DAVID ROSEN (the man who will turn on Hillary)

The 10 summers David Rosen spent ringing doorbells to sell books turned out to be good preparation for raising tens of millions of dollars for the Gore-Lieberman ticket, Hillary Clinton's Senate race and other prominent Democratic candidates.

At Southwestern Co., a Nashville, Tenn.-based direct sales firm that has trained thousands of college students during its 132-year history, Mr. Rosen got to the point where he made sales at five of every six households he called on. He still holds the record for first-year sales, according to Dan Moore, Southwestern's marketing vice-president. The firm's alumni include two current governors, a senator and former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

"He's the most dedicated, hard-working, organized person I've met in a long time," say Chicago lawyer Myron "Mike" Cherry, a veteran Democratic fund-raiser and general counsel for the gubernatorial campaign of Rep. Rod Blagojevich, D-Chicago, for which Mr. Rosen has helped raise about $1 million outside Illinois. "And he's got a Rolodex that would rival (former President) Clinton's," Mr. Cherry says.

What sets Mr. Rosen and his Chicago-based company, Competence Group Inc., apart is his application of business discipline, training and sales techniques to the art of fund raising.

"I can't talk someone into giving money," says Mr. Rosen. "You just have to call a tremendous amount of people and find those who are interested."

He caught the political bug while taking a political science course taught by David Wilhelm, a longtime Chicago-based political consultant who chairs the Blagojevich campaign.

"You can use it whether you're selling airplanes, insurance or politicians," he says.

Clinton, Rosen, Tonken
Joel Miller January 10, 2005

The Hillary Clinton/David Rosen/Aaron Tonken story is exploding. Rush was talking about it today, as was the editorial page of the New York Sun. And NPR even covered it Sunday, tying in the charity-scam angle with tsunami charitable giving.

But the real scuttlebutt is Hillary Clinton. Probing the question of Hillary's involvement in monies spent on the Hollywood Gala that honored her husband and dumped loads of possibly illegally reported cash into her Senate campaign coffers, Rush Limbaugh today summed up the question simply:

When the Clintons are involved and there is a scandal, is it easier to believe they know about it or they don't know about it? Is it easier to believe they're in on it or not in on it? We had Travelgate. We had Whitewater. We had Lewinsky. We had Paula Jones. All of these scandals. . . . I'm telling you, folks, wise behavior here is to take previous experience guided by intelligence and come to a conclusion. The conclusion is, a scandal-ridden bunch like this, there's another scandal, is it logical to assume they don't know anything about it? Is it logical to assume that one of their cohorts is turning on them and trying to screw 'em? Is it logical to believe that they're just innocent bystanders in all this? No it's not logical to believe that in any way, shape, manner, or form.
Based on Aaron Token's recollection of events, Limbaugh is exactly right. Writes Aaron on page 283 of King of Cons, "I went along [with Rosen]. I didn't know any better. Eventually, I would become a lot more familiar with Federal Election Commission requirements and see exactly how much misreporting had been done on things I was involved with. Tons." At the time, though, Aaron says he had to trust Rosen—albeit not completely, it turns out. "Concerned that some day this stuff might come back to haunt me, I saved all the receipts." He did, and he later turned over more than two dozen boxes of documents to the Feds to back up his story.

But back to the junior senator from New York. To how much of the alleged shenanigans was she privy? "Did she really know what was going on?" Aaron writes on 350 and 351. "I think David Rosen knew; I think [longtime aide] Kelly Craighead knew; I think [fund-raiser] Jim Levin knew. But Hillary? It was very possible that they hid it from her. In a way, that was their job. Protect the candidate."

But they didn't do a good job. Flip ahead to pages 365 and 366:

I'd spent odd moments alone with [Hillary] before, primarily in the evening at the White House. But this was my real shot to talk to her with no one else around, and what I wanted was to let her know how much I admired her, how much I was behind her, and most important, what I had already done for her. It was, quite by accident, the moment of truth. . . .
I told her about virtually every penny I'd spent on her behalf. I let her know what I was doing and had done for each event of hers. I spoke about the money and what a pleasure and honor it was to spend it on her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Once and for all, I wanted it clear in her mind who was the person really doing things for her. There was so much jockeying for position among those around her: Kelly, David, Jim Levin, and so on. People taking credit for stuff. I thought I might have been short-changed, and I wanted to correct that.

I believed that once she knew the facts, she would see how valuable I was to her and welcome me into her inner circle. The whole thing was intended to be solely for my benefit. I never wanted to hurt her. I could tell she wasn't entirely comfortable with this conversation, and yet I couldn't stop. It wasn't until much later that I fully realized what I had done. Whatever protection her staff had built around her, however much in the dark they had kept her, that was over.

Now she knew.

Did Hillary say, "Whoa, Nelly! Desist! Halt! Stop!"? Did she tell Rosen to rectify the matter on the campaign finance reports? Did she warn others about Aaron? Apparently not.

King of Cons features reproductions of thank-you letters Hillary wrote Aaron. Others exist that couldn't for space considerations be included. Bill Clinton was closely involved in a future Tonken project, A Family Celebration 2001 (ironic, considering that Bill's idea of family is loose enough to include the White House intern pool). Clinton was also pleased to receive checks totaling $300,000 from Aaron for his presidential foundation—copies of the checks are reproduced in the book. King of Cons also includes copies of Rosen's Beverly Hills Hotel bill for the event. Total: $9,280.58. But it's more than campaign finance.

The entire hypocritical leftist galaxy of Hollywood gets a salacious send-up in King of Cons. From Aaron's days as a virtual prisoner of Zsa-Zsa Gabor, to getting chiseled by Sylvester Stallone, to run-ins with Cher, Lance Bass, Roseanne, Barbra Streisand, the cast of Friends, Melanie Griffith, Sharon Stone—it's hilarious, tragic, absurd, awful, and incredible. And with David Rosen's indictment and further exploration into Hillary's involvement, it's also politically explosive. (Updated, 8:26pm CST.)

January 11, 2005
Post Trauma Syndrome
It must be pretty tough being a Liberal nowadays. Look back at 2004 and you see a stunning electoral defeat, in spite of the fact that CBS producer Mary Mapes and all the bulging foreheads down at the New York Times were doing their level best to put your boy John Kerry in the White House. Look ahead to 2008 and you see Hillary burdened with the albatross of David Rosen--her campaign-finance director in 2000--who has just been indicted for shady fund raising practices. Today's New York Post lays it all out with admirable clarity.

In "Another Hillary Scandal", Dick Morris lays out the time line so well that the prosecutor's work is nearly done. According to Morris, by September of 2000 Republican Rick Lazio had closed in on Hillary's lead and had also raised a large amount of hard money. Knowing Hillary was both an outspoken enemy of soft money and a huge recipient of same, Lazio "invaded her space" during a televised debate, brandishing a pen and demanding she sign a pledge to receive no more soft money. Though shying back as if she had been physically threatened, Hillary signed.

With very little hard money in the campaign coffers, it looked as if Hillary had signed away the election as well.

While her defenders hit the talking-head circuit to portray Lazio as an abusive white male, David Rosen quietly undereported the cost of a recent Hollywood fundraiser for Hillary to the FEC, thus giving the campaign $280,000 in extra hard money. The legal, non-Arkansas way to raise that kind of cash would be to get 280 donors to write 280 $1000 checks. No big deal. The illegal way is a bit trickier. Morris writes out of his considerable campaign experience when he notes, '"A decision of this magnitude--how much to say the event cost--would have been a huge issue within the campaign."

Morris concludes, "If young David Rosen wants to take the fall for Hillary and join the likes of Web Hubbell and Susan MacDougal 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 $280,000.00 was beneath Hillary's notice."

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