The Gregory brothers, Edgar and Vonna Jo, from Brentwood, Tennessee, owned United Shows of America. They were convicted in 1982 on charges of bank fraud. Upon their release, they became buddies of the Clintons, spending time with them at Camp David. They even organized White House parties in 1998 and 2000. Longtime contributors to the Clintons—including to Hillary’s Senate campaign in 2000—the Gregorys also gave $35,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 1998, and $50,000 in 2000. Of course, Clinton pardoned them.
Once again, a Hillary relative was involved. Hillary’s other brother Tony Rodham had struck a deal with the Gregorys, as they later confessed. The two brothers admitted approaching Tony Rodham to help them, and confessed to paying him while declining to specify how much. The Gregorys issued a statement that said, “We have a business contract with Tony Rodham. The compensation definitely fits the work he’s done. He has not been overpaid.”
Joseph Hendrick, a North Carolina automobile dealer, was convicted of mail fraud in a racket involving millions in cash and jewels that he gave to executives at Honda Motor Company in exchange for favorable treatment from those executives. Hendrick is a close friend and former business associate of Hugh McColl, chairman of Bank of America. Two weeks before he got his pardon from the Clintons, the Bank of America’s charitable foundation pledged $50,000 to the Clinton Library. Of course the Bank denied any connection between the gift and the pardon, but as the Greek saying goes, res ipsa loquitur, which means “the thing speaks for itself.”
In the late 1990s Clinton’s agriculture secretary Mike Espy was accused of illegally accepting gifts from major food corporations, notably from Clinton’s old buddy John Tyson. Tyson got immunity for cooperating with the investigation. Espy was acquitted, but two Tyson Foods employees were sentenced to prison. The Clintons pardoned them, no doubt continuing the favor swapping with the Tyson group.
Longtime Clinton pal Jesse Jackson—who was summoned to advise Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, even though he was carrying on his own affair with an aide at the time—successfully sought a pardon for his buddy, former congressman Mel Reynolds, who along with two aides had been sentenced to prison for bank and wire fraud. Reynolds had also served a two-year term for having sex with a teenager. One can see how Bill might identify with both Jackson and Reynolds.
Jackson also prevailed on the Clintons to pardon Dorothy Rivers, a former top official at Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition. In 1997, Rivers pleaded guilty to stealing $1.2 million in federal grants following her indictment for fraud, theft, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. She took money intended for the homeless to buy a fur coat, a Mercedes for her son, and clothes and gifts for her live-in boyfriend. Clinton pardoned her as well.
Clinton advisors William Kennedy III, David Dreyer, and James Hamilton got clemency for various cocaine traffickers, money launderers, and tax cheats who happened to be Clinton supporters and Democratic donors. Clinton also pardoned his former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, who made secret payments to his mistress Linda Jones and then misled the FBI about them. The Clintons pardoned both Cisneros and his mistress.
Harry Thomason convinced Clinton to grant pardons to two Arkansas tax evaders, and DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe successfully pressed Clinton to pardon lobbyist James Lake, convicted of masterminding an unlawful campaign contribution scheme.
Are we done yet? Actually, no. The Clintons pardoned Christopher Wade, a real estate agent involved in Whitewater who concealed his assets in a bankruptcy case and pleaded guilty to fraud charges. President Clinton also pardoned Art and Doug Borel, a couple of Arkansas crooks who were caught rolling back the odometers on used cars.
The Clintons’ most notorious pardon involved Marc Rich, a wealthy financier and oil trader whose customers included Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi and Ayatollah Khomeini. Rich faced life in prison for illegally trading with the government of Iran and for evading $48 million in taxes. These crimes got him on the FBI Most Wanted List. Rich fled to Switzerland with his ex-wife Denise and his business partner.
Denise pressed the Clintons for a pardon. Bill said he was having difficulties even though he was “doing all possible to turn around” the White House counsel who objected to the idea. Eventually Rich got his pardon, but only after Denise Rich gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 New York Senate campaign, $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and more than $1 million to the Democratic Party. She also gave the Clintons several items of furniture for their post–White House digs and in November 2000 presented Bill with a gold saxophone.
At the time, the pardons stirred outrage. Even the Washington Post—usually friendly to the Clintons—said the “defining characteristic” of the Clintons was that “they have no capacity for embarrassment.” In a rare break with party unity, Democrats condemned the Clintons’ behavior. Former president Jimmy Carter said it was “disgraceful.” Congressman Barney Frank called it “contemptuous” and “unjustified” and a “real betrayal” by the Clintons.
Given the heat the Clintons took over Marc Rich, one might expect them to feel a bit remorseful, if not out of conscience—this may be expecting too much—then at least out of the tactical realization that this one backfired on them. The Clintons, however, have never backed down. Bill even wrote a disingenuous self-defense in the New York Times falsely claiming that respected attorneys Leonard Garment, William Bradford Reynolds, and Lewis Libby had approved the Rich pardon. As the Times subsequently wrote in an editorial disclaimer, this was not true.15
How can we explain the Clintons’ unyielding obstinacy in the Rich case? Peter Schweizer seems to have figured it out. Schweizer recently revealed that in the years since Rich’s pardon, millions more have flowed from Rich and his associates to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation. Russian investor Sergei Kurzin—who worked for Rich in the 1990s looking for investment opportunities in the former Soviet Union—donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. Other Rich cronies gave smaller amounts.
The big payoff, however, came from Rich’s close friend and business associate Gilbert Chagoury. Chagoury was convicted in Geneva of money laundering and aiding criminal organizations in connection with billions stolen from Nigeria during the reign of dictator Sani Abacha. As a result of a plea deal, however, Chagoury got his conviction expunged from the record. Chagoury paid Bill Clinton $100,000 to speak in 2003, donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, and in 2009 pledged a whopping $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative.16
In retrospect, the Rich pardon was the Clintons’ most lucrative pardon sale and the initial contributions from Denise Rich to the Clintons and the Democrats were merely a down payment.
The Clintons’ last act before leaving the White House was to take stuff that didn’t belong to them. The Clintons took china, furniture, electronics, and art worth around $360,000. Hillary literally went through the rooms of the White House with an aide, pointing to things that she wanted taken down from shelves or out of cabinets or off the wall. By Clinton theft standards $360,000 is not a big sum, but it certainly underlines the couple’s insatiable greed—these people are not bound by conventional limits of propriety or decency.
When the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee blew the whistle on this misappropriation, the Clintons first claimed that the stuff was given to them as gifts. Unfortunately for Hillary, gifts given to a president belong to the White House—they are not supposed to be spirited away by the first lady. The Clintons finally agreed to return $28,000 worth of gifts and reimburse the government $95,000, representing a fraction of the value of what they took.
One valuable piece of art the Clintons attempted to steal was a Norman Rockwell painting showing the flame from Lady Liberty’s torch. Hillary had the painting taken from the Oval Office to the Clinton home in Chappaqua, but the Secret Service got wind of it and sent a car to Chappaqua to get it back. Hillary was outraged. Even here, though, the Clintons got the last laugh: they persuaded the Obama administra
tion to let the Clinton Library have the painting, and there it hangs today.
In Living History, Hillary put on a straight face and dismissed media reports about the topic. “The culture of investigation,” she wrote, “followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.”17
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RACKET
Just two months after leaving the White House, Clinton sat down with progressive writer Taylor Branch to offer some White House recollections. In the course of the discussion, Clinton relaxed and said what was really on his mind. What was really on his mind was money. Clinton knew there was a lot of money to be made. “I know where to find this money,” he said. “I think I can find it so that’s what I want to do.”18
And that’s what the Clintons did, together. They figured out a charity racket and decided to name it the Clinton Foundation. It gives only 10 percent of its income to charity and actually serves as a war chest for the Clinton machine and Hillary’s presidential campaign. To date the Clinton Foundation has raised more than $3 billion in contributions. How the Clintons got that money is the theme of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. Other publications have supplemented Schweizer’s reporting with their own investigations. Here, from these sources, are a few choice details.19
A substantial portion of the money donated to the Clinton Foundation came from foreign governments. Some sixteen nations together gave $130 million. Among those are the countries of Algeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar. Most of this money was donated while Hillary was secretary of state.
It just so happened that, during this very time, Hillary’s State Department approved more than $150 billion in arms sales to the very nations whose governments were donating to the Clinton Foundation. Many of these deals involved countries whose human rights records were suspect. Yet somehow they all got clearance from Hillary’s team to buy American-made weapons.
Wow, you might say, what world-class thieves the Clintons are. But a world-class thief knows that there is more money to be made on these same transactions. At the same time the Clinton Foundation was raking it in from foreign governments, it was also taking money from defense contractors who had lucrative deals with the U.S. government to make the weapons. Lockheed Martin gave $250,000; Hawker Beechcraft, $500,000; General Electric, $1 million; and Boeing, $5 million.
The Foundation, though ostensibly a charitable enterprise, gives only one dollar out of ten to charity. The Clintons have developed a penchant for traveling in high style, and use a substantial amount of donation money on private planes and penthouse suites. Clearly they are their own favorite charity. The rest of the foundation’s loot seems to have been accumulated into a war chest that is at the behest of the Clintons and the Hillary presidential campaign.
Here’s an example of how the Clintons work through the Foundation to collect money in exchange for favors. Frank Giustra is a Canadian billionaire who had his eye on the uranium wealth of the tiny country of Kazakhstan. He donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation. His business partner Ian Telfer directed another $2.3 million to the foundation.
Following these donations, things began to happen. The Clintons took Giustra to Kazakhstan to meet the dictator there, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Hillary gives a benign account of her Kazakhstan trip in Living History. She writes, “I visited a small women’s wellness center funded through U.S. foreign aid.”20 And that’s it. No mention of the real purpose of the trip.
Mukhtar Dzhakishev, who oversees Kazakh mining, revealed the real purpose. Dzhakishev reports that Hillary Clinton pressured Kazakh officials to sell uranium assets to Giustra’s firm and said that Hillary refused to meet with him until he agreed to approve Giustra’s deal. He did so.
After a series of mergers, Giustra’s firm was acquired by a Russian conglomerate that built the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran. This conglomerate applied to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to buy a controlling interest in U.S. uranium mines. This committee, made up of high-ranking officials, counted among its number one Hillary Clinton.
In the midst of this transaction requiring cabinet-level clearance, a Canadian company named Salida Capital made a $780,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. This was a down-payment; between 2010 and 2012, Salida would give more than $2.6 million. The group also sponsored a talk by Bill in Calgary. Peter Schweizer discovered that the 2011 report of the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom identifies Salida Capital as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Once again, the bribe seems to have worked. Despite obvious national security concerns, the committee approved the Russian takeover. No surprise, Hillary was in favor. Giustra and his partners got more than a lucrative Kazakh deal; they also got control of one-fifth of the entire U.S. uranium production capacity. Bill and Hillary got rich off this deal, and so did Frank Giustra and his partners. The Russians got what they wanted. Everyone benefited—except the United States of America.21
Along the same lines, mining tycoon Stephen Dattels in 2009 donated two million shares of stock in his company to the Clinton Foundation. Two months later, with the support of the U.S. government, including one Hillary Clinton, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh pressured that nation to reauthorize a mining permit that benefited Dattel’s company. The Clinton Foundation never disclosed Dattel’s donation.
In 2008, the Swedish telecom company Ericsson found itself under investigation by the U.S. State Department for selling telecom equipment to the regimes of Iran, Sudan, and Syria—all considered state sponsors of terrorism. In 2011, a State Department report proposed putting restrictions on telecom companies like Ericsson that worked with terrorist-supporting regimes.
That year, Ericsson sponsored a speech by Bill Clinton and paid him a whopping $750,000, around three times Clinton’s fee at the time. Ericsson had never previously sponsored a Clinton speech. Ericsson’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. Later that year, the State Department unveiled its new sanctions list; telecom companies were given a pass.
Douglas Becker is CEO of Laureate Education, a for-profit educational firm that provides online instruction to students in several foreign countries, including Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia. Laureate named Bill Clinton an “honorary chancellor” and paid him to speak several times a year, netting him around $1 million in speech income from Laureate alone. Altogether Bill has received more than $16 million from Laureate. But on the required disclosure forms, Bill merely says he was paid “more than $1,000” by Laureate.
Becker also runs a nonprofit group called International Youth Foundation (IYF). Once Bill got on the Becker payroll and Hillary became secretary of state, U.S. government funds through USAID to IYF increased dramatically. From 2010 to 2012, IYF received annual grants exceeding $20 million, for a total of nearly $65 million.
In addition, the International Finance Corporation, a division of the World Bank—headed by Clinton pal Jim Yong Kim—made a $150 million equity investment in Laureate. Once again, the Clintons’ good fortune corresponded with good fortune for a large contributor.
“CASH HAS NO PROOF”
Sant Chatwal got into trouble in 1997 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. According to the Washington Post, the FDIC sued Chatwal “over his role as a director and guarantor of unpaid loans at the failed First New York Bank for Business.” Chatwal owed a cool $12 million. He claimed he couldn’t pay, even though he lived in a multimillion-dollar penthouse in New York, besides maintaining other residences.
So Chatwal decided to improve his prospects for favorable treatment on the part of the government by raising money for Hillary Clinton. In the fall of 2000, he held a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate campaign, raising $500,000. That same December, while the Clintons were still in the White House, the FDIC “abruptly settled” the case, in the Washington Post’s words, allowing Chatwal to pay just $125,000 and be done with it.
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p; While Hillary was in the Senate, Chatwal also connected the Clintons to various wealthy Indians, who funneled millions of dollars into the Clinton Foundation. Those donations continued when Obama appointed Hillary as secretary of state. Again, Chatwal and his pals had an ulterior motive. They wanted Hillary to back a U.S.-India nuclear deal that Hillary had previously opposed. Sure enough, Hillary’s position “evolved” in the direction of the incoming cash. Chatwal knew the score. “In politics,” he boasted, “Nothing comes free. You have to write checks. I know the system. So I did as much as I could.”
Chatwal knew that Hillary could be bought. This is exactly what the campaign finance laws were passed to prevent, the buying and selling of influence. While Hillary has dodged every prosecution, however, Chatwal, like me, got into trouble with the government for exceeding those laws. (Chatwal is Asian Indian; we Asian Indians appear to specialize in campaign finance violations.)
Except in my case I gave $20,000 over the limit to a college friend without expectation of any return. Chatwal was charged in 2014 with using straw donors as fronts to give more than $180,000 above the limit to Hillary Clinton and a whole group of Democratic candidates. In addition, Chatwal was convicted of witness-tampering; the FBI recorded him trying to get witnesses to lie in court. “Never, never” admit to reimbursements, Chatwal said on tape. “Cash has no proof.”
While my case involved no corruption whatever, I got an eight-month confinement sentence, narrowly escaping the Obama administration’s attempt to send me to federal prison. Chatwal got no prison, no confinement.22 There’s progressive “justice” for you. What these two cases prove is that if you’re going to be a crook, it helps to be a crook working on behalf of the Democratic Party. That’s where the big crooks like Hillary operate without accountability and even the small crooks like Chatwal get all the breaks.
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Page 27
