by Roger Stone
Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel, persuaded Clinton to pardon Rich, who was now a current client. It seems as though Clinton let his decision rest solely on the recommendation of the accused attorney, bypassing the process Jordan outlined in his analysis published by the Wall Street Journal.
According to congressional testimony, only Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Quinn discussed the Rich pardon, but even those conversations were said to have been limited and obviously lopsided in scope.
Neil A. Lewis’s account of the case and history surrounding presidential pardons also drew attention to Rich pardon.
‘’Things had plainly broken down in the last three or four months of the Clinton administration,’’ said Margaret Love, a Washington lawyer who spent many years in the Justice Department handling pardons and served as the main pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997.
‘’You knew that in certain cases over the years like George Steinbrenner there was always a certain amount of persuasion going on,’’ she said, referring to the principal owner of the Yankees, who had conspired to make illegal donations to President Nixon and was pardoned by President Reagan in his final days in office. ‘’But just about all the pardons still went through the Justice Department,’’ she said, including Mr. Steinbrenner’s.
Mrs. Love would surmise that during each previous modern presidency, pardons with the exception of Nixon and a few other high-profile instances, would almost entirely be handled by the Justice Department and not the White House.422
However, during the Clinton presidency, Love argued that the White House took a much more active role in the pardon process and utilized the presidential pardon more so than other modern presidents.
This change in tides and the eventual pardon of Marc Rich put Clinton in the hotseat with the most recent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.
Carter railed against the pardon and called it “disgraceful.”
“I don’t think there is any doubt that some of the factors in his pardon were attributable to his large gifts. In my opinion, that was disgraceful.”
From Arkansas to Pennsylvania Avenue, the Clintons’ appetite for graft and Boss Tweed–esque political quid pro quo arrangements never changed.
Trading favors, profiteering, and living outside the law are commonplace for House Clinton. Whether it’s the Marc Rich scandal, or the (insert scandal list here), fellow Democrat and liberal Hamilton Jordan is spot on in proclaiming the Clintons to be the quintessential grifters. It’s what they do.
Hillary’s love of money would also mar the Clintons’ early political career. In another example of elite deviance, Hillary would turn a one-thousand-dollar investment into a hefty return, courtesy of a wired businessman in Arkansas. This too was a precursor to the wholesale money grab that the Clintons would stage, utilizing the nexus of power at the State Department.
In one of the earliest scandals to outline Hillary and Bill Clinton’s bare greed and rampant disregard for the rules, Mrs. Clinton parlayed $1,000 into over $100,000 over the course of ten months trading cattle futures.423
The trading began as Bill Clinton was the attorney general for the state of Arkansas and would continue until he was elected governor. The original investment was worth a market value of $12,000 dollars, but records from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange show that Clinton had only $1,000 in her account at the time of the investments.424
So how could someone with only $1,000 secure an investment in cattle futures worth $12,000? Relying on an experienced futures trader who was tied to one of Arkansas’s biggest employers, that is how.
James Blair, a friend of Clinton, advised her on the trades and confirmed that they were processed before the paperwork was complete or approved. But Blair was not the only industry insider who was known to underwrite investments on behalf of Clinton, as she had Blair’s business partner Robert L. “Red” Bone willingly approve of Blair’s orders on Clinton’s behalf … even if she did not have the cash to cover them.
Blair gloated that he had paid Bone over $800,000 in commission at the time, and that “he did not ask questions” when approached about the sweetheart deal he was brokering for Clinton, then a wife to a high-profile state official.425
Why would Blair go through so much trouble moving before approval of paperwork and funding Hillary’s investments? During the late seventies, Blair was also the lead legal counsel to Arkansas’s top employer, Tyson Foods. He claimed he advised Hillary out of friendship, but when have we known the Clintons or anyone surrounding them to do something as a “friend”? Observers rightfully acknowledged that the investment scheme was a quick way for one of the state’s largest employers and companies to curry favor with the attorney general, and eventual governor.
It’s extremely unusual given that the trends for that market during the time that the trades were placed were extremely volatile and unpredictable, yet Clinton walked away with a $99,000 gain. Her frequency of trades and net profit were also far outside normal returns for investors buying the same amount. Experts called the trades “unusual.”426
A first taste of how she and her husband, Bill, could parlay elected office into financial gain, it seems.
Clinton would go on to downplay the role that Blair and his associates played in placing and underwriting her trades, but experts have debunked this and confirmed that it would be near impossible for Clinton not to have had a hand in the trades, even at a basic level that would allow her to understand the process.
The trades and the way in which they were handled speak volumes about the hypocrisy that the Clintons employ to this day. Since the start of their residence as public figures, both Bill and Hillary have long railed against the “gilded greed” of Wall Street and, more specifically, investors who trade futures.427
But as with nearly everything involving the well-learned grifters from Arkansas, what they say and what they do are always two different things.
Billed as one of the “Top Ten Scandals Involving Hillary Clinton You May Have Forgotten,” the cattle futures debacle is something we should all be reminded of.428
PART 4
THE CRUDE AND CORRUPTIBLE CLINTONS
CHAPTER 17
PRISON BLOOD
“In so many ways it reminds you of Nazi Germany…. These guys had the power over a captive audience to make money from human beings.”
—Journalist Mike Galster429
In the 1980s, Bill Clinton’s political cronies were selling HIV- and Hepatitis C–laced prison inmate blood to the world blood market. Unscreened prisoners would sell their blood for $7 (in prison scrip) per plasma unit to politically connected blood brokers who would then put it up for sale on the world blood market for $50 per plasma unit.430 The company that brokered the blood was Health Management Associates, Inc. (HMA).
By 1985, the business practices of HMA were coming under close scrutiny in regards to poor health assessment, record keeping, and unqualified staff hiring. Following a state investigation of HMA, the company was allowed to retain its contract because of heavy political influence and the “lobbying efforts of HMA’s president, Leonard Dunn, a Pine Bluff banker who later worked on Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign.”431 That contract lasted through 1986 until it was finally doomed by a critical report.
The problems with HMA were a warning flag.
Pine Bluff Biologicals took up and greatly expanded the low-cost blood acquisitions to include other Arkansas state prison units. “But donor-screening problems persisted. In 1989, a prisoner who had been forbidden to donate on account of disease was able to sell plasma twenty-three times after he transferred from the Pine Bluff Diagnostics Unit to Cummins.”432 The company was carelessly taking blood from Arkansas prisoners who had been infected with HIV and Hepatitis C, and the diseased blood was being sold on the world market, specifically to Canadians. A whopping 20,000 Canadians were infected with Hepatitis C and another 1,000 were infected with HIV from the contaminated plasma.433
In March
1991, reporter Mara Leveritt wrote a story for the Arkansas Times about the prison blood sales. Later in 1998, whistleblower Mike Galster, under the pseudonym Michael Sullivan, wrote the novel Blood Trail, based on the scandal. “Although fiction, Blood Trail evolved from Sullivan’s meditations on the true, tragic and ongoing story of a blood contamination that infected as many as 80,000 people in Canada,” the inside flap read. “Thousands have died, many more have death sentences, and still more will suffer for life.”434
In the 1980s, Galster was running orthopedic clinics in the Arkansas state prison system. Because of his access, Galster knew there were big problems.
Blood Trail was Galster’s way of telling the world what really happened. In May 1999, as a reward for his honesty, Galster’s clinic was burned to the ground. On the same night, the offices of a Canadian hemophiliac victims’ rights group were broken into. Who was behind these crimes?
Around the time that Galster’s book hit the shelves in 1998, Salon published a detailed article on the blood scandal by Arkansas reporter Suzi Parker. Parker’s fine piece of reporting was an indictment of the Clinton administration in Arkansas, which looked the other way while political cronies were making money selling dirty prison blood to the world blood plasma market.
Parker’s exposé pointed out that Arkansas was the last state in the union to allow prison blood to be brokered. The crooked business was practiced until 1994, when, after the Clinton years, the program was shut down. Parker fingered two Clinton cronies who played key roles in keeping the lucrative prison blood deal going: Leonard Dunn, a president of HMA who was very close to Bill Clinton, and a black lawyer, Richard Mays, who received $25,000 as an ombudsman for the troubled program. There were allegations that Mays’s compensation was basically a bribe paid by HMA to keep the blood program alive.
“Problems with the prison plasma program were well known to Clinton throughout the 1980s,” and “In 1986, Clinton’s state police investigated problems at the prison and found little cause for concern, while an outside investigator looked at the same allegations and found dozens of safety violations,” Parker wrote.435
Clinton allowed the dangerous program to continue unfettered because his cronies were making money off of it.
Parker interviewed Galster, who said the program was a “crime against humanity.” Galster attested that he had seen prisoners given illegal drugs as payment for their blood plasma. Galster told Parker that he saw inmates who “appeared jaundiced and very sick. When I would ask if they had just had a blood test, they would say, ‘No, I’ve just given plasma.’ It was clear they were sick.”436
Parker’s article quoted former prisoner John Schock, who was convinced that he got Hepatitis C from a dirty needle in the “pretty shoddy” program. “They had inmates doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. They would let people who was sick bleed … ain’t no telling what they had. They didn’t check all the time.”437
The article exposed corruption and carelessness that resulted in tragic health problems for tens of thousands of innocent people. Parker pointed out that most prison plasma programs were shut down in the early 1980s especially as the AIDS crisis was picking up steam. The FDA asked companies making blood products to refrain from obtaining them from prisons and inmates because many inmates engage in risky behaviors.
Despite the FDAs warnings, Clinton allowed the prison blood program to continue. The FDA had also shut down the Arkansas plasma program for several months in 1983 because Arkansas prisoners with Hepatitis B had been allowed to donate blood.
In 1985, after the Arkansas Board of Corrections had hired the Institute for Law and Policy Planning (ILPP), an independent group, to investigate HMA, and after ILPP had issued a scathing report detailing the forty areas where HMA had violated its state contract, Clinton made sure that HMA kept getting the contract. That happened during the same year that, as stated above, Mays received $25,000 to be an “ombudsman.” Some said that money was a kickback from HMA to a Clinton insider to facilitate that HMA retain its contract. Investigators never found the contract for Mays that spelled out his official duties … they just knew he received a large amount of quick and easy money from HMA.438
“In so many ways it reminds you of Nazi Germany…. These guys had the power over a captive audience to make money from human beings,” Galster said. “This I know, without the governor’s support and protection, this disease-riddled system would have been shut down by 1982.”439
Galster’s harsh words about Clinton were published in Salon in December 1998. When the Galster Orthopedic Laboratories later went up in flames and $200,000 in damages occurred, the firefighters who spent six hours fighting the fire suspected that it was arson.440
Arkansas journalist Suzi Parker was also convinced she was a victim of a Clinton-directed intimidation campaign. Parker’s second story on this topic was published by Salon on February 25, 1999.
The article chronicled a group of Canadian victims, approximately 1,000 hemophiliacs, who had filed a $660 million class action lawsuit against the Canadian government and two Canadian companies involved in importing and supplying the tainted blood plasma to Canadians.
Parker’s article had some other big news in it. The lawyer for the Canadian victims, David Harvey, “said he is seeking a deposition of President Clinton into what occurred in the Arkansas prison system while he was governor during the 1980s.”
The story also revealed that the Canadian hemophiliacs were on the cusp of suing the FDA, the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, the prison systems of those two states, and the companies, such as the Clinton-connected HMA, that ran the blood plasma extraction programs for those prisons in those states. “The suit could also name the president if evidence is found that Clinton knew about repeated FDA violations and international plasma recalls, yet failed to exercise his executive power to shut down the Arkansas Department of Correction plasma industry,” Parker wrote.441
Tens of thousands of Canadians (and others around the world) caught deadly diseases. Parker reported that 7,000 Canadians were expected to die because of their infections caused by the tainted blood. No one else in the media at the time was covering the blood scandal, and following her first piece “Parker began receiving mysterious, threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.”442
In early 1999, Suzi Parker attended a press conference for the lawyers for the Canadian hemophiliac victims. “While attending the press conference Parker says she knew was being watched and followed, perhaps by governmental agents.”443 Parker told author Candice Jackson that “It was creepy,” but she kept reporting on the blood scandal.
Jackson directly tied the firebombing of the plasma scandal whistleblower’s clinic to the burglarizing of the hemophiliac group’s office the same night. “The hemophiliac group had been working closely with the whistleblower to prepare the threatened lawsuit on behalf of Canadians infected with Hepatitis C and HIV from tainted Arkansas prisoners’ blood. Between the intimidating phone calls she’d been receiving and the violent arson and burglary patently designed to deter investigation into this scandal, journalist Suzi Parker got the message and backed off.”444
Parker told Jackson that she is convinced the Clintons were behind the terror tactics that successfully intimidated her from further reporting on the Clinton-Arkansas tainted prison blood scandal. In 2012, Parker again confirmed she had been a victim of a terror campaign.
We contacted Parker via email in October 2012:
Suzi, I have a few questions about your experiences investigating the tainted prison blood scandal in Arkansas. I understand you were a victim of a harassment/intimidation campaign. Is that true? If so, do you think the Clintons were behind it? Or perhaps related business parties who were benefiting from the tainted blood trade? Would you be willing to answer some questions and/or trade information on your experiences on this story?
Parker replied quickly:
Thanks for the email. I am sorry but that chapter of my journalism ca
reer is closed. I was the victim of such a campaign but have nothing else to say on the matter. Thanks again for your interest.
Cheers,
Suzi
All too often, we find a shroud of secrecy surrounds the Clintons’ behavior. People are afraid to go public with any criticism of this powerful couple.
CHAPTER 18
CLINTON FAMILY SECRETS
“President Bush says human cloning is morally wrong. Surprisingly, this is one area where both he and former President Clinton actually agree. In fact, Clinton said today that he believes humans should be created the old-fashioned way, liquored up in a cheap motel.”
—Jay Leno
In 2013, the Globe interviewed a twenty-seven-year-old man named Danney Williams. Williams had never met his fabulously wealthy father, one of the most famous people in the world, but the puffy eyes, the bulbous nose, and the big, mischievous smile were unmistakable. Williams told the Globe that he just wanted to meet his dad and shake his hand: “I read he doesn’t have long to live and I want to meet him face to face before he dies. I just want to shake his hand and say ‘Hi Dad,’ before he dies. I’d like to have a relationship with Chelsea, too. She’s my half-sister.”445
That same year, a New York–based organization, the National Father’s Day Committee, named Bill Clinton “Father of the Year.” The same organization had awarded John Edwards the title a few years prior. That is the same John Edwards who cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer. Edwards had an affair and a baby with an enthralled female supporter named Rielle Hunter.
Chelsea Clinton got up to say what a great dad Bill was. Two people not present for the ceremony were Danney Williams and his mother, Bobbie Ann.
Star reported the Danney Williams story in 1990 and then announced they would conduct a DNA test. They claimed to have DNA from Bill’s semen on Monica’s dress. But the Ken Starr panel never supplied Bill’s DNA to anyone. Clinton, plotting a 1992 presidential run, was on high alert.