11/23/02
Hillary's Private Eye Arrested in Reporter Intimidation Case
I found this on a Rush Limbaugh newsgroup:
A California private detective who worked to discredit Clinton Sexgate accusers Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers has been arrested in connection with attempts to intimidate a reporter for the Los Angeles Times after the FBI caught him with an arsenal of explosives.
Anthony J. Pellicano was arrested Thursday after a search of his office by a dozen FBI agents turned up an "array of explosives," reported New York's Daily News on Saturday.
In February, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was alleged to have hired Pellicano in 1992 in an attempt to discredit Gennifer Flowers' claims of a twelve year affair with Mr. Clinton.
The episode bears an eerie resemblance to the account of Clinton sex-accuser Sally Perdue, who told the London Telegraph in 1994 that after she was threatened with physical violence, her car windshield was broken and spent shotgun shell was left on the seat. Perdue abruptly relocated to China a few months after talking to the Telegraph, shortly after Paula Jones sued Mr. Clinton for sexual harassment.
Though Pellicano's name never surfaced in connection with Perdue's allegations, he reportedly played a key role in attempts to discredit both Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers.
Four days after the Lewinsky story broke in Jan. 1998, ex-Lewinsky boyfriend Andy Bleiler came forward with the claim that she had stalked him. The Washington state school teacher also contended that Lewinsky wanted to become a White House intern so she could perform oral sex on then-President Clinton. "I'm going to Washington to get my presidential knee pads," Bleiler's lawyer, Terry Giles, quoted Lewinsky as saying.
"Anthony Pellicano, the L.A.-based private investigator and O.J. defense team veteran [was] responsible for digging up Andy Bleiler," the New York Post's Andrea Peyser reported days later.
Sexgate provocatuer Lucianne Goldberg told Peyser that Pellicano's services were bought and paid for by the Clinton White House. When Peyser confronted the Los Angeles private detective with Goldberg's claim, he didn't deny it. "You're a smart girl. No comment," Pellicano told the Post reporter.
Digging up Bleiler's "presidential kneepads" story wasn't the first time Pellicano had gone to bat for the Clintons. According to Ron Kessler's 1995 best-seller, "Inside the White House," Clinton's first presidential campaign relied on Pellicano's expertise in the field of audio analysis to discredit Gennifer Flowers' smoking gun tapes. "The Clinton camp made much of the fact that Anthony J. Pellicano, an expert on audio recording analysis, had told the press that a twelve-minute portion of the tape of conversations between Flowers and Clinton had been 'selectively edited' at two points," Kessler reported.
To counter Pellicano's claims, Flowers submitted her recordings to Truth Verification Labs, which found them to be 100 percent authentic. In 1999 Flowers filed a defamation suit against Clinton campaign officials James Carville and George Stephanopoulos - along with then-first lady Hillary Clinton - based on their attempts to use Pellicano's analysis to discredit her.
During a February court appearance, the head of Flowers' legal team, Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman, told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, "Anthony Pellicano was a private investigator hired by Mrs. Clinton herself. And he's the one who did the analysis of the tapes."
Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano's Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine.
This is JUST the part on the Klintons....you have to read the whole thing to understand how slimy this guy is....
…But it is abundantly clear that distortion is standard fare for Blumenthal. Although there are slivers of truth in most of what he writes, the facts are dishonestly rearranged to settle scores or whitewash his and the Clintons' actions.
…Consider one small example: Blumenthal's effort to extricate himself and Hillary Clinton from a clumsy attempt to build a White House dossier on Susan Schmidt, the Washington Post's most aggressive reporter on Whitewater. Blumenthal's role in this vaguely Nixonian exercise was first reported five years ago in a story by the Post's media reporter, Howard Kurtz. When Michael McCurry, who was then press secretary, learned of the project, he proclaimed it "crazy" and killed it. Instead of admitting his involvement, Blumenthal pretends that he was a passive party. After hearing "constant complaints" about Schmidt's reporting from White House legal aides, he writes, he suggested they "should present the facts to the Post to correct any errors. Beyond that, I never knew about a study of Schmidt's reporting. I asked Hillary Clinton, and she had no memory of anything either."
But others do remember--quite differently, as it turns out. Mark Fabiani, the White House lawyer who ran the counsel offices' "damage control" team, said he recalls getting a phone call from Blumenthal strongly urging him to do a report on Schmidt. When Fabiani didn't follow up, he then got a call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff instructing him to get moving on the job. This led to the preparation of a lengthy dossier (one that did little to effectively discredit Schmidt, according to Fabiani) and a series of meetings--including one with Hillary Clinton --about what to do with it. The White House lawyers knew exactly what had happened, says Fabiani. "We all laughed about it. We knew [Blumenthal] had called Hillary and told Hillary this should be done. …He was sort of the brooding, omnipresence over the whole thing."
Another more serious example of Blumenthal's malleable relationship to the truth involves his testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury…
I wrote about Blumenthal's courthouse deceptions in my own book Uncovering Clinton. So I when I picked up The Clinton Wars I was mildly curious to see how he would handle the subject. Would he show the slightest contrition for his deceptive public statements? Not at all. In The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal recounts in exhaustive, self-congratulatory detail how he turned the table on Starr. …
If The Clinton Wars has any central point it is that the scandals that beset the Clinton presidency--from Whitewater to campaign finance to Lewinsky to Marc Rich--were each and every one of them entirely concocted, from start to finish. This is patently absurd.… Blumenthal's blanket whitewash is close to ludicrous--and sustainable only by erasing huge chunks of the historical record.
…
About Whitewater, Blumenthal has this to say: "There was never anything to in the beginning, middle or end." What convinced him? In January 1994, Hillary Clinton called him into her office and told him so. "I believed Hillary Clinton," he writes. "Her telling of the story … sounded convincing; her demeanor struck no false notes."
As for the Lewinsky matter--
it was all very simple: It was about the efforts of rigid, culturally repressed conservatives like Starr to use sex as a "tracer" and a "code" to thwart progressive politics. Remember Vernon Jordan's phone call to Revlon to get Lewinsky a job--
made just days after Clinton's lawyers learned that Lewinsky was on a witness list in the Paula Jones case? There's barely a mention of that. What does Blumenthal have to say about Clinton's famous session with presidential secretary Betty Currie right after he testified falsely in his deposition? ("I was never alone with Monica, right?" he said. "Monica came on to me and I never touched her, right?") He never talks about it.
"It is my serious intent to have written this as a history," Blumenthal recently told the New York Times, insisting that his book was written "dispassionately." But not to belabor the obvious, to write history, you have to have some basic respect for the historical record. You have to make at least some effort at understanding the motivations and thinking of political antagonists--including those you happen to strongly disagree with. Blumenthal has done none of this. His book isn't history; it's one big orgy of political spin.
Insidious Sid
Michael Isikoff, Slate, Tuesday, May 20, 2003