who has met with Attorney General Reno: "She's closing her ears to all of that." Reno, who was clearly more interested in protecting law enforcement agencies than in finding the truth about the Waco massacre, also early bought the Bush administration line in the BNL bank case. She agreed to a plea bargain by Christopher P. Drogoul, the former Atlanta manager of the Italian bank who had claimed that US intelligence officials were aware of loans made to Iraq. Reno declared that she did not think the case had been mishandled by the Bush administration, despite a federal judge's charge that Drogoul and his Atlanta bank colleagues were "pawns and bit players" in a secret deal to provide arms for Iraq and that the Clinton administration's exoneration of its predecessors was only possible "in never-never land."

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - The select House committee looking into the transfer of secret technology to China has filed a secret report on how it happened, illustrating once again the first principle of intelligence: don't let the American people know what the other side already does. As a result of this bipartisan clamp on the scandal, we have no idea as to whether the egregious practices of the Clinton administration were matched by those of Reagan and Bush or not. The implication is, of course, that everybody does it, which means that everybody for the past 20 years has been helping American corporations build up the Chinese economy just as we allowed American industry to transform Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into worthy adversaries. We do know that the Clinton Administration took large sums of barely laundered campaign contributions from the Chinese government and ignored its own national security and diplomatic advisors in loosening export restrictions. The two biggest beneficiaries: Hughes, primarily a Republican donor; and Loral, primarily a Democratic one. The biggest losers: Americans and the security of their country.

[Finally, the Clinton administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the Republican convention in 2000]

ROBERT WINDREM, MSNBC, 2001: As Republicans gathered here last August to nominate George W. Bush for president, a drama played out in secret locations across the city as thousands of American soldiers stood poised for a catastrophic event. Along with a host of civilian emergency specialists, these specialized troops braced for a biological, chemical or nuclear terror attack on the GOP and its nominees the kind of attack that might force a declaration of martial law. No specific or credible threat ever surfaced in Philadelphia or in any of the dozen other U.S. cities hosting similarly high-profile events in the past five years.

But the Philadelphia plan sheds light on a new domestic role for the military. Some argue that the role makes sense in light of the threat posed by modern terrorist groups. But a diverse coalition of civilian law enforcement agencies, civil rights advocates and libertarian groups worry about allowing the military to play so prominent a role on U.S. soil . . Despite the Posse Comitatus Act and concerns about domestic mission creep, a doctrine known as "Garden Plot" exists in the Department of Defense that would allow the armed forces to step in to take control of civilian affairs following a catastrophic event if the president requested it. As with the military's posture abroad - the "Defense Condition" or "DEFCON" there is a step-by-step system for military involvement at home as well. It's known as Civilian Disorder Condition, or "CIDCON." This scenario is the last resort following the collapse of order at home. In this most dire of circumstances - possibly anarchy in the wake of a large-scale terrorist incident, for instance the "Garden Plot" doctrine gives the president the power to invoke martial law under The Insurrection Act.

Here's how it would have worked last August in Philadelphia: Two military "Joint Task Force" units were available for quick deployment. One, called Joint Task Force-Civil Support, is based at Fort Monroe in Virginia. It is trained to coordinate countermeasures for terrorist attacks and would generally be deployed without weapons. The other unit, code-named "Task Force 250," is meant to go in fully equipped for battle. This unit, according to documents obtained by NBC News, is meant to restore civil order after major terrorist events. "Task Force 250" is more commonly known as the Army's 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, N.C. Even without a crisis, hundreds of servicemen were on hand in Philadelphia last summer, and more than 1,000 were on alert to move into the city if necessary. Command centers and alternate command centers - in case the primary headquarters was destroyed - were established. Among those stationed the center: More than 80 military bomb disposal teams, several Army biological advisory and assessment teams, four Department of Defense biological sampling vehicles and the Nuclear Emergency Search Team of the Department of Energy. The Navy even set up a facility for "use as a detainee processing center," the documents say, in case there were numerous arrests . . . According to the documents obtained by NBC, the plans for the presidential conventions said: "Use deadly force only with great selectivity and precision."

http://www.msnbc.com/news/546844.asp?cp1=1

WHY THE CISNEROS CASE WAS IMPORTANT

WALL STREET JOURNAL - [In the final prosecutor's report] we get to see the whistleblower's memo that launched Mr. Barrett on his tax-evasion probe. John Filan, chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division in Texas, wrote to headquarters in March 1997 alleging that the Cisneros tax-fraud investigation had been pulled from his office and sent to Washington with the intent to "'kill' it, regardless of the evidence." Mr. Filan added, "I am not aware of any other criminal tax cases that have been pulled from experienced District Counsel attorneys to be reviewed in Washington." He had forwarded the case to the local District Counsel with a prosecution recommendation. But Washington intervened and declined to refer it to Justice.

Mr. Barrett reports testimony suggesting that Public Integrity officials believed and acted as if their job was to thwart independent counsels, not assist them as required by law. The FBI describes having "confrontational" meetings with Public Integrity over its desire to explore the alleged mistress hush money. And Ms. Farrington is alleged to have told another Public Integrity attorney that "we need to hurry up and shut the investigation down."

Mr. Barrett says he found evidence suggesting Mr. Cisneros's unreported income "exceeded $300,000" and presented Ms. Reno with a "prima facie case of multi-year tax fraud by a public official." In the end Ms. Reno allowed Mr. Barrett to investigate only one year's worth of Mr. Cisneros's tax activities, "effectively preventing any prosecution for tax offenses" because one year was not enough to prove a pattern of misconduct. The Attorney General's decision, writes Mr. Barrett, "might have resulted from activities amounting to obstruction of justice.". . .

Running such interference was a pattern for Ms. Farrington and Mr. Radek, who also intervened to limit a probe involving the Clintons and poultry giant Tyson Foods, for example. After winning a conviction against an aide to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, that independent counsel, Donald Smaltz, also said that Justice's "opposition significantly delayed our investigation and prosecutions." Ms. Reno never did get around to appointing an independent counsel to investigate serious allegations of campaign-finance abuse against Clinton crony Harold Ickes.

INDEPENDENT COUNSEL ACCUSES CLINTON ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL OF BLOCKING INQUIRY

[Barrett was not the only investigator stymied by Reno. There were several. For example, in 1997, independent prosecutor Dan Smaltz and FBI agents grilled a former Tyson's Food pilot for three days. The pilot claims to have carried cash in envelopes from Tyson's Food to the Arkansas governor's mansion. Says Smaltz later to Time magazine, "'I nearly fell off my chair when I heard Joe make the allegation. I took over the questions." Janet Reno, however, blocked Smaltz from pursuing the issue]

NY TIMES - After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes. . . Mr. Barrett began his investigation with the narrower issue of whether Mr. Cisneros lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he was being considered for the cabinet position. He ended his inquiry accusing the Clinton administration of a possible cover-up.

His report says Justice Department officials refused to grant him the broad jurisdiction he wanted; for example, Attorney General Janet Reno said he could look at only one tax year. And after Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington took a Cisneros investigation out of the hands of district-level officials in Texas, the agency deemed the evidence too weak to merit a criminal inquiry, a conclusion strongly disputed by one Texas investigator. . .

Mr. Barrett's 746-page report said that the tax and obstruction phase of the inquiry ended without a definitive conclusion, but it declared: "These agencies' treatment of possible charges against Cisneros was at best questionable and at worst represented serious wrongdoing. There seems to be no question that Cisneros was given special consideration and more limited scrutiny because of who he was - an important political appointee.". . .

CLINTON BAR BANISHMENT ENDS

JOSH GERSTEIN, TAX PROF - After five years of banishment from the legal profession, President Clinton will be eligible this week to reclaim the law license he gave up as a consequence of the inaccurate responses he gave under oath to questions about his relationship with a White House intern. . . While there appears to be little standing in the way of Mr. Clinton's reinstatement to the Arkansas bar, rules for admission in New York and Washington could pose a challenge to him quickly joining those bars. Admission by reciprocity to the New York bar requires that an applicant show that he or she has spent five of the last seven years working as a lawyer. . . Mr. Gillers noted that at any point Mr. Clinton could try to gain admission to the New York or Washington bars by taking the bar examination. Like other bar applicants, he would also have to demonstrate good moral character.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2006/01/president_clint.html

TWO PLEAD GUILTY IN CASE INVOLVING CLINTONS' DETECTIVE

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER - The first criminal cases from the alleged wiretapping scheme of private investigator Anthony Pellicano were disclosed Tuesday, setting the stage for a steady stream of indictments that could ensnare some of Hollywood's top attorneys and executives.

Actress Sandra Carradine, former wife of actor Keith Carradine, has pleaded guilty to perjury for lying to a grand jury about having Pellicano wiretap her ex-husband's telephone during their divorce, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A veteran of the Beverly Hills Police Department has separately pleaded guilty to accessing confidential law enforcement databases for Pellicano and employees of his West Hollywood-based Pellicano Investigative Agency Ltd.

More indictments are expected soon, including that of Pellicano, who is finishing a 30-month federal prison sentence on a separate case of possessing illegal weapons. The common belief is that prosecutors want to turn up the heat so Pellicano will implicate former clients who either knew of or directed the illegal wiretapping. Pellicano's attorney, Victor Sherman, said Tuesday that his client would not break the silence he has maintained throughout his prosecution and imprisonment. . .

Acting U.S. Attorney George Cardona and FBI assistant director J. Stephen Tidwell also said that Craig Stevens, a 24-year veteran of the Beverly Hills Police Department, pleaded guilty Monday to seven felonies, including wire fraud and unauthorized access to protected computers. According to prosecutors, Stevens admitted to using state and federal databases to supply criminal histories and other information to Pellicano. He also acknowledged lying to the FBI about it. . .

Pellicano and Alexander Proctor, who also remains in federal custody on drug charges, face prosecution from state authorities as well. Both were charged in June with conspiracy for allegedly threatening former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch in 2002. . . Proctor placed a dead fish with a rose in its mouth on the windshield of Busch's car, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. It also is alleged that Proctor made a hole in the windshield, presumably to appear like a bullet hole, and attached a sign reading "stop."

CLINTON TIES TO PELLICANO
http://prorev.com/hillary.htm#PI

MAY 2005. . . .

MORE ON CLINTON'S FRIEND, DON TYSON

DEBORAH SOLOMON, WALL STREET JOURNAL: During his four years as senior chairman of Tyson Foods Inc., the perks Don Tyson received were striking even in an era of lavish executive compensation.

They included $464,132 for personal use by him and his family and friends of company-owned homes in the English countryside and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, $20,000 for oriental rugs, $18,000 of antiques, $84,000 in lawn maintenance at five homes where he and his family and friends lived, an $8,000 horse, and other jewelry, artwork, vacations and theater tickets. The company also paid Mr. Tyson $1.1 million to cover his personal income-tax liability associated with all these benefits.

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission said those perks were among $3 million in benefits the Springdale, Arkansas, company paid Mr. Tyson between 1997 and 2001. As part of a broad crackdown on hidden executive compensation, the SEC said that Tyson Foods failed to disclose over $1 million in perks and made misleading or inadequate disclosures about other benefits.

The company agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle the charges. Mr. Tyson, who built the company into a poultry giant and remains a director, was charged with causing and aiding and abetting the company's violation and agreed to pay $700,000 to settle the civil case. He also agreed to repay $1.5 million to the company for "certain items" that the board identified during an internal review.

Under terms of the settlement agreement, Tyson and Mr. Tyson, 74 years old, didn't admit or deny the allegations. . .

The Arkansas magnate, who received $1.1 million in additional perks, some of which were improperly or not disclosed after he retired in 2001, had the company pick up the tab for numerous services used by his wife, daughters and three girlfriends, according to people familiar with the matter. While senior chairman, Mr. Tyson spent $46,110 to maintain nine automobiles, $15,000 on Christmas gift certificates and $203,675 on housekeeping services at five homes owned by Mr. Tyson, his family and three friends "with whom he had close personal relationships," the SEC said. . .

Mr. Tyson, whose net worth Forbes magazine last year estimated at $925 million, has a 10-year consulting contract with the company that pays him $1.2 million annually, plus health insurance and reimbursement of "business related expenses." Under terms of the contract, Mr. Tyson receives personal use of company-owned skyboxes and vacation homes at "pre-established daily rates," which he must repay to the company.

The company also pays for up to 1,500 hours per year of security services at about $40 per hour and reimbursement for costs he incurs in tax and estate planning. Mr. Tyson also gets up to 150 hours per year of personal use of company aircraft for himself and designated passengers. None of these disclosed payments were cited in the SEC complaint. . .

In 1997 Tyson pleaded guilty to providing former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy with $12,000 in illegal gratuities. While neither Mr. Tyson nor his son faced charges, Tyson agreed to pay $4 million in criminal fines and $2 million in investigative costs.

The Tysons were close to another famous Arkansas family, the Clintons. President Clinton, prior to leaving office, pardoned Archie Schaffer III, the former chief spokesman for Tyson, who had been convicted of giving an illegal gratuity to Mr. Espy. Mr. Espy was eventually acquitted of criminal charges.

APRIL 2005

CLINTON LIBRARY BACKS OFF STAFF GAG AGREEMENT
http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&section=News&storyid=112957

KATHERINE MARKS, ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT GAZETTE - The Clinton presidential foundation relaxed confidentiality rules barring volunteers in Little Rock from speaking publicly about their work, after the foundation's New York office discarded standards that threatened legal action against volunteers who spoke out of turn.

Starting last fall, prospective volunteers at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library had to sign a two-page nondisclosure agreement requiring them to alert the foundation in writing if they were subpoenaed. It barred them from granting interviews. In addition, the foundation required them to sign a waiver saying that they would not file a claim against the foundation if injured.

The terms of the agreement applied forever - even after a volunteer left the foundation - and gave the foundation the right to seek damages against any volunteer who violated it. "Due to your volunteer relationship with the Foundation, any false or misleading information you might provide to others concerning the foundation or its employees or board of directors would have an air of authenticity that would make it particularly damaging," the original agreement reads.

The library is federally operated; however, the nonprofit foundation paid for its construction and provides volunteers who work in the library's museum portion.

The foundation's New York office uses a simpler form. A check with several other presidential libraries indicated that the initial confidentiality rules for Clinton library volunteers were far more restrictive than the norm. . .

DID BERGER TAKE FALL FOR CLINTON?
http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20050406-115500-8135r

WASHINGTON TIMES - "Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger has now joined the pantheon of those who, in the immortal words of Webb Hubbell, have chosen to 'roll over one more time' to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton," Dick Morris writes in the New York Post. "This Hall of Ill-Fame includes Susan McDougal, Vince Foster, Monica Lewinsky, Johnnie Chung, former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and old Webb himself. What they each have in common is their silence and willingness to take the fall to protect the Clintons," Mr. Morris said. "Berger has admitted that he stuffed top-secret documents into his pockets, shirt and pants, and why he sliced some up with scissors, destroyed them and then lied about it. Until he gives a credible explanation for this behavior, we are all entitled to make the logical inference -- that he was hiding something to protect himself and his old bosses."

JANUARY 2005

CLINTON'S MIDNIGHT PARDON PAL BEHIND OIL DEALS
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37665.htm

NILES LATHEM, NY POST - New details of billionaire trader Marc Rich's shady oil deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program are emerging, The Post has learned. These include deals with front companies that have connections to Saddam Hussein's underground financial network.

In particular, prosecutors are probing four suspicious deals that took place in February through April 2001. In these cases, Rich was listed as a secondary buyer of oil contracts originally allocated by Saddam to mysterious French and Egyptian companies. The questionable deals began a month after sanctions-buster Rich, a convicted tax dodger, received his midnight pardon from then-President Bill Clinton. . .

Rich, who lives in Switzerland and has not returned to the United States despite the pardon, denied in a statement issued by his company last week that he was involved in any illegal activities.

DECEMBER 2004

THE CLINTON LIBRARY
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20041225-104610-6748r.htm

PAUL GREENBERG, WASHINGTON TIMES - Its slant is obvious from the first: "From the start of the Clinton presidency, the administration's opponents waged an unprecedented fight for power. Seeking to steer America sharply to the right, Republican leaders pursued a radical agenda through radical means. ... " And so partisanly on. . .

The line in the museum's official, expurgated version of Bill Clinton's impeachment that jumped out at me was this reference to the prosecutions that convicted so many - more than a dozen - of the president's friends and associates: "None of these efforts yielded a conviction for public misconduct." The one-word Clinton Clause isn't hard to spot: for public misconduct. Using the Clintonistas' specialized vocabulary in these matters, one could just as easily defend how Enron was run. . .

Bruce D. Schulman, who teaches history at Boston College, noted one of the many glaring omissions from the museum's version of the impeachment debate: Mr. Clinton's agreement to a five-year suspension from practicing law in Arkansas. The suspension of his law license came of Bill Clinton being found in contempt by Judge Susan Webber Wright, who concluded he gave "false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process. ... " He was ordered to pay some $90,000. But you'll find nothing about that in the Clinton Library's sanitized presentation.

DESMOND BUTLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Former president Bill on Monday helped launch a new Internet search company backed by the Chinese government which says its technology uses artificial intelligence to produce better results than Google Inc. "I hope you all make lots of money," Clinton told executives at the launch of Accoona Corp., which donated an undisclosed amount to the William J. Clinton Foundation. The Chinese government, one of several large backers, has granted Accoona a 20-year exclusive partnership with the China Daily Information Co., the government agency that runs an official Chinese and English Web site. The deal gives Accoona data on some 5 million Chinese companies, which Accoona sees as a lucrative opportunity as U.S. businesses seek to do business in China ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

MAN CLINTON PARDONED INVESTIGATED IN SWEETHEART OIL DEALS

JERRY SEPER, WASHINGTON TIMES - Federal authorities are investigating accusations that billionaire financier Marc Rich, who received a questionable pardon on President Clinton's last day in office, brokered millions of dollars in deals between Saddam Hussein and other key traders as part of the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Law-enforcement authorities yesterday confirmed that Mr. Rich's role as a possible middleman for Saddam and others in oil deals, which appear to have been intended to circumvent U.N. sanctions against Iraq's government, is a focus in the ongoing inquiry. They said the deals under scrutiny occurred within a month of his pardon.

Mr. Rich fled to Switzerland after his 1983 indictment by Justice Department prosecutors on 65 counts of racketeering, fraud, tax evasion and illegal oil trading in a case involving the evasion of $48 million in taxes and the violation of U.S. sanctions by trading with Iran while American hostages were held in that country. He has been unavailable for comment. At the time of the Jan. 20, 2001, pardon order, Mr. Rich was No. 6 on the Justice Department's outstanding fugitives list. Prosecutors had refused for 17 years to negotiate with Mr. Rich over the charges.

Saddam, now in U.S. custody as a result of the Iraqi war, is believed to have pocketed more than $21 million in funds as a result of the illegal deals, according to shipping records now being reviewed by federal prosecutors. Named as a key player in the oil-for-food scandal is U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose resignation has been demanded by Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, who heads a congressional investigation into the program.

The new inquiry was first reported this month by ABC News. The New York Post yesterday, citing senior law-enforcement officials, reported that the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau also are investigating Mr. Rich's ties to the oil program. Authorities yesterday said investigators want to know whether Mr. Rich and other prominent oil traders made illegal payments to Iraq to obtain the lucrative oil contracts. They said the probe also has focused on questions of whether illicit cash from the deals was funneled to Mr. Rich's wife, Denise, who contributed $276,500 to the Democratic National Committee between March and November 2000 and gave an additional $450,000 to Mr. Clinton's presidential library in Arkansas in May 2000. . .

Mr. Rich remains the focus of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York in the pardon, which Mr. Clinton said was awarded based on the merits of the case, which were never explained. The pardon was signed despite the fact that three of Mr. Clinton's closest White House advisers vigorously opposed it. Former White House Deputy Counsels Bruce Lindsey and Beth Nolan, along with Chief of Staff John Podesta, told the House committee they recommended against the pardon, although Miss Nolan said Mr. Clinton approved it after a call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

SAUL HANSELL, NY TIMES - Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said that the former president considered the appearance a speaking engagement, not a product endorsement. Mr. Clinton, whose appearances can cost as much as $125,000 each, has made speeches in the past at events sponsored by private companies, but "as a matter of policy, President Clinton does not promote products and he has no plans to," Mr. Kennedy said. Mr. Kennedy declined to specify the fee for the Accoona speech, but said that Mr. Clinton had decided to donate the money to his foundation.

Several former presidents have earned substantial fees for speaking engagements, and some have worked in consulting arrangements with private companies. None has publicly endorsed a product, however. Dan Quayle, the former vice president, did appear in a potato chip commercial. And of course Mr. Dole, a losing presidential candidate against Mr. Clinton, has promoted Pepsi, Visa and Viagra. . . The site's name is derived from the song "Hakuna Matata" from the Walt Disney movie "The Lion King." The song's name is a Swahili phrase that means "no worries."

CLINTON'S BUDDY AND IRAQ

ABC NEWS - Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News. And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts. . . Rich is still living in Switzerland and unavailable for comment.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=295926&page=1

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL, NOVEMBER 2004 - the last thing we want to do is dampen the festivities in Little Rock, where the Clinton Presidential Center is opening today, but does anybody remember Marc Rich? He's the fugitive financier who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his way out of office -- after Mr. Rich's ex-wife, songwriter Denise Rich, gave $450,000 to the foundation raising money for this very same library. The pardon scandal spotlighted a dangerous gap in financial disclosure rules: Sitting presidents are free to raise millions for their future presidential libraries without having to reveal who is writing the checks.

This lack of disclosure was outrageous even before the pardon scandal erupted: Mr. Clinton was vacuuming up six- and seven-figure pledges from his White House perch, and there was no way for the public to know what interests these donors had before the government or what favors they might be receiving. It's even more outrageous that this practice remains legal after the revelations of Mr. Clinton's final-days pardons. The House passed a measure two years ago that would have required disclosure, but the Senate failed to act; with the topic out of the headlines, lawmakers seem to have lost interest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58805-2004Nov17.html

WALL STREET JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 23 2001 - For 17 years, Marc Rich worked hard to clear his name of criminal allegations. For the same 17 years, the fugitive billionaire's trading empire also worked hard -- landing some of the same sorts of deals that helped get him into trouble in the first place. Though the main charges pending against Mr. Rich when Bill Clinton pardoned him involved a complex tax-evasion scheme, Mr. Rich faced another serious allegation: He illegally traded with the enemy, prosecutors charged, by buying about $200 million worth of oil from Iran while revolutionaries allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini held 53 Americans hostage there in 1979-81.

Mr. Rich was never tried because he fled to Switzerland and renounced his American citizenship before being indicted in 1983. An examination of Mr. Rich's trading activities from Switzerland reveals that his multibillion-dollar commodities operation continued doing business with countries that the U.S. deemed unworthy trading partners for supporting terrorism or abusing human rights.

Considering itself unfettered by American restrictions, Mr. Rich's business not only conducted additional deals in Iran, it also traded with Libya, Cuba and South Africa, all at times when U.S. citizens and companies were barred from doing so. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the deals -- involving oil, aluminum and other commodities -- in interviews with more than a dozen former Rich traders and executives as well as with competitors, industry analysts and government officials. . .

Mr. Rich had strong personal ties to Israel -- becoming a citizen, donating tens of millions of dollars and eventually drawing national leaders to his pardon campaign. Yet in August 1991, some six months after the Gulf War, Mr. Rich's Madrid office expressed interest in buying up to 150,000 barrels of oil a day from Iraq, says Ambrose Carey, a former investigator for New York-based Kroll Associates Inc. Iraq was then under an international embargo stemming from its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"I find it amazing that he was prepared to consider transactions with Iraq just after they sent Scud missiles raining down on Tel Aviv" during the Gulf War, says Mr. Carey, who received Rich documents related to the matter during a Kuwait-financed probe of Iraq's trading. Mr. Carey is now a director at Armor Group, a London investigations firm. At the time, Mr. Rich's lawyer said that the expression of interest was conditioned on the sanctions on Iraq being lifted.

After Mr. Egloff left Mr. Rich's operation, he says, he approached Mr. Rich in the mid-1990s about doing an Iraqi deal but was rebuffed. "We offered him a deal that involved swapping medicine for fertilizer and oil products," Mr. Egloff says. He says Mr. Rich told him he didn't want to break the U.N. embargo.

More recently, says Mr. Frutig, the Rich operation's CEO, the firm did some "very small" Iraqi oil deals, including "a couple of liftings of Iraqi crude oil since last year." But those deals were part of a U.N. program allowing Iraq to export oil if the proceeds were used for food and humanitarian supplies, he says.

BUZZLE, FEBRUARY 20, 2001 - Clinton's pardon of Rich, who has lived lavishly in Switzerland as a fugitive since 1983, has led to an investigation by federal prosecutors in New York as well as congressional hearings. Rich was indicted on tax evasion charges, as well as racketeering, violating trade regulations, and fraud. Clinton claimed in his op-ed piece in the New York Times that he made the decision "on the merits as I saw them, and I take full responsibility for it."

He went on to say that "the suggestion that I granted the pardons because Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise, made political contributions and contributed to the Clinton library foundation is utterly false. There was absolutely no quid pro quo." Those investigating the case wish to know if the former Mrs. Rich acted as an intermediary by passing money directly from Rich to Clinton, in exchange for which Clinton would, presumably, grant the pardon. Mrs. Rich has made large contributions to Hillary Clinton's successful senate bid and has reportedly donated $450,000 to the Clinton library foundation.

In the piece, Clinton also asserts that "the case for the pardons was reviewed and advocated" by three Republican attorneys. These were Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; and William Bradford Reynolds, who ran the Justice Department's civil rights division under President Reagan.

All three men noted in the piece were very surprised to be named by Clinton in the op-ed, as none of them had any involvement in the pardons. Clinton later noted that he based the pardon on past arguments by the three attorneys, who had each defended Rich. But even a later correction by Clinton, during a Times press run, still seemed to confuse the issue and suggest that the three prominent Republican attorneys were involved with and supported the pardon. Each vehemently denied that suggestion

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-20-2001-2431.asp

JUNE 2004

TELEGRAPH, UK - Bill Clinton loses his temper with David Dimbleby during a BBC television interview to be broadcast this week when he is repeatedly quizzed about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton The former American president, famed for his amiable disposition, becomes visibly angry and rattled, particularly when Dimbleby asks him whether his publicly declared contrition over the affair is genuine.

His outrage at the line of questioning during the 50-minute interview, to be broadcast on Panorama on Tuesday night, lasts several minutes. It is the first time that the former President has been seen to lose his temper publicly over the issue of his sexual liaisons with Ms Lewinsky.

One BBC executive who has seen the interview, which took place in a New York hotel last Wednesday, said:. . . "It is memorable television which will give the public a different insight into the President's character. It will leave them wondering whether he is as contrite as he says he is about past events. Dimbleby manages to remain calm and order is eventually restored."

BBC- Wagging his finger and getting visibly agitated, Mr Clinton expressed anger at the media's behaviour. He said: "Let me just say this. One of the reasons he [Kenneth Starr] got away with it is because people like you only ask me the questions.

"You gave him a complete free ride. Any abuse they wanted to do. They indicted all these little people from Arkansas, what did you care about them, they're not famous, who cares that their life was trampled. Who cares that their children are humiliated. "Nobody in your line of work cared a rip about that at the time. Why, because he was helping their story.

"And that's why people like you always help the far-right, because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings.

JERRY SCHWARTZ, AP - Part of the problem is that "My Life" is relentlessly chronological, especially the second half of the book, which is devoted to his presidency. Almost every paragraph describes another meeting with a foreign leader or the signing of another bill or delivery of another speech. The effect is mind-numbing. It's like being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946.

MAY 2004

NEWSMAX -In his new book "Rewriting History," longtime aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dick Morris reveals that he's guarded a secret about the Whitewater scandal for nearly a decade that could have led to Clinton's removal from office. . . Morris alleged that Clinton improperly influenced U.S. District Court Judge Henry Woods to dismiss Whitewater charges against then-Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who had threatened to go public about Hillary's involvement in the fraudulent Castle Grande land deal.

After Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno ruled that Starr had jurisdiction over Tucker's involvement in Whitewater, Tucker was "furious," said Morris. Using Morris as a go-between, Tucker sent a warning: "Tell the president that if that SOB wants to play the game this way, I know all about the IDC," the formal business name for Castle Grande.

When Morris passed on the threat to Clinton, "he turned white as a sheet."

"Clinton sat down, put his head in his hands and said, 'Oh my God, do you know what he means?" Morris said he replied, "No, but I think you know what he means."

Later that night, Morris said Clinton told him, "I took care of that problem today." Three weeks later Judge Woods tossed out the Tucker indictment. Though the case was later reinstated, Tucker never followed through on his threat.

APRIL 2004

CLINTON PARDONEE TURNS UP IN UN FOOD SCANDAL

NEWSMAX - Clinton-pardoned fugitive billionaire Marc Rich has turned up in the middle of the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, with his name on a roster of companies authorized to participate in the corruption-plagued arrangement. "One of Marc Rich's companies was on the United Nations list that was approved to trade and transport Iraqi oil," Fox News Channel's Eric Shawn reported Tuesday. "And it appears that Mr. Rich's firm, Marc Rich & Co. Investments AG, may well have been given that approval by the U.N. before the presidential pardon," Shawn added.

That means the U.N. was ready to do business with America's most-wanted white collar criminal, while other program participants were busily stuffing their pockets with Saddam Hussein's kickbacks. Thomas Frutig, CEO of Marc Rich Holdings, denied the allegation, telling Fox, "We were not involved in the Oil-for-Food program." But in the next breath he added, "Every oil company which wasn't trading applied for an authorization to trade, but I can't tell you how much we did, or whether we did anything."

WALL STREET JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 23, 2001 - Though the main charges pending against Mr. Rich when Bill Clinton pardoned him involved a complex tax-evasion scheme, Mr. Rich faced another serious allegation: He illegally traded with the enemy, prosecutors charged, by buying about $200 million worth of oil from Iran while revolutionaries allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini held 53 Americans hostage there in 1979-81.

Mr. Rich was never tried because he fled to Switzerland and renounced his American citizenship before being indicted in 1983. An examination of Mr. Rich's trading activities from Switzerland reveals that his multibillion-dollar commodities operation continued doing business with countries that the U.S. deemed unworthy trading partners for supporting terrorism or abusing human rights.

Considering itself unfettered by American restrictions, Mr. Rich's business not only conducted additional deals in Iran, it also traded with Libya, Cuba and South Africa, all at times when U.S. citizens and companies were barred from doing so. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the deals -- involving oil, aluminum and other commodities -- in interviews with more than a dozen former Rich traders and executives as well as with competitors, industry analysts and government officials.

The pardon of Mr. Rich and his business partner, Pincus Green, has touched off a bipartisan firestorm, House and Senate inquiries and a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. The probes focus on whether Mr. Clinton was improperly influenced, either by Mr. Rich's lawyer, former White House counsel Jack Quinn, or by $1.5 million in donations to the Democrats and the Clinton library from Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise Rich. Investigators also will check whether Ms. Rich was illegally reimbursed for any political donations. . .

Mr. Rich certainly wasn't alone in trading with pariah nations. Offshore subsidiaries of some U.S. companies do business in embargoed countries, insulating employees who are U.S. citizens from the deals. "In any conflict situation," says a former Rich trader, "there is going to be someone who is going to take advantage of the situation. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else. At the time, it wasn't illegal."

Marc Rich Investment, a 350-employee firm that is based in the Alpine enclave of Zug, Switzerland, isn't required to follow U.S. trading laws. Its CEO, Thomas Frutig, who is also a spokesman for Mr. Rich, declined to respond directly to written questions for this article. He asserted without elaboration that some references in the queries were "not true" or "taken out of context." "I don't think it makes a lot of sense to talk about individual transactions over 20 years," he said. "We have never violated Swiss embargoes or international embargoes." Later, after a news conference this week to announce the planned sale of Mr. Rich's trading operation, Mr. Frutig confirmed some of the dealings discussed in this article. . .

Mr. Rich had strong personal ties to Israel -- becoming a citizen, donating tens of millions of dollars and eventually drawing national leaders to his pardon campaign. Yet in August 1991, some six months after the Gulf War, Mr. Rich's Madrid office expressed interest in buying up to 150,000 barrels of oil a day from Iraq, says Ambrose Carey, a former investigator for New York-based Kroll Associates Inc. Iraq was then under an international embargo stemming from its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. "I find it amazing that he was prepared to consider transactions with Iraq just after they sent Scud missiles raining down on Tel Aviv" during the Gulf War, says Mr. Carey, who received Rich documents related to the matter during a Kuwait-financed probe of Iraq's trading. Mr. Carey is now a director at Armor Group, a London investigations firm. At the time, Mr. Rich's lawyer said that the expression of interest was conditioned on the sanctions on Iraq being lifted.

MICHAEL CIEPLY AND JAMES BATES LOS ANGELES TIMES - The Federal Election Commission is investigating a Hollywood gala that raised more than $1 million for Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, according to people familiar with the probe. The FEC investigation, launched several weeks ago, comes atop a U.S. Justice Department inquiry that has focused in recent months on the event and former Clinton finance executive David Rosen. In addition, documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times indicate that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has been examining evidence of wrongdoing by a number of people in connection with the activities of Aaron Tonken, the fund-raising impresario behind the event. The scope of the grand jury inquiry and the identity of its targets remained unclear. The Justice Department is believed to be focusing on whether anyone made false statements about how contributions were collected and disbursed.

Tonken, who peaded guilty in December to two fraud counts in connection with his high-profile charity galas, has been cooperating with federal authorities while awaiting sentencing, according to people familiar with his case. Since last month, FEC investigators have been seeking testimony from a number of witnesses with knowledge of the August 2000 political gala.

Held on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the event at the estate of radio mogul Ken Roberts was billed as a tribute to outgoing President Bill Clinton. But the gala simultaneously gave a much-needed cash infusion to the then-first lady's successful Senate campaign.

Internet entrepreneur Peter Paul - who paid for the event and is awaiting trial on federal charges of business-related fraud - unsuccessfully asked the commission nearly three years ago to investigate the Clinton campaign for allegedly underreporting his contribution. At the time, Paul was jailed in Brazil, awaiting extradition to the United States. He is being held without bail in Long Island, N.Y. Paul is among those asked recently to cooperate with the election commission probe, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

FEBRUARY 2004

CLINTON STILL AT LARGE

A businessman once pardoned by President Clinton pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal tax evasion charges. Almon Glenn Braswell admitted his Marina del Rey-based mail-order vitamin business did not pay $4.5 million in federal income taxes. He agreed to pay the full amount to the Internal Revenue Service within three weeks. Braswell also must pay about $6 million in penalties and interest. Braswell faces 18 months in federal prison under his plea agreement. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Sept. 13... Clinton granted 177 pardons and clemencies just before leaving office in 2001. Braswell was pardoned of convictions for fraud and other crimes stemming from false claims in 1983 about a baldness treatment. His pardon became one of the most criticized after it was learned that the president's brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, had been paid $200,000 to work on the case. Rodham later returned the money.

NY TIMES -- With Howard Dean regrouping and other Democratic presidential candidates rejiggering, Senate Democrats decided maybe they should get a little election-year advice, too. So they huddled behind closed doors on Thursday for a session with a veteran political strategist, one with his own string of victories and a proven record against an incumbent Bush administration. . . Those who attended, including the junior senator from New York, certainly thought it was worth their while. "He is the master," said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of her husband. "I, just like everybody else, watch and listen with admiration."

WE INTERRUPT THIS ENCOMIUM FOR A FACT: In 1992 Clinton won 43% of the vote and would have lost had it not been for Ross Perot being in the race. In 1996, Clinton got just half the votes, or two percentage points more than the constantly criticized Al Gore would in 2000.

MEDIA IGNORING CLINTON-PELLICANO TIE

AMERICAN THINKER - Two LA Times reporters today used almost 2800 words to examine the highly questionable background of Hollywood celebrity sleuth/audio expert/guest of the federal penal system Anthony Pellicano. Although the major focus was on his career as a "forensic audio" expert, not once did they manage to mention his most prominent gig: "analyzing" the Gennifer Flowers tapes of her conversations with Bill Clinton, and declaring them "doctored" during the 1992 Presidential campaign.

Readers with long memories will recall that Pellicano's "discrediting" of the tapes, on which then-candidate Clinton was heard disparaging Mario's Cuomo's ethnicity and possible ties to the underworld, as well as making colorful comments of a sexual nature, led the press to immediately drop the matter, and treat the tapes as a gigantic fraud.

Credit where it is due: reporters Scott Glover and Matt Lait do raise many questions about the validity of Pellicano's "expert" testimony as an audio analyst. They point out that he has a record of hearing things no one else can, that he doesn't understand the science supposedly underlying his analytical techniques, and that occasional judges have thrown out his opinions as value-less.

But the primary burden of the article is to raise questions about prosecutors, who have used Pellicano as a witness. Implicitly, the article suggests that miscarriages of justice may have occurred. . .

All well and good. Kudos to the LA Times for fearlessly raising these important questions. But isn't the potential corruption of a Presidential election also of importance? How is it possible for reporters to ignore the biggest single story in Pellicano's career? How can an editor, presumably well-informed about Presidential politics, and operating during a Presidential election season, to allow such an omission?

DECEMBER 2003

TWO EX-CLINTON AIDES CONVICTED OF TAKING MORE THAN $1 MILLION IN BRIBES

WASHINGTON TIMES - Two former senior Pentagon officials each were sentenced yesterday in Alexandria to 24 years in prison for taking more than $1 million in bribes and accepting prostitutes from government contractors. Robert Lee Neal Jr., 51, of Bowie, and Francis Delano Jones Jr., 51, of Fort Washington, also were ordered to jointly pay $1.75 million in restitution. . . Neal was appointed by President Clinton in 1996 to serve as director of the Pentagon's office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, which helps minority-owned businesses obtain defense contracts. Jones, his top assistant, joined the office in 1999. Federal prosecutors said the men demanded bribes as high as $100,000 in certain cases and received $1.1 million in bribes and other illegal funds. . .

A FEDERAL JUDGE HAS REDUCED from $1 million to $63,000 the amount of back taxes owed by former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker in his guilty plea in a Whitewater case, saying the government used an outdated law to calculate the damages. Tucker and two co-defendants pleaded guilty to conspiring to impede the Internal Revenue Service in what authorities said was an effort to arrange a $2 million bankruptcy scam to reduce their tax liability on the sale of a cable television business in 1988. He pleaded guilty in 1998 and agreed to cooperate in the then-ongoing investigation of President Clinton by Whitewater prosecutors. Tucker was intimately involved with Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association and Capital-Management Services Inc., both as a borrower and as an attorney for the two firms. Madison, owned by Clinton business partners James and Susan McDougal, and Capital-Management, an Arkansas lending agency owned by former Little Rock Municipal Judge David L. Hale, were at the heart of the Whitewater investigation. In May 1996, he was convicted on two fraud and conspiracy counts in the first Whitewater trial and, because of his then-failing health, sentenced to four years' probation.

JULY 2001

THE PRICE OF CHOCOLATE

SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN & SUMANA CHATTERJEE, KNIGHT RIDDER: Daloa, Ivory Coast - There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. Slave labor.

Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor West African country. And on some of the farms, the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or tricked into slavery. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9. The lucky slaves live on corn paste and bananas. The unlucky ones are whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children in Europe and the United States. MORE

A LAWSUIT HAS BEEN filed naming the oil giant Exxon Mobil corporation as responsible for murder, torture, kidnapping and twelve other charges at its liquefied natural gas operations in Aceh, a region on the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia. The suit, filed on behalf of eleven Acehnese villagers, claims that Exxon Mobil hired the Indonesian military to provide security for the corporation¹s facilities in Aceh. Troops stationed at the Exxon Mobil facilities tortured villagers in buildings on Exxon Mobil property, according to the filing by the International Labor Rights Fund . . . Exxon Mobil, rated number one in the Fortune 500, temporarily shut down its liquefied natural gas extraction facilities in March 2001, citing serious security concerns. Since January 2000, Kontras-Aceh, a local human rights organization, has reported more than 670 killings and 161 disappearances in Aceh. The Indonesian military and police act without impunity in the resource-rich region. Prominent civic leaders and humanitarian workers have been executed. LAW SUIT

ECONOMIST: Evidence is accumulating that growth in all three of the world's largest economic areas is slowing sharply. And in all three, for different reasons, there are constraints on the use of a traditional weapon for fending off recession: interest rates For those hoping that the present economic slowdown is a short-lived dip, the persistent drumbeat of depressing data is disappointing. Recent days have seen the publication of gloomy numbers in Japan, the euro zone and, most important of all, the United States. Japan's immediate plight is most serious, since policymakers there seem to have no idea how to stop their country from drifting back into recession. But in Europe, too, official growth forecasts have been cut in the past week, while America's central bank, the Federal Reserve Board, noted that US economic activity was "little changed or decelerating." For Japan, the EU-15 and America taken together, economists at Moody's, a credit-rating agency, have estimated that industrial output fell by 0.5% in the three months that ended in May this year, after growing by 6.3% in the same period last year. This, they say, is the deepest such plunge in a 12-month span on record. MORE

CAROL MORELLO, WASHINGTON POST: Awash in pageantry and symbolism, the opening ceremonies of Dan Pallotta's charity bike rides and benefit walks tap into reservoirs of emotion. Breast cancer survivors clasp hands around an empty circle. HIV-positive cyclists wheel out a riderless bicycle . . . Thousands of philanthropic bike rides and walks are held in America from spring to fall. But none is as overtly sentimental, spiritual or extravagantly packaged as the 16 that Pallotta Team Works will produce this year. The next is a 330-mile bike trek from Raleigh, N.C., to Washington that begins tomorrow and will raise money for two District AIDS agencies. The ride is expected to draw more than 2,000 riders, who have raised a prodigious $2,400 or more each for an occasion that last year had expenses of almost $1,300 a rider. It's numbers like those that have engendered scrutiny and criticism of Pallotta benefits across the country. His private, for-profit company stages events so mammoth and laden with creature comforts that expenses eat up 40 cents of every $1 donated. Pallotta says he can't be compared with other fundraisers because raising money is not his only goal. He also talks of changing the world -- one rider and one walker at a time. His events are a cross between a wilderness school and a telethon, wrapped in high-powered marketing campaigns and the language of human potential . . . According to Pallotta's figures, which largely conform with financial reports made to states and cities where events have been held, the yield to charities varies widely depending on how many people participate and how much they raise. In some events, charities have gotten more than 70 percent; in others, less than 12 percent. The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance says fundraising expenses that exceed 35 percent of the contributions do not meet its standards. The more successful AIDS Rides have been in cities with affluent, politically aware and gay populations. Charities have received about 66 percent of the money donated in Los Angeles and San Francisco, 55 percent in New York and Boston, 59 percent in Washington. MORE

WAL-MART SUED

REED ABELSON, NY TIMES: Six female employees of Wal-Mart Stores filed a federal lawsuit, accusing the company of engaging in widespread discrimination against women. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, has created two work forces with women "predominantly assigned to the lowest-paying positions with the least chance of advancement," the lawsuit says. The suit, filed in United States District Court in San Francisco, seeks class-action status for an estimated 700,000 current and former female employees. If granted, it could eclipse cases against Texaco and State Farm Insurance as the largest discrimination lawsuit ever brought against a private employer in the United States.

MORE

JACK BEATTY, ATLANTIC MONTHLY: Compared to their peers thirty years ago, America's 80 million white-collar employees are working longer hours, for the same pay and fewer benefits, at jobs that are markedly less secure, and for corporations that regard firing whole ranks of employees as a way to post paper gains and so win Wall Street's favor. The long arm of the job has reached into employees' homes, their nights, their weekends, and their vacations, as technology designed to make work less onerous has made it more pervasive. America's insecure white-collar workers are victims not of poverty ~ but of progress. They are, Jill Andresky Fraser writes in 'White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America,' "suffering the unwanted ... consequences of the nation's recent economic boom." . . . According to Juliet Schor's The Overworked American, "If present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time on their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties" - before the eight-hour day became standard. A software-industry professional explains the Darwinian dynamic behind the twelve-hour day: "The long hours aren't because we want to outshine everybody; we want to keep up with everybody." A recent Lexus ad boasts, "Sure We Take Vacations. They're Called Lunch Breaks." But even lunch is becoming a luxury: 39 percent of workers surveyed by the American Restaurant Association say they are too busy to take a lunch break. . . . Overwork and job spill would perhaps be bearable if one were being well paid for it. But white-collar men earned an average of $19.24 an hour in 1997, just six cents more than their fathers made in 1973 . . . Benefits? From medical care to pension coverage to vacation time to Christmas bonuses, "perks" have steadily declined since 1980.MORE

CORPORATE TRESPASSING

WOODY PAIGE, DENVER POST: The new football stadium has a peculiar new name.
Before today I've never uttered the word "Invesco," but Invesco, Invesco. Everyone should be made aware of Invesco's name. Invesco is some global mutual bond-daddy company that purchased the naming rights to the $400 million stadium that was approved by, and primarily funded by, Denver metropolitan taxpayers . . . Recently in Larimer Square - by happenstance - I was introduced to an empty-suited key executive of Invesco Funds Group. Not a minor-league employee, but a man who was quick to inform me he was among the biggest of wigs at the company. He showed proof. He asked my occupation. Usually I reply: "I sell drywall," but I whispered that I write a sporting-type column for The Post. "I don't read the paper," he said disdainfully.

I told the exec I am opposed to Invesco plastering its goofy, vague name all over the stadium. He laughed. "Most of us are, too," he said. "We thought it was a mistake. Too much money. Too little return. And too many people don't like it. But it's Mark's baby, and that's what he wanted." "Mark" is Mark Williamson, the Invesco chairman and CEO who, it was suggested, wants Mile High Stadium to be his baby. "You want to know what we call it at the company?" the exec bragged. "The Diaphragm." The Diaphragm? "Yes, it looks exactly like a gigantic diaphragm," he said, as if he were very proud of the new name . . .

Williamson believes there was a scam or a conspiracy. He does not believe anyone from his company gloated about Invesco Field at Mile High being called The Diaphragm by company insiders. "Regardless of what you were told, that's certainly not the way we think and, unequivocally, not the language we would use." MORE

NDREW GUMBEL, INDEPENDENT, LONDON: Already under pressure from growing concerns about obesity and "mad cow" disease, plus the antics of anti-globalization protesters, the McDonald's hamburger chain now has another problem: customers turning away in droves because they do not like the way they are treated. According to a survey picked up by the Dow Jones news service on an in-house McDonald's website, as many as 11 per cent of the company's customers worldwide are dissatisfied enough to complain each day. Of these, some 70 per cent are unhappy with the way their complaint is handled, leading to a sharp drop-off in custom and uncomplimentary comments to friends. And they are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.

FINANCIAL TIMES: US companies defaulted on $53.8 billion of corporate debt in the first six months of this year, according to Moody's Investors Service, the credit rating agency, causing misery for many but providing a record windfall for restructuring experts. At this rate, outstanding defaulted US corporate debt is likely to end this year higher than last year's record $131.8 billion. Bankruptcy experts predict defaults could continue to rise in 2002 and 2003.
The rising default rate has proved a boon for the restructuring industry, which had some very quiet years until the technology and telecommunications bubble burst last year. MORE

LOUIS AGUILAR, DENVER POST: About 173,000 Coloradans belong to working families who do not earn enough money to afford basic necessities such as food, housing, adequate health care and child care, according to a national study by a pro-labor Washington think tank. "We were looking to define the basic, bottom-line cost that a working family in different parts of the nation must earn so that they can be stable," said Chauna Brocht, policy analyst for the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the study "Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families." . . . The year-long study calculated the basic budget level for a variety of family situations in more than 400 communities nationwide including different regions parts of Colorado. The basic budget included such monthly costs as housing, child care, health care, transportation and taxes.

Other key findings of the report:

Nearly one-third of families who fell below the basic budget level faced at least one critical hardship, like going without food, getting evicted or having to share housing with another family.

Almost half of all black and Hispanic families fall below basic budget levels, compared with one-fifth of white families.

A leading indicator of whether a family falls into hardship is whether the family has adequate health insurance. MORE

JUNE 2001

MICROSOFT CASE

DECLAN MCCULLAGH, WIRED: Thomas Penfield Jackson is not merely a federal judge with a soft spot for government prosecutors and an undisguised contempt for Microsoft executives. He's also a media blabbermouth, whose private chats with reporters wound up costing the Justice Department its biggest victory in a generation . . . Microsoft's adversaries were left fuming, insisting that if Jackson had held his tongue, the breakup order would have remained intact . . . Remaining silent were Jackson's fans in the Washington establishment, who cheered the rotund jurist last year when he was denouncing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates as unethical and compared him to a "drug trafficker" and Napoleon. Last June, Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson proclaimed that "the country is fortunate that there are people like Joel Klein and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson willing to take on this icon of the dot-com IPO world, these, you know, rich guys who don't think that there's any place in America for regulation."
In a Washington Post column, David Ignatius wrote: "Most of the plaudits in this case so far have gone to the Justice Department's lawyer, David Boies. But the real hero, I think, was Judge Jackson." MORE

GREAT MOMENTS IN FREE ENTERPRISE

TODD HARTMAN, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS: The cost for cleaning up pollution at the Summitville gold mine will climb to $235 million and take at least 100 years under a proposal by Colorado and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The new price tag reflects the $75 million cost of long-term decontamination of a high altitude gold operation once hyped as an economic bonanza for an impoverished swath of southern Colorado. It wound up as one of the state's costliest environmental disasters. Carved into the face of South Mountain in the San Juans, the 1,231-acre mine site sends water laced with acid and metals into tributaries of the Alamosa River, which remains almost devoid of aquatic life nearly 10 years after mine owners declared bankruptcy and deserted the operation. Since 1992, the federal government has spent nearly $160 million plugging mine tunnels, treating water and replanting barren land. Now, with many of the quick fixes in place, the state and the EPA are proposing a long-term plan to cut water pollution. MORE

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SHAWN NEIDORF, SAN JOSE MERCURY: Hewlett-Packard is asking its 45,000 U.S. employees to take a pay cut or use more vacation by the end of October to help the company meet Wall Street expectations at a time when slumping demand for computers and related products is damaging the company's financial performance.
The sacrifices are not mandatory. But the Palo Alto-based computer and printer company, which employs 15,000 in the Bay Area, is urging its U.S. employees to sign up for one of the following options:

- A 10 percent pay cut from July 1 through Oct. 31.
- A 5 percent pay cut, plus taking four additional paid vacation days by the end of October, in addition to the six extra days employees previously were asked to use.
- Taking eight additional paid vacation days by the end of October, on top of the six days already requested by the company.

Analysts are expecting HP to earn 20 cents a share for the third quarter ending July 31, 30 cents for the fourth quarter and $1.05 a share for the year ending Oct. 31, said Chuck Hill, First Call's director of research. A year earlier, HP earned 49 cents in its third quarter, 41 cents in the fourth and $1.80 for the year . . . Managers will not know which of their employees have chosen to participate in the cost-reduction program, Berman said.

The only thing keeping the economy afloat is the willingness of American consumers to live beyond their means. There's always the risk that we might start saving money one day. - David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poors

JAMES P. MILLER & KELLY YAMANOUCHI KNIGHT RIDDER: Unemployment among whites held steady at a very low rate of 3.7 percent in March. But the U.S. Labor Department reports unemployment among blacks surged 1.1 percentage points, from 7.5 percent to 8.6 percent. That's still low by historic standards, but the trend is heading the wrong way for a demographic sector that historically has endured a jobless rate twice that of whites.

FINANCIAL TIMES: The US may have already stumbled into its first recession in a decade, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of the country's business cycles. In a departure from its recent statements, the bureau says for the first time that "data normally considered by the committee indicate the possibility that a [US] recession began recently . . . In its latest memo, posted on its website and dated June 18, the NBER stops short of officially declaring recession. "The economy has not declined nearly enough to merit a meeting of the [recession-dating] committee or the determination of a peak date," it says. MORE

REUTERS: Sodexho Alliance said it will sell a minority stake in Corrections Corporation of America partly because the investment conflicts with a policy of providing services to prisons only in countries that have abolished the death penalty. A world leader in food and management services, Paris-based Sodexho acquired an 8 percent stake in the Corrections Corp. in June 1994. Sodexho now has a policy of providing services to prisons only in established democracies that have rehabilitation policies for inmates and no death penalty, the company said. France abolished the death penalty 20 years ago. Sodexho Alliance has 286,000 employees and operations in 70 countries. It recently reached an agreement to fully acquire Sodexho Marriott Services the largest provider of food and facilities management in North America.

[Not mentioned is that Sodexho, which provides college food service, has been a target of student protests because of its connection with CCA]

MAY 2001

CHRIS AYRES, TIMES, LONDON: Wall Street banks are facing an avalanche of expensive litigation, with as many as 100 class-action lawsuits, demanding tens of billions of dollars in damages. The banks are being accused by investors of allegedly rigging the flotations of Internet companies during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. An investigation by The Times has found that 21 separate lawsuits have already been filed against ten different banks in Manhattan federal courts . . . Securities litigation experts in New York estimate that at least another 60 similar lawsuits are currently being prepared. The sheer volume of the lawsuits means that the banks are facing record legal fees. The huge valuations of Internet companies during the 1990s are a bigger problem, however, because former shareholders are claiming billions of dollars in damages. In the case of Ariba, a software company, $20 billion has been wiped off its value since the start of the lawsuit . . . Investigators are looking into whether bankers made money by using “kickbacks” and “laddering”, techniques that are both illegal. Kickbacks involve clients paying abnormally large commissions, effectively bribes, in return for being allocated stock in hot new Internet companies. Laddering occurs when bankers seek commitments from investors to buy more stock, at set prices and at set times, after the flotation has taken place. This guarantees that the shares will go up in the short term.

MORE http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,5-2001181106,00.html

OFFICIAL SECRETS
THIS CHART ILLUSTRATES SOMETHING THE PUBLIC WASN'T TOLD ABOUT THE "CLINTON BOOM."

By the time of the campaign, economic growth was in the third quarter of a downward trend that had actually peaked in the last quarter of 1999. When the GDP growth figures are combined with the similarly downplayed long-term stock market trendlines, it becomes clear that the "Clinton boom" was wearing out its welcome a year or more before the election.

NOVEMBER 2003

PELLICANO CASE UPDATE

AP - Anthony Pellicano, the private eye to the stars who is going to prison for possessing illegal explosives, says he won't cooperate with authorities investigating whether he secretly taped conversations of celebrities and their lawyers. Pellicano, who was to report to the Federal Detention Center in Los Angeles on Monday, also said the lawyers and celebrities he worked for over the years are innocent. "They did nothing wrong," he was quoted as saying in Monday's Los Angeles Times. "The government should leave them alone. And me, I'm going to take this punishment like a man. I will not participate in any way, shape or form with this investigation." . . .

He pleaded guilty last month to illegally possessing military-style explosives and hand grenades found during a raid of his office last year. He is expected to serve 27 to 33 months. Pellicano said he has rejected offers of leniency in exchange for his cooperation with the wiretapping investigation, adding that private investigators "must maintain the confidentiality of every client in every investigation."

CHUCK PHILIPS, LA TIMES - Several witnesses in the case, who spoke to The Times on the condition that they remain anonymous, have complained about the conduct of the investigation. FBI agents attempted to intimidate them and asked leading questions, implying that they had participated in criminal activity without providing evidence, the witnesses said, allegations that government officials denied. . .

According to sources familiar with the investigation, officials suspect that Pellicano paid employees at Pacific Bell to access telephone transmission boxes, locate specific phone lines and install devices that could record conversations. Pellicano would then dump data collected from those devices into a computer program and organize it to decipher conversations, the sources said. . .

In interviews with potential witnesses in the case, FBI agents have told people that their phone lines were tapped by Pellicano. So far, however, officials have not produced transcripts or recordings of the conversations to back up the assertion, according to witnesses who have been interviewed.

The witnesses who have complained about FBI actions in the case include one who said agents accused him of criminal activity and later tried to intimidate his friends and associates. Another individual said an armed FBI agent showed up unannounced in the waiting room of a prominent law firm, flashed his badge and demanded to see an attorney who had hired Pellicano. A third person who was present during an FBI interview characterized the agent's line of questioning as "overly aggressive, unprofessional and bordering on dishonest.". . .

It is unclear whether the FBI has been able to crack the encryption code used to protect Pellicano's files. But people close to Pellicano say he established a reputation in Hollywood as a discreet investigator who made it a practice to deliver oral - not written - reports of confidential information to his clients. They say it would be surprising for an investigator of his caliber to leave behind a trail of computer data that would implicate his clients in illegal activity.

CARL LIMBACHER, NEWSMAX - In 1992, when "the Pelican" hired on to do damage control for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, Mary Matalin, then the political director for President Bush 41's reelection campaign, found herself in the unenviable position of being sought out by women who were linked to Clinton - and threatened into silence by Mr. Pellicano.

Matalin, now a senior White House advisor, discussed the episode in 1997 during a stint as a talk radio host on CBS's Washington, D.C. affiliate. "I got the letters from Pellicano to these women intimidating them," Matalin told her audience. "I had tapes of conversations from Pellicano to the women. I got handwritten letters from the women.". . .

"I controlled the money in the [1992 Bush] campaign," Matalin explained. "And [Clinton damage controller] Betsy Wright announced that she was putting $28,000 on the 'bimbo' patrol and on Jack Palladino and Pellicano, the other guy. "And $28,000 to me, the political director, was four states in the Rocky Mountains. You had a limited budget. I said, how could they spend this much money? How could they basically give up four states to track down 'bimbos'?

"That's why it was kind of shocking to me that it must have been a bigger priority than putting money into states for the purpose of winning and that's why I flagged it at the time. I don't even remember how many or what kind of women.". . .

PELLICANO CASE

NY POST - Court TV anchor Diane Dimond, who reported on the first days of the Michael Jackson sex case a decade ago, is the latest to be caught up in a Hollywood phone-bugging scandal. Dimond said yesterday that authorities have informed her that wiretaps on her phone from 1994 are part of evidence seized by the FBI last year from the computer of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano. Dimond was a reporter for "Hard Copy" in 1993 in the first days after the story broke of a youngster accusing Jackson of sexually molesting him. Pellicano worked for Jackson's attorney, Harold Weitzman

"I [was] positive my phones were tapped - I heard lots of clicking and crackling noises on the line and then my words started coming back to me through others," Dimond told The Post. "I would call new sources and they would tell me, 'We understand you've heard X, Y and Z' so I knew my phone had to be tapped. . .

"My house was vandalized. My car was broken into on the Paramount lot [where 'Hard Copy' was taped]. "I had documents underneath an expensive leather coat - the coat wasn't taken, but the documents were stolen from my car," Dimond said. "My mailbox was mowed over. They gave me armed guards to go to and from work - nothing was safe," she says.

CARL LIMBACHER, NEWSMAX - Though the American press insists on not reporting this inconvenient detail, Anthony Pellicano was first hired by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992 in a bid to discredit Gennifer Flowers' steamy tape recordings of conversations with Mr. Clinton.. . .
In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos - along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton - based on their attempts to use Pellicano's analysis to discredit her. Arguing before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, Flowers' Judicial Watch attorneys tied Pellicano directly to the first lady-turned-New York senator, telling the court: "Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he's the one who did the analysis of the tapes." e court ruled in Flowers' favor, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.

But that isn't the only time Pellicano has been linked to the Clintons.
Four days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in January 1998, ex-Lewinsky boyfriend Andy Bleiler came forward with the claim that she had stalked him. The Washington state school teacher also contended that Lewinsky wanted to become a White House intern so she could perform oral sex on then-President Clinton. "I'm going to Washington to get my presidential knee pads," Bleiler's lawyer, Terry Giles, quoted Lewinsky as saying.

"Anthony Pellicano, the L.A.-based private investigator and O.J. defense team veteran [was] responsible for digging up Andy Bleiler," the New York Post's Andrea Peyser reported at the time. Sexgate provocateur Lucianne Goldberg told Peyser that Pellicano's services were bought and paid for by the Clinton White House. When Peyser confronted the "investigator to the stars" with Goldberg's claim, he didn't deny it. "You're a smart girl. No comment," Pellicano told the Post reporter.

Indeed, the tough-talking private eye makes no bones about his hardball tactics. He claimed to carry a baseball bat, not a gun, as his weapon of choice and once told the Los Angeles Times, "I only use intimidation and fear when I absolutely have to."

Interestingly enough, some of Pellicano's targets, like former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch and one-time "Hard Copy" correspondent Dina Dimond, report break-ins and property vandalism, the kind of problems encountered by Clinton accusers like Flowers, Sally Perdue, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick.

OCTOBER 2003

CLINTON'S GAMBITS FALTER

DEBORAH ORIN, NY POST - Wesley Clark's fizzle from superstar wannabe to self-proclaimed "underdog" is raising new questions in the Democratic Party about former President Bill Clinton's star - and political smarts. Clinton helped launch Clark in a wave of media buzz by talking up the retired general as one of the Democrats' top two stars - along with wife Hillary - and prodding allies like Mickey Kantor to back him. But political novice Clark is sinking in most polls, down to also-ran status in Iowa and New Hampshire, and had a few deer-in-the-headlights moments at last Sunday's debate.

Officially, Clinton now insists he wasn't promoting the retired general, but other Democratics don't buy it. "Yeah, and he never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," sniffed a rival strategist.

What now looks like Clinton's Clark miscalculation comes on top of other missteps by the former president - like claiming the way to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger in California was for Gov. Gray Davis to copy his own strategy during the impeachment crisis. . .

Or take Clinton's all-out 2002 push to beat President Bush's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, last fall. Jeb won by landslide. And many other Democratic candidates last fall asked Clinton to puh-leeze stay out of their states. . .

"Clinton is the nudge-in-chief - he can't resist the action. He's dying to be a player, to undermine the other candidates and make sure that the Democrats don't win in 2004," says a New York Democratic activist.

"He's keeping the party unbalanced . . . He will continue to pick and choose his moments to throw other people off their game," adds this activist, convinced Clinton's real agenda is keeping any Dem from a 2004 win so Hillary has a clear field in 2008.

But there's also broad belief among Democrats that despite his public claims of neutrality, Clinton is desperate to stop Howard Dean for fear that he'll yank the Democratic Party too far to the left, damaging it for decades and hurting Hillary's chances in 2008.

FIGURE COMES BACK TO HAUNT CLINTONS

PAUL M. RODRIGUEZ, INSIGHT MAGAZINE - Peter F. Paul, the flamboyant Hollywood entrepreneur who says Hillary Rodham Clinton has hidden almost $2 million of in-kind contributions he made to her campaign in 2000, is back from Brazil and promising to raise a ruckus about the New York senator as he fights bizarre securities and bank-fraud charges on which he's been indicted. Aaron Tonken, a political operative in Hollywood and a former protégé of Paul under indictment for a variety of alleged sharp deals with the rich and famous, also is promising to tell everything he knows about behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Clinton and many others. . .

Paul, who was in Brazil at the time of his indictment and convinced that the Clintons were out to wreck his credibility lest he become a whistle-blower, decided to fight the charges from South America. Through a series of manipulations he soon was locked up in squalid and dangerous Brazilian jails until extradited recently to Brooklyn, N.Y. . .

Tonken was indicted earlier this year on unrelated charges of bilking mostly rich-and-famous types through mail fraud tied to charity events he led as a result of having worked closely with the Clintons and top Democrats in earlier political battles. He claims he has dirt to dish about a number of related high-fliers, including Hillary Clinton and financial supporters of her campaign. Prosecutors are reported to be listening.

. . . Sen. Clinton, who has declined all comment about these matters, previously claimed through spokesmen that she barely knew Paul, and had returned a $2,000 donation he made to her campaign in the spring/summer of 2000, denied he was involved in setting up Clinton fund-raisers, denied he gave huge in-kind contributions and denied having anything to do with Paul and SLM in any way (except for [a] disputed $400,000, of course). This is curious given the personal notes signed by Hillary, Bill and even Chelsea Clinton thanking Paul for all his work on Mrs. Clinton's fund-raising events back in the summer of 2000.

HOW CLINTON AIDED CHINESE MILITARY SPACE PROGRAM

CHARLES R SMITH, NEWSMAX - China has joined an elite club of world powers with its launch of the manned Shenzhou spacecraft - code-named Project 921. However, the Chinese manned space program is neither a civilian effort nor peaceful. The Chinese manned space program is under the complete and direct control of the People's Liberation Army. The Shenzhou missions are part of an overall space program under the personal command of PLA general Li Jinai

. . . China has had assistance from America in its effort to reach for the stars. Chinese space engineers openly admit that the People's Liberation Army is using U.S.-made software and computers to improve its ballistic missile force and military manned space missions. Cheng Qifeng, an engineer at the Shaanxi Engine Design Institute in Xian, admitted that PLA engineers are using Electronic Data Systems' Unigraphics CAD/CAM computer-aided design software to help improve rocket engines for both space and ballistic missile applications.

. . . The Chinese army runs all space activities from its brand new mission control facility located 30 miles northwest of Beijing. The control center is packed with U.S.-made computers supplied during the Clinton administration.In fact, the Chinese military space effort owes much to the former U.S. president. The Chinese army succeeded in obtaining a wide range of U.S. missile technology from the Clinton administration, including satellite control facilities, satellite image processing facilities, missile nose cone design, multiple warhead delivery systems, guidance systems, kick-motor designs and computer systems for ground and space control.

In addition, documents show that the Chinese military obtained radiation-hardened chip technology, including space-based encrypted control systems, with the personal approval of President Clinton. Radiation-hardened computer chip technology is considered to be a key element of atomic warfare because it gives the Chinese army the ability to fight and control its forces during nuclear combat.

THE SUSAN MCDOUGAL CULT

CLINTONS DON'T FARE WELL IN FOCUS GROUPS

WASHINGTON POST - Still, some Democrats want the Clintons to go away. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently did focus groups around the country with Democratic-leaning voters and found widespread resentment of both Clintons, according to a Democratic aide familiar with surveys conducted in several cities. Many focus group participants called the former president "immoral, smooth, crooked" and dishonest, the aide said, while Hillary Clinton was seen as an "opportunist." "It gives us a brand we just don't need," the aide said.

OBSCURE LIMERICK CONTEST

[This is from a contest on Long Island, New York. The requirements were to use the two words Lewinsky (The Intern) and Kaczynski (the Unabomber) in a limerick, gleaned by reader JG]

Third place:

There once was a gal named Lewinsky
Who played on a flute like Stravinsky
'Twas "Hail to the Chief"
On this flute made of beef
That stole the front page from Kaczynski

Second place:

Said Clinton to young Ms. Lewinsky
We don't want to leave clues like Kaczynski,
Since you made such a mess,
Use the hem of your dress
And wipe that stuff off of your chinsky.

And the winning entry:

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
When deciding how best to be blown.

ALBANY TIMES UNION - So here's President Bush looking, dare we say it, vulnerable, with almost 3 million jobs lost while he's been in office, more people sinking into poverty and a war that's far more costly and complicated than he ever imagined. And here's former President Bill Clinton handicapping the race to unseat Mr. Bush. Mr. Clinton dismissed the field of Democrats, and quite gratuitously so, at a party last weekend honoring the high-rolling contributors to his, and his wife's, campaigns.

The Democratic Party has just two stars, the former president says in comments reported by The New York Times. Neither of them is currently in the race for the party's 2004 presidential nomination. The exalted two, in Mr. Clinton's eyes, are Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and retired Gen. Wesley Clark. . .

What Mr. Clinton has done by oohing and aahing over two Democrats who aren't running is slight those who are. It has become too easy for him, and others, to collectively dismiss the current field of contenders. The truth is that with the election still 14 months away, the Democratic field is taking shape. Mr. Clinton might pay a bit more attention to these candidates.

In about six months, after the earliest of the primaries, a presumptive nominee will emerge, eager for the votes of the plurality who voted Democratic in the last election. The Democratic candidate for president will have, absent a legitimate scandal or a truly botched campaign, all the political standing Mr. Clinton accords to his wife and Mr. Clark. . .

What would Mr. Clinton have said if this sort of star-based handicapping were applied to him when he ran? What if, in September of 1991, it was decreed that the party's only star was, say, Mr. Cuomo, and that Mr. Clinton and the all other Democrats actually running for president were a doomed lot? The man from Hope ought to know better. He wants to beat Mr. Bush and win back the White House, doesn't he?

JULY 2003

AFTER TEN YEARS, VINCE FOSTER CASE LOOMS AGAIN

Key Clinton aide Vince Foster died ten years ago on July 20, 1993. With the anniversary has come the release of a startling tape containing recordings allegedly of Miguel Rodriguez, the assistant Whitewater prosecutor who resigned over the handling of the Foster investigation. The recordings seem to have been made at different times as Rodriquez went over the case with one of more unidentified persons.

The identification of the voice comes from Foster case witness and whistleblower Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer John Clarke.

According to the conservative Worldnet Daily, which first published the story, Clarke said "he cannot divulge how Knowlton acquired the tapes but notes that by publishing the recording, he is putting his career on the line. 'If I were to put out ginned up tapes of an assistant U.S. attorney, they would revoke my license immediately,' he said. 'It's probably a criminal offense.'. . . A lifelong Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, Knowlton told WND the tapes of Rodriguez were legally recorded, legally obtained and come from a 'very reliable source.'"

At one point on the tape, Rodriquez says, "The Independent Counsel themselves, and the FBI, beat me back, in fact threatened me. They told me to quote, this is a quote, 'back off,' either 'back off' or 'back down.' They used both of them. You know it's - I have been communicated with again and told to you know, to be careful where I tread. I can tell you this, that ah, ah, that it has not only to do with my career and reputation, um, they've also had to do with my personal health and family."

Although Kenneth Starr eventually ruled Foster's death a suicide, he did so using the same investigating agency - the FBI - whose initial inquiry had been called into question, including some of the same agents. Starr also failed to address many questions that had been raised by critics of the suicide-in-the-park theory.

Many independent investigators, with the notable exception of crime reporter Dan Moldea, early became convinced that Foster's case had been rigged. Nothing in the subsequent decade has assuaged their doubts, and the weight of their questions suggest strongly that Foster either committed suicide somewhere else and was moved to Ft. Marcy Park or that he was murdered.

A British journalist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, made a number of points about the case some years back:

- The cover-up of Foster's death was not initially Kenneth Starr's doing but the FBI. "Once this had occurred there was no going back. The FBI and the Justice Department were institutionally committed. It would have taken a granite prosecutor to crack this open. Mr. Starr was not a man who was going to tangle with the FBI."

- "Mr. Starr's lead prosecutor in the case, Miguel Rodriguez, the man who conducted the witness cross-examinations, suspected that Foster's death was staged to look like a suicide. As he tried to probe, FBI agents began to obstruct him. Planted stories appeared in the press .... Mr. Starr looked the other way."

- "Why does it matter? Because the FBI engaged in flagrant evidence tampering, and because it invalidates the official story that Foster put a revolver in his mouth and blew his brains out."

More Rodriguez excerpts follow.

On the earlier investigation by Robert Fiske

"All I know is that things did not happen the way that Fiske said that they happened. And the reports don't support what Fiske said. There's, there's really nothing is consistent with him, ah, you know, committing that kind of a violent - or that kind of violent act at all."

On someone moving the body after it was initially discovered:

"They lifted the body and pulled it to the top of the ridge, top of the berm, and once they did that blood started flowing fast. . . In fact, one of the persons who was there when the body was pulled made a joke because the body started sliding back down the hill. Then, they pulled the body up to the top of the berm."

On changes soon made to the park:

"You have to go back to prior to the body being found and find out what access there was, who knew about that access, um, and how is it changed. That is the whole point, you're, again you guys really have to understand they've re-landscaped it prior to this - you know, they, they've changed gates, they've changed paths, they've changed trees, they've filled gullies, they've redefined the slope. You know the whole thing was changed when I was there. The whole area has been re-landscaped. They've even taken, they've even filled the gorge down below - they've taken that and filled it with, with ah pieces of wood and so that they've changed the path that used to be down at the bottom of the berm. You, you guys can't imagine what the aerials looked like a year before. It is - all of this is just so much nonsense. It was landscaped the sly long ago. They, they backfilled.

When Foster's body was found, a paramedic described an automatic pistol at the scene. By the time of the official report, the gun had turned into a black Colt revolver:

"Even the Park Police, even the Park Police and the person who first saw the body, ah, saw different things. But there was a point in time where the particular gun that he described arrived and something before that was either not observed or not completely identified.

On when the White House was notified:

"There's indications that the White House and others knew prior to the time it was officially said to be told. There was notification made well before the time that the EMTs were called."

On the argument that too many people were involved for a cover-up:

"There's not that many people who know these things really. You don't need a lot of people to know what's going on. In fact, you don't need many at all. Everyone makes a very big mistake when they believe that a lot of people are necessary to orchestrate some kind of - some result here. Very few people need to know anything about anything, really. All, all people need to know is what their job is, not why - be a good soldier, carry out the orders.

"And there are a lot of people from - starting at the very night that the body was investigated, all the way down the line, there were, there were, people told to do certain things and they didn't - and there - and their rationale was that they were following orders, being told what to do.

"Nobody, ah, and this goes for all the FBI agents - they all, they don't necessarily know the big picture - they don't know what other people are writing in their reports. When you write a report all you have to do is make sure that it's consistent with - the most innocuous thing is to make sure it is consistent with the result that you ultimately want to get, which is not embarrass your other colleagues who have made a conclusions already.

"It's some motivation which is that simple and, and, you know all of a sudden your notes aren't, don't, exactly reflect what other people have said. It's very simple. It's a very, a very, ah, clean formula to achieve the result. You don't have to know the big picture. All you need to do is just have a couple of people involved. . . You know, you come over, you get their notes and you write your report. Your report's wrong, you hope nobody's gonna catch you on it but if they do so what? It gets obscured and obscured and obscured because you, you control the central figures in the investigation."

On Ken Starr's investigaton:

"Starr could only be as good as the agents - I mean how independent can Starr really be when he was being supplied by the very same agency, ah, you know with the investigative team that did the investigation in first - the very same people."

The media's role:

"I have talked to a number of people that - you know, from Time Magazine, Newsweek, Nightline, the New York Times, Boston Globe, the Atlanta whatever, um, you know there have been well over a hundred, and it risks - this matter is so sealed tight and, um, the reporters are all genuinely interested but the ah, the ah, um, the report- the ed- reporters are genuinely interested but the ah - when they start to get excited and they've got a story and they're ready to go. . . They went to all the trouble of writing, and then it got killed. . . I know the New York Times has it - knows, and just won't ah, ah, I know that they won't do anything about it and I do know that, that many people have called me back. Reporters that I've spent a lot of time with called me back and said the editors won't allow it to go to press. The accepted media here has always had, ah, a certain take on all of this. And there's been story lines from the get-go."

From the start:

"I knew what the result was going to be, I was told what the result was going to be from the get-go. And then there's all so much fluff, and a look-good job, it's just, this is all, all so much nonsense and I knew the result before the investigation began. That's why I left. . . Fiske himself indicated that he had determined the result before he had ever released a report."

The Review has pointed out that the evidence so far suggests White House involvement in the cover-up but not in the death itself. If Foster was murdered, one possible scenario was assassination by criminal associates from Arkansas, perhaps in the drug trade. Two months after Foster's death, Jerry Parks, a Clinton security aide in Arkansas who was known to have been keeping dossier on Clinton, was gunned down in his car outside of Little Rock. Parks was shot through the rear window of his car and shot three more times, thru the side window, with a 9mm pistol. Parks ran American Contract Services, the business which supplied bodyguards for Clinton during his presidential campaign and the following transition. Bill Clinton still owed him $81,000. Parks had collected detailed data on Clinton's sexual escapades, including pictures and dates. Park's wife said that upon learning of Vincent Foster's death, he told her, "I'm a dead man." Mrs. Park also told a journalist that her husband had made large transfers of cash to Vince Foster. After Parks' death, his house was ransacked, and his files, 130 telephone tapes and computer data are removed.

There is also the alternative suspicion that the discovery of tainted blood being sent from Arkansas prisons to Canada and elsewhere - a scandal that was coming home to roost at the time of Foster's death - might have been a factor. In May 1993, two separate tainted blood probes -- one by a California investigator and another by the Canadian government -- led to the door of the Arkansas governor's office, then occupied by Jim Guy Tucker. Both were informed that all Clinton's papers were removed when he left office and that they should contact the White House legal counsel's office. What happened next is not known but presumably they made contact with Vince Foster, the man in the legal counsel's office who knew Arkansas and who had been involved in the prison system and who may, at one point, have represented the corporation involved in the blood scandal.

Two months after Foster's death - the New York Post reported much later - someone called a little-known phone number at the White House counsel's office where Mr. Foster worked. "The man said he had some information that might be important," wrote columnist Maggie Gallagher, who did not name her source or identify the official who took the call. "Something had upset Vince Foster greatly just days before he died. Something about 'tainted blood' that both Vince Foster and President Clinton knew about, this man said."

It should be noted that the appearance of the tapes at this time may not be coincidental. One of the problems with cover-ups is that they can come back to haunt one at inconvenient times, such as when one of the key figures is thinking about running for president.

• PROGRESSIVE REVIEW TIME LINE
• TAINTED BLOOD SCANDAL
• THE PATRICK KNOWLTON STORY
• VINCE FOSTER'S POST-MORTEM DIET AND DEPRESSION
• WORLDNET DAILY