Posted on 12/08/2006 11:55:51 AM PST by agooga
If the wedding is held on January 21st, 2009, he can attend after President Hillary gives him a pardon.
Who cares
THe good news is that the Clintons only had 1 offspring - here's hoping Chelsea won't have kids and that line will die off!
Interesting that the media reported on this. Usually the klinton's control what is printed in the media.
You know what I've been thinking about since I first read this? In all my life I've never known any two people who have so many friends and "acquaintances" that are either in jail, under investigation, accused of wrong doing, or dead.
Just THINK of all the people who are directly associated with them that have been in trouble, etc.
Hell, just the ones we can name off the top of our heads is mindboggling. I know about five people in my whole life who have been in trouble with the law.
How about you?
That was one rocky term in office that Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky served. She represented a rather affluent part of Montgomery County (Philly suburb) and cast the deciding vote for the Democrats' massive tax hike bill, circa 1993.
Yeah, aside from their own notorious achievements Bill and Hill also manage to "befriend" more criminals, scumbags, and other assorted ethically challenged charlatans than anyone I can think of in modern US history. Compared to a couple of Presidents who have been vilified by historians (Harding and Grant come to mind) for the misdeeds of their friends, Bill and Hill should end up characterized that the most egregious scumbags ever to occupy the WH. Unfortunately, for the forseeable future liberals will write most of the histories, so it won't be described objectively.
fwiw, I've never known (among family members, friends, and colleagues) anyone to face anything worse than a speeding ticket, so I guess I must travel in pretty exalted circles..... :^) ha ha...... from a distance I've known of bad deeds and bad people in towns I've lived in, but never yet (I'm 47) has it involved anyone I've actually known in any first-hand way.
In the past year, Chelsea has been linked to her childhood friend Marc Mezvinsky, a Goldman Sachs employee who is the son of former Iowa Congressman Ed Mezvinsky and former Pennsylvania Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinksy.
Chelsea was also seen regularly with twentysomething Bumble Bee tuna heir Evan "Bumblebee Boy" Metropoulos, making the nightclub rounds. Her reps called both men "just friends."
In March, Clinton made the gossip pages when she had to be helped by bouncers out of the Marquee nightclub. She was attending a boozy birthday bash where "friends" said she was drowning her sorrows about the state of affairs with Klaus.
Having now grown out of her gangly appearance during Bill Clinton's years as president into an attractive and sought-after Manhattan career woman working as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, Clinton should have little trouble finding plenty of eligible suitors.
5/3/97
Chelsea and Marc met four years ago at a Renaissance Weekend, and spent "quite a bit of time together" when Chelsea was visiting Stanford last weekend, Mrs. Margolies-Mezvinsky said.
Still, rumors that Chelsea and Marc are boyfriend-girlfriend are just wrong, she said, despite a Jan. 22 Washington Post item that said they engaged in "some cozy chats" at this year's Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head Island.
In their heyday, Ed Mezvinsky and his wife, Marjorie, were a power couple in Democratic Party circles and on suburban Philadelphia's swanky Main Line.
The couple had both served in Congress, and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a magnetic former NBC-TV reporter, was gearing up for a 2000 Senate bid.
Political advisers, fri-ends, and one or another of their 11 children, some adopted from overseas, came and went in their $900,000, 8,200-square-foot mansion in Narberth.
"It was always a vibrant household, with community figures, political figures, cultural figures. Marjorie has many acquaintances, and Ed did, too," said Jerome Shestack, a close friend who is the former president of the American Bar Association.
But the children are now grown, and the couple's careers, mansion, money, and status are all but gone, too.
On Sept. 27, Edward Mezvinsky, 65, admitted that he bilked investors who handed over more than $10 million, including friends, law clients, and even his late mother-in-law.
"I'm trying to understand what happened," Mezvinsky said Sept. 28 from his rented house in Merion, as he watched his native Iowa edge Penn State in overtime. "Something broke."
Margolies-Mezvinsky, 60, who has kept a low profile since the couple's separate bankruptcy filings in 2000 and her husband's March 2001 indictment, was noticeably absent Sept. 27, when he pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 fraud-related counts.
"He boasted to many [victims], for example, of a close personal friendship with President and Mrs. Clinton and of his son's friendship with Chelsea Clinton at Stanford University," Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Zauzmer wrote in the 133-page plea agreement, entered days before Mezvinsky's scheduled Oct. 7 trial.
Margolies-Mezvinsky, who was not charged, has said she left the family finances to her husband. She was not at home Sept. 28, and she could not be reached for comment, her husband said.
"This has not broken Marjorie, nor do I believe it's broken Ed," said her lawyer, Zachary Grayson. "They're lovely people who have lived their lives as much for others as for themselves."
Mezvinsky, the heir to a small supermarket-chain fortune, was a star athlete during high school in Ames who went on to earn master's and law degrees in California. By age 36, he was representing Iowa's 1st District (which included Iowa City) in Washington, where he met Margolies, then a reporter.
Each had a moment in the spotlight in Congress. His came when he served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Nixon.
Margolies-Mezvinsky cast the deciding vote for Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike. The move endeared her to the Clintons, who would invite the couple to their Renaissance Weekends in Hilton Head, N.C., but cost Margolies-Mezvinsky her seat in Republican-held Montgomery County.
Ever-optimistic, she remained in the public eye, heading the U.S. delegation to the Beijing Women's Conference and unsuccessfully campaigning for lieutenant governor.
Mezvinsky, after serving in Congress from 1973 to 1977, became an ambassador to a United Nations commission and state Democratic Party chairman. He also spent millions on unsuccessful races for the U.S. Senate in 1980 and attorney general in 1988.
In the 1990s, Mezvinsky left the politics to his wife and turned to international business deals. But he rarely made a dime, instead losing millions to African con artists pitching pyramid-type schemes.
"Without any meaningful income, he was perpetually in debt throughout the 1990s," the plea agreement states.
While he first sought ever-larger bank loans, that pipeline soon shut down, and by 1995, he was turning to individual investors.
Mezvinsky, moving money at a frenetic pace, deposited $13.28 million in his numerous accounts from 1995 to early 2000, most of it from investors and clients, according to investigators, who reviewed more than 8,000 transactions.
During the same period, he spent $13.3 million, with 44 percent of the money going to creditors, 20 percent to Africans, and 17 percent for cash withdrawals, they said.
While Mezvinsky blamed his woes in part on the costly campaigns and tuition bills the University of Pennsylvania, where Margolies-Mezvinsky now teaches, once sued over a child's tuition prosecutors say those were small potatoes.
Mezvinsky spent approximately $77,000 on tuition from 1995 to 1999, but withdrew at least $2.25 million in cash during the same period, they say.
Mezvinsky's plea comes after U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell rejected defense claims that blamed his actions on a bipolar disorder and the anti-malaria drug Lariam, which he took on trips to Africa.
Prosecutors plan to ask for nine to 11 years in prison at the Jan. 9 sentencing. They will also seek restitution, but they acknowledge that there's no money to be found.
"I'm trying to move on with my life. I'm trying to do what's right, not only respecting the system, but what's right for my family," Mezvinsky said.
On his last day as a free man, Mezvinsky said he had never expected to go to jail.
"I had thought it would all work out," Mezvinsky said on the eve of his flight early Monday to Eglin Federal Prison Camp in Florida, a minimum-security facility where he will serve 80 months. "I thought that they (the business deals) would succeed."
Chair, Women's Campaign International Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky
July 6, 2001
PHILADELPHIA - Former U.S. Rep. Edward Mezvinsky, D-Iowa, will plead not guilty by reason of insanity to charges that he defrauded banks and individuals of $10.4 million, his lawyer said Thursday.
"We have filed a notice of intent detailing our plea of insanity because our client, Edward Mezvinsky, was crazy with a serious mental illness for many years," attorney Mark E. Cedrone told United Press International. The lawyer said an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, made his client's condition worse.
In a 129-page indictment in March, federal prosecutors charged Mezvinsky, who has ties to the Clintons, with 66 counts of fraud and related offenses. They allege he committed fraud "by misusing attorney escrow accounts held in his name, engaging in schemes involving worthless checks deposited at banks, creating forged bank statements, using false financial statements, tax returns and accountant's letters and giving false testimony under oath." The indictment followed a two-year investigation by the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Postal Service and other federal agencies.
Prosecutors said the fraudulent schemes, perpetrated by con artists posing as royalty in Africa, are commonly known as "Nigerian advance fee schemes" that involve promises of great wealth if the person first pays fees or other costs to the defrauders, who are posing as businessmen.
According to prosecutors, from 1989 to 1999, Mezvinsky as a private attorney and self-employed businessman engaged in a classic Ponzi scheme, in which those who entrusted him with money were repaid with money conned out of others, including using checks from his wife's congressional bank account, spending his wife's inheritance and bilking his 84-year-old mother-in-law out of about $300,000. His wife is a former Pennsylvania congresswoman.
"This ordinary insanity defense has been blown way out of proportion because of the mentioning of the drug Lariam," Cedrone said. "The drug did not make him crazy, he was crazy, and the drug made him worse - he didn't know he was crazy - and as person suffering from bipolar disorder he didn't see the downside to these bizarre financial investments."
Mezvinsky took Lariam before dozens of business trips to Africa in the 1990s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise travelers not to take the Lariam, also known as mefloquine, if they have "a history of severe mental illness or other psychiatric disorders." Cedrone said his client had not been treated for any mental illness for the years covered in the indictment. He refused to comment on whether Mezvinsky is currently seeking treatment.
The day after being indicted on the fraud charges, Mezvinsky and his wife, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, filed a lawsuit against Roche Holding AG, Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, a Montgomery County, Pa., pharmacy and Mezvinsky's physician, Dr. Bradley Fenton, charging that Mezvinsky suffered mental and physical disorders from the Lariam.
"As a result of the psychiatric syndrome caused by his long-term use of Lariam, he invested rashly in bad investments," the lawsuit said, the Philadelphia Daily News reported. "He depleted his own financial resources, his wife's financial resources, as well as his wife's inheritance."
His wife was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing. However, federal prosecutors said that she introduced her husband to some of those he victimized, and that Mezvinsky used his position and reputation in victimizing others.
At the time of his indictment, Margolies-Mezvinsky made a statement that she, their children and her family will continue to support him. "He succeeded in defrauding others and gaining their confidence in part by stressing his lengthy experience in national and international affairs and his acquaintance with prominent political figures," U.S. Attorney Michael Stiles said.
Since 1999, Mezvinsky and his wife have been the target of lawsuits alleging they owe $7.4 million to banks and individuals. Mezvinsky filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2000 to give him time to reorganize his finances. Margolies-Mezvinsky filed less than a month later for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Cedrone said his client refinanced his family's houses, but he couldn't comment on whether Margolies-Mezvinsky knew about her husband's business affairs.
"All I know about my client's wife is that her first name is Marjorie," Cedrone said.
Under U.S. sentencing guidelines, if convicted, Mezvinsky faces a prison sentence of 87 to 108 months.
According to Cedrone, the prosecution is attempting to exclude the insanity defense, and a hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15. The case is scheduled to go to trial in January 2002.
"My client lost several millions of his own money in the African schemes," Cedrone said. "My client is a crime victim."
Typical Demagogue, he steals and defrauds over MANY YEARS, then wants to blame it all on a drug and sues the pharmaceutical company, his doctor and pharmacy, etc. etc.
YEAH, the Prozac defense!!!
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