Hillary Clinton made a remarkable admission of a felony violation of the federal election law in a the recently released video tape of a phone call Hillary made to her largest secret 2000 Senate race donor, Peter Paul.

The admission can be heard in the middle of the five minute taped conversation which included Paul’s partner, Spider Man creator Stan Lee.** Hillary tells Peter Paul that she has spoken to Cher for the first time, after Paul enlisted Cher’s singing services for the “hard money” concert he was producing and underwriting for Hillary’s campaign in August, 2000. Hillary’s call to Cher cinched the deal for Cher to perform for Hillary’s Senate campaign’s benefit.

Hillary’s solicitation of Cher’s contribution of her professional performing services, worth more than $150,000, to enable Paul to sell $1000 “hard money” contribution-tickets to benefit Hillary’s Senate campaign, resulted in Cher becoming a co-conspirator and material witness to Hillary’s felony violation of federal law.

It is illegal to contribute, as well as solicit, an excessive contribution (exceeding $2000) to a federal candidate under federal election law, Hillary effectively induced Cher to commit a felony with her!

Cher joins a long list of celebrity witnesses that participated in and/or have knowledge of Hillary’s illegal and fraudulent activities in dealing with Peter Paul.

The witness list includes Chelsea Clinton, Al Gore, Governor Ed Rendell, Larry King, Shirley McLaine, John Travolta, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, Diana Ross, Mike Wallace, Terry McAuliffe among many others.

(Lee himself admitted in a video taped sworn deposition to making illegal contributions in his name to Hillary’s campaign with monies provided by Paul)

Hillary’s Secret War
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 7, 2004

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Richard Poe, a New York Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. Formerly the editor of Frontpagemag.com, he is the author of the new book Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists. Visit his blog at RichardPoe.com.

Frontpage Magazine: Mr. Poe, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you with us.

Poe: Thank you.

FP: So let’s discuss your new book. First things first though: Hillary is out of the White House. Why should we even care about her anymore?

Poe: Well, as we all know, Hillary means to regain the White House, at any cost. I believe she will make her play this year, in 2004. John Kerry is imploding as we speak. He is unelectable. Kerry has too much baggage, too many skeletons in his closet.

Democrat strategists are already quietly discussing a “Torricelli option” – to pull Kerry from the race, just as they pulled Robert Torricelli from the New Jersey Senate race in 2002, replacing him at the last minute with Frank Lautenberg.

If the Democrats “pull a Torricelli” at their National Convention in July – that is, if they force Kerry to withdraw – Hillary will be the obvious frontrunner. I think there’s a strong chance that, when Election Day rolls around, President Bush will face Hillary, not Kerry.

FP: Hillary’s Secret War tells us that Hillary personally led a secret police force from her office in the White House. Tell us about your proof and evidence.

Poe: The operations of Hillary’s secret police have been copiously documented, to the point where the topic can hardly be called controversial any longer.

During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals ran terrible risks. Journalists were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits.

Some may have paid the ultimate price. In February, 1998, just as the Clinton impeachment was gathering steam, Sandy Hume, the 28-year-old son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume, suddenly turned up dead of a gunshot to the head. He was covering the U.S. Congress for the magazine The Hill, and was known for his excellent sources among Republican insiders. Sandy Hume supposedly committed suicide, but friends and associates have questioned the official story.

Some of the White House “secret police” were private detectives, such as Terry Lenzner, Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano. Others were Clinton loyalists embedded in federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the NTSB and so on. Many of these people are still in place, and still doing the Clintons’ dirty work. I call them the Shadow Team.

FP: How does Hillary fit into all this?

Poe: Hillary is the muscle end of the Clinton mafia. It was she who organized and led the Shadow Team. Her role as White House enforcer was first revealed by the late Barbara Olson.

Mrs. Olson was a former federal prosecutor who served from 1995 to 1996 as Chief Investigative Counsel for the Clinger Committee – Rep. William F. Clinger Jr.’s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which probed the Filegate and Travelgate affairs. The evidence Mrs. Olson uncovered convinced her that Hillary Clinton had, among other things, conspired to use the Federal Bureau of Investigation unlawfully to intimidate, punish, harass, frame and otherwise harm innocent people who stood in her way.

In her 1999 book Hell to Pay, Mrs. Olson wrote, “Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer. … In one White House scandal after another, all roads led to Hillary. To investigate White House improprieties and scandals, the evidence necessarily led to her hidden hands guiding the Clinton operation.”

FP: This is actually quite incredible. How did Hillary get away with all of this? Surely Ken Starr would have jumped on any excuse to indict Hillary, no?

Poe: Well, as I explain in my book, there are two Ken Starrs. There’s the imaginary Ken Starr conjured up by Big Media – a ruthless, rightwing religious zealot, bent on toppling the Clintons. Then there’s the real Ken Starr – a timid bureaucrat, afraid of his own shadow, who shrank from investigating any of the truly serious Clinton scandals. On the contrary, Starr actively helped to suppress and whitewash evidence of Clinton wrongdoing.

Take the Vincent Foster case. In September 1994, Starr appointed Miquel Rodriguez to lead the grand jury investigation into Foster’s death. Rodriguez resigned in protest less than four months later, charging that the investigation was rigged. Rodriguez accused Starr’s people of pressuring him to announce that Foster committed suicide, despite evidence to the contrary.

After resigning, Rodriguez tried to go public. But Big Media shut him out. According to WorldNetDaily, Rodriguez claims that he told his story to reporters from Time, Newsweek, ABC’s Nightline, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times. Rodriguez says that he spent six hours with a reporter from the New York Times. In every case, his story was spiked by higher-ups. No one reported it.

Clinton defenders often argue that five different investigations ruled Foster’s death a suicide. But Rodriguez retorts, “In fact, all of the investigations were done by the same people, the FBI.” Rodriguez says that FBI agents threatened his “physical well-being,” if he did not shut up about the Foster case. Today, Rodriguez serves as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Sacramento.

FP: Why would Ken Starr cover for the Clintons?

It has been alleged that the Clintons had some sort of hold over Starr – that, in fact, Starr was “fixed,” either by threats, blackmail or perhaps mutual self-interest.

According to White House whistleblower Nolanda Hill, Starr’s team was thoroughly infiltrated by Clinton loyalists. Even Starr’s FBI investigators reported secretly to Janet Reno. This gave the Clintons enormous leverage to guide and manipulate the investigation their way.

Moreover, Starr had a conflict of interest. In his private legal practice, he represented a subsidiary of CITIC, a company owned by the People’s Liberation Army of China, and led by arms dealer Wang Jun, a Chinese military intelligence operative and a key player in the Chinagate scandal. The mere fact that Starr was on Wang Jun’s payroll should have disqualified him from serving as Independent Counsel. But, for some reason, Starr did not recuse himself.

FP: You also accuse Hillary’s secret police of blackmailing witnesses, journalists, Senators, Congressmen – even federal investigators and House impeachment managers. Can you prove these charges?

Poe: Well, in many cases, these threats were made quite openly. For example, on February 8, 1998, with pressure mounting to impeach Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos appeared on ABC’s This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Stephanopoulos had resigned as White House communications chief in 1996 and become an ABC news analyst. But he was still carrying the Clintons’ water, as his next words made clear.

Stephanopoulos announced that the Clinton White House was planning what he called an “Ellen Rometsch” strategy. He explained that Rometsch was an East German spy who had managed to become John F. Kennedy’s lover. According to Stephanopoulos, the Kennedy White House threatened to open up the FBI files and divulge embarrassing or incriminating information on anyone who attempted to blow the whistle on JFK’s affair with Rometsch. If pressed to the wall, the Clinton White House would do likewise, said Stephanopoulos.

Sam Donaldson asked, “Are you suggesting for a moment that what they’re beginning to say is that if you investigate this too much, we’ll put all your dirty linen right on the table? Every member of the Senate? Every member of the press corps?” To which Stephanopoulos replied, “Absolutely. The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everyone down with him.”

This was a clear threat, delivered openly, on national television. Through Stephanopoulos, the Clintons were warning Congress and the media to back off. The threat worked. David P. Schippers, who was Chief Investigative Counsel for the Clinton impeachment, reveals in his book Sell-Out that Republican leaders, from the get-go, had no intention of holding a proper impeachment trial or of convicting Bill Clinton. It was all a charade.

FP: What is the New Underground?

Poe: The New Underground is the name I have given to the network of dissident journalists who began speaking out against Clinton corruption during the 1990s, through New Media outlets such as talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

FP: How did Hillary persecute the New Underground?

Poe: In July 1995, Hillary’s Shadow Team produced a secret report which identified the Internet as a special danger to the Clintons’ power. The report proved prophetic when journalists such as Matt Drudge, Christopher Ruddy, Joseph Farah and, of course, David Horowitz, began using the Internet to publish stories that Big Media would never touch.

In February 1998, Hillary announced that the Internet needed an “editing or gatekeeping function.” By the time she spoke those words, Hillary was already hard at work putting her gatekeeping machinery into place.

Her most damaging attacks against the Internet came disguised as private lawsuits, brought by third parties. For instance, Hillary operative Sid Blumenthal sued Matt Drudge for $30 million in 1997, charging defamation. The lawsuit was clearly orchestrated by the White House. David Horowitz came to Drudge’s rescue, providing him with free legal representation, and got slapped with an IRS audit for his troubles. The case dragged on for years, but, soon after the Clintons left office, Blumenthal dropped his suit.

In September 1998, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times sued Jim Robinson’s FreeRepublic.com for copyright violation. Like most message board operators, Robinson allowed users to post full-length newspaper articles on his discussion forum. However, unlike other message board operators, Robinson one day found himself deluged by cease-and-desist orders from Times Mirror, Dow Jones, Reuters and other leading news organizations. According to the Washington Weekly, the attack on FreeRepublic was coordinated by Debevoise & Plimpton – a law firm used by the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee.

FP: Have you experienced any persecution or harassment personally? Any threats or warnings? Do you have concerns for your and your family’s safety?

Poe: Well, I doubt that I’m important enough to merit Hillary’s personal attention. The Shadow Team has bigger fish to fry. For instance, I imagine they’ve got their hands pretty full, right now, trying to frame Rush Limbaugh on drug charges.

That said, I did have a devil of a time getting Hillary’s Secret War published. Random House originally signed the book. After I turned in the manuscript, they refused to publish it. Things looked bad for awhile. Then Joseph Farah and WND Books came riding to the rescue, God bless them, and agreed to publish Hillary’s Secret War.

FP: Tell us about Hillary’s secret conspiracy report.

Poe: Its official title was The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. Hillary’s Shadow Team produced this report in July 1995, in an attempt to squelch further discussion of the Vincent Foster case. Hillary’s operatives quietly circulated the report to Clinton-friendly journalists, in order to give them ammunition for debunking and discrediting any journalist who dared to continue probing the Foster cover-up.

The report accused Pittsburgh newspaper mogul Richard Mellon Scaife of fabricating rumors about Foster’s death and paying rightwing journalists to spread them. Significantly, the report featured a special section identifying the Internet as the most dangerous weapon in Scaife’s arsenal, enabling him and his vast rightwing conspiracy to disseminate – and I quote – “an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information…”

FP: We all know that Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story. What other big stories did the New Underground break?

Poe: Virtually every Clinton scandal of any note was either broken on the Internet, or kept alive on the Internet long after Big Media had suppressed it. The list is endless: there’s the Clintons’ involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal; the Vincent Foster cover-up; the suspicious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown; the Clintons’ ties to drug lords and global crime syndicates; the TWA 800 coverup; the Oklahoma City bombing coverup; Chinagate; Russiagate; the Clinton body count. You name it.

FP: You claim that the New Underground helped turn the tide for George W. Bush during the 2000 election. Please explain.

Poe: During the election crisis, FreeRepublic mobilized activists who took the fight to the streets. They created the now-famous “Sore Loserman” emblem brandished by protesters across America. When Jesse Jackson came to Florida to incite racial unrest, the Freepers shouted him down at a major rally and sent him packing. Freepers also joined the protest outside the Stephen Clarke government building in Miami, which helped stop the all-Democrat Miami-Dade canvassing board from carrying out an illegal, selective vote count behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, J.J. Johnson’s SierraTimes.com acted as a central command post for Operation Truckstop 2000 – a nationwide, general trucking strike that would have gone into effect had Gore succeeded in stealing the election.

The real tie-breaker, however, was an exclusive series of stories published on Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily, exposing Gore’s ties to the criminal rackets of the “Hillbilly Mafia.” Local observers say that story, which got wide play in Tennessee media, cost Gore his home state, with its crucial eleven electoral votes. Had Gore won Tennessee, he never would have needed those disputed votes in Florida.

FP: In your epilogue, you recount an interesting experience you had on the day of the 9-11 attack. Tell us about that.

Poe: I was then editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPageMagazine.com — as you are now. On the day of the attack, my wife Marie got a call from our friend Ann Coulter. She was stranded in a bar in Queens, and her cell phone was dying. Manhattan was locked down. The bridges were closed and Ann couldn’t get home. So we got in the car and picked her up.

Ann had a column due that night, so we set her up in our library with her laptop. We were all there together when we got the news of Barbara Olson’s death. Tragically, Mrs. Olson had gone down with American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

Barbara Olson was a personal friend of Ann’s. The loss hit her very hard. That night, Ann sat in my library, with F-16 jet fighters screaming overhead every few minutes, and wrote her eulogy to her lost friend. It concluded with what would soon become Ann’s most famous and controversial one-liner: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

FP: You compare the New Underground to the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. Do you believe we are headed for revolution?

Poe: God forbid. Revolutions usually end in dictatorship, no matter which side wins. Still, if the enemies of our Republic pick a fight – and I’m talking here about our internal foes – I don’t believe that Americans are in any mood these days to back down from it.

FP: Mr. Poe, we are out of time. Thank you for joining us and everyone here at Frontpagemag.com would like to congratulate you on accomplishing this vital piece of work on the Clintons. We hope to see you again soon.

Poe: Thank you Jamie.

Other books by Richard Poe

Posted by Vince Foster

She is so pathetic!

Sen. Hillary Clinton is asking her fellow senators to sign on to her and Sen. Robert Byrd’s plan for an Iraq war vote do-over.

In a letter to all 98 other senators provided to the Daily News yesterday, Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Byrd (D-W.Va.) say Congress should haul President Bush back for a new war vote when the Senate debates the 2008 military spending bill in the next few weeks.

The letter, sent Friday, argues that the 2002 vote for the war, which Clinton backed, is hopelessly out of date.

"That authorization, which references the government of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, is no longer relevant," they say.

Clinton and Byrd want Congress’ original approval to expire on Oct. 11 - the fifth anniversary of the vote to authorize the use of force against Saddam.

"Our troops have toppled the dictator. The Iraqis have voted in a new government," the letter says. "The American public and our troops in the field are entitled to a new debate about this war."

Clinton’s vote for the war has been one of the thorniest issues of her presidential campaign.

She has refused repeatedly to apologize for authorizing a war that she has grown increasingly critical of over the past year and a half. She has instead said she regrets the way President Bush has used that authority.

Read it all here

Posted by Vince Foster

Helen Thomas

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has great political skills, but her war-and-peace compass leaves something to be desired. Clinton has blown hot and cold on Middle East issues, including Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. She is at best pragmatic. Principles? Well, that’s another story. Before and during her early years in the White House, she supported Palestinian statehood, but she apparently forgot this after successfully running for senator from New York as a Democrat.

The rest is history. She obviously had to cater to a new constituency, make the ritual trip to Israel and forget any sympathy she once had for the Palestinians. But is her 180-degree flip-flop on that festering issue a portent of her leadership if she attains the White House? As for Iraq, she voted in October 2002 to authorize President Bush to do what was necessary to unseat Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Unlike former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, she has refused to say she made a mistake when she voted for the war. She cannot claim she was misled.

During the lead up to the war when she was briefed on the latest U.S. intelligence about Iraq, Bush was shouting from the housetops that he was going to attack Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often strutted before reporters at the Pentagon two years before the invasion and bragged about the attack the U.S. would wage against Iraq. Clinton is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a post that will allow her to embellish her credentials as a possible future commander-in-chief to show she would not hesitate to make tough military decisions. As a member of that committee, she visited Iraq in 2005 and said U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake. But she also criticized the administration for making poor decisions about the war. In 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within a certain deadline; the president vetoed the measure. But Clinton then voted against a compromise war-spending bill that tied funding to progress by Iraq in meeting certain benchmarks.

Posted by Vince Foster

From Gateway Pundit - visit them daily!

The New Media Journal is reporting on the Hillary Campaign Finance Felonies this morning.
And, Doug from Upland put together this easy to understand video explaining the case against Hillary Clinton:
(8:22)
The video that was released last week is going to make things very difficult for Hillary Clinton. It’s just too bad the liberal media does not believe this story is newsworthy- It’s not a damning video about George W. Bush or Dick Cheney after all.

Free Republic has several posts on the alleged felonies:

** Hillary Is a Felon: Just Released Tape Proves Crime
** Smoking gun’ Hillary tape filed in court Video records alleged felonies
** HILLARY CLINTON ENGAGED IN FELONIES CAUGHT ONVIDEO SUBMITTED FOR JUDICIAL REVIEW IN CALIFORNIA
** Full Hillary ‘smoking gun’ video released
** DFU PRESENTS - Hillary Clinton Felonies Caught on Tape is now on YouTube - send it everywhere!
** Hillary Campaign Finance Felonies Caught on Video

Now… If you really want to get into the details of this latest Clinton scandal, you can wade through the muck at:

Hillcap.org
The Peter Paul vs Hillary and Bill Clinton Album
Equal Justice Foundation
Peter Paul

These websites are all dedicated to the "Largest Election Law Fraud in History."

Previously:
Hillary Implicated In "Largest Election Law Fraud in History"
HOT!… More Goods on the Latest Clinton Scandal! (Video)

Help spread the word about nohillaryclinton.com Put one of these "ugly banners" on your email signature, blog, website or myspace site! Click examples to see selections

Filed as evidence in case against New York senator, husband

The full, five-minute videotape touted as "smoking gun evidence" of two felonies committed by Sen. Hillary Clinton has been released to WND.

As WND reported, the tape was submitted as evidence to a California appeals court yesterday in a civil fraud suit against the New York Democrat and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

WND reported in April the tape indicates Clinton – despite denials throughout six years of investigation – was directly involved with business mogul Peter Franklin Paul in producing a lavish Hollywood fundraiser in August 2000 that eventually cost Paul nearly $2 million.

Read Quid Pro Quo Part I here

Post by JetMoses

Diana Berger was twenty-seven years old and six months pregnant with her first child when her husband, Alex, was killed in the FALN bombing of Manhattan’s historic Fraunces Tavern on January 24, 1975. Alex was supposed to have lunch somewhere else that day, but the reservations got mixed up, and there he was just after noon, sitting with friends and colleagues at a table overlooking Broad Street when the bomb went off. Alex Berger was twenty-eight years old, a star graduate of the Wharton Business School. His only child, a son, was born three months after he died.

Diana Berger told the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser that she had spoken repeatedly to the White House after the clemency announcement, but all she received was arrogance. “I said, ‘This organization has claimed responsibility for acts of violence.’ He [a White House representative] replied, ‘In this country we do not have guilt by association.’ How insulting.” She told Peyser, “How dare they say these terrorists have been punished enough? We’ve been punished each day, and will be forever.”

Another man, Bill Newall, was with Alex Berger that day. Also at the table were Jim Gezork and Frank Connor. All but Newall were killed. “They died terrible deaths, barely recognizable to their families,” Newall later told Congress. “It is impossible to adequately describe the effects of this savagery on the injured and the dead and their families.” He said he didn’t recall ever hearing, in the almost twenty-five years since that day, “any expression of remorse or concern or contrition by any members of the FALN for the pain and loss they caused unarmed and unsuspecting civilians.”

Rocco Pascarella was injured in an FALN bombing on New Year’s Eve 1982. A young officer with the NYPD, he was assigned to police headquarters downtown. At 9:30 PM they heard a tremendous explosion at headquarters. He thought it was fireworks. Soon they found out a bomb had exploded at 26 Federal Plaza, two blocks away. Pascarella was told to check out headquarters, walk around and see if he saw anything that might be an explosive. As he walked toward the rear entrance of the building he turned toward some debris. At that moment the bomb exploded. It blew off one of his legs below the knee, and badly injured the other. He lost half his hearing, some of his sight, required forty stitches in his face, and was in rehab for a year. After the president granted clemency, Pascarella testified on the September 15, 1999, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said he couldn’t understand why Clinton would grant any “clemency request with American blood on it.”

Neither could Anthony Seft. He was a detective in the NYPD bomb squad that night, and was severely injured when one of the five bombs placed by the FALN exploded as he tried to disarm it. He told the House Committee on Government Reform that on that night he received “a lifelong sentence without the possibility of parole, with no time off for good behavior, and no chance of clemency. My sentence includes five reconstructive operations on my face, the loss of all my sight in one eye, 60 percent hearing loss in both ears. My only solace was that sixteen members of the FALN were serving prison sentences.” He said the president “speaks out of both sides of his mouth,” damning Timothy McVeigh’s terrorism in Oklahoma but ignoring the FALN’s terrorism now. He ended his testimony with the words “God bless America.”

Would the Clintons really have found any legitimate reason to free the men who killed and injured these people? Of course not. Did they do it for mere political gain? Who doubts it?

The Clintons always seem to believe they will get away with such scandals, and so far they have been proven right. The page turns, our attention shifts, new stories claim new headlines. And yet even among their supporters there is a looking away when these kinds of things are discussed, an uneasy shifting and a shrug. One senses with so many Democrats who support the Clintons an unspoken sentence: “They’re all we have.”

-Peggy Noonan

Posted by JetMoses

This is an excerpt from The Case Against Hillary Clinton, by Peggy Noonan.

You’d think lies, especially the political lies of practiced liars, would be subtle. But theirs are not. There are many examples. Consider just one: the events surrounding the freeing of the sixteen FALN terrorists whose sentences President Clinton commuted on August 11, 1999. For ten years starting in 1974 two terrorist groups wanting independence for Puerto Rico—the FALN and another, smaller group—waged a campaign of violence in the United States. They carried out more than a hundred bombings, which killed six people and wounded scores of others. In time sixteen defendants were arrested; the indictments brought against them linked them to violent crimes; they were convicted on charges ranging from armed robbery to weapons violations to sedition. All sixteen were believed to have been involved in the terror campaign and all received heavy sentences.

Puerto Rican activists had long pressed for their release, but the terrorists themselves remained unrepentant. The activist began asking President Clinton to release the FALN-ers in 1993, as soon as he took office. He took action on their requests in August 1999.

Why then? Why at all?

He said that the reason for his decision was that the terrorists’ sentences were too long under current sentencing guidelines. But the staff director of the US Sentencing Commission soon said that wasn’t so; the terrorists could have been tried for treason and received life sentences.

Did the president grant clemency because disinterested professionals in the justice system urged him to? No, they opposed it. The president granted clemency over the unanimous objections of the FBI, whose director, Louis Freeh, warned the president in a memo that the terrorists were unrepentant and likely to return to terrorism if freed; the US Bureau of Prisons; and two US Attorneys. (Newsweek later reported that the Bureau of Prisons had audiotapes of some of the terrorists saying that they planned to continue their terror campaign if they were ever freed.)

Was it compassion for the prisoners that motivated the president? Clinton is not known for this particular kind of compassion; he had used the power of presidential pardon only twice in seven years. As governor, he had even allowed a retarded man, Ricky Ray Rector, to be put to death in Arkansas in 1992 rather than face what he imagined would be political heat in the presidential race for being soft on crime. (Ray’s execution took place during the Gennifer Flowers scandal, and it has been speculated that the former was meant to take the spotlight off the latter.) There is reason to believe the president associates pardons with politics.

So why did Bill Clinton all of a sudden decide to grant clemency?

The most obvious answer is the most widely held: He was thinking of Hillary’s election prospects in New York, which has a high percentage of Puerto Rican voters. Dick Morris, who worked for the Clintons on and off for twenty years, said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe the timing, and likely the substance, of Bill’s decision was linked to Hillary’s courtship of New York’s large Puerto Rican vote is too naïve for politics.”

There is so much evidence to support this view, but one small and I suspect not unimportant piece has not previously been addressed in the clemency coverage. It was an appearance on CNBC by Clinton friend and defender Geraldo Rivera in February of 1999, when the first rumors of a Hillary candidacy were beginning to float. Rivera excitedly told a story. He said that he had just talked with the president on the phone and had told him, “You know, I’d like to invite the first lady to march with me in this summer’s Puerto Rican Day parade up Fifth Avenue… a million and a half people lining both sides of the streets.” Bill Clinton, he said, was very interested. “The president instantly said, ‘I think she’d like that.’ And then, as if to emphasize it, he said, ‘I think she’d like that’ a second time.”

This suggested to Rivera that the rumors of a candidacy were true, and the president was excited about ideas for how to win.

It was six months after this conversation that the president granted clemency to the terrorists. Is it too bold to speculate that that magical number—one and a half million Puerto Rican voters—sparked or sealed his decision?

TO BE CONTINUED

Part 2 HERE