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Travel

Watergate investigation

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SUMMARY

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SUMMARY

FIRST FIRST LADY to come under criminal investigation

FIRST FIRST LADY to almost be indicted according to one of the special prosecutors

NUMBER of Hillary Clinton fundraisers or major backers convicted of, or pleading no contest to, crimes: 9 including Jeffrey Thompson, Paul Adler, Norman Hsu, Jorge Cabrera, Abdul Jinnal, Alcee Hastings, Johnny Chung, Marc Rich, Sant Chatwal

NUMBER OF TIMES that Hillary Clinton, providing testimony to Congress, said that she didn't remember, didn't know, or something similar: 250

NUMBER OF CLOSE BUSINESS partners of Hillary Clinton who ended up in prison: 3. The Clintons' two partners in Whitewater were convicted of 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. Hillary Clinton's partner and mentor at the Rose law firm, Webster Hubbell, pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges, including defrauding former clients and former partners out of more than $480,000. Hillary Clinton was mentioned 35 times in the indictment.

IN THE 1980s, Hillary Clinton made a $44,000 profit on a $2,000 investment in a cellular phone franchise deal took advantage of the FCC's preference for locals, minorities and women. The franchise was almost immediately flipped to the cellular giant, McCaw.

HILLARY CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND set up a resort land scam known as Whitewater in which the unwitting bought third rate property 50 miles from the nearest grocery store and, thanks to the sleazy financing, about half the purchasers, many of them seniors, lost their property.

IN 1993 HILLARY CLINTON and David Watkins moved to oust the White House travel office in favor of World Wide Travel, Clinton's source of $1 million in fly-now-pay-later campaign trips that essentially financed the last stages of the campaign without the bother of reporting a de facto contribution. The White House fired seven long-term employees for alleged mismanagement and kickbacks. The director, Billy Dale, charged with embezzlement, was acquitted in less than two hours by the jury.

HRC'S 1994 HEALTH CARE PLAN, according to one account, included fines of up to $5,000 for refusing to join the government-mandated health plan, $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time, 15 years to doctors who received "anything of value" in exchange for helping patients short-circuit the bureaucracy, $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork, $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment, and $100,000 a day for drug companies that messed up federal filings.

TWO MONTHS after commencing the Whitewater scheme, Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she had a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million.

IN 1996, Hillary Clinton's Rose law firm billing records, sought for two years by congressional investigators and the special prosecutor were found in the back room of the personal residence at the White House. Clinton said she had no idea how they got there.

DRUG DEALER Jorge Cabrera gave enough to the Democrats to have his picture taken with both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. . . Cabrera was arrested in January 1996 inside a cigar warehouse in Dade County, where more than 500 pounds of cocaine had been hidden. He and several accomplices were charged with having smuggled 3,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States through the Keys

In 2000, Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign returned $22,000 in soft money to a businesswoman linked to a Democratic campaign contribution from a drug smuggler in Havana.

IN AUGUST 2000, Hillary Clinton held a huge Hollywood fundraiser for her Senate campaign. It was very successful. The only problem was that, by a long shot, she didn't report all the money contributed: $800K by the US government's ultimate count in a settlement and $2 million according to the key contributor and convicted con Peter Paul. This is, in election law, the moral equivalent of not reporting a similar amount on your income tax. It is a form of fraud. Hillary Clinton's defense is that she didn't know about it

HILLARY CLINTON'S participation in a Whitewater related land deal became suspicious enough to trigger an investigation by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

IN 2007, A Pakistani immigrant who hosted fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became a target of the FBI allegations that he funneled illegal contributions to Clinton's political action committee and to Sen. Barbara Boxer's 2004 re-election campaign. Authorities say Northridge, Calif., businessman Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, fled the country shortly after being indicted on charges of engineering more than $50,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic committees.

HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTED the appointment of Rudy Giuliani's buddy, Bernie Kerick, to be Secretary of Homeland Security,. Kerick subsequently withdrew and not long after was indicted.

TALES OF HILLARY

Times, UK, 2009 - Hillary Clinton . . . was back in Belfast last week, giving a gentle push to politicians dragging their heels over a final piece in the peace process jigsaw.

But according to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament, she said that Belfast's landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995.

The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe's most bombed hotel, earning the moniker "the Hardboard Hotel".

However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.

The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.

Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: "When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel . . . even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs."

During the presidential campaign Mrs Clinton drew on her Bosnia experience, saying: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but we just ran with our heads down to get in the vehicles to get to our base."

After archive news footage was shown of her walking calmly from her plane with her daughter, Chelsea, Ms Clinton admitted: "I did mis-speak the other day. . .

Indictment possibility

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ON APRIL 27, 1998 , deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing met with his prosecutors to decide on whether to indict Hillary Clinton. Here's what happened as reported by Sue Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf in their book, "Truth at Any Cost:"

"[Ewing] paced the room for more than three hours, recalling facts from memory in his distinctive Memphis twang. He spoke passionately, laying out a case that the first lady had obstructed government investigators and made false statements about her legal work for McDougal's S & L, particularly the thrift's notorious multimillion-dollar Castle Grande real estate project. . .The biggest problem was the death a month earlier of Jim McDougal. . . Without him, prosecutors would have a hard time describing the S & L dealings they suspected Hillary Clinton had lied about."

CNN, MAR 18, 1999 - Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing testified at the Susan McDougal trial Thursday that he had written a "rough draft indictment" of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after he doubted her truthfulness in a deposition. Ewing, who questioned Mrs. Clinton in a deposition at the White House on April 22, 1995, said, "I had questions about whether what she was saying were accurate. We had no records. She was in conflict with a number of interviews."

Ewing said those interviews by investigators were primarily with other people in the Rose Law Firm. Ewing said he had questioned Mrs. Clinton about her representation of Jim McDougal's Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan when she was at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock. "I don't know if she was telling the truth. I did not circulate the draft. I showed it to one lawyer (in the independent counsel's office) who said he didn't want to see it," Ewing said, under questioning from McDougal attorney Mark Geragos. . .

Ewing also testified that in a later deposition with both the president and first lady on July 22, 1995, he had questions about the truthfulness of both Clintons. McDougal's attorney Mark Geragos asked Ewing: "Did you say the Clintons were liars?" "I don't know if I used the 'L-word' but I expressed internally that I was concerned," Ewing said.

Ethnic slurs

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In August 2000, the NY Post reported:

"The Arkansas man who accused Hillary Rodham Clinton last month of uttering an anti-Semitic slur in 1974 has passed a lie-detector test arranged by The Post. Paul Fray, who has charged Mrs. Clinton called him a "f- - -ing Jew bastard" after Bill Clinton lost his race for Congress, cleared the polygraph exam administered Sunday near his home here. "There's no doubt in my mind that Mr. Fray is truthful," concluded state-licensed Arkansas polygrapher Jeff Hubanks, who gave the three-hour test. . . The findings were reviewed yesterday by another expert, Richard Keifer, a former head of the FBI's polygraph unit who has 20 years of experience. Keifer judged the results "inconclusive" because they didn't meet the high federal polygraph standards - but said he found nothing to indicate Fray was lying. Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said, "Paul Fray is an admitted liar, and we're not going to be responding to his lies anymore."

That same year former Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson claimed that in their frequent arguments, Bill and Hillary Clinton would use such expressions as "Jew motherf*cker," "Jew Boy" and "Jew Bastard."

Campaign financing & backers

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Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2008 - "An upstate New York developer donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton's foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman's mall project.

"Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel Center in Syracuse.

"Mrs. Clinton also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction."

Why should anyone doubt, then, that in small matters as well as in large ones, the old slogan from the 1992 election still holds true? As Bill so touchingly put it that year, if you voted for him, you got "two for one." What the country-and the world-has since learned is a slight variation on that, which I would crudely phrase as "buy one, get one free."

NY Times, 2001 - The former chairman of the Rockland County Democratic Party, an active supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate campaign, stood before a federal judge today and admitted that he had sought to bribe a town official for a vote on a development project and had evaded paying income taxes. Under an agreement with federal prosecutors, the man, Paul W. Adler, 42, who stepped down as party chairman after his arrest in September, pleaded guilty to two of the more than a dozen charges filed against him.

USA Today, 2014 - A Washington businessman pleaded guilty Monday to funding shadow campaign activity for several candidates, including Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign and the 2010 election of Washington's current mayor.

Wash Times - In 2007, when Mrs. Clinton was considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, she took the unprecedented step of returning $850,000 in contributions raised by Norman Hsu, a top campaign bundler who was wanted on criminal charges in a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Walmart

Ward Harkavy, Village Voice, 2000 - Twice in three days last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton basked in the adulation of cheering unions . . . They would have dropped their forks if they had heard that Hillary served for six years on the board of the dreaded Wal-Mart, a union-busting behemoth. If they had learned the details of her friendship with Wal-Mart, they might have lost their lunches. . .



As she was leaving the dais, she ignored a reporter's question about Wal-Mart, and she ignored it again when she strode by reporters in the hotel lobby.

But there are questions. In 1986, when Hillary was first lady of Arkansas, she was put on the board of Wal-Mart. Officials at the time said she wasn't filling a vacancy. In May 1992, as Hubby's presidential campaign heated up, she resigned from the board of Wal-Mart. Company officials said at the time that they weren't going to fill her vacancy.



So what the hell was she doing on the Wal-Mart board? According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company's annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bused in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in Arkansas, one of the country's poorest states. According to published reports, she was placed in charge of the company's "green" program to protect the environment.



But nobody got greener than Sam Walton and his family. For several years in the '80s, he was judged the richest man in America by Forbes magazine; his fortune zoomed into the billions until he split it up among relatives. It's no surprise that Hillary is a strong supporter of free trade with China. Wal-Mart, despite its "Buy American" advertising campaign, is the single largest U.S. importer, and half of its imports come from China.



Was Hillary the voice of conscience on the board for American and foreign workers? Contemporary accounts make no mention of that. They do describe her as a "corporate litigator" in those days, and they mention, speaking of environmental matters, that she also served on the board of Lafarge, a company that, according to a press account, once burned hazardous fuels to run its cement plants. . .



And the Clintons depended on Wal-Mart's largesse not only for Hillary's regular payments as a board member but for travel expenses on Wal-Mart planes and for heavy campaign contributions to Bill's campaigns there and nationally. . .



Lisa Featherstone, Nation 2005- Unlike so many horrible things, Wal-Mart cannot be blamed on George W. Bush. The Arkansas-based company prospered under the state's native son Bill Clinton when he was governor and President. Sam Walton and his wife, Helen, were close to the Clintons, and for several years Hillary Clinton, whose law firm represented Wal-Mart, served on the company's board of directors. Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" has provided Wal-Mart with a ready workforce of women who have no choice but to accept its poverty wages and discriminatory policies.

WAL-MART BOARD MEMBER CLINTON WAS SILENT AS FIRM FOUGHT OFF UNIONS

Castle Grande

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Stuart Taylor, National Journal - Castle Grande: In the summer of 1995, the Resolution Trust Corp. reported that Hillary had been one of 11 Rose Law Firm lawyers who had done work in the mid-1980s on an Arkansas real estate development, widely known as Castle Grande, promoted by James McDougal and Seth Ward. McDougal headed a troubled thrift, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and had given Hillary legal business as a favor to Bill. McDougal and his wife, Susan, were the Clintons' partners in their Whitewater real estate investment. Ward was father-in-law to Webb Hubbell, another former Rose Law Firm partner, who was briefly Clinton's associate attorney general in 1993. Later, Hubbell went to prison for fraud, as did James McDougal.

Castle Grande was a sewer of sham transactions, some used to funnel cash into Madison Guaranty. Castle Grande's ultimate collapse contributed to that of the thrift, which cost taxpayers millions. Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to "deceive federal bank examiners."

Hillary's billing records for Castle Grande were in a 116-page, 5-inch-thick computer printout that came to light under mysterious circumstances on January 4, 1996 -- 19 months after Starr's investigators had subpoenaed it and amid prosecutorial pressure on Clinton aides who had been strikingly forgetful. For most of that time, Hillary claimed that the billing records had vanished. But a longtime Hillary assistant named Carolyn Huber later admitted coming across the printout in August 1995 on a table in a storage area next to Hillary's office; Huber said she had put it into a box in her own office, without realizing for five more months that these were the subpoenaed billing records.

This implausible tale, on top of other deceptions, prompted New York Times columnist William Safire to write on January 8, 1996, that "our first lady ... is a congenital liar."

Jerry Seper, Washington Times, 2000 - The Arkansas Supreme Court, which is considering disbarment proceedings against President Clinton, yesterday said it also is investigating whether first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in fraud in a questionable Whitewater-related land deal. The probe, confirmed by the court's Committee of Professional Conduct, has focused on accusations about Mrs. Clinton's legal representation of a failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association real estate venture, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. called a "sham." A major area of concern is an option agreement that facilitated a $300,000 payment to Seth Ward, father-in-law of Mrs. Clinton's law partner, Webster L. Hubbell. The option, written by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Hubbell while they were at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm, guaranteed Mr. Ward a payoff and negated his liability in the project.

Attorney Clinton

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During the 1992 campaign, Hillary Clinton defended her role in the Madison Guarantee S&L scandal by saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life."

Forgotten, however, is what inspired this homily: accusations that Ms. Clinton had represented Whitewater business partner Jim McDougal's S&L before her husband's government. Here's what the New York Times reported on March 17, 1992: "Hillary Clinton said today that she did not earn 'a penny' from state business conducted by her Little Rock law firm and that she never intervened with state regulators on behalf of a failed Arkansas savings and loan association. . . "

Records would show that she did, in fact, represent Madison before the state securities department. After the revelation, she says, "For goodness sakes, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks."

Susan McDougal recalled Ms. Clinton coming in and drumming up the business. Ms. McDougal told the Washington Post: "The problem was finances, her finances." The Washington Times quoted an unnamed Clinton business associate who claimed the governor used to "jog over to McDougal's office about once a month to pick up the [retainer] check for his wife."

Jim McDougal's version of the story, according to the LA Times, was that Clinton asked him to throw some legal work his wife's way to help the Clintons out of a financial crunch: "I hired Hillary because Bill came in whimpering that they needed help."

Hillary Clinton wrote Jim McDougal enclosing a power of attorney for him to sign "authorizing me to act on your behalf with respect to matters concerning Whitewater Development Corporation." Another power of attorney was enclosed for Susan McDougal. The power of attorney included the right to endorse, sign and execute "checks, notes, deeds, agreements, certificates, receipts or any other instruments in writing of all matters related to Whitewater Development Corporation."

This letter, uncovered in 1993 by Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, directly contradicted the claim of the Clintons that they were "passive shareholders" in Whitewater.

From a 1996 Chicago Tribune editorial: "The legal issues will sort themselves out in time. But one thing has become all too clear. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their aides have made a concerted effort to deceive official investigators and the American public with half truths and outright lies . . . It's not clear what the Clintons want to conceal, but it's clear that they have made extraordinary efforts to do

New Republic, 1994 - Although Rodham Clinton was a litigator--that is, a lawyer whose task is to appear in court, if only to force the other side to settle-- and an attorney who was named one of the 100 most influential in the country by the National Law Journal in 1988 and 1991, she was almost never seen in the courtrooms of Little Rock; some court reporters remember an occasional appearance, and one could not remember having seen her at all. According to a search conducted by American Lawyer, she tried just five cases during her fifteen years at Rose; other published sources say her work revolved around copyright infringement cases involving songwriters and bread companies. so."

Foreign policy

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Stephen Zunes, Foreign Police In Focus - Senator Hillary Clinton has opposed restrictions on U.S. arms transfers and police training to governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights abuses. Indeed, she has supported unconditional U.S. arms transfers and police training to such repressive and autocratic governments as Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, and Chad, just to name a few. She has also refused to join many of her Democratic colleagues in signing a letter endorsing a treaty that would limit arms transfers to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations.

Civilian Casualties

Not only is she willing to support military assistance to repressive regimes, she has little concern about controlling weapons that primarily target innocent civilians. Senator Clinton has refused to support the international treaty to ban land mines, which are responsible for killing and maiming thousands of civilians worldwide, a disproportionate percentage of whom have been children.

She was also among a minority of Democratic Senators to side with the Republican majority last year in voting down a Democratic-sponsored resolution restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas. Each of these cluster bomb contains hundreds of bomblets that are scattered over an area the size of up to four football fields and, with a failure rate of up to 30%, become de facto land mines. As many as 98% of the casualties caused by these weapons are civilians.

Senator Clinton also has a record of dismissing reports by human rights monitors that highlight large-scale attacks against civilians by allied governments. For example, in the face of widespread criticism by reputable human rights organizations over Israel's systematic assaults against civilian targets in its April 2002 offensive in the West Bank, Senator Clinton co-sponsored a resolution defending the Israeli actions that claimed that they were "necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas." She opposed UN efforts to investigate alleged war crimes by Israeli occupation forces and criticized President Bush for calling on Israel to pull back from its violent re-conquest of Palestinian cities in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

Similarly, when Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other reputable human rights groups issued detailed reports regarding Israeli war crimes during that country's assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Senator Clinton insisted they were wrong and that Israel's attacks were legal. Furthermore, though these groups had also criticized the radical Lebanese group Hezbollah for committing war crimes by firing rockets into civilian-populated areas in Israel, exhaustive investigations have revealed absolutely no evidence that they had used the civilian population as "human shields" to protect themselves from Israeli assaults. Despite this, Senator Clinton, without providing any credible evidence to the contrary, still insists that they in fact had used human shields and were therefore responsible for the death of more than 800 Lebanese civilians.

Senator Clinton has voted to send tens of billions of dollars unconditionally to Baghdad to prop up that regime, apparently unconcerned about the well-documented reports of death squads being run from the Interior Ministry that have killed many thousands of unarmed Sunni men.

In Senator Clinton's world view, if a country is considered an important strategic ally of the United States, any charges of human rights abuses  no matter how strong the evidence  must be summarily dismissed. Indeed, despite the Israeli government's widespread and well-documented violations of international humanitarian law, Senator Clinton has praised Israel for its "values that respect the dignity and rights of human beings."

Goldman Sachs

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Hil Clin gets at least $200,000 to speak at Goldman Sachs conference

Health industry

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RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and ROBERT PEAR, NY TIMES - As she runs for re-election to the Senate from New York this year and lays the groundwork for a possible presidential bid in 2008, Mrs. Clinton is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers. Nationwide, she is the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry, trailing only Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership.

Israel

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HAARETZ - U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she supports the separation fence Israel is building along the edges of the West Bank, and that the onus is on the Palestinian Authority to fight terrorism. "This is not against the Palestinian people," Clinton, a New York Democrat, said during a tour of a section of the barrier being built around Jerusalem. "This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism." Clinton's comments echoed Israel's position that the Palestinians must crack down on militants or Israel will find ways to prevent attacks on its citizens. . . Clinton is not slated to visit the Palestinian areas during her visit. . . .



UPI - U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is in Israel on a visit intended to put to rest any lingering doubts about her support for Israel. . . In 1999, Clinton traveled to the West Bank as first lady and was acclaimed there as a champion of Palestinian nationhood because of comments she had made in 1998 that seemed to express support for a Palestinian state. The comments, criticized by some American Jewish groups, were disavowed by the White House, the newspaper said. In her 2000 Senate race, Clinton staked out a number of positions that appealed to Jewish voters, declaring, for example, that Jerusalem should be the "eternal and indivisible capital of Israel." . . .

Drugs

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Hillary Clinton opposes drug legalization

Vinod Gupta

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Mike McIntire, NY Times, 2007 - When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company's private jet to fly them there. The company, Info USA, one of the nation's largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, Info USA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of Info USA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company's money trying "to ingratiate himself" with his high-profile guests"

Sarah Baxter,Times UK - The frontrunner for the Democrats in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, has been hit by a legal dispute in which one of her fundraisers is accused of trying to "ingratiate" himself with powerful friends at the expense of his company. The row has revived accusations of the influence peddling and favors for donors that marred Bill Clinton's presidency in the 1990s.

For years the Clintons flew on Vinod Gupta's corporate plane, introduced him to world leaders - including Tony Blair - and received donations for their political campaigns and charitable foundations. They relaxed at his holiday home in Hawaii - next door to Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond star - and jetted to Acapulco, the Mexican resort, while Gupta once spent the night as a favored guest in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House.

"If we're negotiating with a company, it helps if Bill Clinton says, 'Oh Vin, he's a good guy'," said Gupta in a frank interview with The Sunday Times.

DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN, NEWSMAX - Since he left office in 2001, former president Bill Clinton has been paid by $3.3 million by Info USA, an Omaha, Nebraska company that has been identified as a key provider of specially designed databases that have been sold to criminals who use the detailed information to defraud the unsuspecting elderly. . . According to the New York Times, Info USA compiled and sold lists that disclosed the names of elderly men and women who would be likely to respond to unscrupulous scams. The lists left no doubt about the vulnerability of the elderly targets. The Times reported, for example, that Info USA advertised lists of "Elderly Opportunity Seekers," 3.3 million older people "looking for ways to make money," and "Suffering Seniors," 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer's disease. "Oldies but Goodies" contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents

Alcee Hastings

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Sun Sentinel, FL - U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Weston, and Alcee Hastings, of Miramar, were appointed national campaign co-chairs on Thursday for U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Democratic presidential effort. "We need a leader with a clear vision and sound judgment, who can work with a Democratic Congress to renew the promise of America. Hillary is that leader," Wasserman Schultz said in a statement.

WIKIPEDIA - In 1981 Judge Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).

In 1988, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. Voters to impeach included Democratic Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Conyers and Charles Rangel. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate. The vote on the first article was 69 for and 26 opposed, providing five votes more than the two-thirds of those present that were needed to convict. The first article accused the judge of conspiracy. . .

Alleged co-conspirator William Borders went to jail again for refusing to testify in the impeachment proceedings, but was later given a full pardon by Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

Hastings filed suit in federal court claiming that his impeachment trial was invalid because he was tried by a Senate committee, not in front of the full Senate, and that he had been acquitted in a criminal trial. Judge Stanley Sporkin ruled in favor of Hastings, remanding the case back to the Senate. . . The Supreme Court, however, ruled in Nixon v. United States that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over Senate impeachment matters, so Sporkin's ruling was vacated and Hastings' conviction and removal were upheld.

Wikipedia - After the 2006 United States House of Representatives elections, Hastings attracted controversy after it was reported that incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might appoint him as head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Pelosi reportedly favored Hastings instead of the ranking Democrat Jane Harman due to political differences and support for Hastings by the Congressional Black Caucus. However, Hastings' impeachment led to accusations that Democrats, who had campaigned against a Republican "culture of corruption," were themselves elevating a corrupt official to a committee chair. On November 28, 2006, Pelosi announced that Hastings would not be the next chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Travel office case

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1993 -Hillary Clinton and David Watkins move to oust the White House travel office in favor of World Wide Travel, Clinton's source of $1 million in fly-now-pay-later campaign trips that essentially financed the last stages of the campaign without the bother of reporting the de facto contribution. The White House fires seven long-term employees for alleged mismanagement and kickbacks. The director, Billy Dale, charged with embezzlement, will be acquitted in less than two hours by the jury. An FBI agent involved in the case, IC Smith, will write later, "The White House Travel Office matter sent a clear message to the Congress as well as independent counsels that this Whit House would be different. Lying, withholding evidence, and considering - even expecting - underlings to be expendable so the Clintons could avoid accountability for their actins would become the norm."

Richard L Berke, NY Times, 1993 - After a third day of embarrassing disclosures about the ouster of its travel office, the White House tonight abruptly announced the withdrawal of the Arkansas travel agency with close ties to President Clinton that it had selected to take over the operation....

CNN, 2000 - Independent Counsel Robert Ray's final report on the White House travel office case found first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's testimony in the matter was "factually false," but concluded there were no grounds to prosecute her. The special prosecutor determined the first lady did play a role in the 1993 dismissal of the travel office's staff, contrary to her testimony in the matter. But Ray said he would not prosecute Clinton for those false statements because "the evidence was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that she knew her statements were false or understood that they may have prompted the firings. . . The final report concludes that "despite that falsity, no prosecution of Mrs. Clinton is warranted."

CNN, 2000 - Ray also criticized the White House on Thursday for what he called "substantial resistance" to providing "relevant evidence" to his investigators. "The White House asserted unfounded privileges that were later rejected in court," Ray said. "White House officials also conducted inadequate searches for documents and failed to make timely production of documents, including relevant e-mails."

Progressive Review - Mrs. Clinton's victim, Bill Dale, put it this way: "Everyone, especially Robert Ray, knows Hillary Clinton lied under oath about her key role in firing me and my colleagues . . . Of course, the Clinton Justice Department prosecuted me with no evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. Despite my 38 years of government service, Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to destroy my good name. They put my wife and me through pure hell. "

Webster Hubbell

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After quitting the Justice Department and before going to jail, Hubbell is a busy man. He meets with Hillary Clinton, and follows up by getting together with major scandal figures John Huang, James Riady, and Ng Lapseng. Riady and Huang go to the White House every day from June 21 to June 25, 1994 according to White House records. Hubbell has breakfast and lunch with Riady on June 23. Four days later -- and one week after Hubbell's meeting with Hillary -- the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, jointly owned by Lippo and the Chinese intelligence services, send $100,000 to Hubbell.

Mrs. Clinton is mentioned 36 times in a fraud indictment against Webster Hubbell. Writes the AP's Peter Yost: "Starr alleges Hubbell concealed his own and Mrs. Clinton's work during the 1980s on a failed Arkansas land deal, known as Castle Grande, that federal regulators say was riddled with 'insider dealing, fictitious sales and land flips.'" Yost notes that the criminal contempt trial of Susan McDougal, which begins next month, could also raise problems for Mrs. Clinton: "The indictment against Mrs. McDougal details a series of grand jury questions about Mrs. Clinton and Castle Grande that Mrs. McDougal refused to answer." The Castle Grande project involved a baroque set of deals aimed at least in part in shoring up the McDougal's failing savings and loan. Not until the sudden discovery of Mrs. Clinton's billing records in 1996 did her extensive role in the matter come to light. She still claimed that she could not remember her work on the project nor 15 conversations with Hubbell's wheeler-dealer father-in-law, Seth Ward. In the end, Castle Grande cost the S&L nearly $4 million in unpaid principal and interest.

The billing records documenting HRC's work on the Castle Grande development scam are discovered in the family quarters of the White House. HRC says she has no idea how they got there.

Johnny Chung

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A photo of Bill and her standing next to illegal fundraiser Johnny Chung was signed by HRC, "To Johnny Chung with best wishes and appreciation." Chung reportedly funneled several hundred thousand dollas from Chinese military intelligence to Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign. As Chung put it once, "I see the White House is like a subway -- you have to put in coins to open the gates." He was talking about the $50,000 he gave Hillary Clinton's top aide while seeking VIP treatment at the White House.

CNN, March 1998 - Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung has agreed to plead guilty to election law violations and cooperate in the ongoing Justice Department investigation into illegal campaign fund-raising in the 1996 elections. . . Chung became a major figure in the Democratic fund-raising scandal when it was learned he made almost 50 visits to the White House. During one visit, Chung gave first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's then-chief of staff, Maggie Williams, a $50,000 check for the Democratic National Committee. The check was delivered inside the White House. Two days later Chung was able to bring a group of Chinese businessmen to watch President Bill Clinton deliver a radio address in the Oval Office. They then had their picture taken with the president. The DNC returned more than $300,000 that Chung raised because of questions about the source of the money.

Drugs

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A drug dealer donated $20,000 to the DNC, attends a Christmas reception hosted by Hillary Clinton, has his photo taken with the Clintons and Al Gore and then -- three weeks later -- is arrested for smuggling 6,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States. It should have come as no surprise to anyone involved. After all, Jorge Cabrera had already served two prison sentences -- one for trying to bribe a grand jury witness and the other for filing a false income tax return. Later he will be back in the news when a businessman pleads guilty to laundering $3.5 million for Cabrera between 1986 and 1996

NY Post, 2000 - Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate campaign returned $22,000 in "soft money" to a businesswoman linked to a Democratic campaign contribution from a drug smuggler in Havana. The donation by Vivian Mannerud Verble was the largest single contribution received by Clinton's soft-money committee. Verble, whose company runs charter flights between Cuba and Miami, also served as the fund-raising intermediary between Jorge Cabrera and the Democratic National Committee in 1995, according to congressional investigators. The probers reportedly learned that Cabrera cut a $20,000 check to the DNC from a bank account in which he also kept profits from his lucrative cocaine trade. The DNC eventually returned the money, while Cabrera pleaded guilty to importing 6,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States. He is serving a 19-year federal prison sentence in Florida . . .

Gennifer Flowers on the Sean Hannity Show - [Clinton] came in one day and told me that Hillary had found out, had heard from some friends that he'd been doing cocaine. And that she said, "Hey, you better stop it." And I said, "Well, what are you going to do?" And he said, "Well, I'm going to stop it." But this wasn't until, I'd say about the mid-80's. So she was aware of his drug problem, as, like I said, as were many others...... It was very common knowledge in Arkansas by a number of people, including his wife, that he was a user of cocaine.

McDougals

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Susan McDougal recalls Ms. Clinton coming in and drumming up the business. Ms. McDougal tells the Washington Post: "The problem was finances, her finances." The Washington Times quotes an unnamed Clinton business associate who claims the governor used to "jog over to McDougal's office about once a month to pick up the [retainer] check for his wife." Jim McDougal's version of the story, according to the LA Times, is that Clinton asked him to throw some legal work his wife's way to help the Clintons out of a financial crunch: "I hired Hillary because Bill came in whimpering that they needed help."

Hillary Clinton writes Jim McDougal enclosing a power of attorney for him to sign "authorizing me to act on your behalf with respect to matters concerning Whitewater Development Corporation." Another power of attorney is enclosed for Susan McDougal. The power of attorney includes the right to endorse, sign and execute "checks, notes, deeds, agreements, certificates, receipts or any other instruments in writing of all matters related to Whitewater Development Corporation." This letter, uncovered in 1993 by Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, directly contradicts the claim of the Clintons that they were "passive shareholders" in Whitewater.

Rose law firm

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Hillary Clinton and the Rose law firm

Madison Guarantee S&L

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Jim McDougal tries to prevent state agencies from shutting down his S&L, which has been providing cash for the Whitewater operation. According to the Washington Times, Ms. Clinton is put on a $2000 a month retainer by the S&L. Ms. Clinton will later claim not to have received any retainer nor to have been deeply involved with Madison.



During the 1992 campaign, Hillary Clinton defends her role in the Madison Guarantee S&L scandal by saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life." Forgotten, however, is what inspired this homily: accusations that Ms. Clinton had represented Whitewater business partner Jim McDougal's S&L before her husband's government.



Here's what the New York Times reported on March 17, 1992: "Hillary Clinton said today that she did not earn 'a penny' from state business conducted by her Little Rock law firm and that she never intervened with state regulators on behalf of a failed Arkansas savings and loan association. . . "



Records will show that she did, in fact, represent Madison before the state securities department. After the revelation, she says, "For goodness sakes, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks."

Cellular phone investment

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Hillary Clinton makes a $44,000 profit on a $2,000 investment in a cellular phone franchise deal that involves taking advantage of the FCC's preference for locals, minorities and women. The franchise is almost immediately flipped to the cellular giant, McCaw.

Whitewater development

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In the late 1970s, the Clintons and McDougals buy land in the Ozarks with mostly borrowed funds. The Clintons get 50% interest with no cash down. The plot, known as Whitewater, is fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. The Washington Post will report later that some purchasers of lots, many of them retirees, "put up houses or cabins, others slept in vans or tents, hoping to be able to live off the land." HRC writes Jim McDougal, "If Reagonomics works at all, Whitewater could become the Western Hemisphere's Mecca." More than half of the purchasers will lose their plots thanks to the sleazy form of financing used. The McDougals will be among a number of close HRC's friends and business associates who will end up in jail..

Details of the Whitewater story

It Takes a Village

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Things that happened to Barbara Feinman after

becoming ghostwriter for "It Takes a Village"

-- She got no acknowledgement in the book by HR Clinton, contrary to what was stipulated in the contract

-- A reporter asked her how much she had written and she replied, "All I can say is they didn't pay me $120,000 to spell-check it."

-- The White House spread rumors that Feinman had been fired

-- Simon & Schuster refused to pay the last $30,000 of her fee. Asked why, Feinman was told that the White House didn't want her paid.

-- Feinman is still getting Christmas cards from the White House

-- The cards always spell her name wrong.

[Reported by William Triplett in Capital Style]

Wikipedia - The majority of [It Takes a Village] was reportedly written by ghostwriter Barbara Feinman. When the book was first announced in April 1995, The New York Times reported publisher Simon & Schuster as saying "The book will actually be written by Barbara Feinman, a journalism professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Ms. Feinman will conduct a series of interviews with Mrs. Clinton, who will help edit the resulting text."

Feinman spent seven months on the project and was paid $120,000 for her work. Feinman, however, was not mentioned anywhere in the book. Clinton's acknowledgment section began: "It takes a village to bring a book into the world, as everyone who has written one knows. Many people have helped me to complete this one, sometimes without even knowing it. They are so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually, for fear that I might leave one out."



During her promotional tour for the book, Clinton said, "I actually wrote the book ... I had to write my own book because I want to stand by every word." Clinton stated that Feinman assisted in interviews and did some editorial drafting of "connecting paragraphs", while Clinton herself wrote the final manuscript in longhand.

This led Feinman to complain at the time to Capitol Style magazine over the lack of acknowledgement. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal reported that "New York literary circles are buzzing with vitriol over Sen. Clinton's refusal, so far, to share credit with any writer who helps on her book." Later, in a 2002 article for The Writer's Chronicle, Barbara Feinman Todd (now using her married name) related that the project with Clinton had gone smoothly, producing drafts in a round-robin style. Feinman agrees that Clinton was involved with the project, but also states that, "Like any first lady, Mrs. Clinton had an extremely hectic schedule and writing a book without assistance would have been logistically impossible." Feinman reiterates that her only objection to the whole process was the lack of any acknowledgement

Greg Estervbrook, ESPN - Once again, Clinton is presented as the author of what is actually a ghosted book. . . This time around, the pages of "Living History" thank three people -- the much-admired former White House speech writer Alison Muscatine, veteran ghost Maryanne Vollers and researcher Ruby Shamir -- who are assumed to be the actual authors. But the cover and the frontispiece still boldly state, "by Hillary Rodham Clinton."

"Living History" is a 562-page book. A work of that length would take an average writer perhaps four years to produce; a highly proficient writer might finish in two years, if working on nothing else. Clinton signed the contract to "write" the book about two years ago. About the same time, she also was sworn in as a member of the United States Senate. Clinton took an oath to protect the Constitution and to serve the citizens of New York. So in the last two years Clinton has either been neglecting her duties as a United States Senator - that is, violating her oath -- in order to be the true author of "Living History," or she is claiming authorship of someone else's work. . .

If you didn't write something, and claimed to the world that you did, what you would be doing is lying. Wouldn't it be a nice gesture if United States senators did not lie?

Perhaps you're thinking, "But all people who reach the limelight lie about being authors." No, they don't. Consider that the previous book project of Maryanne Vollers, one of Hillary's ghosts, was about Jerri Nielsen, the doctor who had to be airlifted out of Antarctica. How was that book presented? As "Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole" by Jerri Nielsen with Maryanne Vollers. No lying about the true author.

Consider that John McCain's autobiographical work, "Faith of My Fathers," proclaims on its cover "by Mark Salter, with John McCain." The true author's name is there for everyone to see, and this neither detracts from sales ("Faith of My Fathers" was a commercial success) nor causes anyone to think any less of McCain. Famous people who care about their honor, like McCain, freely acknowledge using ghostwriters -- this is called "honesty." Famous people with serious ego problems, or who don't care about their honor, lie about being authors.

Now suppose you were a college student, hired someone to write a thesis paper for you, then submitted the work as your own. Suppose, when caught, rather than confess, you indignantly insisted you were the true author. What would happen to you is that you'd be expelled. For you to lie about having written something would be considered inexcusable

FBI files

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Judicial Watch sues Hillary Clinton in a $90 million lawsuit on behalf of the 900 persons whose FBI files were taken by the White House.

Progresive Review - Fighting a subpoena by Judicial Watch in a $90 million lawsuit on behalf of GOP officials and others whose FBI files were abused by the Clinton White House, HRC, in her brief, declares that "as a general proposition, high-ranking government officials are not subject to depositions" and she shouldn't have to testify so she can "have time to dedicate to the performance of [her] government functions." One problem: Mrs. Clinton is not a government official. She is, however, a defendant in the suit.

Special prosecutor Starr decides not to pursue the FBI file matter after an investigation that included a nine-minute interview with HRC over tea and coffee. FBI Director Louis Freeh calls the handling of the FBI tapes an "egregious violation of privacy . . . without justification."

"Mr. Starr also botched the investigation into the White House's illicit use of confidential FBI files on 900 Republican opponents. He used FBI agents to probe misconduct involving the FBI itself. Needless to say, they came up empty handed. A civil suit on behalf of the victims has since uncovered evidence that the purloined files were part of a campaign of political espionage ordered by Hillary Clinton herself. The dirt in the files, including raw data on congressional leaders, was fed into computers. Presumably it was later used for blackmail, or fed to media surrogates for the systematic smearing of Republicans." -- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, London Telegraph

Healthcare plan

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Sam Smith, Shadows of Hope, 1993 - During the first months of the Clinton administration, one of the biggest national policy changes of the past fifty years was being forged by a secret committee led by Mrs. Clinton under procedures that periodically defied the courts and the Government Accounting Office and whose public manifestations consisted of highly contrived media opportunities, carefully staged "town meetings," and similar artifices.

Despite the contrary evidence of public opinion polls, the concept of Canadian-style single-payer insurance was dismissed early. Tom Hamburger and Ted Marmor in the Washington Monthly tell of a single-payer proponent being invited to the White House in February 1993. It was, he said, a "pseudo-consultation;" the doctor was quickly informed that "single payer is not politically feasible." When Dr. David Himmelstein of the Harvard Medical School pressed Mrs. Clinton on single payer, she replied, "Tell me something interesting, David."

In other words, write Hamburger and Marmor: "Fewer than six weeks into the Clinton presidency, the White House had made its key policy decision: Before the Health Care Task Force wrote a single page of its 22-volume report to the President, the single payer idea was written off, and "managed competition" was in."

If there was any popular, grassroots demand for "managed competition" it never appeared. Managed competition had not been tested anywhere. Nonetheless, reported Thomas Bodenehimer in Nation:

"Around Hillary Rodham Clinton's health reform table sit the managed-competition winners: big business, hospitals, large (but not small) commercial insurers, the Blues, budget-worried government leaders and the 'Jackson Hole Group,' the chief intellectual honchos of the managed competition movement. . . Adherence to the mantra of managed competition appears to be the price of a ticket of admission to this gathering. "

What was finally proposed involved a massive transfer of the American health industry - by some accounts now larger than the military-industrial complex - to a small number of the largest insurance companies and other major corporations. These were companies that had the assets to play the game being offered - a medical oligopoly that would dispense health-care under the rules of the Fortune 500 rather than according to those of Hipprocrates.

Tony Snow, 1994 - [HRC] set out to redesign the American health-care system and convened a panel that drafted its plan secretly -- in violation of federal law .... The plan prescribed some eye- popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government- mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years to doctors who received "anything of value" in exchange for helping patients short-circuit the bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment; and $100,000 a day for drug companies that messed up federal filings .... When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton sighed, "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America." When a woman complained that she didn't want to get shoved into a plan not of her choosing, the first lady lectured, "It's time to put the common good, the national interest, ahead of individuals." As for privacy, forget it: Her plan would have required people to carry national identification cards that embedded confidential patient information on computer chips.

A federal judge issued a fine for a quarter million dollars because, "The Executive Branch of the government, working in tandem, was dishonest with this court." At issue is the composition of Hillary Clinton's health task force, a body stacked with those from the medical industry who would gain most from its faux reforms.

Watergate investigation

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Jerry Zeifman was general counsel chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation. In an article for the Wall Street Journal he reviews HRC's performance as a staff member:



-- She violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons.



-- A number of the legal procedures she recommended were ethically flawed



-- In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel.



-- She proposed that the committee should neither 1) hold any hearings with or take the depositions of any live witnesses, nor 2) conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon. Instead, the committee should rely on prior investigations conducted by other committees and agencies.



-- She advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses.



-- Zeifman decided that he could not recommend her for any position of public or private trust.

Terry McAuliffe

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Washington Post, 1999 - In a move that enables the Clintons to buy the house  and Hillary Rodham Clinton to have a base for her New York Senate run  the 42-year-old real estate developer and dealmaker pledged to put up $1.35 million in cash to secure a mortgage for the Clintons. Otherwise, swamped by more than $5 million in legal debts, the Clintons might have had difficulty obtaining the loan for the five-bedroom, century-old house.

Ethics law experts said yesterday that there is no legal difficulty with the Clintons' accepting McAuliffe's help, but some questioned the propriety of the president's accepting such a benefit from a private citizen.

"It's just plain wrong. It's dangerous. It's inappropriate," said Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21. "This is a financial favor worth over a million dollars to the president."

McAuliffe is not actually giving any money to the Clintons. Rather, he will deposit $1.35 million in cash  the full amount of their mortgage  with Bankers Trust; the only risk to McAuliffe's money is in the unlikely event that the Clintons default.

Progressive Review - And there's the little matter reported by John McCaslin in the Washington Times: Chapter 5 of the Federal Elections Commission's guide for candidates states: "An endorsement or guarantee of a bank loan is considered a contribution by the endorser or guarantor and is thus subject to the law's prohibitions and limits on contributions."

Wall Street Journal, 1999 - What Terry McAuliffe did in essence is make a contribution to Hillary's campaign. Its whole purpose is to enable her to establish residence in New York, thus the money is absolutely essential to her campaign . . . In the Hillary race, no McAuliffe "loan," no residency, no campaign. His contribution would seem to be more than $1,000.

Cattle futures

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TPR, 1999 - An example of Washington's culture of impunity can be found in a column by the Washington Post's Richard Cohen in which he justifies Hillary Clinton's cattle futures scam by equating it to some of the sweetheart deals into which George the Lesser has so easily fallen. Cohen suggests that the futures deal was nothing more than a businessman doing HRC a favor and writes, "I have to wonder why Hillary Clinton's preferential treatment is such a scandal and George W's is not." He then proceeds to ask a series of questions suggesting that Mrs. Clinton is a victim because of extraneous factors ending, naturally, with imputations of class and gender bias. Let us ignore the Harold Ickesian spin to the piece so suggestive of its provenance and assume more kindly that Cohen once again just doesn't know what he's talking about. That still leaves a lot of Washington Post readers terribly ill-served. Since your editor may be the only journalist in the country to have taken on the business dealings of both GWB Jr. and HRC, a review of the bidding might help:

-- Hillary Clinton's cattle deal was not just a political favor from Tyson Food, the same firm that would later pay a $6 million penalty for bribing an official of the Department of Agriculture. The sheer mathematical probabilities against it happening legally present us with a smoking gun. There is no statistically logical way in which HRC could have done what she did without someone committing a felony. This case screamed for investigation and never got it. Dubya's sweetheart deal in which he gained an highly profitable interest in the Texas Rangers was, in fact, much closer to the Clinton's original Whitewater scam in which Jim McDougal put up the cash and the Clintons got the percentage. There is, however, one major difference which makes even Whitewater far more sinister: Clinton was a public official at the time. But then Cohen doesn't worry about things like that, dismissing Whitewater as "a mess about something no one can keep straight."

Agbiz Tiller - Mrs. Clinton's ability to turn $1000 into a near $100,000 in ten months of futures trading, a Congressional study would learn, coincided with a period of time that a select group of executives from packing houses, grain companies, feedlot operators and commodity brokers reaped tens of millions of dollars in an "insider" trading scheme in the cattle futures market .... Between February, 1978 and April, 1979 some 32 cattle industry insiders made profits of $110 million by selling cattle futures after they received some 15 "secret signals," which was followed within an average two and one half day period, by a marked drop in cattle future prices. Then Rep. Neal Smith (Dem.-Iowa), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which released the report in February, 1981 noted that in all a total of some 1027 individuals made total net profits of approximately $156 million. Thus, three percent of the large traders --- those with 50 contracts or more --- with correlated trading activity and/or common business affiliations accounted for 70% of the total net profits of this group of traders. Mrs. Clinton traded 50 or more contracts three times .... A previous USDA study in 1979, for example, pointed out that during 20 of the 21 months preceding October, 1979 there was not a single day in which a farmer-feeder could have used the futures market to hedge in a profit and only five days in the remaining month that the farmer-feeder could have broken even .... Meanwhile, the eight largest packers, who at the time were slaughtering 44% of the nation's beef, held over one-half of the futures contracts and made twice as much money in the futures market as they did in trading cattle .... In all, between February, 1978 and December, 1980, some 29 "secret signals" were given although Smith's Committee staff made no estimates on the profits earned after April, 1979 .... There are estimates that 75% to 95% of individual investors lose money in commodity futures markets.***

Eric Shawn, Fox News: How will you deal with the critics who don't believe you when you're dealing with the White House billing records and turning $1,000 into $100,000?

HR CLINTON: Well I think New Yorkers will make their own judgments about that. I think we've moved beyond all of it and I'm going to be talking about the future of education and health care and making sure that upstate New York gets the same kind of economic opportunities that the rest of the state has enjoyed.

White House art collection

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MSNBC: Some people in the art world are outraged that Hillary Rodham Clinton solicited some artists' work for 'permanent display' in the White House and now plans to turn the pieces over to the Clinton Library. In 1993, Hillary Clinton¹s social secretary, Ann Stock, approached more than 70 of the country¹s top artisans, asking them to donate a specific piece or series of pieces for a collection that would become the first permanent White House Crafts Collection. The pieces would form part of a traveling exhibit, Stock told the artisans, and then, unless the artists wanted them back, they would 'be displayed in a prominent location in the White House at various events throughout the years' . . . After the pieces were in hand, however, the first lady was informed that the White House has a policy that prohibits it from accepting works by living artists (except for those who paint the portraits of the presidents and first ladies). Faced with this dilemma, the Clintons decided a perfect home for the pricey art would be the Clinton Library.

Tipping incident

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WASHINGTON TIMES : Maybe it's no big deal elsewhere, but it's all the buzz in Albion. Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped into the Village House, a favorite diner in this upstate farming town, and ordered two orders of scrambled eggs, home fries and rye toast. So far, so good . . . Her breakfast was on the house, and when she left the waitress, a single mom, found not a penny at her plate. The locals have been talking about little else since Tuesday, when she stopped for breakfast after making a speech about how New York's farmers "are really hurting these days." . . . Mrs. Clinton, who once declared a 15-cent income-tax deduction for a pair of her husband's under-shorts that she had donated to charity, had dropped into the diner, halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, along with a dozen reporters in her motorcade. . . . "She had two servings of eggs," said restaurant owner Alex Mitrousis. At first, she just ordered oatmeal to go but then she ordered scrambled eggs, home fries and rye toast. After she ate that, she ordered "two scrambled eggs with cheese," he said.

The savings bond that HRC's staff bought to cover for their boss' failure to tip an Albion, NY. waitress will only be worth $100 in thirteen years. John McCaslin of the Washington Times notes that the bond was given to Tricia Trupo's son for his education, but by that time Joshua Trupo will be 24, and he'll probably have to use it for grad school.

Further developments on Hillary Clinton's stiffing of a waitress in Albion, NY. The conservative web site, Free Republic, has raised over $250 in pledges for the waitress, Trish, through a "It Takes a Village To Tip a Waitress Fund."

HRC's post-crisis spin: "I was not permitted to pay. I was told, 'You are our guest.' I am a big believer in tipping." And she offered this piece of royal wisdom: "We should support working people."

But according to restaurant owner Alex Mitrousis, "I did not tell her not to tip the waitress - it was up to her."

Taking advantage of it all, Rudolph Giuliani went to the Golden Dolphin diner on Long Island and left a $60 tip on a $35 bill, bragging afterwards: "I have an understanding of how you depend on tips. It's something that comes naturally in Brooklyn."

TRISH Village House Restaurant 16 East Ave. Albion, NY 14411-1613 FREE REPUBLIC

Turns out Hillary Clinton not only stiffed that waitress, she flat out lied about it. Reports the Washington Times, "The next day, when Mrs. Clinton was asked about the tipping incident by a reporter in New York, she said, 'That's just another wild story.'"

Meanwhile, Tricia Trupo, 31, the single mom waitress trying to raise her son on $5,000 a year before tips, got a call from HRC's "personal planner" to apologize for her boss for not having left a tip. Shortly after that Mrs. Clinton herself called "She said I was a sweetheart," reports Trupo. But she didn't say anything about sending a tip. Trupo, who has no health insurance and gets no child support, plans to use the over $600 raised by the "It Takes a Village to Give a Tip Fund" for her son's education.