Posted on 04/11/2003 9:42:52 AM PDT by big bad easter bunny
From American Blue, the Internet's oldest daily political news site, on . The original article can be found at:
http://www.american-blue.com/article.asp?id=1782
Content © 2001 . Return to online article
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Clintons Return $28,000 Worth of Gifts to White House Thursday, February 08, 2001
By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former President Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have sent $28,000 worth of household goods back to Washington after questions arose over whether the items were intended as personal gifts or donations to the White House.
"We have been informed that it is being shipped back, and the National Park Service is ready to receive it, take possession of it and take custody of it," Jim McDaniel, the National Park Service's liaison to the White House, said Wednesday.
"The property is being returned to government custody until such time that the issues can be resolved. It may well turn out that that property is rightly the personal property of the Clintons."
After they were criticized for taking $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, televisions, sofas and other gifts with them when they left, the Clintons announced last week that they would pay for $86,000 worth of gifts, or nearly half the amount.
Their latest decision to send back $28,000 in gifts brings to $114,000 the value of items the Clintons have either decided to pay for or return.
McDaniel discussed the matter Wednesday with Betty Monkman, the White House curator, and Gary Walters, the chief usher, or executive manager of the White House.
They were reviewing the gifts the Clintons chose to keep after $28,000 worth of items were found on a list of donations the Park Service received for the 1993 White House redecoration project. The Washington Post this week quoted three people who said that they assumed the furnishings they donated for the project would stay in the White House.
"As a result of questions about the status of certain property donated to the White House during the Clinton administration, the National Park Service will accept the return of the property in question and act as a custodian of such property," according to a statement released by the Park Service, which administers the White House as a unit of the national park system.
A person familiar with the Clintons' move out of the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity, would say only: "They've been returned."
While the Clintons' decision to return these gifts was a way to get out from under this and other criticism surrounding their departure from the White House, the couple provided scant details about the shipment.
Mrs. Clinton's office referred all questions about the gift return to the former president's transition office. Transition office workers said the Clintons would make no statement. They referred all questions to the Park Service, which wasn't exactly sure which gifts were being returned or where they had been kept.
In a statement released Monday, Clinton's transition office said every item they accepted was identified by the White House gift office as a present to them. They said none of the gifts taken was on a curator's list of official White House property.
"Gifts did not leave the White House without the approval of the White House usher's and curator's offices," the statement said. "Of course, if the White House now determines that a cataloging error occurred, ... any item in question will be returned."
Instead of waiting for the issue to be resolved, the Clintons returned the items.
The gifts in question were: A kitchen table and four chairs valued at $3,650 from Lee Ficks of Cincinnati, Ohio; a $1,000 needlepoint rug from David Martinous of Little Rock, Ark.; two sofas, an easy chair and an ottoman worth $19,900 from Steve Mittman of New York; lamps valued at $1,170 from Stuart Shiller of Hialeah, Fla.; and a $2,843 sofa from Brad Noe, a businessman from California.
The gifts were just one of several flaps that followed the Clintons out of the White House.
-Lawmakers are questioning Clinton's desire to rent expensive office space in New York City at government expense. Because of the contention, the former president's foundation has offered to pay at least $300,000 of an estimated $790,000 annual rent for the office Clinton favors.
-Mrs. Clinton, the new senator from New York, has faced questions about the propriety of accepting the gifts in the period between her election and her swearing-in. Senate rules would have limited what she could accept had she been a senator.
-Members of both parties also have criticized Clinton for granting scores of eleventh-hour clemency requests, including the pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive in Switzerland from 51 counts in the United States of tax evasion and fraud.
© Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Capitol Hill Blue Home Page
BUT THE SOFA??
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![]() by Mia T copyright Mia T 2000 |
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Sen. Clinton made another assertion - one that is equally misleading.
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TRANSLATION: An earlier example of the clinton post-election/pre-swearing-in klepto-bribery scheme... |
MIA T, Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers |
--anonymous |
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The no-show manuscript
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TRANSLATION: Fairness? You little people just don't get it. This is no simple second-story thief. This is HILLARY! Haven't you noticed? She's been preoccupied with serving herself during these challenging times, what with juggling
all while hedging her bets on the war/homeland-security thing, (the primary reason for the delay, BTW It is unwritten HILLARY! policy not to put her stupidity in writing; obviously, we're awaiting the outcome of the war thing in order to demonstrate her "prescience." ) [Nonetheless] the writing is wonderfully revisionist in its scope even as it reprises her victim status; it is intended to lift HILLARY! from toilet to bidet. (VIVE LA FRANCE!) |
Hillary Clinton's equal and inapposite reactions seem to be, at first blush, instances of the immutable First Law of The Betrayed and Humiliated Wife: Outdo the errant hubby's doxy...at all cost. Thus, Vanity Fair's glamorous Marilyn-Monroe spread of Monica's digitally reduced spread was answered by Vogue's lushly Elizabethan, gauzy-focus, hindquarter-cropped-pleated-and-flounced, Queen-Hillary-for-President cover. And now we have Hillary Clinton doing a Martha Stewart, who herself, is purported to have been "done" by the aforementioned errant rogue (notwithstanding the plain fact that Martha is more well-known for her tarts than for being one). Seems Hillary Clinton is now writing a book titled "An Invitation to the White House" in which she will follow the format of the Martha Stewart classic, "Entertaining", claim multifarious Martha-Stewart talents and wrap her indecorous and corrupt, backwoods, backroom style of White House "entertaining" in Martha-Stewart elegance and purity. (NB: Written years before Martha ImPloded.) "The Clinton White House has been noted for the...innovation of its events," said Carolyn Reidy, president of Simon & Schuster's Trade Division, the book's publisher. Hillary Clinton's spokeswoman, Marsha Berry, added that the book will focus on how the Clintons have "advanced the availability" of the White House by increasing the number and diversity of people; that it will "highlight the access that the Clintons have given to more people, more types of entertainment..." It should be emphasized that it was without even a trace of irony or the slightest smirk that both women related the above. On closer inspection, Hillary Clinton's bizarre behavior is more than simple Ivana Trump-eting. It is vulgar, compulsive, shameless, smarmy, contemptuous, demagogic, megalomaniacal, in-your-face naked clintonism. It is one thing for the frumpy, chipmunk-cheek, huge-hindquarter fishwife to insinuate her image -- albeit Elizabethan-shrouded and low-res-clouded -- onto the cover of Vogue; but it is quite another for the corrupt harpy to trumpet White House access even as new charges emerge of the clintons' rapes and other predations, of the clintons' corrupt quid-pro-quo arrangements with a menacing and motley assortment of drug dealers, gun runners and nuclear weapons makers. For Hillary Clinton to vaunt White House access just as the clintons' China treason is becoming increasingly, patently manifest to all requires a certain level of contempt for the people and for the country that is uniquely clinton. Thank heaven for small favors... Or as the real Martha Stewart would say, |
HILLARY CLINTON BOOK PAST DUE, PUBLISHER'S ANGST OVER NO MANUSCRIPT, NO TITLE; SENATOR TOOK LARGEST ADVANCE IN HISTORY Executives at publishing powerhouse SIMON AND SCHUSTER are dismayed over Hillary Clinton's failure to turn in a completed manuscript for her book, due out in August, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. The senator of the Empire State has already received a $2.85055 million cash advance on her memoirs, from a total deal valued at more than $8 million. MORE "We must be off to the printer next month, but the manuscript isn't in yet!" said one SIMON AND SCHUSTER source last week. "Advance sales are lagging. And there is no title. Without a title it's been difficult to market." One top source says the situation has not reached a legal concern, rather it is being described as an "annoyance." The former first lady signed the deal before the 9/11 terror attacks. One Clinton intimate explains: "In all fairness, she has been preoccupied with serving New York during these challenging times... [But] the writing is wonderful, touching, and will lift Hillary to a new level of respect." HILLARY CLINTON BOOK PAST DUE
PUBLISHER'S ANGST OVER NO MANUSCRIPT
NO TITLE
Drudgereport.com | 4/7/03 | Matt Drudge
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NOTE THE CBS--SIMON & SCHUSTER CONNECTION
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HALF A HOUSE, HALF A BRAIN:
Why the clintons hit on Simon & Schuster
An "I'm glad I'm not the only person that remembers this" BUMP!
Bump! [a little late maybe]
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