What's Hillary smell? Ted K's rat bro-in-law

Can we now refer to Ted Kennedy's brother-in-law as the Donnie Brasco of the national Democratic Party?

Donnie Brasco was the FBI agent who infiltrated one of the Mafia families in New York. After he was finally outed, the boys were not pleased with the hood who had sponsored him, Sonny Black. It wasn't pretty when the garbage bag containing Sonny washed up on the shore of Sheepshead Bay.

Of course the Kennedys are above that sort of retribution. They don't sleep with the fishes. They just drink like them.

But this Ray Reggie story is very embarrassing to the Beautiful People of the Democrat Party, which is why it's so totally off the radar screen of the lame-stream media.

Still, someone's got some 'splainin' to do, now that a member of the Kennedy crime family has worn an FBI wire to entrap an associate of a competing syndicate - the Clinton crime family. Next month Ray Reggie will testify in L.A. against a Hillary ``fund-raiser'' named David Rosen.

Say what you will about the Kennedys' crime sprees. Until this moment, not one of them has ever stopped the grinnin' and dropped the linen.

Rats always rationalize their betrayals, and surely the brother-in-law had his reasons - namely, the feds had him cold for defrauding a bank for $3.5 million, using a bogus federal contract as collateral.

Hillary issued a statement Friday night saying she expects her boy Rosen will be exonerated at trial next month. Translation: That rat bastard Reggie never got me on tape. But if I were Ray Reggie, I wouldn't be taking any strolls in Fort Marcy Park anytime soon, nor would I be accepting a ride in Ted's Oldsmobile, unless I'm wearing a life jacket.

Reggie, of course, is the brother of Teddy's bride, Victoria. The Reggies' dad, Edmund, did a short stretch under house arrest in 1993 for misusing bank funds - do you begin to notice a pattern here?

To be inducted into the mob, you have to make your bones - kill somebody. In the Kennedy family, you have to be involved in a sex scandal with young babes. And sure enough, according to the New York Sun, Ray Reggie also has a 2002 state rap hanging over him in Louisiana.

The charge: impersonating a police officer. Ted's brother-in-law allegedly had a fake blue light in his car, and, as the prosecutor said, ``He pulls over a car full of young girls, tells them he's a cop, and wants one of them to get out, tried to get them to follow him somewhere.''

It doesn't get much more Michael Kennedy than that, does it? Perhaps this caper was Reggie's initiation ritual into the family. One thing's for sure: Despite Reggie's closeness to Bubba, this was not a Clinton deal. Clinton used real cops as his procurers - the Arkansas State Police.

The prosecutor in the local beef against Reggie added that she had never tried a case like this one.

``People say they have a document,'' she told the Sun. ``I call back. Not only is the document gone, they're gone.''

Can someone say Chappaquiddick? Can someone also say omerta - it's gone? If they want to get back to the White House in 2008, Hillary and Bill are going to have to start conducting their business in swimming pools. The feds still haven't come up with a wire that records underwater - which is also good news for Teddy, come to think of it.

Another Hillary Finance Scandal
By Dick Morris
Slate | January 12, 2005

The indictment of Hillary Clinton's 2000 campaign-finance director, David Rosen, may pose a threat to the senator's presidential bid. For now, the federal indictment is focused only on Rosen, but it is not hard to see the process creeping up the campaign food chain to the senator herself.

At issue are the expenses the campaign incurred in an August 2000 fund-raiser for Hollywood glitterati. Rosen was indicted for claiming that the event cost $400,000 when, federal prosecutors allege, he knew the actual cost to be $1.1 million. Under federal campaign-finance rules, the Clinton campaign was obliged to pay for 40 percent of the cost of the fund-raiser. So, if the gala cost $400,000, the campaign had to pay only $160,000, but if the price tag was actually $1.1 million, the campaign would have been on the hook for $440,000.

By understating the cost of the party, Rosen was, in effect, giving Hillary's campaign an extra $280,000.

While there is no indication that the Senate candidate knew of the understating of the cost of the event, is it credible that she would not be aware of a decision that gave her campaign more than a quarter of a million dollars as it entered the final three months before the election?

Remember what was happening in August and September of 2000 in the New York Senate race. Republican Rick Lazio was gaining traction despite his late start (after Rudy withdrew) and had raised massive amounts of hard money through direct mail. Most of Hillary's money was in soft-money contributions.

Exploiting Hillary's long-time stand against soft money, Lazio challenged the first lady to eschew soft money and restrict her campaign to hard-money donations, raised under a limit of $1,000 per contributor.

This challenge threw Hillary's campaign into a panic. It could not hope to compete in hard money. It was at this time that Rosen chose to underestimate the cost of the Hollywood fund-raiser.

The sum involved was enough to pay for almost an entire week of television advertising in New York City and exceeds the total media budget of many smaller campaigns.

To raise this sum, Hillary would have had to get 280 donors to give the maximum $1,000 individual donation permitted under federal law at the time. A decision of this magnitude — how much to say the event cost — would have been a huge issue within the campaign.

This is no clerical error, nor is it likely to be one young man's decision to commit fraud to help the campaign. It is just not credible to believe that Hillary didn't know about and approve of the understatement of the event's cost.

Hillary has always been a detail person who kept a hawk-like focus on the cost of even her husband's campaigns. How much more involved and fixated she must have been on a major financial decision that affected her own election effort.

The federal indictment of the key financial officer in Hillary's campaign — an event The New York Times did not see fit to put on the front page — shows that Sen. Clinton has not escaped from the culture of scandal that dogged her husband's presidency.

The question of who understated the cost of the Hollywood event now joins the pantheon of questions that have haunted the senator's past — Who hid the billing records? Who ordered the travel office firings? Who helped Hillary to make a killing in the commodities market? Did the first lady know her brother was paid to secure a pardon for a major drug trafficker? Did Hillary represent the Madison Bank in a fraudulent real-estate deal? Who ordered the removal of the FBI files?

Hillary's ethical obtuseness is truly Nixonian. Usually campaign-finance filing errors are so mundane that they draw light fines from the Federal Elections Commission. That her campaign committed so important a breach of the finance laws that govern elections that her finance chairman is under a federal indictment is truly extraordinary.

If young David Rosen wants to take the fall for Hillary and join the likes of Web Hubbell and Susan McDougal, who chose to languish in prison rather than tell the truth, that is his decision. But don't ask us to believe something the average 8-year-old knows can't be true: that a gain to the campaign of $280,000 was beneath Hillary's notice.

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