It never stops: Another fundraiser scandal for Hillary?
Hillary Clinton may soon become an irrelevancy in the campaign, but her associations may continue to create questions about the Democratic Party. Following on the heels of Norman Hsu, Robert Feldman, and Mauricio Celis, McClatchy reports that another Texas fundraiser for Hillary has a history of fraud. Kase Lawal of Houston faces charges of fraud and corruption in Nigeria by the same crusading prosecutor who worked the Nigerian end of the William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson case:
A Texas oilman who’s accused of defrauding the Nigerian government by illegally pumping and exporting 10 million barrels of oil is a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Kase Lawal of Houston is at least the fourth person accused or convicted of criminal wrongdoing to help finance Clinton’s political ambitions since 2000 and the second in her quest for the White House. The list also includes Chinese and Pakistani fugitives and a former Miami lawyer who was convicted of defrauding Cuba. ….
[A] simple Google search by McClatchy produced reports of serious allegations about some of Lawal’s business dealings in Nigeria and South Africa.
Clinton’s campaign lists Lawal among about 250 “Hillraisers” who pledged to collect at least $100,000 in donations. Clinton attended a fundraising luncheon at Lawal’s home in Houston last Aug. 11 that generated more than $100,000, and she spoke to about 250 guests gathered around Lawal’s indoor swimming pool, including two former Houston mayors and Shell Oil President John Hofmeister.
When contacted by McClatchy, the Hillary Clinton campaign insisted that it carefully vets its fundraisers and as far as they know, Lawal is a pillar of his community. The Google search conducted by Greg Gordon and Will Connors belies the notion of any vetting at all. And Lawal is no mere contributor; like Hsu, the Ponzi-scheme fraudster who generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats, Lawal is a Hillraiser, one of her valued “bundlers”.
At Arm’s Length With the Truth
Hillary Clinton met her Waterloo at Tuzla. She’d been regaling audiences with tales of a dangerous landing under sniper fire in Tuzla 12 years ago and then running for cover. None of this occurred. When CBS provided the tape, she was forced to admit to "a misstatement."
Now, confabulation is a fairly common psychological phenomenon. We all have internalized childhood stories so oft repeated by elders that we come to falsely "remember" the actual experience. Adult memories are less susceptible to such unconscious inventions, but past experiences embellished over time by repeated recounting can reach the point where we actually believe the elaborate trappings of our own retellings.
Clinton’s problem, however, is that a corkscrew landing under sniper fire is the kind of thing that is hard to forget and harder still for memory to invent. This is confabulation on a pathological scale.
A Clintonian scale. And that’s the problem. Barack Obama has been gaining on Hillary in part because Tuzla reminds Democrats what they had largely succeeded in banishing from consciousness: the Clintons’ rather arm’s-length relationship with truth. The great New York Times columnist William Safire once called Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar" and made it stick. And that was more than a decade before snipergate.
SEE-THROUGH SENATOR
The National Archives yesterday re leased Sen. Hillary Clinton’s sched ules as first lady.
Finally.
While the archives must follow a meticulous process in releasing historical records, the Clinton Presidential Library has been aggressively non-cooperative regarding authorizations.
Earlier this month, the library blocked records related to the end-of-administration pardons lavished by Bill Clinton.
Yesterday it turned out that nearly a month’s worth of Mrs. Clinton’s First Lady schedules are missing.
That hardly gibes with her statement Tuesday, anticipating the release of the schedules: "I think I’m probably the most transparent person in public life."
Perhaps. Certainly it is true - as Sen. Clinton pointed out - that she has been the subject of some 60 books.
But - and we hate to keep bringing this up - a little more transparency regarding the Clinton family finances would go a long way toward answering many lingering questions.
What about those tax returns?
Clinton’s schedules reveal curious deletions
The early days of 1996 were tense times inside the Clinton White House. On Jan. 4, the First Couple’s top personal aide reported that she had stumbled upon Hillary Clinton’s long-lost Rose Law Firm billing records–documents that had been requested by Whitewater prosecutors two years earlier. Ken Starr quickly subpoenaed the First Lady to testify before a federal grand jury, leading to her historic four-hour appearance at the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington on Jan. 26 of that year.
But anybody looking through Hillary Clinton’s newly released White House records for clues as to how she handled this personal crisis will find … absolutely nothing. The more than 10,000 pages, released by the National Archives in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, purport to be the New York senator’s daily schedules for her entire eight-year tenure as First Lady–the first major "document dump" from the Clinton Library in Little Rock.
But the documents include only Hillary Clinton’s public schedules, not her private calendar. And even those appear to be heavily redacted to exclude almost anything that might be of interest to historians and the inevitable posse of "oppo" researchers. The January 1996 records show Hillary Clinton appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and numerous other TV and radio shows to promote her just-published book, "It Takes a Village." But they show no meetings whatsoever about the Rose Law firm billing records, no sessions with her lawyers to prepare for her grilling by Starr. The calendar for Jan. 26, 1996–the day crowds of reporters and TV cameramen gathered at the courthouse to watch Hillary Clinton enter and exit the grand jury–is totally blank. "NO public schedule," it states simply, wiping out any reference to one of the more embarrassing public episodes of the First Lady’s days in the White House.
The heavy deletions are perhaps not surprising, given that the National Archives staffers who approved the release operated under guidance given by former president Clinton in a November 2002 letter recommending strict restrictions on the types of material that can be divulged. (Among the documents that should be "considered for withholding," were anything related to investigations of the White House and all but "non-routine" communications between the president and the First Lady.) The material the National Archives did decide to release still had to be reviewed and approved by Bruce Lindsey, the president’s longtime loyal aide who serves as chief custodian of the Clinton archives. "This stuff has been sanitized," said Chris Farrell, the chief of investigations for Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group that sued the Archives for release of the records. "Our expectations were very low, and they didn’t disappoint." (Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said the Archives released the records under "very strict legal requirements and guidelines that they follow in their redactions as they do for every president’s documents. The National Archives made the redactions." He added that Lindsey, former president Clinton’s official representative, asked the Archives to "put extensive material back in" and "the vast majority" of the remaining redactions were made to protect the privacy of third parties.)
Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady to be Released
Hmm I wonder if the morning of the Waco Branch Davidian Fire will be accounted for? Many people have concluded that Hillary might have been the one to force the confrontation - and Reno took the wrap.
The National Archives announced on Tuesday that 11,046 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham’s White House schedules will be released on Wednesday.
The records were the subject of a legal fight between Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the National Archives, which has been slow to comply with a request to release the records, arguing that the vetting process takes time.
Mrs. Clinton’s schedules have attracted close attention throughout the campaign, partly because Mrs. Clinton has frequently held up her eight years as first lady as evidence of her experience.
Judicial Watch announced on March 4 that the National Archives promised to release at least 10,000 pages of the records by March 20.
The Archives said in a statement on Tuesday that the schedules are from the staff files of Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s former campaign manager who was her chief scheduler in the White House.
“Arranged chronologically, these records document in detail the activities of the First Lady, including meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for the eight years of the Clinton Administration,” the statement said.
Of the more than 11,000 pages to be released, 4,746 pages have redactions, mostly relating to “the privacy interests of third parties,” including Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and home addresses, the Archives said.
Source: Times
Clinton, McCain delay in making tax returns public
During Hillary’s Clinton’s New York race for the Senate in 2000, a man in an Uncle Sam suit calling himself ”Tax Man” followed Republican candidate Rick Lazio around, demanding to know why Lazio was so slow in making his income tax returns public.
”The people of New York have a right to know what he’s hiding,” said Howard Wolfson, then a top Clinton aide who often trailed behind ”Tax Man” feeding reporters campaign spin. “Rick Lazio’s 15 minutes are up — he should stop making excuses and come clean with New Yorkers.”
Eight years later, Clinton and her presidential campaign aren’t making her income tax returns public. She’s promised to release her income tax information on or around April 15.
Wolfson, now the Clinton campaign’s communications director, won’t say why Clinton wouldn’t release her tax information earlier. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, released his 2006 tax returns last April.
The junior senator from New York isn’t the only presidential candidate who hasn’t made tax records public. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, hasn’t either. His campaign says that he’ll make his records public in the next month or so.
McCain has never made his tax returns public, but Clinton has. In 1994, under political pressure over the Whitewater land deal controversy, the Clintons made public all their tax returns since 1977. The couple also disclosed their tax returns during Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, but not since.
The delays by Clinton and McCain perplex some government watchdog groups, which note that past presidential candidates had no trouble producing their tax returns in a timely fashion. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, released his tax information in December 2003, for example.
”This is a part of the public record that voters have come to expect. Concern grows when anything is withheld,” said Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that examines money and politics. “If it means waiting until April 15, we wait until April 15. We just don’t know why.”
