Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, as we have seen, borders on being delusionary, as Hillary and her campaign advisors continuously attempt to project an image of Hillary as having foreign and domestic policy experiences that, upon close examination, vanish into the ether.
However, from her days at the Rose Law firm to her eight years of being a kitchen cabinet member of her husband's administration and of being a part of his campaigns, there is no question that she does have political (as opposed to policy) experienced. She also has political/financial ties that - "vast right wing conspiracy" aside - require close scrutiny.
Here, then, are some questions about these ties that team Clinton ought to be asked.
Courtesy of some writings by Sander Hicks
- What light might Hillary shed on Jonathan Pollard, the unrepentant spy for Israel? Pollard, Hillary, and Vince Foster are all linked together through investigation of is linked to Foster and Clinton through Systematics, a software firm doing business with the NSA. Systematics was a Rose Law Firm client, which had acquired (some say stolen) a program to monitor the world’s international banking transactions.
- What can Hillary tell us about the following regarding her now deceased former Rose law firm colleague Vince Foster, and partner in a brokerage account called Midlife Partners?:
Forbes magazine reported Foster had ties to Systematics, Inc., a software firm doing business with the NSA. Systematics was a Rose Law Firm client, which had acquired (some say stolen) a program to monitor the world’s international banking transactions. According to Troy Underhill of Media Bypass magazine, Foster had $2.73 million stashed in a Swiss account, payment perhaps for sharing this software with Israeli intelligence. When the CIA started to close in, that $2.73m was seized by the U.S. Treasury-just weeks before Foster’s death.
- Can Hillary please clarify questions about the following?:
Testifying before the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) in 1994, she claimed that the last time she had spoken to Vince Foster was on the phone "the Friday or Saturday before Father’s Day." Yet documents from the National Archives, acquired by the New York Megaphone, show that Foster’s assistant, Tom Castleton, reported he "saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed." Castleton didn’t start working for Foster until after Father’s Day, 1993.
- Also, what were the content of the files removed from Foster's office on the night that he died?
- What can Hillary tell us about her relationship with Webster Hubbell, and through him, her ties to the Riady family? As Hicks says
The Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate run by the Riadys, helped
introduce since-disgraced fund-raiser John Huang to the Clinton
administration, which later endorsed Rappoport's $2 billion Chinese
real-estate project. Rappoport's public service to Texas served his private interests well. Clinton has claimed ignorance of these "indefensible" payments from his good friends and his best friend.
- What does Hillary have to say about the scandal of her husband's 11th hour pardons?
Ambassador Leo Wanta, a former arms dealer who worked for the Reagan White House as a kind of "off the books" operative, told this reporter that Vince Foster traveled to Switzerland to meet with billionaire fugitive (and pro-Israeli operator) Marc Rich in 1993.
It’s no surprise then that Marc Rich was later pardoned by the Clinton White House. While Hillary was campaigning in New York in 2001, Bill was emptying prisons, staying up all night with pardon appeals from hundreds of sentenced criminals. In some cases, the pardons had a direct positive effect on Hillary’s political career, or made her brother some cash. The President ultimately pardoned over 100 convicted criminals. The ones linked to Hillary were colorful, including a man with a baldness cure scam and a group of Hasidic Jews who had defrauded the school system.
Bill Clinton was so enthusiastic about pardoning, the Clintons transformed the standard process into a maddening frenzy of get-out-of-jail-free passes for their friends. According to Barbara Olson’s book The Final Days, "Phones rang constantly, as if the White House was conducting some kind of pardon telethon... The mounting cases led to friction with pardon attorneys at the Justice Department. The White House resolved this by simply bypassing the Department of Justice altogether."
Towards the end of the Clinton pardoning streak, on the advice of an assortment of figures including influential Israelis and Jewish-American intellectuals, Clinton pardoned billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich, who had traded with then apartheid South Africa. Rich was close to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak despite Rich’s business deals with rabidly anti-Israel dictatorships world-wide. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was one of the attorneys who lobbied for Rich.
But while the Rich pardon came to represent the shadiness of Clinton’s last-minute political favors, less-mentioned were his pardons of a group known as the New Square Four – four Hasidic Jews who were elders of an exclusively Hasidic community in upstate New York. The Four had created a fictitious school to defraud the government of millions of dollars.
In August 2000, Hillary visited the secluded village and met with Grand Rabbi David Twersky. Three months later, Clinton received 1359 out of the village’s 1369 votes for US Senate. Previously, the community had always voted Republican. Two months later, the New Square Four got their Clinton pardon. "I did not play any role whatsoever" in the pardons, said Hillary.
The pardon-fest became even more tangled when her brother, the lawyer Hugh Rodham, joined the fray. Word had gotten out he was willing to use his family ties to plead the cases of convicts in front of the president.
Though he had once been a respectable lawyer, Hugh’s fortune had fallen since an unsuccessful Senate run and an even more unsuccessful scheme to sell hazelnuts from the Republic of Georgia. He had taken to hanging around the White House, mostly unwelcome, with his brother Tony. Two of Rodham’s clients included L.A. drug kingpin Carlos Vignali and fraudulent "baldness cure" quack Almon Braswell. Vignali, the son of a Democratic donor, gave Rodham $400,000 to petition the president for clemency. Wire transfer records recorded Braswell paid $200,000 for his shot at freedom.
When the evidence came out, Hillary’s brother returned the money and dropped out of the public eye altogether.
Meanwhile, Hillary, now the junior senator from New York, continued to make statements similar to her defense in the New Square Four case, saying, "I love my brother. I’m just extremely disappointed in this terrible misjudgment that he made. I knew nothing about my brother’s involvement in these pardons. I knew nothing about the money for his involvement. I had no knowledge of that whatsoever." Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White opened an investigation in 2001, but was soon replaced in her post by James Comey, who found no wrongdoing by anyone in or out of the administration, including Rodham. Soon afterwards, Comey was named Deputy Attorney General by George W. Bush.
Answers, please, Hillary!