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On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton was challenged by the press about the Clinton family’s acceptance of more than $900,000 in free private travel from Infousa, a company linked to scamming the elderly.

Her reply? She said that she had complied with all Senate ethics rules and reimbursed the company for the amount of a first class air ticket — usually about 1 percent of the cost of the luxurious private jet travel. According to Hillary, “Those were the rules. You’ll have to ask someone else if it’s good policy.”

In other words, get lost.

Is there anyone out there who would say it’s good policy for a U.S. senator and presidential candidate to accept apparently tax-free gifts of almost a million dollars from a corporation — especially a corporation involved in providing lists of vulnerable elderly people to scam artists?

And it’s not like the Clintons couldn’t afford to buy an air ticket — the family income since 2001 has been more than $63 million! So why do they have to freeload from rich friends?

Well, evidently Hillary doesn’t think that she should be the one to consider whether it makes ethical sense to have rich pals pay for a U.S. senator’s family vacations.

That’s up to “someone else…”

But, Hillary has decided it is up to her — and not someone else — to determine whether corporate policies that allow huge payments and perks to CEOs make good policy. And her answer is a resounding, "NO" … unless, it seems, if she’s benefiting from the perks.

When Senator Clinton condemns corporate greed and attacks over-the-top CEO compensation, she’s not talking about her close friends in the business world. No, to her, they’re different. In the Clintons’ case, it’s OK to use corporate assets to fly her and her husband to jet-set vacation spots all over the world, including a $146,000 plane ride to Acapulco for a Clinton family holiday in January of 2002.

It’s the other corporations and CEOs out there that she’s targeting. They’re the greedy ones that have to be regulated.

Last week, we revealed that former president Bill Clinton was on the payroll of Infousa, the Nebraska company that supplied lists of vulnerable elderly people to con artists who then defrauded the unsuspecting victims. Internal e-mails suggest that employees of Infousa were aware that some of their clients were under investigation for these revolting predatory practices.

Since 2001, Infousa has paid Bill Clinton $3.3 million, although it’s not at all clear what he was supposed to do for the money — other than fly on the company’s jet for vacations and golf games with Infousa’s CEO. Infousa CEO, Vin Gupta, has made the Infousa corporate jet available for the Clintons to travel in style to Hawaii, Switzerland and Jamaica — at a cost of more that $900,000.

Some of the shareholders of the company agree wholeheartedly with Hillary’s public position about overpaid CEO’s. Here’s what the Senator had to say:

“We need to open up CEO compensation to public scrutiny and public challenge and ensure that boards of directors are independent when determining CEO pay.”

In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, shareholders of Infousa claimed that the payments to Bill Clinton and the use of the corporate jet by the Clintons were a “waste” of corporate assets and were not “business related.” Infousa actually claims that all of the Clinton trips — even the vacation excursions — were business related.

Of course.

Hillary Clinton has no words of criticism for the man who contributed at least $1 million to the Clinton Library and $2 million towards her incredible $16 million millenium New Year’s Eve party, and hundreds of thousands to her campaigns and the Democratic Party.

Clinton’s financial disclosure forms never mention the trips provided by Infousa and until the lawsuit was filed, the Clintons released no information about how much Bill was paid — only declaring that it was “more than $1000.”

A lot more!

Hillary just doesn’t get it — and never will.

Just yesterday, she actually lectured about the need to control corporate pay to executives — unless, of course, they’re providing freebies to her and her family.

Since he left office in 2001, former president Bill Clinton has been paid by $3.3 million by InfoUSA, an Omaha, Nebraska company that has been identified as a key provider of specially designed databases that have been sold to criminals who use the detailed information to defraud the unsuspecting elderly.

The consulting fees to the former president were only part of the largess InfoUSA showered on the former president.

Vinod Gupta, the CEO of InfoUSA, lent the Clintons the company’s jet which took them to places like Switzerland, Hawaii, Jamaica and Mexico.

The jet service was worth a staggering $900,000.

And Gupta gave the Clinton library a six-figure gift as well. Indeed, just months after he left the presidency, Bill Clinton was paid $200,000 for a speech given to InfoUSA in Omaha.

InfoUSA is not the kind of company with which a former president and the husband of a presidential candidate should associate.

According to the The New York Times, InfoUSA compiled and sold lists that disclosed the names of elderly men and women who would be likely to respond to unscrupulous scams.

The lists left no doubt about the vulnerability of the elderly targets.

The Times reported, for example, that InfoUSA advertised lists of "Elderly Opportunity Seekers," 3.3 million older people "looking for ways to make money," and "Suffering Seniors," 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. "Oldies but Goodies" contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: "These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change."

InfoUSA sold lists to companies that were under investigation or closed down by courts because of their criminal activity. The company’s internal emails show that employees were aware that the investigation for elderly fraud involved their customers, but sold the lists anyway.

The Times profiled one unfortunate 92-year-old man who entered a sweepstakes sponsored by InfoUSA. The information that he innocently provided was then sold to the predator marketers. After responding to their telemarketing calls seeking financial information, his entire life savings was stolen from his bank account at Wachovia Bank. These practices, using lists supplied by InfoUSA, were repeated all over the country.

Last week, Hillary Clinton sought and obtained an extension of time to file her presidential candidate financial disclosure statement.

Unlike the information required of Senators, this filing requires her to list not just the sources of Bill’s income but exactly how much they paid him.

While Senator Clinton offered no reason for the postponement, one cannot help wondering if a desire to conceal InfoUSA’s payments to her husband while the company is under fire.

The extent of the company’s payments to Bill only came out as a result of a lawsuit by disgruntled stockholders against the company management.

The relationship between Bill Clinton and Vinod "Vin" Gupta, the CEO and Chairman of InfoUSA is both long-standing and deep.

A frequent Clinton donor, he has stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom, admitted to donating $1,000,000 to the Clinton Library and told the press that he’d consider an additional donation.

Again, since the Clintons refuse to disclose who donated money to the library, we don’t know the total that he actually gave. In late 1999, Gupta gave $2,000,000 for Hillary Clinton’s Millennium New Year’s Eve bash. (They party cost $16 million and was closed to the press!)

The links between Gupta and the Clintons are extensive:

• Gupta raised over $200,000 for Hillary’s Senate campaigns and contributed thousands to the DNC and Democratic House and Senate campaigns.
• InfoUSA was one of the sponsors of the Aspen Festival of Ideas last summer where Bill and Hillary Clinton both spoke.
• Gupta built the Bill Clinton Science & Technology Center and the Hillary Clinton Mass Communications Center in his hometown of Rampur, India.
• Bill and Gupta traveled to India together.
• Gupta reportedly paid for a golf outing for Bill at a legendary Scottish course.
• InfoUSA appointed Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton’s longtime moneyman to the Board of Directors of its subsidiary company videoyellowpagesusa.com.
• Clinton appointed Gupta to the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees only a few days before he left office.
• Clinton also nominated Gupta as Consul General of Bermuda and U.S. Ambassador to Fiji, but Gupta was never confirmed.
• Gupta’s company co-sponsored the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative.
• Gupta sent a $7000 treadmill to Chappaqua days after the Clintons left the White House. After the New York Post disclosed the gift, the Clintons returned the gift.

Gupta’s generosity to the Clintons is only matched by his generosity to himself. InfoUSA has lately been attacked by some of its shareholders, particularly by the Greenwich, Connecticut company Cardinal Capital that went after Conrad Black. Lord Black is now on trial in Chicago for corporate fraud.

Cardinal Capital objected to Gupta’s purchase of a $600,000 skybox at the University of Nebraska, his family’s charges of $13.5 million in private jet charges, and $2.5 million for the long term lease of a yacht – all with corporate funds.

In addition to his 2001 visit to the company’s headquarters, Bill Clinton was back there to speak at a conference on privacy issues in September 2006. Senator Clinton’s disclosure statement for that period has not been publicly released, so we don’t know how much he was paid.

This connection between the Clintons and InfoUSA only underscores the necessity of full disclosure of income sources and amounts by all the presidential candidates and the release of their income tax returns, a step Mrs. Clinton has, thus far, refused to take.

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Blogs of War Writes:

The corruption may be moral rather than legal but this couple has such a track record of sleaze that these developments are anything but surprising:

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.

A lawsuit accuses Vinod Gupta of infoUSA of wasting the company’s money on high-profile guests.

The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of infoUSA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests.

And he succeeded:

Gupta, who grew up in dire poverty in India, has said publicly that he relished his relationship with Bill Clinton. In a 2000 interview with The Washington Post, Gupta described the thrill of crawling into bed in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Hillary has her hands in his pockets as well:

InfoUSA paid $18,480 in January 2004 to fly Mrs. Clinton “and her four-person entourage” to New York from New Mexico, where she had made a campaign appearance and attended a book signing. Campaign finance records show that her committee, Friends of Hillary, made a reimbursement of $2,127 for that flight. It was not clear if any other candidate committees in New Mexico also helped defray some of the cost.

Her aides said that in addition to using campaign money to pay for some of the infoUSA flights, Mrs. Clinton used personal finances to pay for parts of any flights that did not involve political activities, like the 2002 trip to Acapulco. As for why infoUSA paid anything at all for a round-trip flight to a vacation destination, Mr. Dean insisted it was a legitimate expense.

“I’m not sure what they were doing down there,” Mr. Dean said, “but it was business related.”

I’m sure he’ll get back to us as soon as they make something up.

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