HELL HATH NO FURY (Hillary Clinton: The Puppet Master)

Billy R. Dale looks out at the lake. In his retirement home in a rural area near Richmond, Virginia, the 65-year-old Dale enjoys sailing his pontoon boat, woodworking and playing with his six grandkids. He doesn't follow politics that much, but does have a certain interest in the career of one politician: New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Dale is aware that something once thought of as a wild-eyed fantasy by both her critics and her supporters is becoming a reality. Hillary Clinton will likely run for president. Pondering whether she could win, Dale remarks, "I cringe. I can't imagine this country electing her president, but then again I couldn't imagine the citizens of New York State electing her senator. I guess we shouldn't be surprised at anything."

Dale has his own reasons for his interest, which this article will get to later, but for millions of Americans who either love or despise the former first couple, following the Clintons' moves has become something of an indoor sport. Now many are wondering how Hillary Clinton, after leaving the White House as First Lady and entering the Senate under a cloud of suspicion, got to the point where she is suddenly being talked about as a serious presidential contender in 2008, maybe even in 2004. In two polls in December from Gallup and Time/CNN, taken just after Al Gore announced he would not run again in a rematch against George W. Bush, Democratic voters rated Hillary as the front-runner among potential Democratic candidates.

Hillary has often been called Bill's "enabler." They discussed big plans for both of their careers ever since their days as classmates at Yale Law School in the early 1970s. When she served as a young lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings and Bill had moved back home, colleagues would chuckle when she bragged that she had a boyfriend in Arkansas who was going to be president. Their plans got off the ground when she joined him in Arkansas after serving on the committee and they were married in 1975. In 1977, Hillary joined what would later be called the Rose Law Firm just as Bill took office as state attorney general.

Their careers seemed to rise in tandem. Joyce Milton, author of the Hillary Clinton biography, The First Partner, writes that Bill Clinton was "never shy about lobbying on his wife's behalf." She often represented clients before state agencies while Bill was governor. Much of the Whitewater scandal involves allegations that Bill used his position as governor to solicit clients for Hillary, which Bill has denied. Hillary was promoted to partner in the 1980s and made about $400,000 a year, becoming the breadwinner in the family. She also was appointed to the boards of big Arkansas-based corporations such as Wal-Mart and TCBY yogurt shops. Her connections with big money as well as liberal groups such as the Children's Defense Fund would prove essential in building Bill a national fundraising and political base.

This is a long way from early 2001, when just days after the Clintons left the White House on January 20, news trickled out that Clinton had issued a record number of 176 pardons and sentence commutations. The most dubious, and the one that received the most attention, was that of Marc Rich, who had fled for Switzerland after being convicted of multiple counts of tax fraud. His ex-wife Denise Rich had been a generous contributor to the Democratic Party and had given nearly $500,000 to the fund for the proposed Clinton library in Arkansas in the months leading up to his pardon. Also among those pardoned were criminals convicted of bank robbery, money laundering, tax evasion, cocaine dealing and even domestic terrorism.

It would soon emerge that some of the pardons were pushed by Hillary's brothers, Hugh, a Miami-based lawyer, and Tony Rodham, a Washington-based consultant, both of whom received money from their pardoned clients. Clinton also commuted the sentence of four members of a Hasidic Jewish Community in New York that had voted an amazing 1400 to 12 for Hillary against her Senate race opponent, Republican Rick Lazio. Hillary denied she had any role in any pardon.

The former First Lady was also in hot water for setting up gift registries at fancy retailers so that contributors could furnish her new homes in New York and Washington. Denise Rich gave the Clintons two coffee tables and two chairs worth $7375 just before her ex-husband was pardoned. The Clintons also took several items of furniture and paintings that White House employees maintained were government property, and were forced to give some of the items back.

At this point, even Democrats who had stood by the Clintons through all the previous scandals lashed out at Bill and Hillary. Bob Herbert, the liberal New York Times columnist who had written a piece titled "Run, Hillary Run!," penned a harsh column urging Democrats to basically disown the former First Couple. "The Clintons are a terminally unethical and vulgar couple, and they've betrayed everyone who has ever believed in them..." he wrote in a column entitled, "Cut Them Loose" in February 2001. "As neither Clinton has the grace to retire from the scene, the Democrats have no choice but to turn their backs on them."

But two years later, Clinton is one of the most powerful Democratic senators. She was chosen to give the Democratic response to Bush's weekly radio address in early January, and was appointed head of a steering committee to choose which Democratic senators get which committee assignments. As the Senate convened early this year, with the Democratic Party now in the minority, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews noted that the Democratic senators were huddling around Hillary as she plotted strategy. "She's the boss," Matthews said on Don Imus' radio talk show. "Everybody was circling around her. Hillary was calling the shots."
Clinton has been coy about whether she'll run for the presidency, telling interviewers such as CNN's Larry King only that she wants to serve her six-year term and be a good senator to New York, of which she only became a resident the year before she ran for the Senate. (Her Senate office declined a request of an interview for this article.)

But observers note that she has taken many of the steps necessary to launch a run, even in 2004 if she chooses. She has traveled to Iowa, where the first big party caucuses for president are held every year, to meet with state Democratic officials. Shortly after she settled into the Senate, Clinton set up HILLPAC, a political action committee that allows her to raise unlimited amounts of money for Democratic candidates. She has had fundraisers for candidates in her swanky Georgetown mansion in Washington. A good national fundraising operation is often considered the first step in setting up a presidential campaign because it will generate lots of IOUs among Democrats from all over the country.

"It helps her create relationships with people she wouldn't normally have relationships with," says veteran New York Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, an adviser to Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign. "It gives her clout that she didn't normally have before. Money is very important in politics."

Another thing helping Hillary is a new nostalgia for the Clinton era among many Democrats, especially after the devastating House and Senate losses in the mid-term election last fall. "There is a longing among Democrats for a world in which they were dominant," Sheinkopf says. "[In the Clinton era], they didn't lose elections, they were more populist, they got things done. It was an era of great things for Democrats. In spite of losing the House and Senate in 1994, they held the presidency for two consecutive terms. No Democrat had been reelected to a second term since Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

But the Clinton's critics are also revisiting the past in anticipation of her run, and almost relish the chance to reopen the administration's controversies. This time, they say, Hillary's role in the scandals will take center stage. "People like me will be reminding the American people of... Whitewater, Filegate, the Travel Office, et al." says David Bossie, a longtime Clinton foe who scrutinized the controversies as a Republican congressional investigator and at the conservative organization Citizens United, where he is now president. "The American people are going to look at that and say, 'Do we want to go back to that era of corruption?'"

Defenders of the Clintons say that Americans will have moved on and that Hillary was investigated all through the Clinton years but prosecutors could never nail her. "I don't think in eight years people will know what Travelgate, Whitewater and all the other unproven nonsense mean," Sheinkopf says. "The facts are also that a glove has not been laid on this woman with respect to personal conduct."

But her detractors say Clinton's conduct during the scandals go to the core of what they say are her lack of honesty and her willingness to step on anyone she believes is in her way. The story of Billy Dale and Hillary Clinton's alleged role in his years of prosecution by the government is Exhibit A.

When Bill Clinton became president, Dale was director of the White House Travel Office, which arranged trips for the President, his staff and reporters who covered him. Dale started work there in 1961, when John F. Kennedy was president. He had served Democrats and Republicans with the same professional manner. "We were taught early on when we went to work at the White House that you don't work for a particular party, you work for the office of the president, and it made no difference to us whether he was a Democrat or Republican," Dale recalls.

Yet on May 19, 1993, less than four months after Clinton took office, Dale and his staff of six were suddenly fired and given just a few hours to clean out their desks by White House director of administration David Watkins, a friend of the Clintons and onetime financial adviser of Hillary's from Arkansas. On that same day, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Meyers announced that the Travel Office staff were being investigated by the FBI for possible embezzlement. But it was soon revealed that it was Clinton administration officials who pressured the FBI to investigate, and for less than noble reasons. They had planned to give the Travel Office's business to the air travel consulting firm of Clinton supporter Harry Thomason.

For the next two and a half years, Dale would be pursued by the FBI. His life was turned upside-down, as the finances of his wife and his children were also probed. "What they did to my family and myself really frightened me," Dale recalls. "It wasn't only my wife and I, it was my three grown kids and their spouses. They went back and investigated my daughter-in-law, who didn't even know us at the time that I was supposedly stealing money." At his trial in 1995, Sam Donaldson of ABC News and several other reporters whom Dale had arranged travel for, testified as character witnesses. Dale had put Travel Office money in a personal account, in case the Travel Office suddenly needed cash to resolve a billing dispute on a trip, a practice he said he later regretted doing. But a veteran FBI agent testified at the trial that there was no evidence Dale had been embezzling money and that it was the White House that had initiated the investigation. Less than 90 minutes after the trial was over, the jury came back with a verdict of "not guilty."

Dale related a telling incident that hasn't been widely reported. He says he had told Watkins of plans to retire a few days before he was fired, but Watkins told him to hold off. "I had gone to David Watkins and told him of my intentions to retire at the beginning of June, and he asked me to hold off making any announcement for a few days, that they had some plans for the Travel Office. He never gave me an opportunity to retire on my own." Watkins could not be reached for comment. Officials contacted at the Clinton Presidential Foundation in Little Rock and former President Clinton's office in New York did not know Watkins' whereabouts.

Travelgate was the catalyst of many of the Clinton scandals. It was primarily about the administration's misuse of the FBI, an issue that would come up again and again in other contexts. The Clintons had the legal right to fire the longtime staff and replace them with their friends and supporters, but that might have looked like the cronyism that it was, so the administration had used the FBI for cover.

Where did Watkins get his orders from? A memo he wrote that was found by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee a few months after Dale was acquitted strongly suggests pressure came from the First Lady herself. In what has come to be know as the "Hell to Pay" memo, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty but never sent, Watkins recounted a conversation in which Hillary "mentioned that Thomason had explained how the Travel Office could be run after removing the current staff" and said that "she thought immediate action was in order." Watkins concluded the memo by telling McLarty, "We both knew there would be hell to pay if... we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes."

Despite this memo, Hillary has repeatedly denied any role in the decision to fire Dale and his staff through her lawyers and in interviews with investigators from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Barbara Olson, the respected chief investigative counsel for the committee and author of two books on the Clinton scandals (who was tragically killed on the American Airlines flight that hit the Pentagon September 11) had told Newsmax.com that Hillary was almost named by then-committee Chairman William Clinger in a criminal referral for perjury. Olson said, "We had a lot of other evidence" on Hillary's role in the firings that corroborated the Watkins memo, but in the end, Clinger felt it would be improper to name the First Lady in a criminal referral.

The "we" Watkins referred to in the "Hell to Pay" memo was White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, who played a strong role in the Travel Office firings. Washington was shocked when Foster was suddenly found dead on July 20, 1993, with a gun in his hand in a Virginia park, a death that was ruled a suicide. Foster had been a partner of Hillary's at the Rose Law Firm since the 80s and had known Bill Clinton since boyhood. Foster and Hillary had a close friendship, and the kisses and squeezes they gave each other at parties and in front of guards in the governor's mansion, lead many to think it was more.

despite police requests that his office be secured, White House officials entered Foster's office. Secret Service agent Henry O'Neill testified that he saw Hillary Clinton's chief of staff Maggie Williams take a stack of folders from Foster's office. Williams, while confirming she was in Foster's office that night, would deny that she removed papers then. Because Foster was a personal attorney also helping the Clintons with the growing scandal involving their financial dealings in the Whitewater real estate venture, pressure mounted for investigations of Whitewater.

The shenanigans in Foster's office also undoubtedly fueled controversy about the cause of his death. Journalists Christopher Ruddy of the New York Post (who is now with Newsmax.com) and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the (London) Sunday Telegraph wrote an article questioning whether Foster's death was a suicide, pointing out details such as the fact that there was little blood near his body. An investigation by Ken Starr, the independent counsel who probed the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, would again rule the death a suicide. But there are still some who question the official verdict. Crime writer Mark Furhman, whose book Murder in Greenwich resulted in a conviction in a 25-year-old murder involving the Kennedys, is currently working on a book on the circumstances of the Foster death.

The House Committee's investigation of the Clinton administration's treatment of Dale would lead directly to another scandal involving the FBI. In 1996, the Committee found the White House was in possession of Dale's highly sensitive FBI file. The file was requested seven months after Dale had been fired. Since he no longer had access to the White House, there was no plausible reason why the White House should have requested or been given his file other than to dig up dirt on him. But Dale's file turned out to be the tip of the iceberg in the scandal that came to be known as Filegate. The Clinton White House had the files of more than 900 Reagan and Bush officials, and the files were in possession of Craig Livingstone, a former bar bouncer and well-known Democratic opposition researcher.

Bill Clinton claimed that it was all an accidental "bureaucratic snafu," but questions immediately surfaced about who had hired Livingstone, who seemed to lack the credential for a White House security position. Notes made by FBI agent Dennis Sculimbrene, when Livingstone was being considered for the White House job, say that White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum told Sculimbrene that Livingston came "highly recommended" by Hillary Clinton, who knew Livingstone's mother. Nussbaum has denied making the statement, and Hillary has denied ever knowing Livingstone before he came to work at the White House. Former Nixon aide Charles Colson made the point that he went to prison for improperly accessing one FBI file, yet the Clinton administration misused more than 900.

Dale's troubles from the Clinton administration weren't exactly over when he was acquitted. The Internal Revenue Service began an audit of his finances shortly after his trial was over. Margaret Milner Richardson, IRS Commissioner, was a Clinton campaign contributor and a friend of Hillary's since they attended Yale Law School. The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee found White House memos related to the Travel Office firings saying that Richardson was "on top of it" and IRS agents were "aware." Besides Dale, several individuals and organizations critical of the Clinton administration were to receive "random" IRS audits, including Gennifer Flowers, who came forward during the 1992 campaign about an affair she had with Clinton, who filed a lawsuit alleging Clinton sexually harassed her when he was governor of Arkansas, and Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged in the late 90s that Clinton had raped her while he was Arkansas attorney general. The Clinton administration and the IRS have maintained this was all a coincidence.

Dale's audit was wrapped up quickly in his favor. But being cleared of any wrongdoing by a jury didn't stop Hillary from again impugning his reputation on national television. When Hillary was interviewed on Today by Maria Shriver shortly after Dale's acquittal, she told Shriver pointedly, that "there was financial mismanagement" at the Travel Office and "the White House, I believe, acted the only way that it could have." Singling Dale out, Hillary said, "Maybe it wasn't done quite as sensitively, and it turned out there was only really one person who was involved in this financial mismanagement."

The late Barbara Olson in her book, Hell to Pay, concluded that the Travel Office and other scandals "show that the abuse of power, the destruction of people who are in their way, the lying, even when the truth might be entirely acceptable - these are the Clintons' modus operandi." Olson described Hillary Clinton as "a woman who can sway millions, yet deceive herself; a woman who has persuaded herself and many others that she is 'spiritual,' but who has gone to the brink of criminality to amass wealth and power." The treatment of Billy Dale and his staff shows, according to Olson, that while the Clintons "have immense compassion for humanity at an abstract level, and can tear up at the story of a Kosovar family's plightŠ they are callous, even coldly cruel, to subordinates."

Ironically, it was the one scandal that almost cost Bill Clinton the presidency that may have boosted Hillary Clinton's political career. When Clinton had been caught making false statements under oath about his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, for the first time, Hillary was seen as an object of sympathy. "As soon as she became the victim, many people, particularly women, gravitated to her because they like her to be vulnerable," says Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway. "She showed there was a vulnerability and a piercing of the invincible, almost cold, icy veneer through the whole episode. I would challenge anyone to show me how she could have successfully run for the United States Senate if not for that entire saga where she was cast first as a victim, and then as a survivor."

Known for abrasive comments, Hillary had done things before to soften her image. In 1996, when her husband was running against Bob Dole, she let it slip to the New Yorker that she and Bill were thinking about adopting a baby after he left the presidency. This was met with a chorus of disbelief. But after the Lewinsky affair, she could appear sometimes convincingly demure. She embarked on a "listening tour" of New York. "They expected her to be boisterous and annoying, and instead she was thoughtful and listening," Sheinkopf says. As hurt as she probably was upon hearing of the Lewinsky scandal - and there are conflicting stories about when she knew if rumors of the affair were true - Hillary was at Bill's side helping him to plot strategy through the ordeal. Right after the allegations of the affair surfaced in January 1998, Hillary went on NBC's Today Show to say the charges were untrue and the plot of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get her and her husband. When Clinton's DNA on Lewinsky's stained dress forced him to tell the nation the truth in August 1998, it was Hillary who encouraged him to use the opportunity to attack independent counsel Ken Starr, according to Christopher Andersen's Bill and Hillary: The Marriage. The speech was widely criticized because of Clinton's lack of contrition, but according to Andersen, Hillary was happily yelling, "That'll show 'em" at the television.

Hillary appears to have taken an active role in discrediting the women in Bill's life who have come forward with their stories. Comparing her to Hera, wife of the philandering Greek god Zeus, Tom Fitton of the anti-Clinton legal group Judicial Watch says, "She went out and destroyed the women he slept with." When Gennifer Flowers came forward during the 1992 campaign with a tape of a phone conversation with Bill Clinton discussing their affair, Hillary went on ABC's PrimeTime Live to suggest that that tape was doctored. Bill later admitted that he slept with Flowers in 1998 during his deposition in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against him (the same deposition where he denied having an affair with Monica Lewinsky). Judicial Watch is currently representing Flowers in a libel suit against Hillary and other Clinton supporters who claimed her tape was doctored.

It was widely predicted that Hillary would divorce Bill after he left the presidency, but after two years, although they're not together in public very much, she shows no signs of leaving him. This gives credence to the "Team Billary" hypothesis, that the Clinton marriage is a partnership based on political advancement for the both of them. It should not be seen any differently now that Hillary is the one holding public office, observers say.
"I thought it was a joke all along when people said that her running for the Senate was a bid for independence," says Milton. "If you look at their relationship, every couple years they seem to be on the verge of breaking up, and what always brings them together is that another political campaign comes along. And when they're planning campaign strategy, they seem to get along quite well."

New York Democrat Sheinkopf says Bill would also like to see Hillary president as a way of hammering Republicans who tried to bring him down. "I think he would enjoy getting back at the Republicans," Sheinkopf said. "Seeing Hillary elected President would be revenge on conservative Republicans who made light of the Clinton presidency."

Even if she can get the Democratic nomination, there is still the question of winning the general election. A lot will depend on what the economy looks like and how big of an issue foreign policy is, but both her opponents and critics say she should not be underestimated.

The prospect of another Clinton presidency sends a slight chill down the spine of Billy Dale. "What they did to my family and me really frightened me," he reflects. "[During the entire Clinton presidency], I felt like I had to somewhat guard what I said, because I didn't know what the Clintons might try to do again. I never knew what they might try to trump up."

Ridding the Clinton's from our public affairs is like getting rid of Saddam. They just keep on going, and going, and going.....could it really be true that Billary is a contender for President of the United States? Perish the thought!!

"People like me will be reminding the American people of... Whitewater, Filegate, the Travel Office, et al." says David Bossie, a longtime Clinton foe who scrutinized the controversies as a Republican congressional investigator and at the conservative organization Citizens United, where he is now president. "The American people are going to look at that and say, 'Do we want to go back to that era of corruption?'" (from article)

With the Internet, I believe it is impossible for her to get elected President. Everytime she donates money to a candidate in flyover Country, the Republican rakes in even more money. They detest her out here and Republicans are a lot more organized on the Net that ever before.

David Bossie has the ability to break this wide open in a campaign against hillary because he has seen it all. Like others, I would spend every waking moment I had to see hillary defeated.

"both her opponents and critics say she should not be underestimated"

The bigger danger lurks in overestimating her. She is as electable as Ted Kennedy was after he drunkenly plummeted off the bridge, and heroically managed to save himself. Every four years they'd threaten he might yet run "sometime in the future" - despite the personal tragedy of his family - but he'll be begged to run by adoring Democrat sapsuckers, and yet cold numerical analysis always revealed he couldn't win anyway.

It might be better for her to go for the bait and get trounced than to become a lifer senator always threatening to threaten.

Hillary, go back to the Little Rock you crawled out from under.

Hillary thinks she's too sophisticated for Little Rock. If she ever went back it would be in a very controlled environment - private jet, private car to a private house, etc..

George W. isn't in the business of repeating p41's mistakes; when he has political capital he spends it, developing more in the process. And he won't give the U.N. anything more than a fig leaf over Iraq.
We-the-people know that Saddam was Hitler warmed over. It would have been impossible ever to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom under any further U.N. delay (the GIs who sweltered in Baghdad as it was will swear to that). Since none of the Democrats strongly favor U.S. sovereignty, the U.N. Iraq fiasco will be an embarrasment bordering on a humiliation.
"Senator, would you have ordered the forces into Iraq without the U.N.?"
Umm . . . Umm . . . Umm . . .
"Senator, did you criticize and carp when the president did take action to free Iraq?"
Umm . . . Umm . . . Umm . . .

Illinois and Arkansas are just fading memories to New York senator Hillary! Clinton. Yessir, she's a Yankees fan now, just doing her very best to represent the people of her new home state. If I had a dime for every time she's actually stayed in her alleged home in Chappaqua, I just might have enough money for a cup of coffee (McDonald's, not Starbucks).

...If I had a dime for every time she's actually stayed in her alleged home in Chappaqua, I just might have enough money for a cup of coffee (McDonald's, not Starbucks).

McDonald's...$0.85 USA

Mother Russia ??? Kopeck

Red China......???? Yaun

With the Internet, I believe it is impossible for her to get elected President. Everytime she donates money to a candidate in flyover Country, the Republican rakes in even more money. They detest her out here and Republicans are a lot more organized on the Net that ever before.

This is why a lot of us in NY want Rudy to wait for the Senate race in 06, so he can finally drive the stake through her heart. As long as she's a NY Senator, she will keep running for President until she gets embarassed. And as long as she carries NY and Cal in a national election, she will continually put on a decent showing.

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Hell Hath No Fury Hillary Clinton: The Puppet Master

Hell Hath No Fury
Hillary Clinton: The Puppet Master