Snippets from an article, clintons in arkansas... if we forgot who they are...
1980’s
Arkansas becomes a major center of gun-running, drugs and money laundering. The IRS warns other law enforcement agencies of the state’s “enticing climate.” According to Clinton biographer Roger Morris, operatives go into banks with duffel bags full of cash, which bank officers then distribute to tellers in sums under $10,000 so they don’t have to report the transaction.
Sharlene Wilson, according to investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, flies cocaine from Mena to a pickup point in Texas. Other drugs, she and others say, are stuffed into chickens for shipping around the country. Wilson also serves as “the lady with the snow” at “toga parties” attended, she reports, by Bill Clinton.
According to his wife, security operative Jerry Parks delivers large sums of money from Mena airport to Vince Foster at a K-Mart parking lot. Mrs. Parks discovers this when she opens her car trunk one day and finds so much cash that she has to sit on the trunk to close it again. She asks her husband whether he is dealing drugs, and he allegedly explains that Foster paid him $1,000 for each trip he took to Mena. Parks said he didn’t “know what they were doing, and he didn’t care to know. He told me to forget what I’d seen.”. . .
.Later Evans-Pritchard will write, “Foster was using him as a kind of operative to collect sensitive information on things and do sensitive jobs. Some of this appears to have been done on behalf of Hillary Clinton. . . Foster told him that Hillary wanted it done. Now, my understanding . . . is that she wanted to know how vulnerable he would be in a presidential race on the question of — how shall I put it? — his appetites.”
Tens of thousands of dollars in mysterious checks begin moving through Whitewater’s account at Madison Guaranty. Investigators will later suspect that McDougal was operating a check-kiting scheme to drain money from the S&L
Hot Springs police record Roger Clinton during a cocaine transaction. Roger says, “Got to get some for my brother. He’s got a nose like a vacuum cleaner.”
Ronald Reagan wants to send the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Contras. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis goes to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons “excess” and leaves them behind for the Contras.
A relative of Bill Clinton is raped. Wayne Dumond is arrested and imprisoned in the case. While awaiting sentencing, Dumond himself is sexually assaulted and castrated by two masked men. A local sheriff, later sentenced to 160 years for extortion and drug dealing, displays Dumond’s testicles in a jar on his desk under a sign that read, “That’s what happens to people who fool around in my county.” A parole board, upon receiving new evidence of Dumond’s innocence, will vote to release him after 4 1/2 years in prison. Governor Clinton — according to the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette — stages a “romping, stomping fit” and blocks the release.
Journalist Evans-Pritchard will describe the Arkansas of this period as a “major point for the transshipment of drugs” and “perilously close to becoming a ‘narco-republic’ — a sort of mini-Columbia within the borders of the United States.” There is “an epidemic of cocaine, contaminating the political establishment from top to bottom,” with parties “at which cocaine would be served like hors d’oeuvres and sex was rampant.” Clinton attends some of these events.
The attorney general of Louisiana tells US Attorney General Ed Meese that drug trafficker Barry Seal has smuggled drugs into the US worth $3-$5 billion.
1993
Vince Foster, the Clintons’ attorney, finally files missing Whitewater tax returns.
On July 19, FBI director William Sessions is fired. Clinton personally orders him by phone to turn in his FBI property and leave headquarters.
That evening, Jerry Parks’ wife Jane overhears a heated telephone conversation with Vince Foster in which her husband says, “You can’t give Hillary those files, they’ve got my name all over them.”
On July 20, Clinton names Louis Freeh as Sessions’ successor.
That same day, the FBI raids David Hale’s Little Rock office and seizes documents including those relating to Capital-Management.
Just hours after the search warrant authorizing the raid is signed by a federal magistrate in Little Rock, Vince Foster apparently drives to Ft. Marcy Park without any car keys in a vehicle that changes color over the next few hours, walks across 700 feet of park without accruing any dirt or grass stains, and then shoots himself with a vanishing bullet that leaves only a small amount of blood. Or at least that is what would have to have occurred if official accounts are to be reconciled with the available evidence. There are numerous other anomalies in this quickly-declared suicide. Despite two badly misleading independent counsel reports, Foster’s death will remain an unsolved mystery.
Less than three hours after Foster’s body is found, his office is secretly searched by Clinton operatives, including Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff. Another search occurs two days later. Meanwhile, US Park Police and FBI agents are not allowed to search the office on grounds of “executive privilege.”
Foster’s suicide note is withheld from investigators for some 30 hours. The note is in 27 pieces with one other piece missing.
Patrick Knowlton, who stops in the park seventy minutes before Foster’s body is found, reports seeing things that do not fit the official version. Declining under pressure to change his story, he is eventually subpoenaed by the Whitewater prosecutor. On that day, he becomes the target of extensive overt harassment and surveillance of a sort used by intelligence agencies to intimidate witnesses.
When ex-Clinton security operative Jerry Parks hears of Vince Foster’s body being found at Ft Marcy Park, he tells his wife, “I’m a dead man.” Two months later, Parks will be shot to death in a mob-type slaying in Little Rock. News of Parks’ death sets off a flurry of activity and closed-door meetings at the White House. Parks’ house is ransacked, and his files, 130 telephone tapes and computer data are removed.
Thanks for going to the trouble to post all of that. There are still a few of us around who knew and remember those things, and much more. It is truly disheartening to realize that the general level of knowledge of these things on FR is so abysmally low.
You mentioned Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to talk with him during that time. He was the Washington Bureau Chief for the London Daily Telegraph, and did an outstanding job investigating the Clintons.
Instead of sitting in his Washington office and repeating the AP and other networks’ pablum stories, he actually rented a car and went to Arkansas and interviewed the original sources. Imagine that!