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Olson Book's Chilling Warning: Clinton's Terrorist Pardons Sent Signal Crime/Corruption In a bone chilling chapter of her new book "The Final Days," late heroine-author Barbara Olson warned that ex-president Bill Clinton's pardons of terrorists who had repeatedly bombed buildings in New York City "send a signal" that the U.S. isn't serious about fighting terrorism. In words that now seem like a harbinger of her own Sept. 11 death at the hands of the Middle Eastern terrorists, Olson cited example after example of how U.S. officials strenuously warned Clinton that pardoning FALN Puerto Rican separatists who had waged their own bombing jihad on America posed a threat to national security. In August 1999 Clinton pardoned 16 FALN terrorists without even being asked, in a move that was widely seen as a cynical ploy to win Hispanic votes for his wife's New York senate bid. The group had planned and executed 130 bombing attacks on New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. from 1974 to 1983. Miraculously, the FALN managed to kill just six Americans. But hundreds more were seriously wounded. Law enforcement officials were stunned when Clinton decided to pardon the FALN bombers. "The FBI's assistant director of national security, Neil Gallagher, said that the people turned loose by Clinton 'are criminals, and they are terrorists, and they represent a threat to the United States,'" Olson wrote. In a subchapter eerily headlined "Pardons for Terrorists Send a Signal," she reported: "President Clinton had not bothered to consult with relatives of victims of FALN terrorism. In fact, the survivors of those murdered and those whose lives had otherwise been destroyed by the terrorists were not even informed that their attackers were being released." Olson continued: "Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder.... conceded that the nation owed much greater consideration to the victims. And Holder's boss, Janet Reno, explicitly acknowledged that groups aligned with the FALN still posed a threat to national security." In comments turned gut-wrenching in light of last month's attacks, former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Love told the late author that Clinton's terrorist pardons should have set off alarm bells. "We should have seen a big flashing red light because of the FALN cases.... That was a foreshoadowing of what happened later." Love was referring to Clinton's January 2001 pardons of drug dealers and international fugitives, not the attacks on the U.S., which no one foresaw. But it's nearly impossible now to read those words as anything but prophesy of the terrorist acts that murdered Olson and nearly 6,000 others last month. In a moment of now legendary heroism, the late author telephoned her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, from American Flight 175 to warn that terrorists had hijacked her plane. Mr. Olson had the terrible task of telling his wife that two planes had slammed into New York's World Trade Center minutes before. Barbara Olson's phone call was the first warning the government had that Washington, D.C. had come under similar attack. In comments sure to irk those who argued for eight years that Bill Clinton's private life was nobody else's business, the late author contends that the terrorist pardons were payback for Mrs. Clinton indulging her husband's decades of rampant philandering. "Hillary had done a lot of heavy lifting for her husband, much of it, such as the various bimbo eruptions, that required her to hold her nose. She had to cover for her husband and lie." Olson called the FALN pardons Bill Clinton's "first return on her investment." Though a lively debate has raged ever since Sept. 11 over whether the ex-president did as much as he could to stop Osama bin Laden, the one-time congressional Clinton investigator is the first to raise the FALN pardon question at any length. Perhaps now Sen. Clinton, who has made herself newly available on the TV talk show circuit since the World Trade Center attacks, will be asked whether she agrees with Olson that her husband's terrorist pardons "sent a signal."
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"My client had nothing to do with the low-rent, trailer-park trash politicians who infested our country for the past eight years."
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--Michael Rosen, lawyer for Thomas Gambino, son of late Mafia boss Carlo Gambino
New York Post via The Wall Street Journal
(Michael Rosen was understandably eager to distance his client, a convicted loan shark, from the clintons. Another Thomas Gambino reportedly paid $50,000 to roger clinton in an unsuccessful effort to get a pardon for his father, Rosario Gambino.),
- It's not easy to play fair against Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, who, in the words of the authors, "operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests." What's amazing, of course, is that's exactly what Clinton friends and aides have always done, from Susan McDougal to Webster Hubbell to flocks of nameless White House special assistants. Even Jim McDougal died just in time to deprive the independent counsel of a key witness against Mrs. Clinton, thus derailing what the authors report to have been her likely indictment for perjury and obstruction related to the Whitewater investigation....
Reading the tumultuous events of the Lewinsky probe in a comprehensive narrative is unlike attempting to make sense of it in daily doses. Something different comes through the heavy accumulation of detail of, for example, the duplicity of the Justice Department, or the sharklike behavior of the White House. One begins to get a choking sense of the atmosphere of corruption and ruthlessness the Clintons inhabit -- and, worse, have forced the rest of us to inhabit. Taken in one piece, the habitual, even casual abuse of power on display begins to resemble conditions one normally associates with a state of totalitarianism, where such concepts as truth and justice are only paid lip service. In the end, then, it makes you wonder when there will be fresh air again.
- -----Crime-family values
"I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted," insisted Sen. KnowNothing, seeming to forget her presence at the New-Square/Oval-Office schmooze that secured pardons for the four Hasidic felons who set up a phony school in Brooklyn to swindle the government out of millions intended for the poor.
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WASHINGTON- February 22. Sen. KnowNothing Victim Clinton held her premiere press conference today on Capitol Hill, ostensibly to answer questions about the peddling of White House pardons by her brother and her campaign treasurer. Notably absent among the press queries were any about her own involvement not only in those pardons, but in the larger universe of sold pardons--the incipient clinton scandal du jour--Pardongate. KnowNothing's brother, Hugh Rodham, secured two of the 141 clinton midnight pardons, one for a cocaine kingpin and the other for a snake-oil swindler. Rodham netted a quick $400,000 for his "work" according to various rodhams and clintons and their assorted lawyers. KnowNothing's campaign treasurer, William Cunningham III, himself a law partner of longtime KnowNothing adviser Harold Ickes, helped obtain last-minute pardons for two convicted felons. LA FAMIGLIA Displaying a willingness to throw her brother (along with her husband) to the wolves, Sen. Victim Clinton was quick to make a distinction between her big, bad brother's pardon "work" and that of her campaign treasurer, "a fine lawyer and a fine man." The "family" connection of brother Rodham to Clinton made brother Rodham's "work" bad, bad, bad, whereas the campaign treasurer Cunningham's connection to the senator and her campaign coffers made his securing of two pardons in record time a sterling example of highminded, effective public service. KnowNothing is apparently not the best of thinkers. If the "family" connection makes lobbying for cocaine-kingpin and snake-oil-swindler pardons bad, bad, bad for brother Rodham, then the "family" connection makes lobbying for the Hasidim 4 (see Keating 5) pardons bad, badder, baddest for the wife, First Lady and senator-elect. Moreover, pardons for votes is arguably worse than pardons for dough. EFFECTIVELY PLEADS 5TH BY INVOKING SPOUSAL PRIVILEGE KnowNothing specifically declined to answer when asked whether she discussed the pardons with her husband, effectively pleading the 5th. Turning aside questions about the pardon decisions her husband had made, she told reporters they should address those issues with him and his staff. She refused to say whether he should agree to appear voluntarily before congressional committees investigating the pardons. Interestingly, no one asked her whether she would agree to appear voluntarily before those same congressional committees. I DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH THAT PARDON "I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted," insisted Sen. KnowNothing, seeming to forget her presence at the New-Square/Oval-Office schmooze that secured pardons for the four Hasidic felons who set up a phony school in Brooklyn to swindle the government out of millions intended for the poor. RESURRECTING RUFF KnowNothing noted that her"best memory" was that she never spoke to her brother or to Mr. Cunningham about the pardons. With variations of "I don't have a memory" and "my best memory, and avoiding the more obvious "I don't recall" and "my best recollection," KnowNothing reprised the Ruffian standard used during the clinton years to commit perjury without penalty. I GET LETTERS ...or more precisely, envelopes. During her denials of involvement in any of the pardons, KnowNothing made the curious claim: "People handed me envelopes, I passed them on [and never opened a single one. Honest.]" I AM VICTIM Reprising the role of victim that enabled her to win a senate seat in spite of record-high personal negatives and public failures, the senator peppered her answers about big, bad Hugh (understanding that the subtext was big, bad Bill) with "saddened" and "disappointed" and "heartbroken" and "shocked." UTTER CONTEMPT FOR THE PEOPLE This session today was cut short by a staffer when reporters appeared dissatisfied by Senator KnowNothing's lack of candor. In the end, this press conference full of poses, poll-tested phrases and prevarication was just another display of the clintons' utter contempt for the people. Bill Clinton committed the same error last Sunday in his shameless, lie-filled New York Times Pardongate Apologia. The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains. 
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HER: Sen. KnowNothing Victim Clinton Effectively Pleads 5TH by Invoking Spousal Privilege
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