posted March 28, 2007 02:48 PM            

Bill's deep-rooted flaws, Tyrrell contends in his latest book, "The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House," render him equally prone to squandering his potential as an elder statesman as he did his political career.

Tyrrell is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, and a longtime observer and author on the scandals of Bill and Hillary Clinton. His investigative reporting highlighted Clinton's womanizing as well as the couple's involvement in the shady Whitewater land deal.

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax, Tyrrell reveals Clinton's lifestyle as a "rogue," his celebrity status overseas, and the curious "chop suey connection" with Communist China that still threatens U.S. security as it makes the Clintons rich.

NewsMax: Was one of the things that provoked you to write this book the ascendance of Hillary to perceived front-runner status for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination?

Tyrrell: It was mainly the fact that I understand, as apparently a lot of writers don't, there's something odd about the 1980s generation, and that the Clintons represent the enduring amorality of that generation.

I was told in 2000 or 2001 that the Clintons were history and I said ‘How can that be? The 1960s generation faces two great elections ahead before they are history': that's the ‘04 election and the ‘08 election and I guess I've been vindicated because the Clintons are up and dominant in the Democratic Party.

NewsMax: You paint a picture of a thoroughly despicable human being in describing Bill Clinton. Reading the first two chapters makes one feel as if he were in a cesspool. How accurate a depiction is that?

Tyrrell: When I got to covering him in retirement - and as you can see I've had terrific sources, secret service agents, military aides, people close to the Clinton family - I saw him more vividly than I ever did see him during his presidency because the trappings of the presidency were no longer around to obscure the essential rogue that is Bill Clinton. Lax, lonely, reckless - a rogue. That's the cesspool you found yourself in.

NewsMax: As a political operator he's smart as he can be. Yet you reveal that he has failed miserably - that in campaigning for others he has no coattails.

Tyrrell: Most people in the media think he's a political genius. I cite a Washington Post writer as saying that the Clintons are the greatest politicians of their generation, forgetting Newt Gingrich of course, and George Bush.

If you look at the facts, they are bunglers. They are good for themselves, they've advanced themselves, but as they have advanced, the Democratic Party has weathered. In regard to Bill Clinton's coattails, when he campaigned in 2004 for something like 14 candidates only two of them won. In ‘06 he was a negligible quantity in every race he competed in. Most of these Democrats won, but in ‘06 most of the Democrats won all over the country.

NewsMax: In regard to his wife, are we going to see her ruthless, or Bruno, side or will that remain behind the scenes?

Tyrrell: We've already seen her Bruno side and I think the press is a little bit alarmed. The mainstream press goes through the cycles of great hope for the Clintons, then indignation over the Clinton scandals, to whatever scandal that might be, and then suddenly a great hope once again.

Yes, we're going to see the tough-guy stuff; We've already seen it in her furious assault on Barack Obama.

NewsMax: Given the Clinton modus operandi, do you expect that Hillary's people will go to work on Obama behind the scenes and he'll never know where it's coming from?

Tyrrell: Yes, it's already taking place. In the book I have explained how she has distinguished herself by using private investigators since the days in Arkansas and those private investigators didn't just dig up information which is legitimate but they intimidated, they roughed people up, and those are the kind of things Hillary is associated with.

The interesting thing about those people is they came out of the new left - the radical left - with her in the late '60s.

NewsMax: Most Democrat candidates today are essentially socialists, but Hillary embraces the fascist political philosophy - the mixed state pioneered by Benito Mussolini, doesn't she?

Tyrrell: I did compare her to Mussolini in the book. At least she has nicer hair.

NewsMax: You write about Bill's inability to make a difference - he operates behind the scenes and you never know whose side he's on. That was obvious during the primary in 2004 where each candidate thought he was backing them.

Tyrrell: He's a little bit like Franklin Roosevelt in the 1944 election when Roosevelt had everyone hoodwinked as to who he was supporting as his vice president. Bill in '04 had everyone hoodwinked as to who he was supporting for the presidency. From Howard Dean on they all thought that they had Bill's ear - they had his ear but they didn't have his support. He originally supported Edwards and then supported Wes Clark to knock off Dean - they really were fearful of Howard Dean.

NewsMax: One of the most shocking revelations in your book is what you call the "chop suey connection" - you demonstrate what amounts to criminality in the Clinton China connection. Yet he was allowed to go scot-free.

Tyrrell: He probably should have been impeached, if for no other reason than for campaign contribution irregularities in '96, particularly with the Red Chinese. He took money from the Chinese military to get re-elected president of the United States.

In compensation for that he turned around and relaxed technology bans that allowed technology transfers to the Chinese that strengthened their military and that allowed them to sell some of the technology to Pakistan and Iran which made the world an even more dangerous place.

Then in retirement he's been enriched handsomely by the Chinese in speaking fees all over the world. In the back of the book I have an appendix that shows his speaking venues since his retirement and the enormous amounts of money he's made. In one day in Hong Kong he made half a million dollars in two $250,000 speeches.

NewsMax: Why is he so popular overseas?

Tyrrell: As I point out in a book he has become a celebrity. And he's become a celebrity as many celebrities become in America these days, because of his wrongdoing. He's kind of on a par with Anna Nicole Smith.

NewsMax: Why didn't the Bushes pursue him for his wrongdoing after he left the White House?

Tyrrell: George H.W. Bush is a very nice man and he had no imagination when it came to the Clintons and he didn't understand that the next generation behind him, the 1960s generation, was as amoral as it is. He still doesn't. I can't explain his son's neglect of the Clintons except that his son is a gentleman and not the fierce politician he's made out to be.

One of the things I hope I've made clear is the book is based on facts and the facts make it very clear that Bill Clinton and his wife are a couple of rogues. A lot of people aren't familiar with those facts. And that's why I had a lot of fun writing the book but also provided a public service in revealing the facts of what rogues these people have been during Bill Clinton's retirement.

NewsMax: It appears that Barack Obama is a creature of the media which indicates that a segment of the media has become anti-Hillary.

Tyrrell: When I talk about her prospects for becoming president in the book I said that she is no shoo-in because there is a rising younger generation in the Democratic Party and in the liberal culture that's had enough of these people. They think it's now their day and that the day of the 1960 coat-and-tie radical is over, and I think that is going to add a great deal of drama to this race.

NewsMax: Does this new generation fall into the Obama camp?

Tyrrell: It looks like they do; it looks like they're lining up behind him.

NewsMax: Do you think she has what she thinks she has: the women's vote?

Tyrrell: No. The more women find out that she was an enabler and that she enabled Clinton - in the book I show how she covered for Clinton, she had her own intelligence operation in the White House keeping her informed of the president's harem - once that information is out that is certainly not going to help her with the women's vote.

NewsMax: Didn't she know about Monica from day one? You write that Evelyn Lieberman, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, kept her informed of Bill's affair with Monica and his other peccadilloes.

posted March 28, 2007 03:26 PM            

Damn, there goes my chance to be First Gentleman!

Of course, everyone knows Commander Corruption fails the test at every level to be First Gentleman.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 1:30 p.m. EDT
Harris Poll: 50% of Adults Won't Vote for Hillary

Exactly half of voting-age Americans in a recent Harris Interactive poll indicate they would not vote for Hillary Clinton if she became the Democratic nominee for president in 2008.

The poll, which surveyed 2,223 potential voters, was released Tuesday. It revealed strong, negative opinions of the New York senator, who is viewed as a polarizing figure in American politics.

Nearly half of those polled said they don't like Clinton's political opinions and/or Clinton as a person. A majority - 52 percent - of those polled said "she does not appear to connect with people on a personal level."

Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half (45 percent) of the women polled would not vote for Clinton, while 56 percent of men said they would choose someone else instead. Self-proclaimed seniors (62 years and older) also tilted against Clinton in the poll, with 69 percent showing their disapproval of her as a 2008 candidate.

More than one in five Democrats and 48 percent of self-proclaimed independent voters also said they would choose another candidate over Clinton for 2008.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/3/27/140537.shtml?s=po

posted April 07, 2007 03:50 PM            

"Look, this is a political case and the decision is going to be made at the national level."

Accountant John Roux was not quite sure that he had heard correctly. Had IRS Field Agent Thomas Cederquist actually described the audit he was conducting as a "political case"? No, he couldn't have. Surely Cederquist was aware that auditing any person or organization for political reasons was illegal. Indeed, attempted abuse of IRS audits had been one of the most serious charges brought against Richard Nixon, appearing as the second item on his articles of impeachment.

Roux needed clarification. He asked Field Agent Cederquist to please explain what he meant. "This is a political case, and the decision is going to be made at the national level," Cederquist repeated. There was no mistake. John Roux had heard the man correctly. Cederquist had apparently just admitted that the Internal Revenue Service was targeting Roux's client, the Western Journalism Center, for political reasons.

It all had to do with Christopher Ruddy. The reporter's tireless crusade to expose the Vincent Foster cover-up had made him a hot potato. Anyone who helped Ruddy during those years quickly found himself in the cross hairs of Hillary's Shadow Team.

The Western Journalism Center was a nonprofit organization founded in 1991 by Joseph Farah, who was, at the time, editor in chief of the Sacramento Union. Its purpose was to encourage independent investigative reporting. After the New York Post pulled the plug on Ruddy's investigation into Vincent Foster's death, Farah funded a major ad campaign to keep Ruddy's work in the public eye. In doing so, Farah deeply offended the White House. It was not long before the Shadow Team began applying muscle.

Richard Nixon fell from power largely due to his role in covering up the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. But when burglars invaded the offices of Joseph Farah's Western Journalism Center in 1994, no national scandal ensued.

In order to raise funds for Ruddy's investigation, Farah had taken out full-page advertisements, first in the Washington Times, then subsequently in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Farah's ads laid out the evidence of a cover-up and appealed for donations to keep the probe going.

Burglars entered Farah's office in Fair Oaks, Calif., soon after. Farah says:

"Nothing was stolen. They broke in through the roof of the building, entered into an adjacent office, turned the place upside down, stole nothing from any of the offices, and then exited through the locked front door by smashing the glass and going out. We had just gone very high-profile by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times just the week before … so it was extremely coincidental."

Two years later, after Farah moved to new offices, burglars entered again. "Out of probably 20 offices in this larger complex, only our office was broken into, and again nothing was stolen," Farah recalls. In addition, he says, "Our mailbox in the post office was broken into. … I thought that was very suspicious. All in the same time period. … It just seemed like a lot of amazing coincidences."

The Troopergate burglaries

Farah was not the only Clinton critic to experience burglaries. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.'s American Spectator magazine also suffered break-ins during its reporting of the so-called "Troopergate" scandal. According to London Sunday Telegraph correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the American Spectator "suffered these mysterious burglaries of its offices just at the time the [Troopergate] article was nearing completion."

In August 1993, American Spectator reporter David Brock completed more than 30 hours of interviews with four Arkansas state troopers who had served on Gov. Clinton's personal security detail. Published in January 1994, Brock's exposι focused mainly on sex-related scandals – specifically, on allegations that Clinton had used his state trooper bodyguards to solicit women for sex, and sometimes to bribe and intimidate those women into silence. The sexual aspect of Troopergate got wide coverage in mainstream media and, to this day, most people believe that the Troopergate revelations were all about sex.

However, the burgeoning scandal threatened to reveal more sensitive matters. Clinton bodyguard Larry Patterson later testified that it was common knowledge among Arkansas state police that "large quantities of drugs [were] being flown into Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns, that there was an ongoing operation training foreign people in that area. That it was a CIA operation."

State trooper Larry Douglas Brown, better known as L.D. Brown, testified under oath that he had been inducted into the CIA on Bill Clinton's personal recommendation. Brown testified that in 1984 his CIA handler instructed him to ride along on two flights out of Mena airport, on military C-123K transports. On the trip down, the crew dropped M-16 rifles by parachute into a mountainous, tropical area, presumably to be used by the Contra rebels in their war against the Sandinistas. Afterward, the team landed in Honduras, picked up four duffel bags, and flew home to Arkansas.

'Lasater's deal'

On the second such mission, Brown saw what was in the duffel bags. They were filled with one-kilo bricks of cocaine, in what he called "waxene-wrapped" packages. Frightened and angry, Brown went to Gov. Clinton and asked him point-blank if the CIA was running cocaine from Central America. "Oh no," Clinton reportedly said. "That's Lasater's deal."

Danny Ray Lasater was a wealthy Little Rock bond broker, a Clinton campaign contributor and a long-time intimate of Gov. Clinton. Following a four-year investigation, the FBI's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force concluded in 1986 that Lasater was a major cocaine trafficker. However, he was indicted only for distributing cocaine for "recreational use" and received a 30-month prison sentence – surprisingly mild treatment given the evidence the FBI had compiled against him. His close relationship with the governor appears to have won him leniency. Indeed, Lasater served most of his sentence in a halfway house in Little Rock and received a state pardon from Clinton in 1990.

Several authors have explored the guns-for-drugs operation that allegedly ran out of Mena airport during Clinton's governorship. One such author – Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Gary Webb, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News – was found dead in his home on Dec. 10, 2004, with a bullet wound in the head. His death was ruled a suicide.

The late Mr. Webb wrote of the Mena operation from a leftwing perspective. Others, such as American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., have written about Mena from a conservative perspective. Still other writings have emanated from the shadow world of professional liars, dissemblers and disinformers.

To unravel fact from fiction in the Mena affair lies beyond the scope of this discussion. For our purposes, it is enough to know that the Troopergate scandal threatened to reveal far more than gossip over Bill Clinton's sex life. The news that Arkansas state troopers were talking to the American Spectator must have hit Hillary's War Room like a tornado. There was no telling what those troopers might say.

Burglars hit the American Spectator three times in 1993, all during the period that David Brock was working on his Troopergate story. Intruders entered the magazine's office on Sept. 3 and 10. On Sept. 22, burglars broke into an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan that the Spectator used. The burglars' modus operandi was similar to that of the intruders who invaded Farah's office.

Regarding the office break-ins, Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, who was then managing editor of the Spectator said, "All the desk drawers were left ajar. … Whoever entered got in through an unused part of the top floor, then cut a hole in a thin wall into the mail room. … These are the first break-ins in our 27-year history. We didn't necessarily connect it with David [Brock's Troopergate] research, but it made you wonder."

Richard Mellon Scaife was not far off the mark when he called the Foster case "the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton administration." Foster's ghost seems to haunt virtually every Clinton cover-up of any significance. The Troopergate burglaries are no exception.

On Feb. 19, 2001 – shortly after the Clintons left office – Lord William Rees-Mogg wrote a scathing commentary about the Mena scandal in the Times of London, in which he plainly implied that Foster's death was connected to the drug-smuggling operations at Mena.

Rees-Mogg is a prominent and respected journalist, having served as editor of the Times for 14 years and subsequently as vice chairman of the BBC. Today he is chairman of NewsMax Media Inc. – the parent company which owns Christopher Ruddy's NewsMax.com.

In his February 2001 article, Rees-Mogg called the Mena airport affair "the biggest scandal of modern American history." He noted that "there were several suspicious deaths" connected to Mena, notably those of former Clinton security chief Jerry Parks and Vincent Foster, and that money from Mena "can be traced through Parks as far as Vince Foster. …" Rees-Mogg cited evidence that the late Foster was involved in the drug-smuggling business that revolved around Mena.

"In 1993, Parks was murdered by two unknown gunmen," noted Rees-Mogg. "He lived in a dangerous world, as, indeed, did Vince Foster, who was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia."

The world of Jerry Parks and Vincent Foster was indeed a dangerous place. Christopher Ruddy had entered that same "dangerous world" when he undertook the Foster investigation. Now, by daring to extend a helping hand to Ruddy, Joseph Farah had entered that world, too.

The conspiracy report

Journalist Philip Weiss was going places. He had discovered a simple but effective formula for success: Defend the Clintons and attack their enemies, and all good things would come to you in the end. In large measure, Weiss owed his newfound success to the death of Vincent Foster.

Weiss had craved acceptance by the "in" crowd all his life. In a March 1995 interview with Newsday, Weiss ascribed his social insecurities to having grown up in what he called a "parochial" Jewish family. At Harvard, young Weiss felt intimidated by the "preppy WASPs" who dominated campus life. Later, as a successful journalist in New York, Weiss threw himself into the party scene. For all his carousing, however, Weiss never lost the sense of being an outsider with his face pressed against the glass.

"I tried to get in with an in-crowd in New York," Weiss told Newsday. "My head was turned by the notion of social status. I really cared about that, or thought I cared about that. And in the end I didn't find it meaningful. I realized that I had fooled myself, made a fool of myself."

Weiss showed admirable candor and self-awareness in that Newsday interview. Sadly, he had not yet finished making a fool of himself. His face was still pressed against the glass, in more ways than he knew. Weiss would soon enter the innermost of all possible "in" crowds – the charmed and secret circle of Hillary's Shadow Team.

In 1993, the Wall Street Journal ran a series of editorials skewering Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster for his role in the Travelgate scandal, for his past work with the less-than-savory Rose Law Firm, and for the part Foster played in concealing the scary details of Hillary's health-care plan from the public.

After Foster's death in July 1993, the Clinton spin team blamed the Wall Street Journal for driving the poor man to suicide. "When the history of these events is written, the Wall Street Journal editorial page will have a lot to answer for, and a lot to be ashamed of," declared former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum in a phone interview with Philip Weiss. Weiss subsequently quoted Nussbaum in an Oct. 9, 1995 New York Observer column, in which Weiss blamed the Wall Street Journal for Foster's death. That story proved to be Weiss's ticket to the in crowd. He later wrote in the New York Observer of Nov. 22, 1999:

I became a White House friend. I didn't realize it fully until later, but I was in. One Clinton friend called me to ask if he could put my Foster article on a pro-Clinton website. I was flattered, and naοve. I didn't understand that the war had already begun, and that on the Web the Clintonites were losing.
Weiss had a friend in the White House named Chris Lehane, a lawyer who worked for Mark Fabiani. Readers will recall Fabiani from Part I of this series as the Clinton spinmeister who told the Washington Post in 1996, "Mena is the darkest backwater of the right-wing conspiracy industry. The allegations are as bizarre as they are false."

Weiss visited Lehane several times at the White House. On one of these visits, Weiss recalls that Lehane "proudly showed me a report he'd written. It was a thick blue looseleaf binder of news clippings interspersed with some analysis he'd written. It was titled, bizarrely, 'The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.'"

Weiss did not know it, but Lehane had just shown him one of the deepest secrets of Hillary's Shadow Team – a secret that Weiss was destined to betray.

The Clinton haters

In the fall of 1996, the New York Times Magazine asked Philip Weiss to write a story on "Clinton haters," eventually published on Feb. 23, 1997. Weiss' assignment was to interview Clinton conspiracy theorists and portray them as nutcases. Weiss called up his friend Chris Lehane at the White House and requested another copy of The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, which arrived "bigger than ever," updated with plenty of fresh news clips. Before departing for Arkansas, Weiss met with Mark Fabiani at the White House.

The first call Weiss made when he arrived in Arkansas was to Linda Ives. Weiss knew from the conspiracy report that Mrs. Ives was a central figure in the so-called "boys on the tracks" case, also known as the "Train Deaths" case.

On the night of Aug. 23, 1987, two teenage boys, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, said they were going deer hunting. At 4:25 a.m., the crew of the northbound Union Pacific train saw the boys lying side by side on the track. The train could not stop in time.

Arkansas State Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak ruled the deaths "accidental," saying that the boys had passed out on the tracks after smoking too much marijuana. Malak, however, was notoriously corrupt and incompetent, and a local grand jury refused to close the case. The bodies were exhumed and outside pathologists brought in. The new medical team concluded that the boys had been murdered. Someone had beaten Kevin Ives with a rifle butt and stabbed Don Henry in the back. Most likely, they were already dead when their killers laid them on the tracks. The grand jury ruled that the boys' deaths were homicides.

Bit by bit, the real story began to leak out. The place where the boys died was known to local law enforcement as a drop zone for drug smugglers. Low-flying airplanes regularly dumped their contraband there for pickup. The boys had likely shown up at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had seen too much. Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown was ordered off the case in 1988. "I was told it had something to do with Mena and I was to get off it," Brown later explained.

Bill Clinton played a suspicious role in the cover-up. As governor, Clinton shielded his medical examiner, Fahmy Malak, who remained in office until 1992. As president, Clinton hamstrung the Train Deaths investigation for good.

As recounted earlier in this series, Clinton ordered the resignation of all 93 U.S. attorneys and replaced them with Clinton loyalists – something no other U.S. president had ever done. He then fired FBI director William Sessions on July 19, 1993, an act equally unprecedented in U.S. history. Finally, Clinton appointed former campaign worker and long-time crony Paula Casey as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. He pulled the FBI off the Train Deaths case and turned it over to Casey. The probe fizzled out. Kevin's mother, Linda Ives, has been seeking justice ever since.

Of his meeting with Mrs. Ives, Weiss later admitted that the three or four hours he spent with her changed his life. He writes:

The boys' murders had been blatantly covered up as an accident by Gov. Clinton's medical examiner, and when at last the state was forced to rule them homicides, they had never truly been investigated. The drug dealers were obviously politically connected. The story was nauseating and left me troubled about the White House counsel's office. Here was a woman as wronged as an Argentinian mother, still seeking justice, and the White House had lumped her in with the lunatic fringe.
When I left Linda's house, late at night … I promised her I wouldn't sell her out. … I didn't realize it yet, but I was already becoming a Clinton-hater.

There was something else Weiss did not yet realize. In the three or four hours he had spent with Linda Ives, he had done something much more significant than simply begin to hate Clinton. He had jammed his foot in his mouth right up to the knee bone. Weiss had unwittingly blown the story of Hillary's secret war wide open.

Traitor to the cause

"Linda had been through hell, and she was a lot tougher than I was, and not nearly so naοve," Weiss recalls. "She'd asked me that night how I learned about her case and I'd glibly told her about the White House documents."

Mrs. Ives promptly called Micah Morrison at the Wall Street Journal. Morrison had written articles about the Train Deaths and had won Mrs. Ives's trust. She told him about her strange visit from Weiss. The Arkansas housewife told Morrison that Weiss "wanted to know what journalists I had been talking to. Mark Fabiani, the White House spokesman had sicced him on me, he said. I found that curious. What would the White House want with me?" Good question.

Weiss was not the first reporter whom the Shadow Team had sent to ambush Linda Ives. A producer from "60 Minutes" had been there first. Former prosecutor Jean Duffey headed a drug task force in the Seventh Judicial District where the boys on the tracks were killed. Duffey's career in law enforcement came to an abrupt end when her Train Deaths probe began implicating public officials. She tells this story:

The summer before the White House sicced Weiss on Linda, Evalyn Lee, a "60 Minutes" producer, was sent on a similar mission. Again, after spending two days with Linda and me, Lee confessed that she was supposed to "befriend and interview" us and to "fold our interviews into a story about Clinton-bashers." According to Lee, the story was to air that fall before the '96 election and was supposed to boost support for Clinton. Lee said she had changed her mind about using us and planned to ask her superior to run a legitimate story about the Train Deaths. Of course, that never happened. …
By the time Weiss phoned Morrison at the Wall Street Journal, the veteran newshound was lying in wait for him. Morrison turned the tables on Weiss, teasing information from the befuddled Shadow Team operative while giving little in return. "I called Mr. Morrison to interview him for my article," Weiss later recounted in the New York Observer. "He was suspicious and opaque. He refused to meet with me, would only talk on the phone. In being interviewed by me, he interviewed me, and thoroughly finessed me. Then he called Mr. Fabiani to get the conspiracy report."

The cat was out of the bag. Chris Lehane called Weiss in a panic. "He told me his clear understanding was that the report was off the record," Weiss remembers. "I was defensive. I said I didn't remember him declaring it off the record. We both braced for what would come."

Of course, Weiss knew that he had betrayed Lehane and Fabiani. He had ratted them out to the enemy. But why? "[A]ny fool should have known it was off the record," Weiss reflected years later. "And yet the report should have become public knowledge – it was wrong that taxpayers should have been paying for the White House counsel's office to put out such crap. I wonder how much of that I'd unconsciously figured out."

Thanks to Weiss, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce did become public knowledge. Morrison's story appeared in the Jan. 6, 1997 Wall Street Journal. For a brief time, Press Secretary Mike McCurry found himself under siege. Philip Weiss recalls that he was driving down I-40 outside Lonoke, Ark., when McCurry came on the radio. "I ducked my shoulders in the car, amazed that it had made CBS at the top of the hour," says Weiss, who remembers feeling "stunned and scared." Weiss need not have worried. As with virtually all Clinton scandals, the furor over The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce evaporated quickly. No serious consequences ensued.

One could argue that Hillary's secret war on "Clinton haters" made the White House, at the very least, an accomplice to murder after the fact. Vincent Foster may or may not have met foul play, but there is no question about the boys on the tracks. They were murdered. The Shadow Team's efforts to discredit Linda Ives plainly helped the boys' killers evade justice by discouraging further investigation. No matter. The scandal faded within days. Most Americans never heard about The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, and most have never heard about the Train Deaths.

Chris Lehane went on to become Al Gore's spokesman and later an adviser to presidential hopefuls Gen. Wesley Clark and John Kerry. He and Weiss no longer speak. Weiss later wrote of the experience in a New York Observer column titled, "The Truth About Clinton Cost Me a Powerful Pal."

"Looking back on it, we were both being used," Weiss mused. "He was the pawn putting out poison and washing his hands of it, I was the slithering snake that f--ked him. We told ourselves we were friends."

IRS-gate

In January 1996, Farah heard rumors from at least three different people that the IRS "had the goods" on him and was going to "nail" his Western Journalism Center. Farah's accountant John Roux assured him that the Center's finances were in order and that IRS filings were current. Moreover, Roux had heard nothing from the IRS.

Farah now believes that the rumor campaign may have been a shot across the bow to warn him off the Foster case. He did not take the hint. In July 1996, IRS Field Agent Thomas Cederquist began auditing Farah's Center. The audit continued for nine months and came up blank. It uncovered no wrongdoing. Nevertheless, it accomplished what was probably its intended purpose. It forced Farah to stop supporting the Foster probe.

In April 1996, Field Agent Cederquist submitted to Farah's Center an IRS "Information Document Request" which demanded, among other things, "Copies of all documents relating to the selection of Christopher Ruddy as an investigative reporter and how the topic was selected. Who was on the review committee?"

Accountant John Roux was shocked. What business did the IRS have questioning Farah's decision to fund Christopher Ruddy – or any other investigative reporter? In a face-to-face meeting, Roux confronted Cederquist over the strangely political flavor of his audit. It was then that Cederquist made his now-infamous declaration, "Look, this is a political case and the decision is going to be made at the national level."

For months, the Center devoted most of its manpower to dealing with the audit. It had to gather thousands of documents demanded by the IRS and pay a small fortune in accountants' and lawyers' fees. Worst of all, the nine-month audit cast a shadow over Farah's reputation. Contributors backed off for fear that the Center was about to lose its nonprofit status and that their donations would no longer be tax-exempt.

Other contributors, sensing the political nature of the audit, cut their ties with Farah for fear that they might be audited next. Those fears turned out to be well-founded. When Farah retained civil liberties lawyer Larry Klayman to sue the IRS in 1998, Klayman's Judicial Watch organization was immediately audited.

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary even took it upon herself to contact one of Farah's major corporate donors and threaten to pull the donor's government contracts if he gave one more penny to the Western Journalism Center. "The warning was effective," Farah wrote later. "He has not donated any money since."

In the end, the Clinton administration's economic warfare succeeded in forcing Farah to cut staff and stop funding investigative reporters, including Ruddy. The long ordeal had crippled his operation.

Farah's experience was not an isolated event. At a Jan. 23, 1997, press conference, a reporter asked Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry to comment on the large number of conservative organizations being hit with IRS audits. "I'm not aware of any credible news organization that's reported anything like that," McCurry deadpanned.

At that time, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times had all published stories on the suspicious audits, as McCurry was surely aware.

Joseph Farah broke the story of the IRS scandal nationally in an Oct. 22, 1996 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Farah traced his IRS troubles to a secret White House plan, concocted one month after Republicans swept Congress in 1994, to harass and neutralize Clinton critics.

Associate White House Counsel Jane Sherburne had drawn up a memo "naming names, outlining strategy and assigning staff to handle specific targets," wrote Farah. When congressional investigators obtained a copy of Sherburne's memo in September 1996, Farah discovered that he and his Western Journalism Center were targets. "When my article hit, it was like a bombshell," recalls Farah.

The Wall Street Journal mounted a crusade, publishing story after story on the IRS abuses. It soon became clear that few Clinton critics of any significance had been missed. Hillary's auditors hit dissident journalists particularly hard. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News was audited three years in a row, beginning the first year he launched "The O'Reilly Factor." Also hit was David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which published the magazine Heterodoxy and the popular website FrontPageMagazine.com. Hillary's IRS targeted the National Review, the Heritage Foundation and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr's American Spectator magazine.

As the IRS spun out of control, even left-of-center journalists began to worry. "The talk shows got on the political audits and even the liberals on those shows were saying, 'This is beyond the pale,'" says Farah. However, as with all Clinton scandals, the indignation proved ephemeral. IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson – a friend of Hillary who had worked on the Clinton campaign – quietly resigned in February 1997. And that was it. The political audits continued under her successor. And Bill Clinton's articles of impeachment, unlike Nixon's, contained no mention of IRS abuses.

American Spectator in the cross hairs

In the case of the American Spectator, Hillary's Shadow Team went beyond mere economic harassment. Editor R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. later wrote of his travails in a Spectator story of November 2002.

"Our offices were broken into twice, our New York apartment once," Tyrrell recalls. "Thieves stole the manuscript to [Tyrell's book] 'Boy Clinton' while it was being sent across town to Bob Novak for a blurb. … [N]umerous instances of intimidation [were] attempted against Spectator staffers by Arkansas thugs."

Most damaging to the Spectator – and to press freedom generally – was an effort by the Clinton Justice Department to press criminal charges against Tyrrell and his associates for what turned out to be trumped up allegations of witness tampering.

On Jan. 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton famously appeared on NBC's "Today Show" with Matt Lauer, urging news media to focus attention on the "vast right-wing conspiracy," which she charged with persecuting the Clinton White House – the same conspiracy described in Hillary's 1995 Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce report, which featured Richard Mellon Scaife as ringleader.

Hillary was not speaking idly. Major government and media institutions sprang into action to put her words into effect.

On April 1, 1998, Congressman John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" to discuss the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Host Brian Lamb asked Conyers how the American Spectator fit into the picture. "We're investigating the magazine," Conyers responded.

Eight days later, the Clinton Justice Department launched a criminal investigation against the American Spectator over alleged witness tampering. Richard Mellon Scaife was the prime target. A long-time financial supporter of the magazine, Scaife had provided generous grants for its Clinton investigations. Such grants are common in journalism. The Pew Charitable Trust and Bill Moyers' Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for example, regularly lavish staggering sums on radical, left-wing media.

Hillary's operatives could not fault Scaife for providing grants to journalists. Instead, they accused him of witness tampering – specifically of using the American Spectator as a conduit to transmit bribe money from Scaife to Judge David Hale, a major witness against Bill Clinton in the Whitewater investigation.

For 14 months, Scaife and various associates of the Spectator were hauled before investigators to testify. In the end, no charges were pressed. Scaife and the Spectator were exonerated. But the 14-month investigation nearly bankrupted Tyrrell's magazine. More importantly, it set a dangerous precedent in American politics.

"[T]he precedent had been set to harass writers and publications that print unfavorable news about government. … [T]he practice of criminally investigating opposition journalists has now been established. …" Tyrrell later wrote.

Unexpected consequences

Hillary's campaign against dissident journalists had unexpected consequences: It got Joseph Farah and many other journalists thinking about their dangerous dependency on mainstream media outlets.

"We felt the full wrath of government persecution," says Farah. "We were darned lucky there was a Wall Street Journal that was willing to allow us to have a little say. Had it not been for the Wall Street Journal, virtually nothing would have been said or published about this in the United States." But suppose the Wall Street Journal had not let Farah speak. What then?

In 1996, Farah received strange phone calls from two journalists, one from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other from The New York Times. The New York Times reporter was none other than Philip Weiss. Farah recalls, "They would say, "We have this report from the White House, and you're all over the thing. What do you have to say about it?' And I would say, 'Well, I don't know anything about this report. Can I see it?' And neither one of them were willing to give me a copy."

Farah ultimately obtained the report from Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation. Levin had somehow managed to get a photocopy from the Democratic National Committee. It was, of course, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, now swollen to 331 pages.

Hillary is widely believed to have been the moving force behind the conspiracy report, and with good reason. Christopher Lehane wrote and compiled The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce at Mark Fabiani's behest. Both men worked for Hillary's Shadow Counsel's Office. In the October 1998 American Spectator, Daniel E. Troy alleged that "Hillary Clinton … championed the report."

During the brief media flurry that followed Micah Morrison's Jan. 6, 1997, exposι, Hillary lay low, letting White House press secretary Mike McCurry fend off most of the flack. On Jan. 17, however, in a C-SPAN interview with Steve Scully, Hillary emerged from the shadows to defend the essential claims of the conspiracy report, while carefully refraining from mentioning the now-infamous document by name.

"There is a very effective, well-organized press that is … very up front in its right-wing, conservative inclinations and makes no apologies," Hillary charged. Yet no liberal or left-wing press existed "on the other end of the political spectrum … to counterbalance that," Hillary argued. Perhaps, in Hillary's mind, The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce helped provide that missing "balance."

Dark prophetess

Joseph Farah likes to joke that Hillary Clinton gave him the idea of publishing WorldNetDaily.com. And in a way she did. Inasmuch as Hillary appears to have masterminded The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, Hillary grasped the power of the Internet years before most of today's leading Web journalists.

It would seem that, as early as 1995, the first lady had already identified the Web as a threat to Big Media's information monopoly – and therefore to the Clintons' power. A dark prophetess of doom, Hillary decried the Internet's subversive potential at a time when dissident scribblers such as Farah were still trying to get their message out through printed newsletters and op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal. In 1999, after the Drudge Report had fulfilled Hillary's direst warnings, Farah called The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce a "premonition" and a "prophetic nightmare." He wrote:

[R]emember that the White House was having this bad dream back in 1994-1995. This was long before anyone had ever heard of Matt Drudge. It was long before WorldNetDaily.com … was even on the drawing board. … Was it a premonition? Indeed, this was an administration doomed to scandal exposed by the Internet – the one form of mass communication its partisans in the old, establishment press couldn't seem to control. And, already, by early 1995, the White House could see the handwriting on the wall. … It doesn't take a Ph.D. in computer science to recognize that the Clintons and their political allies are scared of the Internet. They are clearly dying to get their hands on it – not for their own creative use, mind you, but for the purposes of control, for stifling free expression by others.
When Farah first saw the report, he read through it in amazement, paying special attention to Section IX, which dealt with "The Internet Influence." Farah says:

The ironic part is that we were not utilizing the Internet very well back then. We did have a website called etruth.com, and it did get a high level of traffic. I was always surprised that there were more people reading our stuff on the Internet than were reading our newsletter. But it still never occurred to me that it had all that much potential until the Clintons connected the dots for me.
When I saw that report, I became convinced that the Internet was the vehicle for keeping government under control, because if these guys were so scared of it, I felt we could do much more as journalists to utilize it. That report really was the genesis for WorldNetDaily.com.

More than any other factor, Hillary's fear of cyber-journalism alerted Farah to the power of the Net. Ultimately, it led him to focus his efforts on Web publishing. Many other dissident journalists made the same decision around the same time.

The Web Underground made a quantum leap from the newsgroups and message boards of the early '90s, when the Web had served mainly as a giant bulletin board to publicize articles from newspapers and magazines. Now it began generating its own reportage, much of it high-caliber investigative work, assigned and edited by news professionals such as Ruddy and Farah.

posted April 07, 2007 04:14 PM            

During the last presidential campaign, on Dec. 1, 2003, Diane Rehm of National Public Radio interviewed Howard Dean, who was then still running for president. A caller accused the Bush White House of "stonewalling" the 9-11 investigation. The following exchange ensued:

Caller: Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9-11 and not stonewalling?

Howard Dean: Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9-11.

Diane Rehm: Why do you think he is suppressing that report?

Howard Dean: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

Like so many high-ranking Democrats today, Howard Dean – who now serves as chairman of the Democratic National Committee – does not shrink from publicly speculating on the possible complicity of President Bush in the mass murders of 9-11.

By contrast, most conservatives – whether in or out of public life – long ago abandoned any effort to investigate the "Clinton body count." The topic has become taboo.

With Hillary all but certain to run for president in 2008, that taboo needs to be lifted. No critique of Mrs. Clinton can lay claim to thoroughness without addressing these darkest of allegations against the Clinton White House.

As noted previously, the secret "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" report makes clear that Hillary feared the Internet in 1995 chiefly because it served as a conduit for speculation regarding the Clinton body count – the growing number of Clinton critics, whistleblowers, former lovers, business associates and eyewitnesses to Clinton scandals of one sort or another who had been threatened, beaten, murdered or, in several cases, reportedly committed suicide.

The Clintons were hardly settled in the White House when Internet chatter about the "body count" began spilling over into mainstream media – into foreign media, that is. Most U.S. journalists were no more willing to touch the story in the early '90s than they are now.

"[A] peculiar pattern of suicides and violence surrounds people connected to the Clintons or their associates," noted the staid British journal the Economist on July 9, 1994. "It may be no more than coincidence, but it prompts questions."

Why so many people with knowledge of Clinton scandals met sudden and often violent deaths remains a mystery. Perhaps the Clintons were just lucky. Whatever the reason, the "peculiar pattern of suicides and violence" that surrounded the Clintons was an open secret in Washington from the earliest days of their co-presidency.

When covering Clinton scandals, journalists in the know feared for their safety. The most widely publicized case of journalist-bashing on the Clinton beat involved L.J. Davis, a contributing editor of Harper's magazine. New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan dispatched Davis to Little Rock, Ark., to look into the Whitewater scandal. Davis produced a brilliant report titled, "The Name of the Rose."

Published April 4, 1994, Davis' nine-page cover story artfully untangled the spaghetti-like business relationships that bound the Clintons and the Rose Law Firm to an elusive, global network of money launderers, drug runners, and S&L pillagers, many with links to the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Davis told New York Post columnist Deroy Murdock that a "high government official" in Washington had warned him against lingering too long in Little Rock. "You've gotten into a red zone," said the official. "Work your ass off and get out of there as fast as possible."

Davis did not get out fast enough.

At about 6:30 p.m., on Feb. 14, 1994 – St. Valentine's Day – Davis went to his room in the Legacy Hotel and unlocked the door. The next thing he remembers is waking up four hours later with a lump "the size of a darning needle over my left ear." Davis' doctor told the Wall Street Journal that the wound was not consistent with a fall, but looked more as if Davis had been struck with a blunt object. The hapless journalist suffered a concussion and a blood clot on the brain, for which he was given medication.

Davis' watch and wallet were not stolen, but several pages of his notebook had been torn half through, as if someone had been rifling through them.

Davis bravely stayed on in Little Rock until his work was done. But things got stranger by the day. On March 8, Davis e-mailed a partial draft of his story to the New Republic. The phone rang in his hotel room three hours later.

"What you're doing makes [Iran-Contra Independent Counsel] Lawrence Walsh look like a rank amateur," said a man's voice.

"Who is this?" asked Davis.

"Seems to me you've got your bell rung too many times. But did you hear what I said?" the man continued.

"Yes, I did," Davis replied. The mystery caller hung up.

The man's remarks, especially his crack about Lawrence Walsh, seemed to indicate that he had intercepted and read Davis' draft. "Somebody seems to be reading my computer transmissions," Davis told Murdock. "Whoever called me knew what I'd just sent to the New Republic."

Hillary's War Room

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton strategists famously huddled in a so-called "War Room" under Hillary's direction. It was Hillary who gave the War Room its name. Later, Hillary designated the White House office where she directed Shadow Team operations as a "War Room." In December 2004, Democrats set up a "War Room" in the U.S. Senate, in obvious emulation of Hillary's longstanding practice. Outraged by this affront to the Senate's collegial tradition, Republicans responded by setting up a "Peace Room."

What goes on in these war rooms? Regarding the original 1992 War Room, the Washington Post reported:

The War Room was set up to gather as much intelligence as possible and quickly turn it to Clinton's advantage. Campaign advisers tried to anticipate what stories reporters were working on in hopes of shaping those stories before they were written. James Carville and others combed through daily news media reports like intelligence analysts, trying to ferret out information that would help them figure it out.

By some accounts, the War Room's activities were far less innocuous than those described in the Washington Post. In Judicial Watch's lawsuit on behalf of former Clinton lover Gennifer Flowers, Larry Klayman – who at that time headed Judicial Watch – charged that "Mrs. Clinton ... conceived of, ran, and used the War Room to smear, defame and harm perceived adversaries ..."

Could it be that illegal wiretapping, such as L.J. Davis experienced, was one of the methods the War Room used to "anticipate what stories reporters were working on," as the Washington Post so daintily put it? Could it be that cold-cocking journalists in hotel corridors was one of its techniques for "shaping" stories "before they were written?" We can only speculate.

Such speculation acquires a keener edge, however, when we consider some of the personnel whom Hillary recruited for her black operations.

The Chokehold

In his 1996 book, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," journalist David Brock notes that Hillary exerted her power chiefly through the White House counsel's office. "Hillary was the de facto [White House] counsel," he writes. "Through her control of the counsel's office, which functions as the president's in-house law firm, Hillary had a chokehold on the entire government."

In order to tighten her "chokehold," Hillary set up what Brock calls a "Shadow Counsel's office" – working parallel to the ordinary White House counsel's office, but answering directly to Hillary loyalist Harold McEwan Ickes (pronounced ICK-eez).

Ickes was well-suited to the task of heading this secretive operation. As a New York labor lawyer, Ickes had represented numerous corrupt unions controlled by the Gambino, Colombo, Genovese, Lucchese and other organized crime families. His work on behalf of gangsters and labor racketeers brought him perilously close to prosecution, but Ickes displayed a Houdini-like gift for evading the authorities. "There are more than a couple of prosecutors in this city who believe that the only thing separating Harold Ickes and a jail cell is his ability to go strong and silent in the face of tough questions," noted New York Post columnist Mike McAlary in 1993.

Ickes' personal loyalty to Hillary is impressive. He ran her successful Senate campaign in 2000 and continues serving her today as the Shadow Party's de facto CEO.

A former New Left militant during the '60s, Ickes traveled in 1965 to the Dominican Republic, where a junta of left-wing colonels was trying to restore deposed President Juan Bosch to power. Bosch was a socialist who had spent two years of his exile in Castro's revolutionary Cuba.

Fearful that the Dominican Republic would go the way of Cuba, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched 22,000 Marines to the island nation on April 29, 1965. After fierce fighting, the leftist colonels were beaten. The socialist Bosch stood for election on June 1, 1966, losing to the pro-American candidate Joaquin Balaguer, who took 56.3 percent of the vote.

Ickes' role in these events is obscure. In an Oct. 15, 1994, profile on Ickes, the Boston Globe stated:

[H]aving traveled to the Dominican Republic to help deposed leftist president Juan Bosch return to office, [Ickes] was present when Lyndon Johnson – citing a communist threat – dispatched the U.S. Marines to occupy the country and keep Bosch and his rebels from power. After touring Latin America, Ickes came home and joined the anti-war movement ..."

The Globe did not explain by what means Ickes sought to "help" Bosch and his leftist colonels "return to office." However, the episode suggests that Ickes' involvement with the far left went beyond the ordinary civil-rights activism and anti-Vietnam protests, which most of his journalistic profiles cite. Whether as a Mob lawyer or a covert participant in Latin American coups, Ickes has spent more than 40 years living and working in the company of killers.

Hillary's Private Eyes

A significant portion of the Shadow Team's operations were carried out by private investigators, among them: Terry Lenzner, founder and chairman of the powerful Washington, D.C., detective firm Investigative Group International; high-ticket San Francisco private eye Jack Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland; and Hollywood sleuth Anthony J. Pellicano.

Former congressional investigator Barbara Olson writes that, "In the political life of the Clintons, it was she [Hillary] who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists."

Hillary's detectives engaged in "a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public," former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998.

Hillary's secret police tend to be a tight-lipped bunch, professionally skilled at keeping a low profile. However, we know more about Anthony "The Pelican" Pellicano than about most Hillary operatives, thanks to his boastfulness and taste for the limelight. Pellicano's violent career as a private investigator reveals much about the sorts of qualifications Hillary sought in her Shadow Team.

In the January 1992 issue of GQ magazine, Pellicano boasted of the dirty work he had performed for his clients, including blackmail and physical assault. He claimed to have beaten one of his client's enemies with a baseball bat. "I'm an expert with a knife," said Pellicano. "I can shred your face with a knife."

FBI agents raided Pellicano's West Hollywood office on Nov. 22, 2002, and arrested him on federal weapons charges. In his office, they found gold, jewelry, and about $200,000 in cash – most of it bundled in $10,000 wrappers – thousands of pages of transcripts of illegal wiretaps; two handguns; and various explosive devices stored in safes, including two live hand grenades and a pile of C4 plastic explosive, complete with blasting cap and detonation cord.

C4 is a military explosive that cannot be sold legally to civilians. Pellicano had a surprisingly large quantity in his safe. "The explosive could easily be used to blow up a car, and was in fact strong enough to bring down an airplane," noted Special Agent Stanley Ornellas in a sworn affidavit.

The FBI raided Pellicano's office after an accomplice ratted him out. Ex-convict Alexander Proctor told the FBI that Pellicano had hired him to threaten and intimidate Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had been poking her nose a little too deeply into a feud between Mafia kingpins and actor Steven Seagal. It seems that Seagal's former friend and production partner, Julius R. Nasso, was tied to the Gambino crime family. When Seagal and Nasso quarreled, the dispute got ugly.

Rough stuff

On the morning of June 20, 2002, reporter Anita Busch approached her car, which was parked near her home. To her horror, she saw a bullet-hole in her windshield. A cardboard sign taped to the glass bore one word: "Stop." A dead fish with a long-stemmed rose in its mouth lay on the hood.

Busch took the hint. She immediately went into hiding, staying in a series of hotels at her paper's expense, while the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Deprtment's organized-crime division investigated.

A break in the case seemed to come when ex-convict Alexander Proctor spilled the beans to an undercover FBI informant. Proctor reportedly told the informant, on tape, that it was not the Mafia who were harassing Anita Busch – it was Steven Seagal! Proctor said that Seagal hired detective Anthony Pellicano to intimidate the woman into silence. Pellicano, in turn, had subcontracted Proctor to do the dirty work.

"He wanted to make it look like the Italians were putting the hit on her, so it wouldn't reflect on Seagal," Proctor told the informant. Proctor accused Pellicano of ordering him to "blow up" or set fire to Busch's car to frighten her. However, Proctor said he got cold feet and merely damaged the car, leaving the dead fish and "Stop" sign as calling cards.

A federal judge sentenced Pellicano to 30 months in prison for possession of the hand grenades and C4. Later, on June 17, 2005, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley charged him with conspiracy and making threats against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. He will likely face prosecution for illegal wiretapping.

Pellicano's 2002 arrest was big news in Hollywood. Article after article touted Pellicano as a "celebrity sleuth" and a "private detective to the stars," whose client list had included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Roseanne Barr, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson (whose chronic problem with child molestation charges provided Pellicano with plenty of damage-control work).

Despite the sensational coverage, few mainstream news organizations uttered the name of Pellicano's most famous client: Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano's Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine," reported NewsMax on Nov. 23, 2002."

A detailed, 1,680-word round-up of the Pellicano case published in the New York Times on Nov. 11, 2003 – a full year after his arrest – made no mention of Hillary's name, nor even hinted at Pellicano's White House connection. Only Internet media such as NewsMax.com focused relentlessly on his Clinton ties.

The omission was deliberate. Pellicano's involvement in Clinton damage-control operations – including his well-known efforts to discredit former Clinton lovers Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky – has been public knowledge for years, the details available to any journalist with a Nexis account.

The taint of violent criminality that infected Hillary's Shadow Team cannot be denied. Pellicano's arrest and conviction – not to mention Harold Ickes' Mob law practice – speak for themselves.

posted April 08, 2007 01:15 AM            

(CNSNews.com) - More than six years after the Clintons left the White House, nearly half of the respondents in a new poll -- 45 percent -- worry that if they return, they could bring "high levels of corruption" with them.

A Zogby International poll released Thursday in Washington highlights in particular concerns about former President Bill Clinton's ability to "behave honestly in the White House" if his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is elected president in 2008.

The poll results indicate that scandals which dogged the Clinton administration remain relevant to a significant number of voters.

The 45 percent figure would likely be even higher, said Tom Fitton, president of conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, if elected officials and the media were more willing to ask tough questions about numerous ethical quandaries that surrounded the Clinton administration and the then-first lady's role in those issues.

"It's because the media doesn't want to talk about it and the American leaders won't talk about it," Fitton said. "The fact that no-one is talking about it and people are still concerned speaks volumes."

Judicial Watch sponsored the poll.

Forty-two percent of respondents also said they view Sen. Clinton as corrupt. Of those, 17 percent regard her as "very corrupt."

The New York senator is leading the pack among Democratic candidates for president in most polls. She announced this week that she had shattered previous fundraising records - though just slightly above her top primary rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

The Clintons weathered numerous investigations into alleged criminal conduct and ethical lapses during the Clinton presidency, and in some of them Hillary Clinton was suspected to have played a major role.

Fitton pointed out that these include: the Whitewater probe, in which independent counsel Robert Fiske said she was not truthful to a federal grand jury but did not believe he could obtain an indictment from a Washington D.C. jury; the firings in the White House travel office; and smears against women from her husband's past through the hiring of private investigators during the 1992 campaign to curb what became known as "bimbo eruptions."

These are all questions Sen. Clinton should answer, Fitton said. He added that every other candidate should also answer questions about their own past ethical lapses.

"Some are old issues in the sense that they took place several years ago," Fitton said. "But they're new issues in the sense that they don't have answers."

Perhaps the best news for Bill Clinton from the new poll was its finding that 50 percent believe he would behave honestly in the White House. Thirty-six percent of respondents felt otherwise, while the remaining 14 percent was undecided on the issue.

On a broader question, 93 percent of respondents said they believe corruption is still a significant problem in Washington, and 78 percent think bigger government leads to bigger corruption.