Clinton skeletons burst out of cupboard unlocked by the FBI (new details)

IN THE summer of 1998, as the Monica Lewinsky scandal closed in around him, Bill Clinton was hosting an official White House dinner when he told his guests he needed to visit the bathroom.

Excusing himself, he left the table. But, unknown to his guests, he walked in humiliated fury not to the bathroom, but to the White House Map Room. Waiting for him were FBI doctors and a federal prosecutor, there to take his blood sample to see of it matched the DNA on Ms Lewinsky’s now infamous semen-stained dress.

This extraordinary episode, which remained secret until yesterday, is recounted in an explosive new book by Louis Freeh, the FBI Director during the 1990s.

Mr Freeh writes for the first time about his appalling relationship with the President who appointed him, and the endless stream of scandals that made Mr Clinton the constant target of FBI investigations.

“The problem was with Bill Clinton — the scandals and the rumoured scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones never ended,” Mr Freeh writes in My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror.

“Whatever moral compass the President was consulting was leading him in the wrong direction. His closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out. We were preoccupied in eight years with multiple investigations.” The scandals included the Whitewater inquiry and Mr Clinton’s affairs with Ms Lewinsky, Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers.

The need to obtain Mr Clinton’s blood sample was the most unsavoury element of the FBI’s investigation of the Lewinsky saga, Mr Freeh says.

The White House intern, whose affair with Mr Clinton led to impeachment proceedings, had kept a Gap dress stained with his “genetic material” as proof of their relationship. She later revealed its existence to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating the former President. The dinner party subterfuge was “like a bad movie”, Mr Freeh writes. “But we did it, very carefully, very confidentially.”

John Harris, a Washington Post reporter, provides more detail about the Map Room encounter in his biography of Mr Clinton, The Survivor.

“Clinton’s face was flushed with anger as he rolled up his sleeve while one of his Navy physicians drew the sample. A prosecutor and federal agent fixed their gaze on the vial the entire time, fearful that Clinton’s team might try a surreptitious switch.” Such was the mutual distrust between Mr Starr and Mr Clinton that the former President’s lawyer ordered a second blood sample in case Mr Starr resorted to dirty tricks, according to Mr Harris.

Mr Freeh also writes of a conversation between Mr Clinton and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 US servicemen in Dhahran in 1996. He claims that Mr Clinton used the occasion to solicit a donation for his presidential library.

Mr Freeh says that Mr Clinton refused to insist that the Crown Prince allow the FBI to question suspects held in custody in Saudi Arabia. “Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the Crown Prince he understood the Saudis’ reluctance to co-operate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.”

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker and erstwhile Clinton nemesis, said on the Fox television network: “If Louis Freeh is prepared to swear on oath that he knows that President Clinton was asking foreign leaders for money . . . this has to be a criminal offence of the first order.”

Mr Freeh was appointed by Mr Clinton in 1993, but relations between the two became poisoned. Mr Freeh writes that to distance himself from the scandals, he refused a White House pass that would have allowed him access without signing in. “I wanted all my visits to be official,” he said.

They clashed repeatedly, including over an FBI inquiry into alleged Chinese efforts to funnel campaign donations to Democrats, an inquiry that Mr Freeh never told Mr Clinton about. Mr Clinton soon referred to the FBI chief as “F****** Freeh”, seeing him as an agent for the Republicans.

Mr Freeh resigned from the FBI in 2001, three months before the September 11 terrorist attacks. He was harshly criticised by the commission that investigated the atrocity.

Jay Carson, Mr Clinton’s spokesman, said: “This is clearly a total work of fiction, written by a man who’s desperate to clear his name. It’s unfortunate that he’d stoop to this level in his desperate attempt to rewrite history. Freeh’s claims about library fundraising are more untruths from a book that’s chock-full of them.”

Daniel Benjamin, a former Clinton aide, said that the former President “pushed the Crown Prince quite hard” over the Khobar Towers investigation, and won Saudi co-operation that led to indictments.

The clinton team knew damn well the feds weren't going to do any "dirty tricks".

How would the clinton team have known that? We know the FBI has 'lost' evidence that favored the accused; created false evidence that favored the FBI's accusation; falsely accused citizens when there was NO evidence of their guilt; spent years trying to entice citizens into committing a crime that the citizen was not otherwise going to commit and they only did so reluctantly after YEARS of persuasion, tricks, and enticement by FBI operatives; and the FBI, instead of bringing charges against citizens it thought guilty of some crime, spent years hounding and harrassing citizens till they commited suicide.

No dirty tricks from the FBI? You have a short memory.

Forgotten History: The Clinton Administration Found Ties Between Iraq and Al Qaeda

Stephen F. Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard (Dec. 29, 2003-Jan. 5, 2003):

ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.

For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The intelligence included information that several top chemical weapons specialists from Iraq had attended ceremonies to celebrate the plant's opening in 1996. And, more compelling, the National Security Agency had intercepted telephone calls between Iraqi scientists and the plant's general manager.

Iraq also admitted to having a $199,000 contract with al Shifa for goods under the oil-for-food program. Those goods were never delivered. While it's hard to know what significance, if any, to ascribe to this information, it fits a pattern described in recent CIA reporting on the overlap in the mid-1990s between al Qaeda-financed groups and firms that violated U.N. sanctions on behalf of Iraq.

The clincher, however, came later in the spring of 1998, when the CIA secretly gathered a soil sample from 60 feet outside of the plant's main gate. The sample showed high levels of O-ethylmethylphosphonothioic acid, known as EMPTA, which is a key ingredient for the deadly nerve agent VX. A senior intelligence official who briefed reporters at the time was asked which countries make VX using EMPTA. "Iraq is the only country we're aware of," the official said. "There are a variety of ways of making VX, a variety of recipes, and EMPTA is fairly unique."

That briefing came on August 24, 1998, four days after the Clinton administration launched cruise-missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (Osama bin Laden's headquarters from 1992-96), including the al Shifa plant. The missile strikes came 13 days after bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people--including 12 Americans--and injured nearly 5,000. Clinton administration officials said that the attacks were in part retaliatory and in part preemptive. U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up "chatter" among bin Laden's deputies indicating that more attacks against American interests were imminent.

snip

The al Shifa plant in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:

snip

he U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.

The senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters laid out the collaboration. "We knew there were fuzzy ties between [bin Laden] and the plant but strong ties between him and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Iraq." Although this official was careful not to oversell bin Laden's ties to the plant, other Clinton officials told reporters that the plant's general manager lived in a villa owned by bin Laden.

http://tinyurl.com/9ubeu

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