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Monday, April 11, 2005 8:36 a.m. EDT
Hillary Clinton's Fundraising Troubles Worse Than Tom DeLay's

This week's media attack on Tom DeLay has a top Washington lobbyist telling Newsweek magazine that the Republican House leader "knew everything" about allegedly shady fundraising on DeLay's behalf.

But if the claims of former fundraisers are the standard by which political trouble is measured, Sen. Hillary Clinton's problems are much bigger than DeLay's.

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For years Jack Abramoff, who is currently the subject of a Justice Department probe, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for DeLay's political causes and hired DeLay's aides, reports Newsweek. For his part, DeLay and his aides say he knew nothing about the suspicious fundraising.

That doesn't sound nearly as bad as the allegations facing Clinton, whose former finance chairman David Rosen has already been indicted for trying to hide cash from the Federal Election Commission in connection with an Aug. 2000 Hollywood concert fundraiser.

Like Abramoff, who says he's not angry at DeLay, Rosen isn't ready to implicate the former first lady in any crimes - at least not yet.

But unlike the top Republican, the case against Clinton includes not one but two witnesses who say she "knew everything" about what Rosen was doing.

"Hillary Clinton personally called the producer of the concert part of this event," claims Peter Paul, the Hollywood mogul who bankrolled the Aug. 2000 event.

"She asked him to lower the fee that he was charging of $850,000 at my request," he added, in an interview last year with the Fox News Channel. "So I don't understand how she could possibly say that she didn't know."

Lest anyone doubt Mr. Paul's word, there's Aaron Tonken, whose specialty was rounding up stars for charity events in Tinseltown - and who distributed most of the cash Peter Paul used to pay for the Hillary bash.

In his recent book "King of Cons," Tonken describes his sit-down with the former first lady in the backseat of a limo, where he gave her a chapter and verse update on the money her top aide was hiding from the feds.

"I told her about virtually every penny I'd spent on her behalf," Tonken recalled. "I told her about the money and what a pleasure it was to spend it on her candidacy."

Both Tonken and Paul kept meticulous records on the gala Hillary fundraiser - records prosecutors used to indict Mr. Rosen.

Of course, the press has virtually ignored the claims of the two Clinton accusers, while reporting every tidbit of dirt anyone cares to share about DeLay.

Predictably, a handful of elected Republicans have already begun handwringing in public over DeLay's so-called ethical problems - despite the media's egregious double standard that lets Hillary off the hook.

Perhaps they'd do better to call on Democrats to clean up their own glass house and do something about the corruption currently swirling around their likely 2008 presidential nominee.