FLOTSAM & JETSAM: A few reasons Hillary Clinton shouldn't run for president again

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

A few reasons Hillary Clinton shouldn't run for president again

A TIMELINE OF PROBLEMS

1960s

After becoming involved in politics, Wellesley graduate Hillary Rodham will order her senior thesis sealed from public view.

1970s

Two months after commencing the Whitewater scam, Hillary Clinton invests $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she has 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.

1980s
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.

Hillary Clinton writes Jim McDougal: "If Reagonomics works at all, Whitewater could become the Western Hemisphere's Mecca."
1990s
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. 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 White House would be different. Lying, withholding evidence, and considering - even expecting - underlings to be expendable so the Clintons could avoid accountability for their actions would become the norm."

Hillary Clinton attempts to conceal the fact that she had $120,000 of editorial help in preparing her book-like substance.

Hillary Clinton tells New Zealand television that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. At the time of Mrs. Clinton's birth, Edmund Hillary was an unknown beekeeper.
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.


Hillary Clinton goes for her daily dose of photographic self-aggrandizement - at the pediatrics ward of the Georgetown University Medical Center. She is to be pictured reading to the kids. The problem: sick children don't look that cute, especially those who are bald from cancer treatments or fitted out with tubes and such. The solution: replace the sick children with well versions belonging to the hospital staff. It works beautifully.

Webster Hubbell is indicted over the Castle Grande land scheme. Hillary Clinton is named in the indictment as the Rose Law firm "billing partner."

On April 27, 1998, deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing meets 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- 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 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.

Ewing later  reveals that a criminal indictment against Hillary Clinton concerning Whitewater had been prepared but never presented to a grand jury.

2000
Independent Counsel Robert Ray's final report on the White House travel office case finds 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."

SOME HILLARY STATS

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.

ALSO . . . .

 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.

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 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.


MORE TALES OF HILLARY

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."

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."




WAL-MART

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.


CASTLE GRANDE

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.

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.

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"

JOHNNY CHUNG

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 dollars 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.


WHITEWATER DEVELOPMENT

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

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.

[Reported by William Triplett in Capital Style]



AND THERE'S MORE