How Clintons took control of federal law enforcement

Worldnet Daily ^ | July 7,2005 | Richard Poe

[murdoog]

Hillary recognized early that the Internet posed a threat to her power. Her efforts to regulate Internet speech began as early as 1994. By 1995, her operatives were engaged in an all-out war to silence Clinton critics on the Web.

When the Clintons took office in 1993, Big Media still monopolized the news. Its editors and news directors largely determined what Americans knew about the events of the day. By the time the Clintons left office in 2001, Big Media had lost its hold on the American mind. New Media such as talk radio, cable news and the Internet fanned the flames of a growing dissident movement – disgusted with Washington corruption and charged with a militant spirit.

Through a curious stroke of fate, the technology which made the Web Underground possible emerged in the same year that William Jefferson Clinton took office as president of the United States.

Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993. The following month, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the Mosaic browser. Later renamed the Netscape browser, this was the first genuinely user-friendly browser to reach the mass market, enabling ordinary people to navigate the World Wide Web using easy point-and-click technology.

Before 1993, only computer nerds knew the word "Internet." After 1993, cyberspace was open to the masses.

The earliest online dissidents posted their messages on what is now a fairly obscure corner of the Internet – the so-called Usenet, or Unix User Network – through newsgroups such as the venerable alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater. Other online subversives set up message boards on subscription-only commercial services such as Prodigy – a closed online community much like AOL.

In the early '90s, Prodigy's Whitewater News bulletin board became a hot spot of dissident activity. Like Alice's looking-glass, it offered a portal into another world. The complacent America conjured up each evening on our TV screens by Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings gave way on the Prodigy board to a harsher, more daunting terrain, where Americans faced hard choices, as momentous, in their way, as the choices our forefathers confronted in 1776.

Banana Republic, USA

The Whitewater News board covered a range of Clinton scandals far beyond the crooked Ozarks real estate deal from which it took its name. The board exposed the deep-rooted network of corruption in Arkansas which had given rise to the Clintons.

A poor, sparsely-populated state, Clinton's Arkansas had evolved into a kind of Third-World country within the United States. Local government – including police – were notoriously cozy with the "Dixie Mafia" kingpins who ran Arkansas' criminal rackets.

The Clintons blended comfortably with Arkansas' traditional backwoods corruption. But they also helped raise that corruption to new levels. During Bill Clinton's tenure as attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, the state became a veritable Dixie Casablanca, a hotbed of global intrigue, in which shady operators ranging from Columbian drug lords and BCCI money launderers to Chinese intelligence agents took part.

Arkansas had become a kind of banana republic, not unlike Noriega's Panama, in which the local dictator, Bill Clinton, and his circle of friends lived above the law and gained access to rivers of dirty money, in exchange for little more than keeping their mouths shut and staying out of the way.

Under Gov. Clinton, the state of Arkansas had been turned into a massive base for CIA black operations supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. From roughly 1982 to 1986, transport planes flew weapons from the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Ark., down to the Contras in Central America – allegedly often returning with cocaine shipments supplied by Columbia's Medellin drug cartel.

What role the alleged drug shipments played in the Iran-Contra operation has never been fully resolved. Some investigators charge that the CIA funded the Contras with drug money. Others blame rogue elements in the Contra supply operation who sold drugs on the side, while their CIA handlers pretended not to notice. Either way, it was not a nice picture.

Mainstream Republicans have proved just as reluctant as mainstream Democrats to look deeply into the secrets of Mena airport. However, the Prodigy message board proved a ready conduit for press reports on Mena. Some of the earliest reports posted at Prodigy were drawn from leftwing journals; others had appeared in local newspapers such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Many appeared in response to the 1994 book "Compromised," by ex-CIA pilot Terry Reed, who offered a unique, insider's account of the Mena operation.

Regardless of ideology, every writer who took on this explosive topic found an open-minded audience in the Web Underground.

In later years, Clinton defenders would blame a "vast rightwing conspiracy" for concocting the Mena story. White House spokesman Mark Fabiani, a member of Hillary's Shadow Team, told the Washington Post in 1996, "Mena is the darkest backwater of the rightwing conspiracy industry. The allegations are as bizarre as they are false."

But they were not false. And it was the hard Left that broke this story, not the hard Right. The radical Covert Action Information Bulletin brought it to light in the summer of 1987, in a special edition on "The CIA and Drugs." In 1989, activist Mark Swaney led a group of leftwing University of Arkansas students, called the Arkansas Committee, to investigate the Mena affair. Subsequent reports appeared in the early '90s in leftist journals such as the Nation, the Village Voice, In These Times and on the Pacifica Radio Network.

Leftwing writers such as Alexander Cockburn, Roger Morris and Sally Denton had their own reasons for pursuing the Mena story. To them, Mena exposed Bill and Hillary as hypocrites, capitalist sell-outs masquerading as "progressives." Whatever the investigators' motives, however, the facts were available for anyone with an interest. To this day, few have taken the trouble to look at them squarely.

The Clinton coup

On Oct. 18, 1994, a ripple of excitement stirred the Web Underground when the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, "The Mena Cover-up," by Micah Morrison. Incredibly, Morrison recounted the whole sordid tale of the Mena arms-for-drugs operation, for the first time in a major national newspaper.

"My Lord, so the end is really at hand," one poster exclaimed on the Prodigy message board.

The end was not at hand, however. None of the intrepid citizen journalists at Prodigy suspected in 1994 how bulletproof the Clintons had become to any and all allegations of criminal activity raised against them.

One of the first projects the Clintons undertook in the White House was to bring federal law enforcement under their personal control. They accomplished this through a massive purge, in three phases. By the time the Mena story broke in the Wall Street Journal, there was no one left with any genuine power to investigate or prosecute Clinton wrongdoing.

The first phase of the Clinton coup came on March 23, 1993. Only 11 days after becoming attorney general, Janet Reno called her first press conference to announce that she was firing all 93 U.S. attorneys and replacing them with Clinton loyalists. This was an unprecedented act. Phase 2 was equally unprecedented. Bill Clinton sacked FBI director William S. Sessions on July 19, 1993, on the pretext of various petty ethics charges.

"I love the FBI, and I hated to be the first president ever to have to fire a director," Clinton remarked at a press conference.

Sessions later claimed that the real reason for his dismissal was that he fought White House efforts to use the FBI for political purposes. And indeed, the Clintons – especially Hillary Clinton – had begun abusing the powers of the FBI almost since the day they took office.

Hillary's 1993 purge of the White House Travel Office provides a case in point. Her goal was to free up jobs for political cronies. Instead of dismissing the old employees quietly, Hillary orchestrated a massive smear campaign against them. The FBI, Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department were assigned to dig up dirt on Travel Office director Billy Dale and his team. Dale was prosecuted for embezzlement, his taxes audited, his FBI background file turned over to dirty-tricks specialists in the White House. Only after two and a half years of harassment was this innocent man finally cleared of criminal charges.

The paper trail leaves little doubt that Hillary was calling the shots in Travelgate. For instance, the notes of White House administrative director David Watkins show that, five days before the firings, Hillary said, "We need those people out – we need our people in. We need the slots." A Watkins memo further states that White House staffers knew "there would be hell to pay if ... we failed to take swift and decisive action with the first lady's wishes" regarding the Travel Office.

Hillary also appears to have masterminded the Filegate caper, in which the White House illegally commandeered from the FBI over a thousand secret background files on potential enemies. Several witnesses have stated that Craig Livingstone, the White House operative who obtained the files, was Hillary's agent, reporting directly to her.

FBI Director William Sessions reportedly protested these sorts of abuses. If true, it would appear that his integrity cost him his job. With Sessions out of the way, the FBI lost whatever trace remained of its fabled independence. The Bureau devolved into something resembling a personal secret police force for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Big Fix

Phase 3 of the Clinton coup finished the job. The Clintons proceeded to defang the federal judiciary. Between 1994 and 1998, they appointed seven new judges to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. – all Clinton cronies. The new appointees nicknamed themselves the "Magnificent Seven" – a name that stuck until the Clintons appointed an eighth member to the team in 1998.

The Magnificent Seven scandalized their colleagues by holding closed meetings every month, from which other federal judges were excluded. "I cannot imagine any legitimate reason for them to meet together once a month, even socially," one courthouse official told the Washington Times. Another court official charged that the meetings "reek with impropriety."

Indeed they did. Throughout the Clinton years, these hand-picked judges issued ruling after ruling shielding the Clintons and their alleged accomplices from federal prosecutors.

It later came to light that the obstructive activities of the Magnificent Seven had been carefully coordinated. The Associated Press reported on July 31, 1999, that Carter-appointed judge Norma Holloway Johnson – chief U.S. district judge for Washington, D.C. – had flouted standard procedure by personally and secretly assigning Clinton-related cases to Clinton-appointed judges. Federal cases are ordinarily assigned at random, by a computer. But the Clinton judges followed their own rules. Whatever crimes the Clintons or their operatives may have committed, they now had little to fear from the law.

The congressional investigation of Travelgate set the tone for the Clintons' remaining years in office. The White House stonewalled five federal probes into this scandal, withholding key documents and witnesses. In the end, investigators simply gave up. "Never has a president and his staff done so much to cover up improper actions and hinder the public's right to learn the truth," noted William F. Clinger's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in its Travelgate report.

Perhaps sensing the mood of the times, Prodigy – which was jointly owned by Sears and IBM – began censoring anti-Clinton discussions more aggressively. More and more frequently, articles critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton were pulled by Prodigy moderators.

One Prodigy poster – a programmer and software entrepreneur named Jim Robinson – later wrote, "I became frustrated with ... Prodigy's frequent threats to censor users of the Whitewater bulletin-board. In addition, I was also beginning to realize that the Internet was a much larger audience than Prodigy, which was a 'subscription' service which was accessed directly by modem, rather than being accessed by the Internet." Robinson launched his own website – FreeRepublic.com – in 1996.

In effect, Robinson chose to "light out for the territories" – the wide-open spaces of the unregulated Internet – rather than submit to corporate censorship. Millions would do likewise in the years ahead.

But those wide-open spaces were not as free as they seemed. By 1996, Hillary's plan to suppress dissident speech on the Net was already in motion.

[lowbridge]

bump

[Richard Poe]

wayoverontheright asks: "[A]m I too far out there to see a quid-pro-quo between OKC and subsequent actions on Iraq which greatly benefited Saddam?"

It sounds reasonable in theory. But what are the specifics? In what specific ways did Clinton help Saddam?

[skred]

I am trying to find the list of the US Attorneys that Bill Clinton replaced when Janet Reno fired all the US Attorneys back in 1993, and then information on who those newly appointed US Attorneys brought in as Assistant US Attorneys. Do you have any idea where I might find this information on the web?

Thanks

Greg