Posted on 01/07/2004 5:03:36 AM PST by oldfashionedvalues
Hello all....copied from a newsgroup I am subscribed to. I am not the "guy"......ofv
BTW, I was the guy who (without realizing it) scooped the story on her futures trading. I had been talking off and on for years to a financial reporter at USA Today (he'd call me sometimes when he needed to be walked through some futures-related stuff for an article) and when the white house released her trading records he called me and after trying to explain to me over the phone what was on his copies of her broker statements, he ffinally decided to fax 'em to me so we'd be "on the same page" when conversing. I scoured them and figured out it had to be a scam and gave him the reasoning and evidence. The brokerage statements she'd issued to the press had very obviously been "sanitized" -- whited out and then xeroxed. There was almost no info on 'em, yet a monthly statement is supposed to provide full detail on a daily basis and summarized totals, and all monthly statements always do that (I'd even specifically seen Refco statements and hers had only about 10% of the usual info on 'em). It was like a math or logic puzzle but I was able to figure out some stuff from the little info provided, by using math, logic, and what I know about the futures markets. I stayed late at the office to make sure I wrung everything that could possibly be deduced from the "clues" on the sanitized statements, and explained all my findings to the reporter late that night. USA Today then ran two articles using it the next day, and USA scooped the story -- though others were poring over the stuff the Clintons had released, none had been able to decipher anything -- and USA Today sent me a thanks for the job of "investigative reporting" I hadn't realized I'd been doing -- I was merely helping out a reporter and it was fun cuz I was enjoying digging up the dirt on the Clintons first hand. I had figured others would surely be able to figure it out too, but maybe they were simply too lazy to do it or the reporters who had the stuff did not have access to knowledgable decipherers. Anyway, USA today was the only paper in the country with a critical expose on it the very next day. It turned out that much of the stuff I'd deduced from the paltry data available was still being argued about by other "experts" weeks later, though everythihng I had deduced that first evening was ultimately proven correct from other sources (so, much of what I'd logically proven from the meager data was still considered, and IS still considered, only indicated but not provable from that initial info, yet it really WAS 100% provable if you are good at logic and puzzle solving -- the answers were in there, and the Clintons attempt to provide only worthless data was unsuccessful -- the dirty fingerprints were there hidden but detectable. It was fun to trounce the Clintons that way, to foil their scheme). Becuz of the USA Today scoop, the WSJ then quoted me from their article on the day following, in an extra long editorial damning HIllary. The day after that, my home phone rang and it was Leslie Stahl. Because I never watch crap like 60 Minutes, I didn't even know who she was, and she was a little aghast. Actually, she woke me up on the morning the WSJ editorial appeared before I even knew it had appeared and I was groggy and wondered if this was some prank caller, and she was a little miffed that someone was unimpressed by a call from her, didn't recognize her name, and was suspicious of her call instead of awestruck). Anyway, I wound up being the main advisor and their "in house" expert for almost every aspect of the production of the segment they did on Hillary's trading, with them calling me several times a day for explanations of stuff they were hearing from others and advice on who to talk to and what to ask about, and I explained the hows and whys of the mechanics and technical aspects of futures to them, gave 'em a crash course. They also made me the "clean up hitter" on the segment itself, where I supposedly was summing up Wall St's suspicions of her (they cut and pasted the interview with me and showed only the fairly mild stuff I'd said). On the very next day after it aired, the Cllintons held a press conference and 'fessed up that they had "inadvertantly" forgotten to declare still other futures profits and had therefore now decided to pay their back taxes with interest due on the income they'd 'forgotten' to declare. It made me very very pleased to feel that I had personally had a role in giving the Clintons a spanking in public and also costing them a few bucks of their own money.
BTW, 60 Minutes taped a Q&A between Leslie Stahl and me for over 3 hours and only showed about 1.5 mins of it at the end of the segment that aired. I saw first hand how tepid even the alleged "crusading, investigative reporters" are. There was real, provable, serious dynamite right in their hands and they did NOT use it in the segment. They were very clever about creating some very limited, vague-ish pressure on the Clintons, but it was less than a slap on the wrist compared to the dynamite they had on Hillary. I think the fact that there was even a hint of negativity from that media source must have scared the Clintons -- they were probably well aware that 60 Minutes loved them and if they showed a smidgen of dirt, it meant there had to be a ton of it lying around somewhere. That's why the Clintons "fessed up" in such a panic, within less than 24 hrs of the airing of the segment. They were so shocked that so much had been deducible from their oh-so-thoroughly sanitized brokerage statements, that they were worried a lot more might have been figured out too, and they figured they better get some of their crimes out in the open themselves to pre-empt anyone catching them before they had a chance to confess and present it all as a good faith "oversight."
You would be surprised (maybe not) at the stufff which has never been revealed about the event. It has been written about in various books, even in lengthy articles in mags like American Spectator, and the real dirt has NEVER been told, because it was so well swept under the rug. I wrote it all out for 60 Mins and they never used the most juicy stuff.
Hillary actually lied, barefaced, boldfaced, clear and provable and direct lying during her press conference a week or two later. I would have no qualms about saying this in public since the truth is a defense against libel and I am certain I can prove it beyond any doubt. All her audience was made up of reporters, who are by no means experts, especially in futures trading, and she was able to bamboozle them with her lawyer talk and word parsing like her husband's, only they never realized that was what she was doing. Nevertheless, she did slip up and expose herself to accusations of outright lying -- probably because she was so certain none of the reporters had the expertise to realize that what she was saying HAD to be a gross lie.
I later got a little more info from a guy I'd previously worked with who was actually on the commitee at the Chicago Merc Exch where she'd traded, and where her broker was given the largest fine and longest suspension in the history of hte industry, at the very time she was actually doing this trading. He was on the investigative committee and had lots of inside dope for me on her trading cuz he'd been part of the exchange's investigative committee during the time the scam was going on, right up until the fines were assessed. One small item never mentioned in the press was the real reason she closed her account when she did. Because the heat was on. The investigation was closing in on the crooked broker she was using (more accurately, the one her briber or sugar daddy or whoever was using on her behalf). She cut and run while the running was good, before the sh*t hit the fan. That's only one little tidbit that never made the light of day for the public. There's so much evidence, there is absolutely no doubt in the mind of any professional futures trader I know who sees even a part of the material, that she was definitely in on a crooked scam. (Another little tidbit: her account that was opened with $1,000 initial deposit was made with GREEN CASH. I have never, ever, in 30 years experience heard of a brokerage acc't opened with cash. And she is a lawyer and a business lawyer at that. Why would she open an account with cash? Tie this in with another fact: Despite Hillary's well known insistence that her individuality demands the correct use of her name as Hillary RODHAM Clinton, etc, it so happens that her first name was MIS-SPELLED on ALL the statements, margin calls, trading confirms, and other communications she received from Refco for the entire period of her trading -- it was never corrected. What does that tell you? Opened with cash, and her name spelled wrong and never corrected. Clearly, someone else opened it in her name and the statements arrived at her home only to be ignored totally because she was not trading at all, the whole thing was a conduit for laundering a bribe into an account set up in her name and she didn't have to lift a finger. She probably never even looked at the statements.)
There is much more damning and solidly provable stuff, but it takes too much space to tell it all.
LOL!!!
The Clintons are masters of the disguised bribe. Consider the $20 million book advances to our delightful couple for books no one reads, and the $200,000 a pop "speakers fees" to Bill.
In a free society, where the left does not control the media, these dubious sources of income would have been investigated.
I was a partner in a group that formed a commodities scale-trading venture for a few years (it actually made some money). We used Refco as the clearinghouse and what the author says is true, there is a lot of detail on their statements, what was traded when and for what prices. You got a monthly statement detailing all account activity for that period, as well as statements for individuals trading days if you had activity on those days. If Hillary! really did full disclosure then it should have been child's play to verify that the trades were done legitimately. In any case you need those detailed records for tax purposes. There is no reason why the information should not have been available if a legitimate demand for it was made.
I saw first hand how tepid even the alleged "crusading, investigative reporters" are.
Oh, reporters in the lamestream press can be quite "crusading" and "investigative", if they want to be. But if the eight long, dreary, weary years of the Clinton regime proved anything, it was that the presstitutes have no interest in exposing any wrongdoing by the Clintons specifically, or Rats in general. If it were Gingrich or Bush or Reagan, they would have gone after them tooth and nail.
The key insight in this article is the one on the kid-gloves treatment by the 60 Minutes crew: but then again, the first Clinton appearance was a staged "saving" of this pathetic couple. You can almost blame CBS and 60 Minutes (plus Don Imus) for saving Bubba's candidacy in 1992 and giving us the 8 years of dreck that became the Clinton Administration.
Dittmer's support for the Clintons later became more apparent, to me at least, after reading about their relationship in the American Spectator and other places.
But back ti Refco and Dittmer.
Dittmer explained to me how he made his first big money trading in egg futures. I think he inherited the top spot at Refco from his (step)dad, Roy Friedman. None the less, Dittmer was a legend in Chicago.
The interesting part of the Clinton connection goes back to my first meeting with Dittmer and his people in the late 1980's. I had been charged with due diligence on the firm (Refco). That included background research and actual meetings with Dittmer and some of his staff in the area we were looking into. Part of the research was any legal or regulatory problems the firm may have or have had. And this was in the days before the internet or vast databases one could easilly access.
Crains Business had a reference to Refco having been levied a huge fine for cattle futures trading. It was, I believe, then one of the biggest fines ever against a trading company. The case arose in an Iowa court. Something I always thought interesting, given the exchange this was done on was located in Illinois.
To make a long story shorter, we opted not to do business with Refco. But that research stuck in my head long enough to trigger when the Clintons started becoming a household word.
As many know there was a great deal of reporting about Hillary's windfall. And most of the reporting in the mainstream press was atrocious. Part of that was becuase the records of her trades were incomplete, and her Refco broker - Red Bone - was also incomplete.
Hillary's explanation for her windfall was that she read the Wall Street Journal and used the advice of a Tyson executive named Blair to pick her trades. Given the Journal is more a paper of record, rather than a periodical of trading recommendations, one must assume that her trading prowess was more the advice she was given than from anything she read.
The probability of a Hillary Clinton or anyone else making money via speculation is low, particularly over a long period of time. Spec traders generally only make money about 10% of the time. The reason the markets exist in the first place is more about producer and consumer hedging than it is about speculation. The Hillary's of the world only help provide liquidity.
Thus we know that no charges were ever levied against Hillary. And chances are if they would have been they would not have been by the CFTC or other market regulator. That's because Hillary probably was not behind any attmpts to manipulate the cattle futures market. Instead, that appeared to be going on through her broker's parent company, Refco. At least in term of the charges and penalties levied.
My theory on Cattle Gate is that Bill (through Hillary) was being bribed via Tyson or someone else with Blair as the bag man. This was accomplished through "mirrored" trading - a process by which both short and long positions are taken. In doing so the winning trade (whatever way the market goes) can be passed along to the "customer" after the price is known. And to keep things looking proper, if it is done in a series of transactions, is to "sprinkle" a few losers in as well (just to make it look like Hillary really was playing the market).
If I recall, Hillary's windfall came around the time the Clintons bought or were about to buy a new house. And the money put down on the house was pretty close to Hillary's cattle trading profits.
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