A FLOCK OF FLYING DONKEYS

To see where Money and Politicians meet,
climb into the Catbird Seat!

The Catbird Spots Democrats

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Al Gore - Vice President of the United States of America (1993-2001). Loser Democratic candidate for President - 2000.

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From Red Mafiya - How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America: Until the Bank of New York fiasco, the top rungs of the U.S. foreign policy establishment refused to acknowledge the Russian government's staggering corruption. In 1995, the CIA sent Vice President Al Gore, who had developed a "special" relationship with then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, a thick dossier containing conclusive evidence of his widespread corruption.

Gore's friend had become a multibillionaire after he took over Gazprom, the giant natural gas monopoly, with holdings in banking, media, and other properties. The CIA said it cost $1 million merely to gain entry into Chernomyrdin's office to discuss a business deal. [By way of comparison, it only cost $10,000 to get into Clinton's oval office or the Lincoln bedroom.]...

Gore angrily returned the report, scribbling a barnyard epithet across the file ... and declared that he did not want to see further damning reports about Russian officials....

"The bottom line is that Clinton and Gore had lots of warning about Russian corruption under Yeltsin's banner of reform," wrote political columnist David Ignatious in the Washington Post.

"And the question continues to be: Why didn't the administration do more to stop it?"

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From Year of the Rat : . . . In 1988 Huang, Riady, Democratic activist Maria Hsia, and others formed the Pacific Leadership Council in an effort to attract Asian-Americans to the Democratic Party. Huang and Hsia are credited with organizing the April 1988 Democratic fund-raiser at James Riady's home in Los Angeles.

They were also tour guides for a January 1989 trip to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia by Senator Al Gore and California Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy. The later-famous Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple paid for Gore's trip....

On April 29, 1996, Vice President Al Gore attended a luncheon at the Hsi Lai Temple, which describes itself as the largest Buddhist monastery in the United States. When the media first questioned Gore about the luncheon, the vice president claimed that it had simply been a "community outreach event," not a fund-raiser....

In the two years since the press discovered the temple luncheon, Vice President Gore has been between a rock and a hard place:

If he and his supporters admit that he was aware it was a fund-raiser, then he opens himself to having knowingly participated in something illegal. If Gore denies that he was aware it was a fund-raiser (when everyone else around him knew), people will wonder if anyone this incompetent is fit to be president....

Today, it is much harder for Gore and his associates to claim ignorance because everyone knows that Gore's 1996 visit to the temple was not a one-time happening. Gore's relationship with the temple, and the illegal fund-raising, went back eight years. This is just one of the reasons that the temple fund-raiser was far worse than "inappropriate."

The Hsi Lai Temple has been used to launder campaign funds for the DNC. Moreover, the April 1996 luncheon Gore attended was awash with Chinese Communist agents....

CAMPAIGN FINANCE: The Clinton-Gore record of campaign finance abuses is staggering:

●        Chinese agents ensured victory for the Clinton-Gore team in the 1992 general election with a massive cascade of illegally laundered foreign funds into key states.

●        More than one hundred potential witnesses of illegal foreign campaign contributions to the Clinton-Gore team have fled the country, taken the Fifth Amendment, or refused to be interviewed by investigative bodies.

●        Chinese agents helped secure the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination for Clinton with a multimillion-dollar loan from an Arkansas bank under their influence.

●        Chinese agents became the number one donors to Clinton and Gore in 1992.

●        The Clinton Justice Department allowed the statute of limitations to run out so that illegal donations from Chinese agents could escape prosecution.

●        Leading donors to the DNC are business associates of a major Tiananmen massacre war criminal that even the Chinese have jailed.

●        Chinese agents tried to use their donations to Democratic senators to pressure Taiwan's banking authorities.

●        Chinese agents gave $100,000 to convicted felon Webster Hubbel at the very moment the independent counsel's office was seeking his cooperation in its investigations of the Clintons.

●        Chinese agents helped fund Dick Morris's brilliant stealth advertising campaign against the Republicans in 1995-1996.

●        A Macau criminal syndicate figure who exploits women for prostitution laundered more than $1,000,000 in illegal donations to the DNC; he met Clinton on a number of occasions, including on visits to the White House; and he may also have funneled more than $300,000 in illegal cash donations to the Democrats and/or hush money for Hubbell.

●        A Chinese agent who is also in the business of exploiting women for prostitution donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and he sat beside both the president and vice president at intimate fund-raisers.

●        A Chinese agent/DNC donor with personal connections to Clinton and Gore is a business associate of Cambodia's largest narcotics trafficker.  

●        A Chinese agent who raises funds for Gore may be assisting Chinese spies to gain entrance into the United States.

●        Leaders of a Thai conglomerate that is in business with Middle Eastern terrorists and with China's biggest arms smugglers had a White House meeting with Clinton at which they were illegally solicited for campaign donations.

●        A Chinese PLA spy laundered illegal campaign funds through Johnny Chung and met Clinton twice at fund-raisers.

●        A Macau gambling figure and a Hong Kong billionaire in business with the PLA donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Clinton's favorite charities.

●        A Chinese gangster dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign funds on the Clinton Legal Defense Trust on the same day he delivered a letter demanding that Clinton abandon Taiwan.

●        A PLA partner sat next to Clinton at a DNC fund-raiser contributed tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign funds to the Democrats.

●        The officers of an American defense contractor in business with China's missile builders became the number one contributors to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1995-1996.

●        After illegal campaign funds began to flow to the DNC from a PLA spy, the Clinton White House and his navy secretary helped the PLA's arms delivery boys secure the port at Long Beach, California.

. . . The bottom line: CLINTON AND GORE GOT AWAY WITH IT

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AL GORE'S SILENCE: Special attention needs to be given to the role of V. P. Al Gore and the issue of Chinese cruise missile sales to Iran....

The Chinese have a particularly deadly anti-shipping cruise missile designated the C-802. . . . in 1992 then-Senator Al Gore (D-TN) joined with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to pass the Iran-Iraq Arms Non-Proliferation Act.

The legislation placed severe sanctions on foreign countries that exported advanced conventional weapons, including cruise missiles, to Iran or Iraq. At the time of passage in 1992, Senator Gore addressed the president of the Senate as follows: "It is abundantly clear that we need to raise the stakes high, and we need to act without compunction if we catch violators."...

Although the State Department has admitted to Congress that there is "evidence" of the Chinese shipments of C-802s to Iraq, and fifteen thousand American servicemen and women are within range of these weapons, the administration has refused repeated congressional demands to enforce American sanctions. The vice president has been totally silent on the issue and has made no effort to enforce or defend his own legislation....

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From If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates:

GORE FITS IN . . . While George W. was born to the manor and summered at the family compound on Walker's Point ... Al Gore was born the son of a well-to-do but decidedly maverick U.S. senator from Tennessee....

But Al Junior is hardly a chip off that old block of in-your-face populism. Far from it -- his own mom, Pauline, has described her second child as "a born conformist."

Unfortunately, that fits him like a black suit on an undertaker. As he has confirmed from childhood all the way through his vice presidential years, this is not a fellow who's comfortable coloring outside the lines, much less challenging the corporate order....

Anyone who thinks Gore is about to leap out in a pair of tights and a red cape to crusade as The People's Champion needs (1) to get professional help if you really fantasize about Al Gore in tights, and (2) to explain why he's been spending such an inordinate amount of time in the company of Rattner, Tisch & Kramer....

Steve Rattner is chief executive of the investment banking house Lazard Freres; John Tisch is scion of the multibillionaire Tisch family, with major holdings in everything from Loews hotels to the New York Giants; and Orin Kramer owns the megabucks money-management firm of Kramer Spellman.

These three gentlemen of the Street have become Al's best pals during the past three years, touting him as hot political stock and working furtively to bring him into the inner sanctums of America's most powerful brokers, bankers, and bond dealers.

RT&K's objective has not been merely to introduce him to the conservative (and genetically Republican) world of these high-level money changers but to have them really get to know Al, trust him, teach him, and-- dare I say it? -- bond with him.

According to the Washington Post, the trio of Rattner, Tisch, and Kramer has put together dozens of what they refer to as "cultivational" meetings between Gore and a who's who of America's financial heavies, including top executives from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan; Citigroup; AIG Inc., and Bankers Trust.

Gore has been courting them like a boar in heat ever since he and Clinton were reelected in '96. He has lunched in Manhattan hotels with them, held tete-a-tetes with them in his Executive Office Building hideaway, had breakfast brainstorming sessions with them in Washington and New York, brought them in for White House coffees (some people just never learn), and even threw three intimate Christmas parties at the Vice President's mansion in 1997 especially to host his new Street buddies and their spouses.

The bonding is complete. Rattner, Tisch, and Kramer have been harvesting bales of campaign dollars from the fertile fields of Wall Street for Gore's presidential run. By midsummer of '99, Kramer was already on record as having baled up more that $100,000 for Gore, and executives from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and many more are known to have bought stock in Al.

Check by check, event by event, private meeting by private meeting, Gore has steadily forged and fitted the links of his own Wall Street shackles.

What do they get? A good boy. One who's well trained, properly grateful, eager to have their continuing approval, and a born conformist. . . .

For example, the Gore2000 model has toned down considerably the enviro-protecto persona that only a few years ago was his political hallmark. Instead, he now emphasizes a remarkably Republican-like approach that advocates balancing any environmental action with the absolute need to assure that America's "good business climate" (including the stock prices of polluters) is not harmed in any way....

As Al himself put it, "I believe that anybody who aspires to lead this nation in the 21^st century needs to be fully conversant with the business environment." Save the Dow, man!

Likewise, Gore2000 has come to the altar of the high church of free-market orthodoxy, becoming almost evangelical in lecturing leaders of developing nations-- as he did in Malaysia in 1998-- on the imperative of throwing open their borders and their people to the holy whims of Wall Street investors.

Never mind that this orthodoxy is crushing the aspirations of those people, even as it drains the life out of the aspirations of America's middle class, Al's focus is on campaign check writers.

Jon Corzine, co-CEO of Goldman Sachs, is one of those check writers, as well as one of Gore's tutors ... In a telling understatement about the reelection of Democrat Gore, Corzine told Washington Post reporter Ianthe Jeanne Dugan: "The Vice President has tried to understand how the global economy works from the eyes of someone sitting in Wall Street."

Swell. When's the last time Gore tried to understand how the global economy works form the eyes of someone on your street? But, then, unlike Mr. Corzine, you and your Goldman Sachs colleagues haven't written more than $76,750 worth of checks to him, have you?

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To keep Gore from getting his streets confused, his pals Rattner, Tisch, and Kramer continue to surround him with the right kind of people. Various Wall Street executives regularly confer with him behind closed doors to explain global financial issues and to counsel him on his economic policies ("Don't touch that Dow!") -- and they even vet his speeches. . . .

Not to worry, say some Gore strategists, explaining that Wall Street itself is sort of "populistic" now that so many Internet-browsing, Starbucks-sipping Americans are, like, you know, really into the market in a Third Millennium kind of way, and they see CEOs as celebrity studs, so seeing Big Al rubbing shoulders with them really has its own grassrootsy appeal.

Really. None other than Roger Altman, the New York investment banker who first introduced Bill Clinton to Wall Street and later helped shape Clinton's elitist economic policy as deputy treasury secretary, embraces both Gore and his "SmartPolitics" identification with wealth.

As Altman told Post reporter Dugan: "With a third of American households invested in Wall Street, and mushrooming millionaires made there, Wall Street is more important than ever."

Not that Gore means any harm to us non-mushrooming millionaires or to the two-thirds of us who are not immersed in the thrill of the Dow, but-- hey -- he's taken the money and kissed the devil square on the lips, so what do you expect him to do?

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Al Gore has a PAC, too ... renamed Leadership 98, apparently oblivious to the fact that the name had a built-in Y2K problem. What the hell, said one of Gore's political operatives in the New York Times, "We're more concerned with the purpose than the name."

Fair enough. The purpose is to bag as much special interest cash as quickly as possible, and Leadership 98 has bagged $4 million, including $5,000 each from the top executives of Netscape, 3Com, Bell Atlantic, Lucent Technologies, Lazard Freres, SunAmerica, AT&T, Disney, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Dow Jones, Travelers, Cablevision, Prudential, Dreamworks, Rite Aid, Playboy, Merrill Lynch, Northwest Airlines, Bear Stearns, Qualcomm, America Online, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Genetech, Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank), Fleet Bank, Morgan Stanley, Long Term Capital Management, BankAmerica, Solomon Smith Barney, Smith Kline Beecham, Enron, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Miramax, Lehman Brothers, and BellSouth....

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From The Buying of the President (1996 ed): . . . The Telecommunications Companies -- Of course, the financial industry has not been the only business group to capitalize on the Clinton Washington bonanza....

During the 1992 campaign and as vice president-elect, Al Gore advocated a nationwide fiber-optic "information highway" as a public investment project....

A year later, on Dec 21, 1993, Gore outlined a completely different vision: "Unlike the interstates, the information highways will be built, paid for, and funded by the private sector . . . And so I am announcing today that the administration will support removal, over time, under appropriate conditions, of judicial and legislative restrictions on all types of telecommunications companies: Cable, telephone, utilities, television, and satellite."...

Gore's dramatic reversal got little media play, but did not go unnoticed by the telecommunications industry. On the exact date of his speech, Gore's Democratic party received $92,000 in soft-money contributions from key industry players....

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From The Buying of the President 2000 :

On Sept 7, 1995, Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., stood on the White House lawn and talked in sweeping terms about ending the era of big government. He touted a list of recommendations formulated by the National Performance Review, an initiative Gore directed that, he claimed, streamlined the federal bureaucracy, cut unnecessary waste, and helped make the government "work better and cost less." Gore said that his report, delivered to President Clinton that day, would continue the drive to "reinvent government."

Gore did not mention that his recommendations to the President included a plan to give oil companies access to thousands of acres of oil-rich, publicly owned land that the U.S. Navy has held as emergency reserves since 1912. Ever since the federal government earmarked the reserves for military emergencies, the oil industry had tried and failed to pry them away from the Navy.

In 1922 a couple of oil men-- Edward L Doneny and Harry Sinclair-- bribed Albert Fall, the Secretary of the Interior in the Harding Administration, for secret leases to drill on two of the fields, the Teapot Dome field just outside of Casper, Wyoming, and the Elk Hills field in Bakersfield, California. Doheny and his Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company (later Atlantic Richfield Company or ARCO), paid $300,000 to Fall in exchange for the rights. When the bribes were uncovered the ensuing Teapot Dome scandal forced the resignations of Fall (who later went to prison) [and who forever gave his name to the colloquialism: "fall guy"] and Edward Denby, the Secretary of the Navy.

In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, the Nixon Administration tried to lease Elk Hills to boost domestic oil production. In 1984, 1986, and 1987, the Reagan Administration proposed selling Elk Hillsfor a lump sum payment of $1.5 billion that would go toward reducing the federal budget deficit. Each time, Congress wisely blocked the sale of Elk Hills.

But where Fall, Nixon, and Reagan had failed, Gore succeeded. ... President Clinton took Gore's advice and approved a deal to let oil companies buy some of the reserves. The White House then pushed to have language authorizing the sales inserted in the 1996 defense authorization bill, which Congress ultimately approved.

Oil companies bid on the field and, finally, on Oct 6, 1997, the Energy Department announced that the government would sell its interest in the 47,000-acre Elk Hills reserve to Occidental Petroleum Corp for $3.65 billion. It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental's U.S. oil reserves overnight. . . .

Although the Energy Dept was required to assess the likely environmental consequences of the proposed sale, it didn't. Instead, it hired a private company, ICF Kaiser International, Inc., to complete the assessment. The general chairman of Gore's presidential campaign, Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.

Just hours after the announcement of the Elk Hills sale, Gore stood across town on the campus of Georgetown University and delivered a speech to the White House Conference on Climate Change on the "terrifying prospect" of global warming, a problem he blamed on the unchecked use of fossil fuels such as oil. . . .

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[Occidental Petroleum] has been a steady supplier of campaign funds to Gore and to the Democratic Party, though its relationship with Gore goes far deeper. Armand Hammer, who built Occidental Petroleum into the behemoth it is today and who's been described as "the Godfather of American corporate corruption," liked to say that he had Gore's father, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., "in my back pocket." When the elder Gore left the Senate in 1970, Hammer gave him a $500,000-a-year job as the chairman of Island Coal Creek Company, an Occidental subsidiary, and a seat on Occidental's board of directors. By 1992, Gore owned Occidental stock valued at $680,000. . . .

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Consider the lineup:

Tony Coelho . . . resigned in disgrace from the House of Representatives amid charges that he was involved in a sweetheart deal with Michael Milken, the notorious junk-bond dealer.

Nathan Landow . . . investigated for trying to influence the testimony of Kathleen Willey, the White House volunteer who alleged that President Clinton groped her in a corridor outside the Oval Office.

Franklin Haney . . . indicted on 42 counts of making illegal contributions to Tennessee politicians and investigated by Congress for financial irregularities in the lease of a Washington office building that is now home to the FCC.

Maria Hsia . . . indicted for making improper campaign contributions.

Howard Glicken . . . convicted of persuading a foreign national to contribute to a campaign.

Mark Jimenez . . . indicted for making illegal campaign contributions, and currently a fugitive from justice living in the Philippines.

What do they all have in common?

Albert Gore, Jr.

Some are currently employed by, or otherwise involved in, Gore's presidential campaign. Others are past associates that Gore would like the public and the press to forget as he pursues the highest office in the land. . . .

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Albert Gore, Jr.'s Top 10 Career Patrons

1. Ernst & Young International

2. BellSouth Corp.

3. Goldman Sachs

4. D.E. Shaw & Co./Kohliner families

5. Citigroup, Inc.

6. Viacom, Inc.

7. Mattel, Inc./The Learning Co.

8. Eskind family

9. Walt Disney Co.

10. Olan Mills family

See also: Tony Coelho ; William J. Clinton

Bill Bradley - From The Buying of the President 2000: On Jan 24, 1989, members of the Senate Finance Committee, then chaired by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, held a hearing to discuss the wave of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts that had sent shock waves through the American Economy.

"In 1981, the total value of leveraged-buyout transactions in this country was $3 billion," Bentsen explained to his fellow committee members. "By 1987 that had increased over ten times, until last year alone, in the acquisition of Kraft and RJR-Nabisco, that acquisition by itself- those acquisitions- were shown to be at $36 billion."

Even more troubling, Bentsen explained, were the rivers of red ink that leveraged buyouts were adding to the bottom lines of so many American companies. "The net result of all these transactions is that you're seeing a corporate debt burden that is being tied to a reduction in corporate equity," he said. "Over the period of 1984 to 1987, the non-financial corporations in this country retired a net of $313 billion in equity, and at the same time borrowed a net of $613 billion in debt."

The surge in corporate debt wasn't the only reason for concern. The leveraged-buyout spree of the 1980s brought an unprecedented wave of bankruptcies, layoffs, plant closings, and financial frauds. A few got fantastically rich. Hundreds of thousands of others- ordinary Americans who'd worked for years for companies that were part of their communities- lost their jobs, their pensions, and their standards of living.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee the same day, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady discussed the effects that the wave of leveraged buyouts and the growing pile of junk debt had on federal tax revenues. "Since interest payments are deductible but corporate dividends are not, there is a substantial tax advantage that accrues to LBOs and other transactions that effectively substitute corporate debt for equity," Brady testified.

In other words, a company that generated profits and issued dividends to shareholders also paid taxes, a company whose profits went to paying off mountains of junk bond debt paid no taxes at all.

It was just the arcane issue that typically fascinated the cerebral second-term Senator from New Jersey, Bill Bradley. As one of the key architects of the Tax Reform act of 1986, Bradley was familiar with the intricacies of corporate finance. . . . He was acutely aware of the vast assortment of loopholes, shelters, and other devices that wealthy individuals and corporations used to avoid paying federal income taxes. If anyone was qualified to understand the implications of the shift from equity to debt, it was Bill Bradley.

But rather that address the issue of the unlimited deduction for corporate interest that, as Treasury Secretary Brady described it, allowed the junk bond dealers "to change the rules of the game," Bradley decided to focus on the short-term. Brady suggested that interest deductions be limited to prevent the abuses of the leverages-buyout artists; Bradley preferred to accentuate the positive. He noted that those who sold companies to corporate raiders earned capital gains, which were subject to income taxes.

The bottom line, to Bradley at least, was this: "And well- and so, it's a wash to the federal government in terms of tax revenues."

In this case, however, Bradley, an Ivy Leaguer and Rhodes scholar, was wrong in a big way.

In 1994, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, total corporate deductions for interest came to $611 billion. The sum of long- and short-term capital gains- that is, the amount of money all individual taxpayers earned by selling stocks, real estate, art, and so on - totaled just $150 billion. And the revenue produced by that $150 billion was far less. The maximum tax rate on capital gains in 1994 was 28 percent, meaning that at most the capital gains tax raised was $42 billion- less than a tenth of the value of the corporate interest write-off.

For the record, the $611 billion in total interest deductions that year also dwarfed the $173 billion in total federal income taxes paid by corporations.

Debt had indeed produced a new set of rules, but Bradley preferred to think of it as "a wash."

Nine months after the hearing, in Oct 1989, the Washington Post reported that takeover artists had flooded Congress with contributions the year before. The top recipient was none other than Bradley, who received $96,000 in contributions- mostly from executives of two firms, Wesray Capital Corporation and Hambrecht & Quist- in a year he wasn't even running for reelection....

In 1992, in an interview with a writer for the New Republic, Bradley said that he opposed any attempt to use the tax code to rein in hostile takeovers....

Over the course of his political career, Bradley has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from officers and executives of firms in the corporate-takeover business. Some highlights: at least $50,000 from Wesray Capital Corporation; at least $65,500 from Hambrecht & Quist; at least $84,250 from Skadden, Arps, Meagher and Flom, a New York firm that made millions advising corporate raiders, at least$102,601 from Prudential Securities, Inc. (formerly Prudential Bache Securities) and Prudential Insurance Company of America; $148,800 from Goldman Sachs, and at least 4228,000 from Solomon Smith Barney (now a subsidiary of Citigroup, Bradley's No. 1 career patron).

Before it collapsed in 1990, Bradley took in nearly $20,000 from the notorious Drexel Burnham Lanbert, Inc. In 1986, Bradley even attended Drexel's Predators' Ball, a lavish party at which Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, Nelson Peltz, and other corporate raiders could rub elbows with junk bond king, Michael Milken, savings-and-loan operators, and favored politicians.

Few of their endeavors could be described as "good." Consider:

●        Michael Milken, who at the height of the buyout binge was paid bonuses of up to $40 million a year, pleaded guilty to six felony counts for violating securities laws in 1990. He was fined $400 million and sentenced to ten years in prison. Milken's junk bonds, which gave corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Norman Peltz the ready cash they needed to acquire such companies as Trans World Airlines and National Can Company, saddled those same companies with high-interest debt for years afterward.

●        In 1986, Salomon Smith Barney, known as Salomon Brothers at the time, turned its attention from manipulating federal Treasury Bond auctions (for which the company was fined $200 million in May 1992) to managing the leveraged buyout of Revco, then the second-largest chain of drugstores in the United States. Salomon made $38 million on the deal. The cost of servicing Salomon's junk bonds was greater than the company's cash flow, however, and it declared bankruptcy in 1988. Two years later Revco's shareholders, bondholders, and creditors sued Salomon Brothers, among others, for fraudulently misrepresenting Revco's financial condition to sell the $1.2 billion worth of junk bonds used to buy the company out. (Salomon Brothers settled the suit for $30 million.)

●        Victor Posner, another takeover artist and one of the highest-paid executives of the 1980s, looted some $65 million from the worker pension funds of eight companies he owned as a means of expanding his business empire and paying for his lavish lifestyle. Posner used company funds to pay for a yacht and horses; he was also fond of putting family members on his payrolls. In 1987 Posner pleaded no contest to filing fraudulent federal income tax returns; a U.S. District Court judge ordered him to pay more than $4 million in back taxes, penalties, and interest.

●        The 1989 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, Inc. - at the time, the largest such deal in history - led to the layoffs of some 825 salaried employees, 700 hourly wage-earners, and another 115 temporary workers, as the company struggled to pay off the $25 billion in debt it had taken on. When Philip Morris Companies, Inc., bought out Kraft Foods, Inc. that same year for $12 billion, it laid off some 400 Kraft employees; another 2,000 positions disappeared at the company as workers who retired or found other jobs weren't replaced.

Wesray Capital all but invented the leveraged buyout. The firm was started by William E. Simon, who was Treasury Secretary under President Gerald Ford, and Raymond G. Chambers, a tax accountant. It made its first big killing in 1982 when it bought Gibson Greeting Cards, Inc. To buy the company, Wesray put down $1 million of its own money and borrowed another $80 million. A year later Wesray arranged an initial public offering for Gibson, and sold it off for $290 million. Simon's personal profit was estimated at $66 million. As for the $80 million in debt, that stayed with Gibson; the newly public company had to repay the loan.

In 1986, Wesray bought out Simmons Mattress Company, which manufactured the Beautyrest mattress and the Hide-A-Bed convertible sofa, for some $120 million. Wesray sold off the company's overseas operations, slashed its workforce from its peak of 4,000 to 2,500 in 1988, and then sold it for $249 million to new investors.

The new investors were Simmons' own employees, most of whom were not even aware of the terms of the deal. Wesray cancelled the workers' 401(K) pension plan and put an employee stock ownership plan in its place. The ESOP then borrowed $249 million, mostly from banks, the proceeds of which ended up in the pockets of the Wesray investors. The employees of Simmons, as the new owners of the company, would pay the debt off over ten years. In return for their retirement nest eggs and the debt they were taking on, the workers got shares in the new company valued at roughly $10 each.

By 1990 the shares were worth about 50 cents apiece. . . .

By 1990, Simon had moved on to other investment endeavors . . . . And six years later, Bradley left the Senate, leaving a trail of scorn in his wake.

He blamed "the power of money in politics" for the public's mistrust of government. Once out of office, he pledged to "energize movements in states to send Washington a message for radical campaign-finance reform."

But Bradley chose an odd way to follow through on his pledge. A month after his retirement from the Senate, he was pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the same Wall Street brokerages whose practices he defended form the Senate. Instead of toiling in the grass roots, he took a job with J.P. Morgan Services, Inc., that paid him $100,000 for consulting work. Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York, a J.P. Morgan subsidiary, paid him a $200,000 fee, again for consultations. And Van Beuren Management, Inc, a New Jersey firm closely tied to Raymond Chambers, hired Bradley as well. Bradley has not disclosed what he did for the company or how much he was paid.

What Bradley's financial disclosure statement shows is that after he left the Senate, he wasn't building a movement for reform. Rather, he was doing what he's done best for more than twenty years, chasing down cash. . . .

In Dec 1998, he went public with the news that he would seek his party's nomination in 2000. . . .

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"I want to give people a sense of where we're headed in the midst of all this change that we're experiencing now on multiple levels," he explains on his campaign's Web site. "And I want to do that in a way that allows people once again to regain some faith in their democracy- that their participation actually counts. You don't have to give money. That's important, but your participation also counts. The key to this campaign is going to be to get more and more people who have not been a part of campaigns to get involved because they recognize that something is different."

If the advisory board he's chosen for his campaign is any indication, Bradley hasn't been very successful in reaching out beyond his base of well-heeled contributors. He's surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders, corporate raiders, and high-powered attorneys.

His campaign treasurer, Theodore V. Wells, Jr., is a partner in the New Jersey law firm Lowenstein, Sandler, Kohl, Fisher and Boylan, Bradley's No. 12 career patron. Wells made a name for himself defending James Regan, a general partner of Princeton/Newport Partners, L.P., who was indicted and convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for insider trading. Four other partners of Princeton/Newport, and a trader with Drexel Burnham Lambert, were also found guilty in the case. All six convictions were later overturned on appeal.

Wells has defended a host of other high-profile clients. He represented Exxon Corporation in 1990 when the government launched three separate criminal probes into the company's involvement in an oil spill in the waters that separate Staten Island and New Jersey. Exxon eventually pleaded guilty to reduced charges and paid $15 million in fines.

Wells defended Salim "Sandy" Lewis, a Wall Street trader who pleaded guilty to manipulating the share price of Fireman's Fund Corporation in concert with Ivan Boesky, the notorious arbitrageur, who also pleaded guilty to charges of insider trading.

More recently, Wells successfully defended Mike Espy, the disgraced former Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton Administration who accepted more than $35,000 in gratuities from companies his department regulated.

Wells is hardly an anomaly. Bradley's top advisers and fund-raisers include Joseph H. Flom, an attorney with Skadden, Arps and a major fund-raiser for Bill Clinton; Louis B. Susman, a partner in Salomon Smith Barney, the Wall Street investment firm; and John W. Jordan II, whose firm, Jordan Industries, Inc. deals in junk bonds and leveraged buyouts. All are among Bradley's most generous career patrons.

Bradley has also added Raymond Chambers, the "Ray" in Wesray, to his board of advisers. Chambers jumped on President Bush's "thousand points of light" bandwagon in 1990 and formed the Points of Light Foundation.

Another not-for-profit organization, the Points of Light Initiative, shared the same Morristown, New Jersey, mailing address as Wesray Capital and Van Beuren Management- the same company that hired Bradley as a consultant for an undisclosed sum a month after he left the Senate. Since 1990, Van Beuren has given Republican Party committees more than $190,000 in soft money. . . .

Bradley's campaign chairman is Douglas Berman, who as a teenager met Bradley when he was still a star for the New York Knicks. Berman managed Bradley's 1978 and 1984 Senate races; he also managed James Florio's successful 1989 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Berman spent one year as the state's treasurer, then went on to work for Wall Street financier Jerome Kohlberg, a former partner of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, which made millions managing the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. . . .

~ ~ ~

"The choice of tax reform is that you get lower rates in exchange for giving up certain credit exclusions or deductions," Bradley said on the Senate floor on June 11, 1986. "You give up those loopholes which only some people use, so that the tax rates on everyone can be lowered dramatically."

That was the theory behind the Tax Reform Act of 1986. By closing the loopholes that allowed millionaires to pay no taxes, all Americans could enjoy a huge reduction in their tax rates. The particular loophole that Bradley wanted to close that day was the deduction for contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts, a provision in the Internal Revenue Code that overwhelmingly benefitted not the wealthy, but the middle class.

Passed in 1981, the IRA deduction was hailed by members of both political parties as a tool to provide additional retirement savings for the middle class. Journalists Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele reported in their 1994 book, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes, that the tax break did just that. Some 90 percent of taxpayers taking the deduction earned less than $75,000 a year - hardly the wealthy. But Bradley didn't see it that way.

He brandished a chart that had a different take on the numbers. "It says that the upper income," Bradley told his colleagues, referring to his visual aid, "those making more than $40,000- 15 percent, the top 15 percent of the American taxpayers- take 40 percent of the deductions, contribute 50 percent of all money contributed to IRAs, and realize 60 percent of all tax savings."

In other words, those earning as little as $40,000 a year are in the upper-income bracket. Under Bradley's scheme, they would be treated just like someone earning $400,000 or $4 million. ... Whereas before the top tax rate of 50 percent applied only to the wealthiest, the plan Bradley crafted lowered it to 28 percent. That new top rate kicked in for married couples earning more than $29,750, and single filers earning more than $17,850. So by Bradley's reckoning, $40,000 was a little too high an income to qualify as middle class.

While Bradley fought to close the IRA "loophole," he chose to leave alone another retirement plan that got special treatment in the tax code. Known as Keogh plans, they can be used only by self-employed professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and investors, and by partnerships such as law firms. Keogh plans allow these better-off individuals to shield up to 30 percent of their incomes from taxes- a far greater amount than the maximum $2,500 that a factory worker or a secretary could save tax-free in his or her IRA. In 1994 those earning more than $100,000 a year shielded $5.7 billion in income by paying it into Keogh plans- and realized, to use Bradley's language, 70 percent of the tax savings.

Of course, even without the tax advantages, one can still open an IRA. But without the tax advantage, it's less desirable. In 1985, before Congress eliminated the deduction, 16.2 million taxpayers took advantage of the tax break to save for their retirements. By 1994 that number had fallen to 3.9 million. . . .

~ ~ ~

Preserving the Keogh tax break for wealthy professionals while killing the IRA deduction for the middle class wasn't the only favor Bradley did for the well-off during his three terms in the Senate. While Bradley may have eschewed constituent services for the many, there were a few New Jerseyans whom he was willing to go to bat for. They just happened to be multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Bradley often pointed to the fact that pharmaceutical companies were one of the largest employers in the state as his motive for protecting their interests. But more than once, his favors for drug makers, who contributed large sums of money to his campaigns, flew in the face of the public interest. On two occasions Bradley even abandoned the public stand he took against tax breaks for special interests to save the pharmaceutical industry's biggest boondoggle, Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code.

Under Section 936, companies that shift manufacturing jobs to Puerto Rico receive as much as a 100 percent tax break on revenues earned in the territory. The purpose of the tax credit, which first took effect afer World War II, was to encourage U.S. companies to invest in Puerto Rico, thus creating jobs and raising wages on the impoverished island. While the standard of living in Puerto Rico remains far below that of the United States, the tax break has proven to be a lucrative way for U.S. companies to boost their profits.

Although any industry that operates in Puerto Rico can benefit from the tax credit, drug makers benefit more than any other. A 1992 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that from 1980 to 1990 the Possessions Tax Credit generated a $10.1 billion windfall- about 56 percent of the tax benefit- for 26 pharmaceutical companies. Drug companies not only have factories on the island, but they also shelter income earned in the United States there by transferring patents for highly profitable drugs to their Puerto Rican subsidiaries.

Little wonder that one of Bradley's colleagues in the Senate, Democrat David Pryor of Arkansas, branded Section 936 "the mother of all tax breaks."

Bradley first saved the Possessions Tax Credit in 1986, just as Congress was hammering out the details of the Tax Reform Act. By that time, it had become clear that Section 936 was doing little to improve conditions in Puerto Rico, and was costing the Treasury billions. . . .

The drug industry, understandably, moved to save its lucrative subsidy. In a letter to Bradley, the chief executives of nine drug companies made a thinly veiled threat to move their operations to foreign countries if Section 936 was repealed. Bradley later told the Center that he didn't remember the letter, adding that it wouldn't have mattered anyway. He fought to save Section 936 and won. "The pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest employers in New Jersey [50,000 jobs], and I didn't need a letter from the companies to know the importance of the industry to my state and my constituents," Bradley told the Center. The sweeping Tax Reform act of 1986 left the provision alone.

When "the mother of all tax breaks" came under assault a few years later, Bradley once again came to the drug industry's rescue. On March 11, 1992, Pryor introduced an amendment to do away with Section 936. It was the first step in a larger effort to force drug makers to contain the skyrocketing prices of prescription drugs. (Prescription drug prices have increased 146 percent in ten years- triple the rate of inflation.) Closing the Section 936 loop-hole would have saved the nation's taxpayers more than $7 billion over five years. But the pharmaceutical industry's allies immediately took to the Senate floor to block the proposal. First up on the podium was Bradley.

Bradley was the second-ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, the tax-writing panel that had jurisdiction over Pryor's amendment. He was soon followed by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the committee's chairman, who made it clear that Pryor's amendment was going nowhere. . . .

Those weren't the only special tax breaks Bradley sought for special interests. From 1986 to 1993, Bradley introduced at least 45 bills on behalf of chemical companies seeking a reduction or suspension of the taxes they pay on imported chemicals used in a variety of products, from pesticides and drugs to dyes and resins.

Bradley explained away the contradiction between his effort to close tax loopholes embodied in the 1986 Tax Reform Act and doling out corporate welfare to chemical companies by saying, "I think the distinction is, if you believe in open trade, you believe in as low a tariff as possible. You want to get to a world where there are no tariffs."

Bradley was so enamored of free trade that he even tried to eliminate tariffs for the benefit of foreign companies. He cut tariffs for Dutch and French firms as well as American corporations, all with dire consequences for the environment and public health.

Among the substances Bradley repeatedly sought tariff exemptions for are highly toxic pesticides, ethyl parathion, methyl parathion, and malathion. All three belong to a class of chemicals known as organophosphates, which were originally developed during World War II by the Nazis for use in chemical warfare. The EPA lists all three pesticides as a danger to birds, mammals, and aquatic life.

Bradley won the duty suspensions on the pesticides for Cheminova, Inc., a Danish chemical giant whose U.S. subsidiary is based in Wayne, N.J.

When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, ethyl parathion attacks the nervous system, causing nausea, vomiting, headaches, blurred vision, sweating, drooling, muscle spasms, and, in some cases, coma and death. It has been linked to the deaths of at least 70 people and illnesses in thousands of farm workers. In 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of ethyl parathion on nine crops in the United States. Cheminova still manufactures compounds containing ethyl parathion in the United States for sale abroad.

Methyl parathion is an agricultural pesticide that has found its way into urban areas with disastrous results. In 1996 an exterminator sprayed methyl parathion in houses and buildings in Pascagoula, Mississippi, causing the evacuation of dozens of families and homes and a $50 million federal cleanup. A similar incident led to the contamination of more than 200 homes in Ohio in 1994.

The third pesticide that Bradley won tariff exemptions for, malathion, can cause nausea, sweating, and muscular weakness in people even at low levels of exposure. In 1999, health authorities in New York City ordered the spraying of all five boroughs with malathion in an effort to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes. In 1998, a similar effort in Florida to eradicate Mediterranean fruit flies led to a class-action lawsuit by residents in the sprayed areas who complained of headaches and respiratory problems.

The duty suspension Bradley won for malathion in 1993 alone was worth $1.1 million annually. The tax break on all three pesticides was worth $2.5 million annually. . . .

In 1993, Bradley won Biocraft Laboratories of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, tariff suspensions for six chemicals. In the mid-1990s Biocraft was responsible for more than half the industrial air pollution in Bergen, New Jersey, releasing nearly 500,000 pounds of dichloromethane, a solvent that can be breathed in or absorbed through the skin, potentially causing cancer and liver and kidney damage. It was the fourth-biggest source of toxic emissions in the state. In 1994 the Food and Drug administration and the Justice Dept also forced Biocraft to recall nine major drugs and to stop making five drugs because the company failed to meet testing, quality-control, record-keeping, and manufacturing standards.

Bradley handed out pork to another New Jersey polluter, Merck & Company. In 1992 he won Merck tariff suspensions that are worth $10 million annually. In July 1991 New Jersey Citizen Action listed Merck among ten companies responsible for nearly half of the toxic waste dumped in New Jersey.

Also making the top ten polluter list was Givaudan Corporation, of Clifton, New Jersey, a subsidiary of Roche Holding, Ltd., the Swiss multinational. A month later, Bradley won Givaudan a tariff exemption for ethanon-1,2-naphthyl, a chemical used in making scents.

Bradley even won pork for Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical giant, which only a year earlier had leaked methyl isocyanate- the same gas responsible for the deaths of thousands in Bhopan, India, in 1984- from its plant in West Virginia. Rhone-Poulenc didn't report the leak for three days.

Rhone-Poulenc is also the world's only producer of aldicarb, which the Natural Resources Defense Council has called "the most acutely toxic pesticide registered for use on food." It is responsible for the largest case of food-borne pesticide poisoning in U.S. history: more than a thousand people fell ill in 1986 for aldicarb-tainted watermelons. Because of the health risks, eleven countries have banned or deregistered the pesticide, but the company still sells it in more than 70 countries.

In all, Bradley won at least $100 million worth of tariff suspensions for drug and chemical makers. Little wonder that the pharmaceutical industry rewarded its most valuable player on Capitol Hill with record amounts of campaign money. . . .

~ ~ ~

After leaving the Senate, Bradley became an outspoken advocate of campaign-finance reform. But while he was in office, he was one of the Senate's most prolific fund-raisers. In 1984 and 1990 he built huge war chests even though he faced weak opponents. In 1984 his campaign even cooked its own books so that it could raise more money for the general election.

Under federal election law, individuals can give a candidate up to $1,000 for a primary election and another $1,000 for the general election. After a primary election is over, candidates can raise money for it only if they still have debts incurred for that election. In 1984, Bradley's campaign operatives created the illusion of a leftover debt from his primary campaign by redesignating money spent for the general election as having been spent for the primary. This enabled them to let individuals "max out" with $2,000 contributions- and PACs max out at $10,000- long after the primary election was over.

That wasn't the only irregularity Bradley's campaigns have been accused of. In 1990, contributions from Wall Street made him "the king of bundled contributions," according to the Center for Responsive Politics. "Bundling" refers to donations given to a candidate on the same day by many employees of one company. That year, Bradley collected bundles of at least $20,000 from Salomon Brothers, Smith Barney, and Shearson, Lehman, Hutton (all three firms are now part of Citigroup, Bradley's No. 1 career patron); Merrill Lynch (his No. 2 career patron); Goldman Sachs (his No. 3 career patron); Morgan Stanley (No. 4); Time Warner (No. 5); and Prudential Securities (now part of Prudential Insurance Company of America, his No. 6 career patron.)

Some time later, the bundled donations from Prudential caught the eye of FEC lawyers. In 1994, they determined that the securities firm had violated federal campaign-finance laws when its president, George Ball, instructed employees and vendors to donate to Bradley and other candidates. Prudential-Bache, which raised $140,000 for Bradley from employees, vendors, and other securities firms, eventually paid a $550,000 fine, the largest ever levied by the FEC. Bradley immediately announced that he would return Prudential's money. But he kept the bundles he received from other Wall Street patrons.

As a presidential candidate, Bradley has resumed taking money from Prudential. Employees of the company gave him more than $27,000 in the first half of 1999, bringing their total contributions to Bradley over his career to more than $100,000....

Before he left the Senate, Bradley sided with Wall Street in supporting legislation- now law- to insulate securities firms from class-action lawsuits. In 1994, Orange County, California, had gone broke, making the record books as the biggest local-government bankruptcy in U.S. history. The county lost $1.6 billion and at least 1,200 county employees lost their jobs. Within weeks, the county sued its investment manager. Merrill Lynch eventually agreed to pay the county $437 million to settle the suit and $30 million to end a criminal probe by the county's district attorney. The securities industry wasted no time in pressing Congress to limit such lawsuits, and Congress passed the Securities Litigation Reform act. Bradley voted for the bill and voted to override President Clinton's veto of the legislation. . . .

~ ~ ~

During his brief retirement before he ran for President, Bradley raked in millions in speaking and consulting fees. In addition to the $300,000 in consulting fees he got from J.P. Morgan and its subsidiary, Morgan Guaranty, he was paid $131,250 by the Gartner Group, Inc., a consulting company in Stamford, Connecticut, during the same period. Neither J.P. Morgan, the Gartner Group, nor Bradley's campaign would tell the Center what he did to earn those fees.

Whatever he did for the more than $400,000 they paid him, neither was a full-time job. He still had time to be a visiting scholar at no fewer than four universities, from East Coast (the University of Maryland) to West (Stanford University).

His traveling around the country as an itinerant scholar also proved lucrative. Private companies were willing to pay $30,000 a pop for a chance to hear the ex-Knick and ex-Senator. One company, KeyCorp, a Cleveland-based bank and financial services firm that ranks among the Fortune 500, paid him an estimated $300,000 to $400,000 to speak at thirteen of its branches. . . .

For more on Goldman Sachs, GO TO > > > Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs?

For more on Prudential, GO TO > > > Prudential: A Nest on Shaky Ground .

For more on Wall Street, GO TO > > > Wall Street

Dan Harmon - From The Secret Life of Bill Clinton : . . . Sharlene Wilson had been the bartender at Le Bistro, a Little Rock nightclub where Roger Clinton used to play with his rock band Dealer's Choice. Big Brother would come by from time to time with one or two of his State Troopers. . . .

"Roger had all the pretty girls and drugs and the fast life, and Bill was pretty envious of this," she said. On one occasion "Roger the Dodger" came back to the bar and said he needed two grams of cocaine right away. They carried out the deal near the ladies room. The Dodger then borrowed her "tooter," ... and handed it to the governor....

"I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall. He must have had an adenoid problem because he casually stuck my tooter up his nose," she said. "He was so messed up that night, he slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat here like a complete idiot."...

Afterward they went back to the Governor's Mansion and partied into the early hours of the morning. "I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that we had a governor who got high."

That was not the only time she snorted cocaine with Bill Clinton. She claimed to have been present with him at a series of "toga parties" at the Coachman's Inn outside Little Rock between 1979 and 1981. "I was, you know, the hostess with the mostess, the lady with the snow," she said. "I'd serve drinks and lines of cocaine on a glass mirror." . . .

People shared sexual partners in what amounted to a Babylonian orgy. They were elite gatherings of two to twenty people, mostly public officials, lawyers, and local notables, cavorting in a labyrinth of interconnected rooms with women that included teenage girls. Bill Clinton was there at least twice, she said, snorting cocaine "quite avidly" with Dan Harmon.

She gave a graphic description of the sexual activities that Bill Clinton preferred. She remembered seeing a distinctive mole at the base of his stomach. "It's darned me that he's managed to get elected through all this," she said. . . .

Sharlene was surprisingly frank about her job at the Mena Airport in the mid-1980s. The cocaine was flown in on twin-engine Cessnas, sometimes as often as every day. "I'd pick up the pallets and make the run down to Texas. The drop-off was at the Cowboys Stadium. I was told that nobody would ever bother me, and I was never bothered". ...

"If there was a problem I was to call Dan Harmon... A lot of the cocaine that came into Mena was taken up to Springdale in northwest Arkansas," she said, "where it was stuffed into chickens for reshipment to the rest of the country." . . .

But she had another job, which she revealed to me two years later when we were allowed to meet and talk in relative privacy at the prison library. This time she was trembling with emotion, giving free rein to the terrible remorse that had been eating at her for nine years. She used to pick up cocaine deliveries on the railway tracks near the little town of Alexander, thirty miles south of Little Rock. . . .

"Every two weeks, for years, I'd go to the tracks, I'd pick up the package, and I'd deliver it to Dan Harmon, either straight to his office, or at my house. ... Sometimes it was flown in by air, sometimes it would be kicked out of the train. A big bundle, two feet by one and a half feet, like a bale of hay, so heavy I'd have trouble lifting it ... Roger the Dodger picked it up a few times."

But in the summer of 1987 one of the drops disappeared. Furious, Harmon brought out some of his men to watch the delivery on the night of August 22. They were expecting a delivery of 3 to 4 pounds of cocaine and 5 pounds of "weed."

Sharlene was supposed to make the pickup that night but she had been "high-balling" a mixture of cocaine and crystal and was totally "strung-out." They told her to wait in the car, which was parked off Quarry Road. It was around midnight.

"It was scary. I was high, very high. I was told to sit there and they'd be back. It seemed forever. ... I heard two trains. Then I heard some screams, loud screams."

"When Harmon came back, he jumped in the car and said, 'Let's go.' He was scared. It looked like there was blood all down his legs."

She later learned that a group of boys had been intercepted at the drop sight. According to Sharlene some of them had managed to get away, but Kevin Ives, 17, and Don Henry, 16, were captured. Harmon's men interrogated them as they were lying on the ground, face down, hands tied behind their backs.

They were kicked and beaten, and finally executed. One of the boys was stabbed to death with a "survival knife." The bodies were wrapped in a tarpaulin, carried to a different spot on the line, and placed across the railway tracks so that the bodies would be mangled by the next train.

The following day Harmon told Sharlene that she would have to ditch her car. He gave her $500 in cash and told her to deliver a packet of cocaine to an address in Rockford, Illinois. ... from there she fled to the obscurity of Nebraska. . . .

I have Sharlene's signed confession, which she gave to the narcotics detail of the Little Rock Police Dept. on May 28, 1993. The FBI has is, so does the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The whole damn government has it. . . .

See on the Net: The Crimes of Mena ; Arkansas Justice ; Big News from Arkansas

Recommended Books: The Boys on the Tracks ; The Secret Life of Bill Clinton ; Compromised.

Dan Lasater - From: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: . . . Dan Lasater -- the Dixie Godfather, and the friend of and provider for the Clinton brothers. . . .

PATTY-ANNE SMITH was sixteen years old when she fell under the ruinous influence of Dan Lasater, friend and patron of the Clinton brothers. ... Her nicknames were Muffin and Precious. She was still a child, but not for long.

"I was a virgin until two months after I met Dan Lasater. He plied me with cocaine and gifts for sexual favors and I finally gave in and slept with him," she said in a police statement . . . At the time Lasater was 40 . . . Under his tutelage she soon became addicted to hard drugs....

Lasater arranged for a corrupt doctor to give her "a pelvic examination and prescribe birth control pills." Once on contraceptives, she was made available to Lasater's business colleagues, including Arkansas State Senator George Locke. In the end Patty-Anne fled Arkansas after it was explained to her that he planned to use her as a semi-prostitute to "entertain."...

~ ~ ~

Dan Lasater is a talented entrepreneur. . . . By the time he was 30 he was the owner of the Ponderosa steakhouse chain in Ohio and Indiana, with annual sales of more than $300 million. Cashing in his equity for around $15 million, he turned to horse racing and soon became the most successful breeder and racer of thoroughbreds in the world.

With stables of 80 horses in Florida and Kentucky, he was the leading money winner three years in succession -- 1974, 1975, and 1976 -- netting a total of $10 million in prizes . . . But according to a police statement by one of his employees, Lasater's success with the horses was achieved by "putting in the boot" -- fixing the races.

It was at the Oaklawn Race Track in Hot Springs that Lasater first befriended Virginia Kelley, the mother of Governor Clinton, and began to close his vice around the First Family of Arkansas.

Collecting governors was one of his business specialties. In early 1983 he bailed out Governor John Y. Brown of Kentucky with $300,000 cash in a paper sack at the Lexington airport. At the time Brown was desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the IRS. He had withdrawn $1 million out of a Florida bank without a "cash transient" report.

"I just took care of John Y.'s money problems," Lasater told his colleague Michael Drake. . . .

~ ~ ~

Lasater moved into the bond business in 1980. A brief business partnership with Senator George Locke was dissolved, because of enveloping SEC violations, before Lasater embarked on his own as Lasater & Company. One former broker told me that he never witnessed enough authentic business to justify the existence of Lasater's office . . .

He suspected that Lasater was "shuffling money." By the mid-1980s, Little Rock was a hub of petty racketeering and fly-by-night securities trading. The target: small, deregulated thrifts that had been neglected by the big firms on Wall Street. "You have no idea how crazy it was here in the mid-eighties," said Ron Davis, a former Lasater broker.

"At one point there were 54 investment houses in Little Rock. There were 4,000 brokers working in this city. In 1987 we did more institutional sales than any other city in the world, and that includes New York, London, and Tokyo. You had used car dealers signing up making a $1 million a year in commissions."

For investigators attuned to the methods of organized crime, the Lasater empire looked suspiciously like a laundromat for tens of millions of dollars of drug profits. Nor was this an idle hunch. In 1977 Lasater had lost a Lear jet in Santa Marta, Columbia, after it was confiscated by the Colombian authorities on suspicion of narcotics trafficking....

Among the passengers on the jet was Jamiel "Jimmy" Chagra, viewed as one of the most dangerous mob bosses in the United States....

~ ~ ~

Lasater had his own agents in the State Police. One of them was a narcotics investigator named Mike Mahone, whom he had befriended at the Oaklawn Race Track in the box of Virginia Kelley -- Governor Clinton's mother. Lasater spotted easy prey. The subsequent courtship offers a revealing insight into his methods of corrupting law enforcement.

First he invited Mahone to spend the July 4^th weekend, in 1985, in one of his condominiums at the Angel Fire Ski Resort. Having broken the ice, the bribery began.

It was disguised, of course. What Lasater did was to instruct one of his subordinates to buy a run-down property belonging to Mahone. The price was inflated, netting the State Trooper a windfall profit. Lasater also paid off $7,500 of a delinquent loan that Mahone had taken out in his sister's name.

In return for these little favors, Mahone was generous with police intelligence. In the early summer of 1986 he met with Lasater and Senator Locke at a hotel in Chicago to brief them on the status of the investigations into their drug activities. . . .

In the end, U.S. Attorney George Proctor offered Lasater a plea agreement that charged Lasater with a conspiracy to distribute cocaine for "recreational use." It was a slap on the wrists. Lasater was paroled after one year, most of it spent at a halfway house in Little Rock. The prosecutor was later appointed to be head of the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs by President Clinton. . . .

~ ~ ~

Governor Clinton gave Lasater a state pardon in 1990, purportedly so that he could regain his hunting license. The pardon was of dubious validity, because Lasater had been sentenced by a U.S. federal court, not a state court. But it sent a signal to the Arkansas authorities that Lasater should be allowed to resume his financial and broking activities without hindrance. . . .

~ ~ ~

Lasater & Company was deeply involved in the demise of thrifts in Illinois. One of them, First American Savings and Loan of Oak Brook, Illinois, fired back with a lawsuit against the firm in October 1985, alleging that Lasater had transferred "unprofitable investments from his personal account the account of the Plaintiff" after trading was closed.

The suit was taken over by the government's Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation in April 1986, after First American was seized by regulators.

It hired the Rose Law Firm to handle the case. The attorneys were Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster. They settled for a modest $200,000 in a sealed agreement that drew a veil over the reasons for the collapse of the S&L.

The Chicago Tribune ran a blistering series on Hillary Clinton's role. It accused her of a "glaring conflict of interest" for negotiating "a secret, out-of-court settlement" that ended a suit "against a family friend and an influential benefactor of her husband."

Patsy Thomasson handled the case for Lasater, who was by then in prison. She was more than just an executive vice-president. She was also a "financial and operations principal" of the brokerage firm, with direct liability for criminal misuse of client accounts. . . .

* * *

From: The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: . . . Dan Lasater also tried to befriend Governor Tony Anaya of New Mexico, offering him a consulting job at the end of his term. Anaya never took up the offer, but he did use taxpayer funds to construct an 8,900-foot runway at the Angel Fire Ski Resort owned by Dan Lasater.

The governor was viewed by his opponents as naive but honest. However, the Attorney General's Office in Sante Fe was later to investigate Lasater for suspected "narcotics trafficking via aircraft with possible Organized Crime ties" operating out of Angel Fire.

At the time of the alleged drug trafficking, Angel Fire was managed by Patsy Thomasson, later to become Director of the Office of Administration at the White House. "I put Patsy in as the assistant chairman, and she pretty well ran that project for me," said Lasater.

But the show trophy of his collection was undoubtedly Governor Clinton, who seemed to require more favors than most. . . .

* * *

From: Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA - . . . Lasater was a major investor in a ski resort named Angel Fire near Taos, New Mexico; where Governor Bill Clinton vacationed at Lasater's expense. Lasater later sold the resort to a Savings and Loan that eventually failed and was taken over by the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC).

In an article headlined "Probe of Clinton Pal Shut Down Early, Ex-Cop Says," Mike Galagher of The Albuquerque Journal revealed on Sept 20, 1994, that an Arkansas State Police investigator probing allegations of narcotics shipments by Lasater to the resort claimed his investigation was stonewalled by federal prosecutors. This left the clear suspicion that Lasater's money-laundering activities for the Agency gave him carte blanche to do what he pleased without law enforcement interference. . . .

See also: Patsy Thomasson

Diane Feinstein - Democratic Senator from California; former mayor of San Francisco.

From Washington on $10 Million a Day : Foreign Lobbying . . . But the China lobby's biggest friend in Congress is Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.

Feinstein's romance with China dates to the 1970s, when she was mayor of San Francisco and became close friends with Jiang Zemin, then mayor of Beijing and now China's president. In explaining her interest in U.S.-China relations, Feinstein has said, "In my last life I was Chinese."

It's not possible to confirm this but even if true, Feinstein's passion for Beijing is more likely linked to the fact that her husband in her current life, merchant banker Richard Blum, has substantial business and real estate interests in China. Blum manages $750 million in investments for about 70 companies, with a large chunk of that amount tied up in China.

Blum is also a director of Shanghai Pacific Partners, a major import-export firm. In 1994, Feinstein led the effort to renew MFN for Beijing at a time that her husband was preparing to invest $150 million of his clients' money, along with $2 million of his own, in China.

The China lobby has augmented its firepower by deploying a fleet of lobbyists to directly pressure Congress. ... In addition to Hogan & Hartson, the China lobby has retained Patton, Boggs-- which assigned eight lobbyists to the MFN campaign, including Tommy Boggs and Michael Brown, son of late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown; Hill and Knowlton, headed by Howard Paster; and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, past home to ex-Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor. These four firms alone took in at least $160,000 in 1996 to lobby on the MFN issue.

Donald J. Tyson - a/k/a "Chicken Man" - In his book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

I had been given comprehensive intelligence files from the Criminal Investigations Division of the Arkansas State Police, going back as far as the early 1970's . . . I was scarcely able to believe what I was seeing. Among the famous names of the Arkansas oligarchy that jumped out from page after page of criminal intelligence files was Don Tyson, the billionaire president of Tyson Foods and the avuncular patron of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton....

A gruff barrel-chested man with a cropped beard and a reputation for ruthless business practice, Don Tyson is one of the great characters of Arkansas. He presides over the biggest chicken processing operation in the world from his "Oval Office" -- a replica of the real one -- with dooor handles in the shape of eggs....

The family business, based in Springdale, has grown at an explosive rate since the 1960;s, swallowing up rival companies in a relentless quest for market share....

The documents I was looking at made me wonder about the origins of his liquidity. Here were files from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, marked DEA SENSITIVE, under the rubric of the "Donald TYSON Drug Trafficking Organization."

One was from the DEA office in Oklahoma City, dated December 14, 1982. It cited a confidential informant alleging that "TYSON smuggles cocaine from Colombia, South America inside race horses to Hot Springs, Arkansas." It cited the investigation tracking number for Don J. Tyson, a/k/a "Chicken Man," as Nadis 470067.

A second document from the DEA office in Tucson, dated July 9, 1984, stated that "the Cooperating Individual had information concerning heroin, cocaine and marijuana trafficking in the States of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri by the TYSON organization." The informant described a place called "THE BARN" which TYSON used as a "stash" location for large quantities of marijuana and cocaine.

"THE BARN" area is located between Springdale and Fayetteville, Arkansas, and from the outside the appearance of "THE BARN" looks run down. On the inside of "THE BARN" it is quite plush. . . .

~ ~ ~

A memo by the Criminal Investigative Section, dated March 22, 1976, states that Don Tyson "is an extremely wealthy man with much political influence and seems to be involved in most every kind of shady operation, especially narcotics, however, has to date gone without implication in any specific crime . . ."

The memo was triggered by a dispute between Tyson and the Teamsters Union over allegations of drug dealing and prostitution at a Teamsters-owned hotel leased by Tyson. Two sets of documents refer to alleged hit men employed by Tyson to kill drug dealers who owed him money. Another report alleged that Tyson was using his business plane to smuggle quart jars of methamphetamine. All told, it was a staggering portrait of a drug baron.

None of the allegations led to criminal charges, and it would soon become clear why. Police officers who tried to mount a case against Tyson were destroyed by their superiors in the State Police. The first to try was Beverly "B.J." Weaver, then an undercover narcotics officer in Springdale. Working the streets and bars of northwest Arkansas, disguised as a deaf woman, she collected detailed intelligence on Tyson's alleged smuggling network....

"There were loads going out with the chickens," she explained. "They'd put the coke in the rectums of the chickens, live chickens. That's how they'd move it."...

As the allegations from her informants mounted, she requested the intelligence files on Don Tyson. That is when her problems began. Her colleagues in the Springdale office -- who she now believes were "on the take" from the Tyson machine -- put out the word that she was "not stable," that she had "flipped out." Then it got rough. "They started passing out my photo on the streets, which put my life in danger. I became paranoid. I didn't trust my phone line. There was nobody I could really trust."...

By 1987 her position was untenable. Her career in ruins, she resigned from the police and found a job as a security guard in the Bahamas....

* * *

To Don Tyson, who has reportedly again become disenchanted with Clinton and is giving money to Bob Dole in the 1996 campaign, the business of politics has never been particularly complicated.

It consists of "a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money...a world where every quid has its quo."...

For more on Tyson Foods, GO TO > > > Down on the Factory Farms

Edward Mezvinsky - Democratic ex-Congressman from Iowa.

EX-CONGRESSMAN PLEADS GUILTY TO PYRAMID SCHEME

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 28, 2002 (AP) - Former Rep. Edward Mezvinsky pleaded guilty yesterday to defrauding friends and family members out of millions of dollars in a pyramid scheme.

The former Democratic congressman from Iowa had blamed his involvement in the scheme on manic depression and the effects of an anti-malaria drug he took while in Africa.

Mezvinsky, 65, pleaded guilty to 31 counts of fraud, admitting he bilked investors who handed over more than $10 million for deals he claimed to be arranging in Africa.

Gary Condit - U.S. Representative (D) from California; member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY

THE CONDIT CASE ISN'T JUST ABOUT ADULTERY. IT'S ABOUT PUBLIC TRUST AND NATIONAL SECURITY.

July 30, 2001

Last week, I asked a senior House member why Rep. Gary Condit was still on the Intelligence Committee. Mr. Condit himself describes the committee as concerned with "very sensitive issues of immediate and long-term national security." I reminded the lawmaker that Mr. Condit's behavior has clearly made him a prime candidate for blackmail. "Well, with all this coverage he no longer looks to be blackmailable," this Condit colleague said before quickly changing the subject.

That abdication of responsibility won't do. Mr. Condit has more to hide about his double life. That became clear when, just hours before police were to search his apartment, the California congressman was spotted throwing away a watch case another erstwhile paramour had given him. Presumably Mr. Condit's affairs are no longer news to his wife, so from whom was he trying to hide?

It's true that whether Mr. Condit can continue to be an effective representative is for the people in Modesto to decide. But it's clear he has abused the public trust in the course of a criminal investigation by withholding evidence and allowing himself to be compromised in ways that are far more serious than having a discreet affair. Mr. Condit should resign his membership on the Intelligence Committee. If he won't, it's up to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who named the Democratic members of that committee, to remove him. But there's "no reason to act now," Mr. Gephardt says.

Victoria Toensing, who served as chief council for the Senate Intelligence Committee in the 1980s, begs to differ. Mr. Condit is a "classic national-security risk," she says. There must be "a marriage-like trust" between the intelligence agencies and congressional intelligence committees.

Back in 1995 President Clinton made known his concerns about the danger of blackmail against high-ranking officials. In August of that year he signed Executive Order 12968, which states that individuals eligible for access to classified material must have "strength of character, trustworthiness, honesty, reliability, discretion, and sound judgment, as well as freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion."

Of course, three months later Mr. Clinton began his relationship with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He later told her he feared their phone sessions had been monitored by a "foreign embassy." In the end the president escaped accountability for his reckless disregard of national security. But that bad precedent is no reason for Congress to let Mr. Condit off the hook, as some of his colleague appear more than willing to do.

The House Ethics Committee has already received two separate complaints asking it to look into Rep. Condit's behavior. The first was by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The second was by Rep. Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who was the first member of Congress to call for an impeachment inquiry of President Clinton.

Mr. Barr's complaint notes there is "already substantial evidence" that Mr. Condit obstructed a law-enforcement investigation and has brought discredit to the House. He clearly misled police during their first two interviews about Ms. Levy's disappearance, confessing to their relationship only when cornered. In addition, stewardess Anne Marie Smith claims that Mr. Condit pressured her to deny their yearlong affair. Mr. Condit's law firm has admitted it e-mailed a "draft" statement to her that claimed she had not had a "romantic relationship" with him. If Mr. Condit encouraged perjury, that alone merits the close attention of the House Ethics Committee.

Unfortunately, the committee has a spotty reputation. Mort Kondracke of Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, calls it a "Keystone Kops outfit" that too often will "take endless years to come up with a conclusion."

Certainly, neither the committee nor House leaders are eager to act. Ethics Chairman Joel Hefley, a Colorado Republican, told National Public Radio: "Far as we know, Congressman Condit has not violated any laws. . . . I would hope I wouldn't have handled it quite that way, but who knows?"

Just last Wednesday, Mr. Gephardt actually told Alan Colmes of Fox News Channel that "Gary, as far as I know from reports I've read, is cooperating fully with the police." Lanny Davis, an erstwhile Clinton spinner, was "just dumbfounded. . . . He now knows that for two months, Mr. Condit misled and withheld material evidence from the police concerning his relationship, including that his wife was in town the last weekend."

Congress is allowing its desire to protect one of its own to override its responsibility to police its own ranks. Obviously, some members of Congress have strayed from their wedding vows. Mr. Condit, though, has engaged in reckless behavior and compromised the public trust. It's imperative that the House remove him from the Intelligence Committee and initiate an Ethics Committee probe that doesn't interfere with the police search for Chandra Levy.

For more, GO TO > > > WHO's Guarding the Hen House?

Gene and Nora Lum - Democratic fund-raisers.

From freerepublic:

Lum Pleads Guilty to Tax Fraud

Tulsa, Okla (AP) 8/13/98 - Democratic fund-raiser Gene K.H. Lum changed his plea in a tax fraud case to guilty Thursday as part of an agreement that seeks his cooperation in other investigations.

Lum, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to making illegal donations to Democratic campaigns, admitted he filed tax returns that claimed more than $7.1 million in false deductions for him and his wife.

Lum, 59, faces up to six years in prison and $500,000 in fines at a Nov 23 sentencing. . . .

Under the pleas agreement, the government agreed not to seek indictments against his wife, Nora, or their corporations....

The Lums, who operated a Tulsa-based gas pipeline company at the time of the violations, pleaded guilty last year to a charge of felony conspiracy for laundering $50,000 in illegal donations to 1994 congressional campaigns.

Their daughter, Trisha C. Lum, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation in a separate campaign finance incident.

Gene and Norn Lum each received 10 months in prison and $30,000 fines in that case.

The tax charges stemmed from information uncovered by independent counsel Daniel S. Pearson during his investigation of Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. Pearson closed his inquiry when Brown was killed in an airplane crash.

He transferred his findings about other people to the Justice Dept for continued investigation and prosecution.

~ ~ ~

Comments in the freerepublic forum: . . . Of some interest to me was the fact that the golf course Michael Brown (son of Ron Brown) was given a membership to (and which Bill Clinton often uses ...) in suburban Virginia was owned by the Bishop Estate of Hawaii. . . . Bishop put close to 100 million into a company called McKenzie Methane Gas a few years before Dynamic. Bishop also bought into a Red Chip bank with Mochtar Riady's brother in law. Bishop hired as its Washington law firm Verner Liipert and whose lobbyist is ex Gov. John Waihee. Waihee appointed 4 of the 5 Bishop Trustees. Waihee attends Clinton coffees. Waihee appointed Sen. Akaka. Verneer Liipert has another big name partner ex Sen. George Mitchell. Mitchell's son in law was president of Lum's company Dynamic Energy. Bishop owns 11% of Goldman Sachs. Sec of Treasury Robert Rubin's blind trust managed by Bishop, etc, etc. (abwehr, 8/13/98)

* * *

From PBS Frontline: Interview with Charles Chidiac - Charles Chidiac is a financier-developer who knew the Lums in Hawaii. He was also involved in Asian Pacific Advisory Council-Vote, a Los Angeles Democratic fund-raising group once headed by Nora Lum. He has a checkered past. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the BNL financial scandal.

Q: Give me an example of corruption in Hawaii in the 1980s.

Chidiac: Well, if you want to do business in Hawaii, you go and you apply for a zoning. You get a call from an attorney. And he says, "I want to see you." "About what?" "Oh, I want to talk about your application." . . .

"But I already have an attorney." "It's necessary to see you anyway." So he comes over and he says, "Listen, you applied. This attorney of yours is no good. If you don't hire me, you'll never get your zoning. . . ."

So, that's how they do it. It's called in Hawaii, "law firming," instead of laundering. "Law firming" is laundering money through law firms.

Q: In other words, bribery?

Chidiac: Pure, pure bribery, under the cover of being legal work.

Q: Describe Nora Lum.

Chidiac: Well, she is a Japanese woman ... And she's very smart. ... Her husband is an attorney. ... She knew all the tricks of raising money ...

Q: You had a very close relationship with them for awhile.

Chidiac: . . . I had everything ready and this thing was dragging on and on and on. And I didn't realize that the state of Hawaii, to extort half a million or a million dollars from a developer, would go to the extent of destroying a project that would create 3,000 to 4,000 jobs for the poorest part in the islands, where you have 30% unemployment. The sugar cane industry is collapsing, and they just didn't care. . . . We were planning to build three hotels ...

Q: Big money?

Chidiac: The project was going to cost somewhere around $800 million.

Q: Did Nora and Gene have access to Governor John Waihee?

Chidiac: All the time, any time. Any time....

Q: What was her stock in trade?

Chidiac: Power pimping ... and greed. She pays for power; she buys power.

Q: Did she ever have big success in Hawaii?

Chidiac: I think I was her biggest success. . . . She introduced me to late Commerce Secretary Ron H. Brown in Honolulu. ... and she only boasted about her power....

Q: Did she have many businesses?

Chidiac: She had no business. She was just acting as a power peddler. And raised money for different councilmen and politicians....

Q: What motivated them?

Chidiac: They told me that ... their only interest was to make money.

Q: How did the Lums and Ron Brown meet?

Chidiac: I think she met him through John Waihee because ... as the governor, he met Bill Clinton....

Q: Was she talking to big wigs on the phone all the time?

Chidiac: Yeah, -- We had calls from Hillary Clinton. . . . I heard her talking to Ron Brown....

Q: Does it surprise you that a woman who owns a souvenir shop and her part-time lawyer-husband can go in and out of the White House 13 times and accompany the president to Jakarta . . . Does it surprise you that their daughter ends up working for Ron Brown? That Gene almost gets on Amtrak's Board of Directors? That Nora can come and go with Bruce Lindsey, who helps them do an oil deal in Oklahoma?...

Chidiac: Well, I mean, if the President is corrupt, everything's possible....

* * *

From a Frontline interview: Anthony P. Locricchio is an attorney who represented Hawaiian farmers in a lawsuit against Japanese golf course developers. Locricchio and others also alleged in a 1989 Federal Elections Commission complaint that foreign nations made illegal contributions to local politicians. Five years later, FEC investigators found more than 100 violations of federal election campaign law....

Q: What was the money game here?...

Locricchio: The game was possible ... because of the huge imbalance between the yen and the dollar. One of the most beautiful places on earth suddenly became a bargain place, and Hawaii, a very tiny place, vied with California and New York for ... the largest investment of Japanese dollars ... It was for sale, it was cheap, and you found willing collaborators. The takeover of Hawaii economically and the loss of the environmental protections and protections for our people only occurred because lawyers, accountants, and political beings, were ready, willing and able to help sell their birthright.

Q: For a buck.

Locricchio: No, they were very smart. It was for several bucks.

Q: Where would you see Japanese investment?

Locricchio: It started with the tourist industry, with hotels, resorts, golf courses, and then started to move into restaurants, office buildings, really through the entire fabric of the economy. And the usual economic rules were thrown overboard. For example, a hotel might sell to a Japanese interest for $30 million. Two months later, it would sell for $60 million. In four months, it would be $120 million. ... You would have had to ... rented out rooms at $500 a day and 100% occupancy to meet the debt service. . . . Hawaiians couldn't afford to live in Hawaii. We had, during this period of time ... a huge outflow of people at the bottom of the economic sector, especially native Hawaiians....

Q: Where does golf course development fit in this? . . . Did Hawaii have any regulations in place governing land acquisition for golf development?

Locricchio: It should have been very difficult, because Hawaii is the only state in the country which has a constitutional protection for agricultural land. You were required, before you changed the use of agricultural land, to have a two-thirds vote to approve those kinds of changes by constitutional amendment. . . . For the Japanese, not only was the land a great bargain, but buying the politicians was a great bargain. They used to joke about how little money ... it took to buy influence. They were able to change the law and to get the Constitution ignored....

The people who were involved in agricultural subsistence farming then became the targets, and the Japanese land owners were getting them thrown out and buying up the land, so they had no place to farm. In this very short period of time, within five years, you went from a predominantly agricultural-supported economy to literally a disappearance of agricultural land for local farmers.

Q: . . . So what your need to do along the way, you're telling me, is first gain influence with the politicians. That turns out to be easy enough. Who else do you need?

Locricchio: You need to hit all the levels of politics. ... getting the state law changed was not enough. You then had to go to the local mayor. And he told you to hire his attorney and to give contributions to his campaign. And again, that was fairly easy....

Q: And when push came to shove, how would it play out? How would people be literally removed from the land they'd be farming?

Locricchio: We had situations where the police were actually used to help threaten and terrorize the farmers on these lands. They would come in with false eviction notices, with a policeman in uniform, and these farmers were uneducated, didn't know they were false evictions. .... The left because they were told, "You'd better get out, or we'll carry you out."

Q: You mean the police were privately employed for these purposes?

Locricchio: We have a unique situation here, where police are permitted to work on their off hours for private land owners and private businesses. They're permitted to wear their uniforms, to carry their guns, and to have many of the police powers they have as public officers. ... Or, it they didn't use the police posse and used somebody else, you'd go to make a criminal complaint, and absolutely nothing would happen. Whether cattle were shot, cattle were stolen or you had eye witnesses, absolutely no police action would be taken....

Even though we lived here and experienced it, we got numbed by our Americanism. We kept thinking, "This will work out. We will be able to stop this." Because Americans are ultimately optimistic . . . Even though we're angry at our government, we still believe deep down the American democratic system will prevail. And that was our stupidity.

Q: One of the things you observed during this Japanese economic invasion of Hawaii was the willing participation of all levels of Hawaiian residents (as opposed to native Hawaiians.) This was presumable motivated by what?...

Locricchio: Money. Hawaiian professionals ... had never seen anything like the Japanese invasion. Law firms overnight moved into marble-encrusted quarters because suddenly their Japanese clients were paying huge legal bills. Middle men who had operated in political arenas and gotten mediocre money for it suddenly saw opportunities to make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars....

Q: So Nora and Gene Lum present themselves to these money people as fixers. They can work one end of the political machine to the other and help get things done, help clear the way. Can you give us an example?

Locricchio: There are three key examples of when the Lums really used their fixer skills: One that affects a project outside of Hawaii, and two here in Hawaii....

Mount Olomana is one of Hawaii's scenic treasures. It's Japanese-owned, and we believe ... Nora Lum ... was partially responsible for bringing the Japanese land buyer to this valley and buying 1,090 acres of land here in Hawaii for only $7 million. In Hawaii, that's an incredible bargain. . . . After they were able to buy the state legislative vote change, that land became worth $40-$50 million overnight....

Finally, there is a golf course. It was delayed for several years while we fought against it. . . . They actually built a golf course on the side of a mountain. It is a ridiculous location for a golf course, but in Japan they were selling memberships at $250,000 per membership. That did not even give the owners of the membership a piece of the land. They just got a membership, and then they would have fees over and above that....

Q: Who were the people with the money who connected with the Lums?

Locricchio: That spectrum of people was everyone from legitimate Japanese established businesses and the largest corporations in Japan to the criminal yakuza, which is the Japanese Mafia...

Q: What is the interest of the yakuza in Hawaiian golf development?

Locricchio: The incredible amounts of money . . . there were reservations for thousands of memberships at $250,000 each, which was hundreds of millions of dollars before the golf course would even be built....

Q: What became of the Wongs and the other ranchers who were dislocated by the developers?

Locricchio: . . . The houses of the "bad" farmers, who refused to buckle under, were bulldozed. The Wongs' children were shot at, the 93-year-old Filipino guy who had lived there for years and years had a SWAT team of 10 police officers pull him out of his house. He ended up in the emergency room and in the hospital for months and months. He had to have a tracheotomy, he was so petrified. 54 state and local police officers, sheriffs, helicopters, submachine guns with SWAT teams, moved little old ladies and elderly people and children, ripped them out of their houses with full governmental support ... and the area was sealed off so the press couldn't get in and take pictures. They had massive bulldozers....

My associate learned that two of the children were so panicked by what was going on ... they had hidden under their house, and the mother, who was off the land, was not allowed to go back on and find her children. She went ballistic, because she knew they were going to bulldoze the house. She couldn't get the police to go in and get the kids out of there. ... Tom Levine, an attorney, went around the police lines, ran in to try to get the kids out of there. He was arrested. He was booked. He was tried for criminal trespass.

Q: Arrested by this hired police force?

Locricchio: By the police, who on their off hours worked for the golf course owners.

Q: Were the children there?

Locricchio: The children turned out to be under the house. Tom finally convinced the guys who were dragging him off for booking to please go in and look under the house. ... sure enough, minutes before the house was bulldozed down, these frightened to death children were pulled out.

Q: What is there now?

Locricchio: It sits there, bulldozed today, and there was no need to do it. . . . And you'd see this opulent golf course now, which has lost lots and lots of money....

Q: Are Nora and Gene Lum typical or atypical . . . Are they low-level fixers who just got lucky?

Locricchio: I guess I have to say that their greed is exceptional....

Q: Should Ron Brown have known better than to tie in with these people, or did he see what he wanted to see?

Locricchio: . . . Putting on the shoes of the guy who's got major funding responsibility is a very difficult situation. I think you become blinded by the need . . . And whoever takes his place ... whether it's Democrat or Republican, is going to find the same pressures, and need to find the Genes and Noras.

This is our electoral process. Our whole system is so stupid that we now have a population that expects its politicians to be corrupt because that's the only way they can get elected. And something is very wrong.

Q: Where do people like the Lums fit into that?

Locricchio: They take advantage of history. They build a profession and a lifestyle based on this horrible deviation from democracy, and they make a living, and a very good living from it.

* * *

From The Reagan Information Interchange , 10/17/97:

Reno Blocks Couple from Testifying about Foreign Money to Clinton

by Mike Reagan

I was going through one of my papers today and saw an article. It was the tiniest of articles. . . .

It says, "The Justice Department opposes giving convicted Democratic Fund Raisers Nora and Gene Lum immunity from further prosecution in exchange for their congressional testimony about a scheme to funnel foreign money to Democrats in 1992. The Dept said immunity would cause irreparable harm to its investigation."

Well, I saw that and I thought I better go back because I've got a couple of stories I just haven't had time to get to. Because, there is probably a very good reason these people are not able to get immunity. So, let me share with you a story by Bob Novak. . . . What he said in his article ... is: "Two former high level Democratic Fund Raisers are ready to swear that the foreign leader ... [to whom] Bill Clinton's 1992 Campaign for President returned $50,000 was South Korea's President Kim Young-sam.

"The alleged $50,000 payment is the most shocking of many eyebrow lifters in the offing that is proposing to sing like canaries to win immunity from further prosecution for Democrat insiders Gene and Nora Lum. . . ."

"The Lums say DNC Ron Brown who met the Hawaii-based Lums in 1991 asked them at the 1992 National Convention to go to California to help promote the Democratic party to Asian Americans there. They created a PAC. The Lums would testify to this . Working with the DNC in fund-raising they would testify they used conduit contributions - money disguised from its real illegal donors with the knowledge of the DNC personnel."

They also offer to tell about John Huang's links with the Indonesian billionaire Moshtar Rhiady and his son James, and Clinton friend and fund-raiser Charlie Trie's influence with the Chinese government.

Now that you have all that information ... who is it that is stepping in the middle and not allowing these people to have immunity to testify? And if you guessed Justice Dept Janet Reno you are 100% on target!

Janet Reno is a joke! She is a joke to the office.

But the problem is, no one, except the Clintons, are laughing. . . .

* * *

From The N.Y. Times, 5/24/98 (AP): FBI Documents Suggest Help for Clinton Donors in '92 Inquiry . . .

The FBI gathered evidence as early as 1992 that a Democratic couple who helped start Asian-American fund-raising efforts for President Clinton were engaged in wrongdoing, Justice Dept documents show.

The fund-raisers, Nora and Gene Lum, were not prosecuted for making illegal donations to Democrats until 1997, well after the controversy over the party's campaign financing efforts broke open.

Now investigators have gathered testimony that accuses the Lums of getting help during the earlier investigation from Ronald H. Brown, who was the chairman of the Democratic Party at the time, and Webster L. Hubbell, a longtime Clinton friend who became an official at the Justice Dept in Clinton's first term, according to documents and interviews.

Brown was killed in a plane crash in Croatia on April 3, 1996.

Among FBI memorandums obtained by The Associated Press, a 1993 document relying on information from a cooperating witness says that "Nora Lum once stated to him that she transported $150,000 in cash in a travel bag to the mainland to be delivered as campaign contributions on the national level."

Two years later, a former business associate of the Lums, Stuart Price, told investigators that Lum "brought the two suitcases of money back to the United States and turned the money over to the DNC," documents say. In 1997, Lum denied that such an incident had occurred. . . .

The advisory council was the start of what would become a much larger Asian-American fund-raising effort for Clinton. It brought the Lums together with John Huang, who later emerged as a central figure in the 1996 fund-raising controversy.

According to documents released recently by Congressional investigators, bank statements and canceled checks showed that the Lums had transferred $159,000 raised by the advisory council, some at an Oct 1992 fund-raiser in Clinton's name, to their own accounts.

The emergence of FBI files on the Lums comes as pressure is mounting on Atty Gen Janet Reno to name an independent counsel to take over the fund-raising investigation.

In a public statement, the Justice Dept said the decision to shut down the inquiry was made by career prosecutors and there was "not a scrap of evidence or inference that Hubbell ever attempted to inquire about or influence any matter concerning the Lums."

Hubbell was the No. 3 official at the Justice Dept in the first 15 months of Clinton's Presidency.

Hubbell was indicted on tax charges this month and remains under investigation by Whitewater prosecutors. . . .

After their 1997 conviction, the Lums admitted to other infractions that the FBI had been investigating in 1992, including bringing in $10,000 in donations to Hawaii's governor from "Japanese clients" and laundering thousands of dollars in contributions to another candidate.

* * *

From Free Republic , 10/14/97, by Linda Franklin (AP): Death of Man Investigated; He Recorded Fund-Raisers . . .

The state medical examiner's office is investigating the death of an Oklahoman who tape-recorded business dealings with a controversial husband-wife team of Democratic fund-raisers.

Ron Miller, 58, of Norman died Sunday at Integris Baptist Medical Center, where he had been taken last week after becoming ill at home Oct 3.

Kevin Rowland, chief investigator for the state medical examiner's office, said the case was turned over to the state because the hospital said the death was not fully explainable....

Miller owned Gage Corp, an energy company that was sold in 1993 to Dynamic Energy Resources, Inc in a transaction studied by federal and state investigators.

Nora Lum, the chief executive of Tulsa-based Dynamic Energy, and her husband, Gene, were sentenced last month to 10 months confinement and $30,000 fines apiece after admitting to using "straw donors" to conceal their $50,000 in illegal contributions.

The money went to the re-election effort of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, and the unsuccessful congressional candidacy of W. Stuart Price of Oklahoma in 1994 and 1995.

Miller tape-recovered phone conversations he had in recent years involving his business dealings with the Lums and their associates. More than 150 tapes have been given to the FBI.

J. Dell Gordon, president of Mid-America Lamborghini, said Miller had turned over boxes of material to a congressional government oversight committee. . . . Miller and Gordon were partners in Mid-American Lamborghini....

The state Corporation Commission studied an Oklahoma Natural Gas contract that Dynamic received after it bought the assets of Gage and Creek Systems, a Gage subsidiary. Transcripts from a 1995 civil case said a condition of the sale was that Creek Systems settle disputes with ONG....

Gordon said Miller's death was surprising.

"He went from being healthy to dying in a week," Gordon said Monday.

* * *

On 3/19/98, five months after his mysterious death, Oklahoma's Medical Examiner's Office quietly ruled that Ron Miller died from "natural causes."...

* * *

See also: Ron Brown

For more, GO TO > > > Broken Trust ; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics and Bishop Estate

George Mitchell - From the ABA Journal - The Lawyer's Magazine - April 1999, by Terry Carter:

The Mitchell File

When former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell left capitol Hill to become a lobbyist in early 1995, he ended a lengthy career in public service or so it seemed when he joined a big Washington, D.C., law firm.

But it wasn't long before he was more statesman than lobbyist: the president's special envoy brokering the Good Friday agreement to bring peace to Northern Ireland, a member of a blue-ribbon panel looking at the have-and-have-not-economics of Major League Baseball, and the head of a panel investigating corruption in the selection of Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics.

He also had been President Clinton's first choice to give the closing speech in the Senate impeachment trial. (He declined for lack of time and the more silver-tongued former Sen. Dale Bumpers made one of the most praised speeches in recent history.)

And, oh yes, Mitchell did bring in more than $10 million last year for Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand. While much of it was a one-shot deal in the tobacco talks, the former democratic Senate majority leader is said to be bringing in plenty of clients.

Through it all, Mitchell appears to be fashioning a new wrinkle in the Washington lobbying game. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, so-called "wise men" such as John McCloy, Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford moved deftly in and out of presidential cabinets and advisory positions, and the term "superlawyer" was coined for their work as lobbyists.

But in the past decade or so, lobbying has evolved beyond mere reliance on name and access, the most basic coins of the realm that permitted Clifford's legendary bill of $10,000 for making a single phone call. "Now it's name, access and substance," says law firm headhunter Charles W. Garrison III. "It's no longer just a matter of who you know and what you know. There has to be a willingness and ability to apply it."

Master of the Deal:

Mitchell was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his efforts in Northern Ireland. But the prize ultimately went to the two Irish political leaders, one Protestant and one Catholic, he led to compromise....

"He's turning into what used to be called in Washington the wise man or one of the wise men, though now increasingly you have to include some women in that group," says Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution and formerly an aide to Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon.

"They are people for whom doors are opened and who know all the players. They have a reputation for integrity - no scoundrels need apply - because all they have is their word. T hey move information and ideas around, and they create back channels in doing that."

New Terms for a New Breed:

But don't call it lobbying or public relations. With more carefully spun silkiness, Mitchell's former counterpart in the Senate, Bob Dole, now his fellow senior counsel at Verner Liipfert, prefers the term "strategic adviser."

Mitchell, who also is special counsel to Preti, Flaherty, Beliveau & Pachios of Portland, Maine, has helped the 185-lawyer Verner Liipfert move quickly to the top of Washington lobbying. The firm went against prevailing wisdom and committed heavy outlays of cash to bring heavyweight names to its letterhead.

Before Mitchell joined, it had signed on former Michigan Gov. James Blanchard and former Hawaii Gov. John Waihee. Then came former Sen. and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards (a non-lawyer).

As often happens in big lobbying firms, the lineup was tilting decidedly in one direction, this one Democratic. But in 1997 Verner Liipfert snared another big name to help balance the equation: former Republican Senate Majority Leader Dole. . .

Last fall, Fortune named Verner Liipfert the top lobbying firm, the one with the most power and access.

"It has become a huge lobbying engine," says Hess of the Brookings Institution. "I was amazed to see them jump to No. 1 so suddenly."

Mitchell had a lot to do with it. Most notably, he brought in five tobacco companies wanting help fashioning a universal settlement of claims against them. They paid more than $2 million each.

But along with the cash came criticism from those who believed the firm was doing the devil's work.

"We satisfied ourselves that the industry was prepared to accept dramatic change, and we also became convinced that a comprehensive settlement of the issues would serve the nation's interest," Mitchell says.

But the effort failed to bring Congress on board, and Verner Liipfert has been criticized for that.

"I understand and accept the fact that some people are critical of any effort in this regard, and that's part of the political process," Mitchell says, talking just weeks after Clinton declared that the Justice Department would begin looking at possible litigation against tobacco companies....

What the Future May Hold:

Most observers believe there is only one public service job Mitchell would go for full time: chief justice of the United States.

He was on the shortest of lists for the Court in 1994 but was occupied in other ways. For one, six years after being divorced he married a 25-year-old Canadian sports promoter, and they now have a 17-month-old son, which makes Mitchell a young 65....

* * *

Comments in the freerepublic forum: . . . Of some interest to me was the fact that the golf course Michael Brown (son of Ron Brown) was given a membership to (and which Bill Clinton often uses ...) in suburban Virginia was owned by the Bishop Estate of Hawaii. . . . Bishop put close to 100 million into a company called McKenzie Methane Gas a few years before Dynamic. Bishop also bought into a Red Chip bank with Mochtar Riady's brother in law. Bishop hired as its Washington law firm Verner Liipert and whose lobbyist is ex Gov. John Waihee. Waihee appointed 4 of the 5 Bishop Trustees. Waihee attends Clinton coffees. Waihee appointed Sen. Akaka. Verneer Liipert has another big name partner ex Sen. George Mitchell. Mitchell's son in law was president of Lum's company Dynamic Energy. Bishop owns 11% of Goldman Sachs. Sec of Treasury Robert Rubin's blind trust managed by Bishop, etc, etc. (abwehr, 8/13/98)

For more, GO TO > > > Dirty Money, Dirty Politics and Bishop Estate

Henry Cisneros - Convicted (and pardoned) Housing Secretary in the Clinton administration.

Clinton's final day includes pardons . . .

WASHINGTON (CNN), 01/20/01 -- President Clinton, just hours before leaving office, pardoned more than 130 people, including Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, ex-CIA chief John Deutch and publishing heiress Patty Hearst.

The president pardoned his brother, Roger Clinton, who had been convicted on a cocaine charge in the 1980s after cooperating with authorities, and former Gov. Fife Symington of Arizona, a Republican whose conviction for bank and wire fraud was overturned on appeal. Prosecutors had sought a rehearing in the case. . . .

Cisneros, former San Antonio mayor, Clinton's closest friend among his early Cabinet appointees and a rising political star when his career was unhinged by scandal, was convicted in a cover-up controversy involving payments he made to his ex-mistress.

For more, GO TO > > > HUD

Hillary Rodham Clinton - From Boy Clinton by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.:

On July 20 (1993), Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was found dead, an apparent suicide. . . .

On July 20, the day the FBI acquired permission to search the office of David Hale, a member of the Arkansas "political family" suspected of Small Business administration fraud . . .

Mrs. Clinton, who was in Little Rock visiting her mother, expressed her sadness. The White House reported that she and Foster were very close and that Foster had overseen matters of personal finance for her. In fact, as was suspected in Washington and would soon be substantiated by disgruntled former Clinton bodyguards, the two had been lovers. . . .

~ ~ ~

That August, Clinton's troopers were talking to two reporters from the Los Angeles Times and one from the American Spectator, Brock. . . .

Following up on several leads, by the time of Vince Foster's death, I had enough on him and Mrs. Clinton to report their affair in the American Spectator, but it was not until the next month, when Brock met with the Clintons' former bodyguards, that we developed sufficient sources to chronicle irrefutably the Clintons' Big Chill marriage. . . .

In August (1993) Clinton's longtime foe, Arkansas lawyer Cliff Jackson, approached our Brock with a project. He had four of the Clintons' security men who wanted to talk. Their motives were not wholly public spirited. Two were miffed that the Clintons had passed them over when choosing cronies for their new government. The other two would most probably have remained silent had the Clintons provided them with jobs, but the immediate provocation for their disloyalty was nothing more dramatic than a typically reckless Clinton snub. After all the irregular demands he had made on them in his pursuit of parties and security for his illicit liaisons, he ignored their request for autographed pictures. That stung both officers, Roger Perry and Larry Patterson, and their retaliation did him enormous injury. . . .

All four troopers had acquired a bland disrespect for the Clintons, for Mrs. Clinton because of her bitchiness and hypocrisy, for Clinton because of his lechery, childishness, and hypocrisy. Their grotesque behavior was unusual even for a political couple. . . .

After Jackson's meeting with Brock all four troopers allowed themselves to be taped by him . . . From August through October Brock taped more than thirty hours of interviews, covering the Clintons from early 1970 to January 16,1993 . . .

According to my calculations (in November) we had the story ready to go. It revealed sexual irregularities by both Clintons -- in the case of the male Clinton, irregularities of rather gargantuan proportions. It previewed the angry, devious, arbitrary Hillary Clinton that came out from behind the arras in late 1995 when her billing documents suddenly appeared in the White House residence after being under subpoena for two years. What is more, the troopers' testimony revealed abuse of authority, misuse of state property, and now blatant lies to the national press. It was a most important story. . . .

Our piece was in the galleys and being polished for a December publication. It contained the most devastating sketch of a sitting American president ever written, and Hillary did not come off looking all that homey either. The information was about character, precisely the issue Clinton had hornswoggled the press into avoiding during the campaign and precisely the source of his administration's present failures . . . I decided to publish the piece. . . .

~ ~ ~

(On Tuesday, December 21) Mrs. Clinton denounced the Spectator piece as "outrageous, terrible stories." She perceived conspiracy. "I find it not an accident," she told the Associated Press, "that every time he [her husband] is on the verge of fulfilling his commitment to the American people ... out comes yet a new round of these outrageous, terrible stories that people plant for political and financial reasons." The interview led the evening news. That day the Los Angeles Times also came out with its piece corroborating our story. . .

~ ~ ~

At least one of Clinton's trysts had taken place in the Governor's Mansion since his election to the presidency, making a mockery of his promise on 60 Minutes to err no more. Wednesday brought more distress for the president. During three interviews that day, questions about Troopergate flew at him. An Associated Press interview broadcast on the evening news caught him glassy-eyed and stammering, "I have nothing else to say. We ...we did, if, the, the, I, I, the stories are just as they have been said. They're outrageous, and they're not so." . . .

Apparently, the "personal" problem persisted, for after the election, Clinton had the aforementioned nocturnal meeting with the woman in the basement of the Governor's Mansion, a trooper standing lookout as Mrs. Clinton snoozed soundly upstairs (the consensus among the troopers is that Mrs. Clinton could have slept through the San Francisco earthquake.) . . .

~ ~ ~

Wherever I went in New York or Washington, piquant intelligence reports came my way. When Mrs. Clinton read our piece her violent screams alarmed the White House staff and sent the president scrambling down the elevator from the family quarters in a state of dreadful agitation

Brock's story held historic consequences. The corruption of the First Family was revealed in vivid American lingo, and it prefigured many of the scandals that embroiled that First Family in late 1995 and 1996. Brock's troopers had seen the Lady MacBeth in Mrs. Clinton. In front of the Governor's Mansion in 1991 she exploded. "I thought something was terribly wrong, so I rushed out to her," trooper Perry asserts, "she screamed, 'Where is the goddam fu*king flag?' It was early and we hadn't raised the flag yet. And she said, 'I want the goddam fu*king flag up every fu*king morning at fu*king sunrise.'"

~ ~ ~

In 1996 the press began to report her coarse treatment of the president, but it had begun back in Arkansas in front of the troopers of the president when she would call the governor to his face "a motherfu*ker, cocksu*ker, and everything else," according to trooper Patterson. "I went into the kitchen," after one such outburst, Patterson told Brock, "and the cook, Miss Emma, turned to me and said, 'The devil's in that woman.'"

~ ~ ~

Clinton is portrayed as nicer but no more civilized. He was carrying on several affairs at a time, using government personnel to cover for him and to expedite meetings with the women and with various pick-ups.

He bragged of his sexual gymnastics in crude language, for instance telling Perry that Gennifer Flowers "could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose."

He engaged in sex in parked cars, frequently oral sex about which he was obsessed, once telling Patterson that "he had researched the subject in the Bible and oral sex isn't considered adultery."

The troopers described violent assaults by Mrs. Clinton on her husband and whatever property she could lay her hands on in the family quarters.

~ ~ ~

Another of the rhythms one discovers in Rodham's public life in Little Rock and in Washington is corruption, sometimes quite serious. . . .

The Sunday Times of London reported in 1994 that in the late 1980s "Hillary Clinton...and two senior members of the Clinton administration have been implicated in a multi-million dollar deal to profiteer from the sale of old people's homes. As a senior partner in the Arkansas law firm which oversaw the transactions, she received thousands of dollars from a share out of legal fees.

Earlier in the decade Rodham engaged in repeated conflicts of interest, for instance, by representing the government in cases involving such friends as Clinton's crony, Dan Lasater, the convicted drug distributor, and against Frost & Co., the accounting firm that had handled her taxes.

In 1978 Rodham and her husband entered into their Whitewater partnership with the McDougals. . . . In 1980 she began her shadowy bank dealings by putting her name on a questionable loan for $30,000. For the next decade this loan was refinanced by friendly banks just a few paces ahead of federal bank examiners.

Several of the bankers Rodham dealt with, of course, were receiving favors from Rodham's husband, the governor, and one was the state bank commissioner.

In 1985 as First Lady of Arkansas she began taking a $1,000 monthly retainer from McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, though the trust was under the scrutiny of federal examiners skeptical of its solvency. According to McDougal, her husband leaned on him for the arrangement.

In 1995 House Banking Committee hearings introduced reports from the Inspector General of two federal regulatory agencies lambasting Rodham's Rose Law Firm for its failure to disclose conflicts of interest in its relations with seven of the seventeen failed savings and loans on which it did legal work for the federal government. One of Rodham's clients, of course, had been Madison.

Two others were Illinois thrifts that charged they were defrauded by the Clintons' friend, Lasater. The record was so egregious that House Banking Chairman Jim Leach said the review of the Rose Law Firm is likely to be "a case study of legal impropriety at law schools for decades to come."

Yet the revelations were not over. In late 1995 during the Senate's Whitewater hearing it was revealed that, as a Rose Law Firm lawyer, Rodham had handled the Castle Grande development project, which bank examiners discovered involved in part a series of fictitious transactions devised to inflate profits. . . .

* * *

From No One Left to Lie To: . . . The late Les Aspin, Clinton's luckless and incompetent secretary of defense, once told me that he had planned to make a brief personal appearance in Sarajevo, in order to keep some small part of the empty campaign promise made by Clinton to the Bosnians, but had been ordered to stay at home lest attention be distracted from "Hillary's health-care drive." . . .

Perhaps you remember the highly successful "Harry and Louise" TV slots, where a painfully average couple pondered looming threats to their choice of family physician. As Mrs. Clinton put it in a fighting speech in the fall of 1993: "I know you/ve all seen the ads. You know, the kind of homey kitchen ads where you've got the couple sitting there talking about how the President's plan is going to take away choice and the President's plan is going to narrow options, and then that sort of heartfelt sigh by that woman at the end, 'There must be a better way' . . .

What you don't get told in the ad is that it is paid for by insurance companies." . . .

It is fortunate for the Clintons that this populist appeal was unsuccessful. Had the masses risen up against the insurance companies, they would have discovered that the four largest of them -- Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, and Cigna -- had helped finance and design the "managed-competition" scheme which the Clintons and their Jackson Hole Group had put forward in the first place. . . .

Dr. David Himmelstein, one of the leaders of the group, met Mrs. Clinton in early 1993. It became clear, in the course of their conversation, that she wanted two things simultaneously: the insurance giants "on board," and the option of attacking said giants if things went wrong.. . . .

The "triangulation" went like this. Harry and Louise sob-story ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), a group made up of the smaller insurance providers. The major five insurance corporations spent even more money to support "managed competition" and to buy up HMOs as the likeliest investment for the future.

The Clintons demagogically campaigned against the "insurance industry," while backing -- and with the backing of -- those large fish that were preparing to swallow the minnows.

This strategy, invisible to the media . . . was neatly summarized by Patrick Woodall of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen:

"The managed competition-style plan the Clintons have chosen virtually guarantees that the five largest health-insurance companies -- Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, Cigna, and The Travelers -- will run the show in the health-care system."...

And Robert Dreyfuss of Physicians for a National Health Program added:

"The Clintons are getting away with murder by portraying themselves as opponents of the insurance industry. It's only the small fry that oppose their plan. Under any managed-competition scheme, the small ones will be pushed out of the market very quickly." . . .

Having come up with a plan that embodied the worst of bureaucracy and the worst of "free enterprise," and having seen it fail abjectly because of its abysmal and labyrinthine complexity, the Clintons dropped the subject of health care . . .

Since they had been gambling with other peoples' chips, the First Couple felt little pain. . . .

The same could not be said for the general population, or for the medical profession, which was swiftly annexed by huge HMO's like Columbia Sunrise.

Gag rules for doctors, the insistence on no-choice allocation of primary "care givers," and actual bonuses paid to physicians and nurses and emergency rooms that denied care, or even restricted access to new treatments, soon followed.

So did the exposure of extraordinary levels of corruption in the new health-care conglomerates.

Until the impeachment crisis broke, no comment was made by the administration about any of these phenomena, which left most patients and most doctors measurably worse off than they had been in 1992....

* * *

From Year of the Rat : . . . On June 18, 1997, PrimeTime Live aired [Brian Ross's] interview with the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's mistress, Nolanda Hill. ... Ross asked her how John Huang came to be appointed to the Commerce Department:

Hill: Ron told me that the White House put him there, and it was Ron's opinion that the White House meant Hillary in this instance.

Ross: That she put him there.

Hill: He believed that she was the person that made the call.

Initially, we were skeptical, but after our extensive research we now believe that the weight of motivation, opportunity, and evidence points directly to Hillary Clinton's intervention. And we further believe that her reasons for intervening were corrupt.

The story begins in Nov 1992, right after her husband's election. Like many Democratic activists, Huang was thrilled that after 12 years of Republican rule the Democrats would be back in the White House. Huang and his sponsors, the billionaire Riady family of Indonesia, immediately began pressing the Clinton transition team to appoint Huang to an important post.

For the Clinton administration, it should have been an easy call. According to his American colleagues at the Riady-owned LippoBank, Huang knew the president from Arkansas days. He would proudly tell people that he was an FOB. Huang had personally raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clinton-Gore team and the Democrats.

More importantly, the Riadys, family friends of the Clintons, were the number one source of funds for the Democrats in the 1992 election cycle. Lippo consultant and Democratic activist Maeley Tom sent a gentle reminder to Bruce Lindsey, then head of White House personnel, that the Riadys had "invested heavily" in Clinton's campaign. . . .

Huang had letters of recommendation from Democratic Senators Paul Simon Of Illinois ... and Tom Daschle of South Dakota (the current Senate minority leader). Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota wrote to Bruce Lindsey: "This country would be fortunate indeed to have a man of John's caliber and integrity in the Executive Branch."...

On his employment form Huang listed as references Joe Giroir, former chairman of the Rose Law Firm, where Hillary had been a partner; and Curt Bradbury, president of Little Rock's Worthen Bank, a crucial source of Clinton campaign funds during the primaries. . . . But for some reason it took Huang eighteen months to gain his position. And the position he did take-- principal deputy assistant secretary of Commerce-- was a job best described as mid-level....

During the delay, the Clinton administration was having more than its share of disasters.

First, there were a series of embarrassments involving high-level appointees (i.e., Nannygate). In the summer of 1993 Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel and the first lady's former law partner, was found dead by gunshot.

By Jan 1994, a 3-judge panel had named an independent counsel to start poking around in the Clintons' Arkansas affairs. Around the same time, the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic ran major stories on corruption in Arkansas, featuring longtime friends and associates of the first family.

In the spring of 1994, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum resigned under fire.

Also in the spring of 1994, it became known that the Senate Banking Committee would hold serious hearings on Clinton land deals in Arkansas, and a number of Clinton appointees at the Treasury Department would leave under a cloud.

In that same spring, Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, Mrs. Clinton's former law partner and President Clinton's close friend, resigned amid accusations of stealing from his clients in Little Rock.

With regard to the Riadys' wish to place Huang in the government, Clinton's advisers were not blind. They knew he was trouble, and they had had enough of that already. Even if they did not know of the Riadys' long-term relationship with Chinese intelligence-- and they could have simply asked the CIA to perform a background check on the Riadys-- Huang's Arkansas connection itself was enough to send up red flags.

Months before Huang arrived at Commerce, his supervisor-to-be, David Rothkopf, was worrying about his links to Arkansas' Worthen Bank, which was then the subject of an unfavorable cover story in The New Republic.

Clinton's advisers' strategy was simple: Stall Huang and hope he would lose interest. He completed the paperwork in Jan 1994, but throughout the spring his appointment was still going nowhere.

Then, mysteriously, everything came together in one week.

THE TIMELINE...

In the middle of June 1994, Clinton's close friend Webb Hubbell ran out of money. ... Having resigned from Justice under a cloud, he had no job; his legal and other debts, including back taxes and penalties, were skyrocketing; and he was on his way to jail. What's more, the Clinton White House could not afford to have another disaster of the sort that had plagued the administration until that point.

With this in mind, consider the very interesting sequence of events that took place over an 8-day period toward the end of that month:

●        On Mon, June 20, Webb Hubbell met with Mrs. Clinton. On the same day, Mr. Ng Lapseng, financial backer of Clinton crony Charlie Trie ... quietly arrived in the United States from Macau carrying $175,000 in cash."

●        On Tue, June 21, James Riady and John Huang visited Mark Middleton, an aide to the chief of staff and a special assistant to the president, at the White House. In the evening, Huang attended a Business Leader's Reception with the president on the South Lawn of the White House.

●        On Wed, June 22, Ng and Charlie Trie had lunch with Middleton at the White House. Riady and Huang made their second visit to Middleton at the White House. That evening Trie and Ng were honored guests at the head table with President Clinton during the Presidential Gala fund-raiser staged at Washington's Hilton Hotel.

●        On Thurs, June 23, Riady met Hubbell twice, for breakfast and lunch. Riady returned for a 3^rd time to the White House, and Huang made two visits on the same day. In the afternoon, James Riady and John Huang visited U.S. Export-Import Bank Commissioner Maria Haley, an old friend from Arkansas. At the time the bank was considering supporting a Lippo joint-venture energy project in China with New Orleans-based Entergy.

●        On Fri, June 24, Riady and Huang visited the White House twice, once to meet with Middletion and once to meet with then-Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, now-Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin.

●        On Sat, June 25, Riady and Huang attended the president's weekly radio address in the Oval Office . . .

●        On Mon, June 27, the first business day after the radio address, the Lippo-controlled Hong Kong Chinese Bank paid Webb Hubbell $100,000 from a Riady company account ("Hong Kong China, Ltd."). ... Hubbell has refused to tell federal investigators what services he rendered for the Riadys. On the same day, Huang received a memo from the Lippo Group in Jakarta congratulating him on his new position at the Commerce Department and telling him that his severance package from them would be $468,125.

On Mon, July 18, Huang started at Commerce.

~ ~ ~

It is no secret that the White House has been very worried about what Hubbell might reveal to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr about Arkansas business deals and other matters....

They had reason to be concerned. Hubbell's office at the Rose Law Firm was next to Mrs. Clinton's. Boxes of Whitewater files made their way to Hubbell's basement during the 1992 campaign and just sat there, away from prying eyes. In Dec 1994, just before Hubbell was sentenced to prison for stealing from the law firm, Deputy White House Legal Counsel Jane Sherburne made a list of potential legal problems for the Clintons, and Hubbell's possible cooperation with Starr featured prominently.

By the spring of 1997, Starr had concluded that Hubbell's failure to cooperate with prosecutors was related to possible "hush money" payments, and the White House was directed to produce any information it had relating to Lippo Insurance Group, Stephen Riady, and Riady consultants Mark Grobmeyer and Joe Giroir, old friends of the Clintons from Arkansas....

On April 30, 1998, Hubbell, his wife, his lawyer, and his accountant were all indicted for income tax evasion-related offenses....

~ ~ ~

The deal may have been more complex than a simple exchange of a Commerce job to Huang for a bail-out of Hubbell. The billion dollar Entergy-Lippo project in China needed a political boost. Commerce Secretary Brown would later complain to Nolanda Hill that the White House forced him to promote the project on his Aug 1994 China trip. Lippo consultant Joe Giroir was on Brown's 1994 trade mission, and Mrs. Hill has now given a signed affidavit in which she stated that Commerce's foreign trade missions were corruptly used to elicit campaign contributions and to raise funds for the DNC....

In the legend of Dr. Faustus, the protagonist sells his soul to the devil for a promise of earthly knowledge and power. The available evidence here points to a reckless exchange between the Clintons and associates of Chinese intelligence. The warning signs were all there; the Clintons chose to ignore them in order to eliminate a threat to their power....

See also: Vince Foster

Ira Sockowitz - DNC fundraiser involved in the Clinton/Brown/Lippo/Loral encryption technology scandals.

From: Free Republic, 9/23/98, by Charles Smith, Dead Men Tell No Tales:

Vince Foster and Ron Brown were both involved in the Clinton/China encryption scandal. One known event took place in May, 1993 when Vince Foster, Webster Hubbell and Bernard Nussbaum paid the National Security Administration (NSA) a visit.

These three fine gentlemen, with close connections to Hillary Clinton and the Arkansas Rose Office Law Firm, were tasked by President Clinton to help develop policy for U.S. communications technology. . . .

Hubbell was convicted in 1994 for fraud at the same time he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Indonesian billionaire Mochtar Riady. Riady and his Lippo Group had a great deal of interest in advanced U.S. technology. Riady's man inside the Clinton administration was John Huang at the Brown Commerce Department. . . .

The CIA briefed Huang 37 times on satellite encryption technology while at Commerce.

Huang's co-worker, former DNC fundraiser Ira Sockowitz, walked out of the Commerce Dept in 1996 with over 2,000 pages of top secret information on satellite encryption, space launch and earth imaging technology.

Sockowitz was supposed to fly with Brown on the fatal trade trip but he took an advance flight ahead of the Secretary instead. Sockowitz identified Ron Brown's body at the crash scene.

Sockowitz left Commerce with the secrets only days after Brown's death. He was never prosecuted nor investigated. . . .

Janet Reno - Former Clinton Attorney General of the United States of America.

From If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates:

No Limits, No Fear -- Raw political cynicism is Clinton's lasting legacy. By his careless use of soft money, he has authorized all future presidential and congressional candidates to disregard the law and treat public office as a commodity to be retailed for unlimited sums of campaign money.

It turns the political clock back to the utterly corrupt days of Nixon, who literally kept wads of corporate cash stashed around the White House.

One of those stashes included $25,000 from Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas -- money used to pay the Watergate burglars. A quarter of a century later, there was Bill Clinton with his 1996 unregulated stash of political money, including $295,000 from Andreas.

Oh, the soft-money prohibitions still are on the books, but they're now like one of those quirky old laws that occasionally pops up in news features: "A 1913 Iowa statute makes it illegal, even today, for a farmer to be naked in the cow barn at milking time."

There was a chance to clamp the lid (if not the cuffs) on those who so openly broke the law in 1996, both in the Clinton and Dole campaigns. To their credit, the gutsy staff auditors of the Federal Elections Committee tried to do just that, concluding that Clinton's campaign spent $45 million more than was legal and that the Dole campaign was $17 million outside the law - nearly all of which had been spent on their bogus "issue advocacy advertising."

The auditors were gutsy because their bosses, the six FEC commissioners, are political appointees (three appointed by the Democrats, three by the Republicans). The commissioners are appointed to prevent trouble for the parties, not cause it, and they've shown that they'd sooner try sandpapering a bobcat's butt than to stand in the way of the free flow of this illegal money into the coffers of their parties.

Unhappy to see this ugliness suddenly surface and be dumped in their laps, the commissioners were angrier at their auditors than at the outlaws. When the report hit the media, David Mason, who had been an aide to Republican leader Trent Lott before being named to the FEC, snapped: "It's a virtual certainty that these things won't be adopted." He was right. A week later, the commissioners voted 6-0 against any punishment for the Clinton and Dole campaigns.

This left Janet Reno as the last sheriff in Dodge.

~ ~ ~

The attorney general's office had subpoenaed an early draft of the FEC auditors' report and was considering whether its charges warranted the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Clinton's unlawful spending.

Since she had proven to be a mighty slow draw on other Clinton-Gore fund-raising violations, there were very low expectations that General Reno would do anything this time, and she actually underperformed on the expectations.

Just before Christmas of '98, Reno delivered a nice stocking stuffer for Clinton, ruling that there should be no further legal inquiries into his soft-money sleight of hand because there was "clear and convincing evidence that the President . . . lacked the criminal intent to violate the law."

Huh?

Clinton was known to have been intimately involved in the whole scam -- raising the money for it, developing the ad strategy, critiquing and changing the content of the ads themselves. The law plainly says that a candidate can't do this.

What part of "can't" had the lawyer-president not understood? Maybe Reno discovered that Clinton had said "Kings X" or had his fingers crossed behind his back while plotting with [Dick] Morris, or that he hadn't inhaled the whole time. But, no, it was nothing so logical as that.

Her ruling was that (follow the bouncing ball here): (1) while the President might have violated the law, (2) he didn't intend any violation, as proven by the fact that (3) his lawyers told him his actions were legal, so (4) he "lacked the criminal intent," and (5) ergo, ipso facto, habeas corpus delecti and dipsy doodle, Bill Clinton can walk. . . .

The new legal standard on soft money, then, is that candidates may violate the law with impunity as long as their lawyers tell them it's OK. And every lawyer will say it's OK, because the Clinton precedent now exists, having been sanctioned by the FEC and the Justice Department. . . .

* * *

From: Free Republic, 9/23/98, by Charles Smith, Dead Men Tell No Tales:

Vince Foster and Ron Brown were both involved in the Clinton/China encryption scandal. One known event took place in May, 1993 when Vince Foster, Webster Hubbell and Bernard Nussbaum paid the National Security Administration (NSA) a visit. These three fine gentlemen, with close connections to Hillary Clinton and the Arkansas Rose Office Law Firm, were tasked by President Clinton to help develop policy for U.S. communications technology. . . .

Foster's attendance at Ft. Meade also confirmed that Attorney General Janet Reno tasked Hubble to encryption policy. Hubble had access to Top Secret material on U.S. encryption. This fact was confirmed by a series of 1997 interviews with Democratic and Republican staff members in the House. . . .

The CIA briefed Huang 37 times on satellite encryption technology while at Commerce. Huang's co-worker, former DNC fundraiser Ira Sockowitz, walked out of the Commerce Dept in 1996 with over 2,000 pages of top secret information on satellite encryption, space launch and earth imaging technology. Sockowitz was supposed to fly with Brown on the fatal trade trip but he took an advance flight ahead of the Secretary instead. Sockowitz identified Ron Brown's body at the crash scene. Sockowitz left Commerce with the secrets only days after Brown's death.

He was never prosecuted nor investigated. . . .

John Huang - From Year of the Rat - How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash:

John Huang The Magician

The late CIA Director William Colby once said that the ideal spy is "the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter's eye in a restaurant."

John Huang, the Riadys' man in America, fits the profile.

We don't know where he was born, or even when. His U.S. government employment and security forms list his place of birth as China's costal province of Fujian. Fujian is also the Riady family's home province. But another account of Huang's life ... lists his birth in the Chinese province of Zhejiang. And whereas on his employment form he lists a birth date of Apr 14, 1945, on visa applications for China and Korea he claims to have been born in 1941....

In 1969, after his required military service in Taiwan's air force, his family managed to send him to the University of Connecticut . . . He became an American citizen in 1977....

Huang's first known contacts with the Chinese government began in the late 1970s. He had begun his banking career in Washington with an entry-level position at the American Security Bank. He was the bank's principal contact with the Chinese Liaison Office, and took Chinese dignitaries to visit American business facilities, such as Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant outside Baltimore.

From American Security he rose to a higher position with the First National Bank of Louisville. While there he accompanied its chairman to China for meetings with the Bank of China....

In the early 1980s, Huang received two lucky breaks. First, in 1980 he met Mochtar and James Riady in Little Rock at a Harvard-sponsored seminar.

Nest, he signed up with the Union Planters Bank of Memphis, which by coincidence happened to have a correspondent relationship with LippoBank and other business ties to the Riadys. Union Planters sent Huang to Hong Kong in Sept 1983 to open a representative office. While stationed in Hong Kong he traveled widely in Asia, broadening his contacts with officials in China, Japan, and Korea.

Much as Huang tried, there was not enough agricultural trade business to sustain the Union Planters office in Hong Kong. When it closed a little more than a year later, Huang was adrift in Hong Kong without prospects. He needed a lifeboat-- and the Riadys picked him up. . . .

Huang had found his patrons. But there is a downside to having a patron: it creates a strong dependency and a constant need to please one's benefactor.

Huang spent the next two years with Lippo's banking operations in Hong Kong, holding several titles, including vice president and Far East manager of the Worthen Bank of Little Rock, then under the management of the Riadys. . . .

In March 1985, Huang pointed out the sights of Hong Kong to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who was by then a Riady family friend. He would meet the governor again in 1988 when he escorted Riady clients to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.

In late 1986, the Riadys transferred Huang to their banking operations in California. He spent a couple of years there, then two more years looking after Riady interests in New York, returning to California by the beginning of 1990.

Huang the Fund-Raiser

The Huang story hit the public in Sept 1996 with a Los Angeles Times story about his illegal fund-raising. By early October, Huang was on the front page of every newspaper, every day....

Just a week before the presidential election, a conservative legal foundation called Judicial Watch took the only deposition ever given by Huang. Under intense pressure, he answered a number of tough questions, but two stand out.

He was asked if he had done any significant fund-raising for the Democrats before he went to the DNC in 1995, and he was asked if he had had any relationship with the president before being appointed to the Commerce Department in 1994. He denied both....

But the Democratic members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee later concluded, "He [Huang] raised money for President Clinton's campaign in 1992." Actually, he began as a Democratic activist and fund-raiser on his return to the U.S. eight years earlier. In 1988 Huang, Riady, Democratic activist Maria Hsia, and others formed the Pacific Leadership Council in an effort to attract Asian-Americans to the Democratic Party. Huang and Hsia are credited with organizing the April 1988 Democratic fund-raiser at James Riady's house in Los Angeles. They were also tour guides for a Jan 1989 trip to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia by Senator Al Gore and California Lt Gov Leo McCarthy.

The later-famous Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple paid for Gore's trip. . . .

* * *

Late in the 1992 election cycle, Huang began to demonstrate the fund-raising talents that would prove to be so crucial for Clinton and Gore.

On Aug 12 he directed that a $50,000 check from Hip Hing Holdings be sent to the "DNC Victory Fund." Hip Hing was a Riady-owned shell company under Huang's control. Five days later, Huang requested reimbursement from Jakarta, and inside of a few weeks it arrived.

This check was only the beginning of a cascade of Riady money flowing to the Democrats. Within days, hundreds of thousands of dollars came in from family members and employees in Hong Kong and other places, ultimately making the Riadys the leading source of money for the Democrats in 1992. . . .

Between March 15, 1993, and his first day at Commerce (7/18/94), John Huang entered the White House at least 47 times, according to Secret Service records. Nine of the visits were listed as with the president-- most in the first family's quarters in the White House. Copies exist of letters to the president signed by Huang that discuss meetings and visits that took place well before July 1994.

What is so significant about Huang's 1992 fund-raising and his relations with Bill Clinton that he would risk a charge of perjury to deny them? What was he really doing for the Riadys that was so valuable it had to be kept secret?

By the summer of 1994, John Huang was living the good life in California. His U.S.-based compensation was more than $200,000 per year plus bonuses. And Lippo gave him a luxury model Mercedes Benz 560 as a company car. When he went to Commerce he reported a total severance package of almost $900,000, including the car. Huang traveled around the world in the highest political and financial circles, including the Oval Office. . . .

* * *

Whatever Huang was doing, it wasn't traditional banking. His Lippo colleagues viewed him as James Riady's "man in America" and a political "fixer."

The Riadys themselves never took their American business interests too seriously. They were mostly vanities designed to promote the Riadys' personal and political agendas. John Huang oversaw these enterprises, all of which were consistent money-losers. But no one seemed to care that they weren't profitable-- hardly the usual response from hard-nosed bankers and businessmen. Whenever Huang was low on money, his secretary would send a memo to Jakarta for "capital injection," and fresh money would magically appear.

All indicators force the conclusion that Huang's real job in the 3 to 4 years before he went to Commerce was overseeing the Riadys' political and financial investment in the Democratic Party in general, and Governor Bill Clinton in particular. . . .

* * *

But the Riadys had higher ambitions for Huang. Soon he would go from being the Riady's "man in America" to their "man in the American government."

But for this, Huang would need a security clearance.

Of all the mysteries surrounding John Huang, his access to American classified materials is certainly among the most controversial.

Answers are still needed to the questions of how he received his security clearance, when he had it, how long he kept it, what he saw, what he heard, and, most importantly, with whom he may have shared classified information.

First, the facts regarding his security clearance, as we know them:

●        At the end of Jan 1994 Huang received an interim "Top Secret" security clearance on the pretext that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown needed his services urgently. At that point Huang could see and hear American classified information up to the Top Secret level. Top Secret includes our best foreign intelligence. But Huang did not join the Commerce Department until July 18, 1994, meaning that for 5 � months this U.S. representative of a foreign bank could legally see highly classified information.

●        During his Commerce career, from July 18, 1994, to early Dec 1995, he had the access to classified materials. . . .

●        Until Congressman Gerald Solomon (R-NY), chairman of the House Rules Committee, forced Commerce to investigate, it was not widely known that Huang had kept his Top Secret security clearance for a year after he left Commerce for the DNC. We now know that during the 1996 campaign Huang was actively seeking campaign funds for the DNC from Chinese and other foreigners who have ties to organized criminal syndicates (Triads), narcotics trafficking, gambling, prostitution, the Chinese military, and all of Communist China's intelligence services. We also know that during that same period he could have legally received highly classified information....

Huang's legal access to American intelligence, first as a Lippo executive and later as a Democratic Party official, is totally unique. A Commerce Department security officer testified before Senator Fred Thompson's (R-TN) Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that "no other consultant on the Department of Commerce payroll was ever granted a top secret security clearance." . . .

But what justification could Huang show for a continuing clearance after he left Commerce for the DNC?

He certainly campaigned hard for it. According to the Thompson committee's report, he pressured his immediate superior, Asst Secretary Charles Meissner, to massage the system at Commerce so that he could become a consultant to Commerce and receive a new Top Secret clearance. When this idea was ridiculed by his higher officials, Meissner went up the chain of command to Secretary Ron Brown's chief of staff.

Huang also visited White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, who oversaw the running of the DNC from his position at the White House and who certainly would have wanted one of his top fund-raisers to have all the tools he needed.

Huang's consultancy was never approved-- but his new clearance was. Such was the overall destruction of Commerce's security clearance system that the department awarded Huang the new clearance on Meissner's mere request to Commerce's security office.

Meissner died in the same plane crash that killed Ron Brown. In the winter of 1997, a U.S. official in a position to know told us privately that Huang's association with Commerce created a "climate of fear" among Commerce career employees-- and that "a lot of secrets died with Chuck Meissner." . . .

* * *

On the evening of June 18, 1997, PrimeTime Live aired [Brian Ross'] interview with the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's mistress, Nolanda Hill.

Patiently and gently Ross asked her how John Huang came to be appointed to the Commerce Department.

Hill: Ron told me that the White House put him there, and it was Ron's opinion that the White House meant Hillary in this instance.

Ross: That she put him there.

Hill: He believed that she was the person that made the call.

Initially, we were skeptical, but after our extensive research we now believe that the weight of motivation, opportunity, and evidence points directly to Hillary Clinton's intervention.

And we further believe that her reasons for intervening were corrupt.. . . .

John Waihee - Ex-Governor of Hawaii (D) and a long-time BIG FOB (Friend Of Bill).

Passed over as a Bishop Estate trustee, Waihee is currently a lawyer for the Washington D.C.-based firm of Verner Liiphert Bernhard McPherson & Hand . . . and a lobbyist for Bishop Estate.

See also: Gene & Nora Lum

For more, GO TO > > > Broken Trust ; Dirty Money, Dirty Politics and Bishop Estate ; The Indonesian Connection

Johnny Chung - From Year of the Rat: . . . Using Clinton donor Johnny Chung as her intermediary, a PRC military officer connected to the highest military and intelligence circles in China, made contributions to Clinton's DNC and had her picture taken with the president in 1995.

In short order, the Clinton administration began making policy decisions favorable to COSCO, a merchant marine that is essentially a naval arm of the PLA. We believe the relationship between Chung's donations and Clinton's policies toward COSCO is one more way in which Chinese campaign cash resulted in policy shifts beneficial to China and harmful to U.S. security.

Johnny Chung, a would-be businessman from southern California, made large donations to Clinton's reelection effort ... Currently cooperating with the Justice Department's probe of 1996 campaign finance violations, Chung has told prosecutors that he got his contribution dollars from Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying.

Lt. Col. Liu is the daughter of General Liu, the most senior officer in the PLA. By means of these contributions, Chung was able to arrange for a "grip and grin" photo op with the president for Lt. Col. Liu. . . .

There is a consensus among military intelligence specialists that China is priortizing two areas of military growth: its missile program and its navy. COSCO is essential to its naval program, and Lt. Col. Liu's campaign contributions , relayed through Johnny Chung, were essential to COSCO . . ..

Joseph I. Lieberman - U. S. Senator from Connecticut - Al Gore's Vice-Presidential running mate in 2000.

From The Center for Responsive Politics:

1999-2000 - Total Campaign Funds Received: $3,413,893

1999-2000 - Total Spent: $1,193,493

Cash on Hand $3,438,914

TOP 20 CONTRIBUTORS

1 - Citigroup

2 - United Technologies Corp

3 - Hartford Financial Services

4 - Pfizer Inc

5 - WPP Group

6 - Aetna Inc

7 - American International Group

8 - Northeast Utilities Service Co.

9 - Richman Group

10 - MacAndrews & Forbes

11 - National Jewish Democratic Council

12 - Purdue Frederick Co.

13 - Apollo Management

14 - General Electric

15 - Microsoft Corp

16 - National Westminster Bank

17 - Verizon Communications

18 - Blue Cross/Blue Shield

19 - Free Cuba PAC

20 - General Dynamics

TOP 20 INDUSTRY CONTRIBUTORS

1 - Lawyers/Law Firms: $224,454

2 - Pro-Israel: $213,410

3 - Securities & Investments: $211,700

4 - Real Estate: $210,900

5 - Insurance: $197,419

6 - Retired: $129,550

7 - Health Professionals: $97,480

8 - Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $91, 150

9 - Misc. Manufacturing & Distributing: $64,650

10 - Defense Aerospace: $63,000

11 - Computer Equipment: $58,738

12 - Retail Sales: $56,650

13 - Democratic/Liberal: $47,509

14 - Misc Finance: $44,800

15 - Accountants: $43,971

16 - Health Services: $43,199

17 - Business Services: $41,480

18 - Lobbyists: $40,049

19 - Hospitals/Nursing Homes: $39,700

20 - Commercial Banks: $39,096

Mark Middleton - From The Asian Wall Street Journal, 8/25/97, by Phil Kuntz: