Bushies Target Hillary in Expanded Scandal Probe

Newsmax ^ | 2/9/02 | Limbacher

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

In an astonishing reversal of President Bush's nonchalant attitude towards an array of corruption charges against Bill and Hillary Clinton, the president and his aides are now said to be "quietly pushing" a probe into allegations that Clinton staffers trashed the White House in Jan. 2001.

What's more, they've asked that the newly revved up investigation focus on the East Wing, where former first lady Hillary Clinton had her offices.

The shift could mean the GAO probe will also examine evidence that Mrs. Clinton absconded with furniture and other White House artifacts to decorate her private mansions in New York and Washington.

"White House folks suggested we cast as wide a net as possible," GAO director Bernard Ungar told the New York Daily News Saturday, adding that the Bushies wanted to redirect the probe's previous focus from the Eisenhower office building to Mrs. Clinton official digs.

The request for action on the Clinton vandalism charges prompted complaints from GAO chief David Walker, who told the News, "they want us to do more work than is even reasonable."

The Clinton probe could prove distracting to Walker's focus in recent weeks: prying loose White House records on meetings between Vice President Dick Cheney and Enron officials.

Immediately after reports of White House vandalism, Bush seemed to take no interest in the episode and urged the media to look that other way.

"There might have been a prank or two, maybe somebody put a cartoon on the wall, but that's OK." he told reporters. "It's time now to move forward."

But after Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner complained last June that Clinton workers had been unfairly smeared and demanded the Bushies apologize, White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer said the destruction was more extensive then the president had let on.

A list of damages he released included:

75 phones that had been "tampered with," including 10 where the lines had been cut.

Twenty percent of the desks in the Eisenhower Office complex had been overturned.

Obscene graffiti was discovered by Bush staffers in six offices.

A 20-inch-wide presidential seal had been ripped off a wall.

One hundred computer keyboards had been rendered inoperable by the Clinton vandals.

Pornography was left behind in White House photocopiers.

Trash was spilled throughout the White House counsel's office, along with other assorted random damage.

One estimate put the cost of the destruction as high as $250,000.

Bush administration spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the White House counsel's office had photographs of the vandalism, but did not explain why they were not offered to the GAO when the agency first requested proof in April.

In releasing the list of damages, Fleischer explained, "We tried to be gracious, but the last administration would not take graciousness." Claims that Bush staffers had lied about the destruction had forced him to respond, he said.

After Fleischer's comments, the GAO's Ungar began backtracking on his April report that there was no unusual damage to the White House after Clinton staffers departed.

"Ungar said the GAO found accounts of damage that included telephones disconnected from wall jacks, phones with extension numbers defaced and tables and desks that were overturned," reported Newsday, in a follow up story on Fleischer's list.

It's not clear whether the White House's newly aggressive attitude will translate into action in the office of the U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District, which has been accused of footdragging in its probe into the Clinton Pardongate scandal.

[MeekOneGOP]

Not only Terry McAuliffe, but California's own Barbara Boxer. Reportedly the same investment and the same profit in the same amount of time. Coinkydink?

Hmm? Isn't that something? There are a lot of folks gonna get caught up in the Global Crossing mess. Of course, the DIMocRATS will say now, "It's just about Money!" Ha! Yeah, right! Bu-bye Terry! Bu-bye Barbara!

[MeekOneGOP]

Are you serious?? I never knew that! Nah! they wouldn't have allowed x42 to put a picture of Mao in the Oval Office, would they??

LOL! Yeah, right! With his Legacy, expect anything. . .

i got away wif murder, rape
and obstruction ov justice. . .
i so proud o' myself!

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

The point in bringing up the Salon.com article was not to validate the contents of the article, but rather to substantiate my belief that Bernard Ungar can be fairly catagorized as a "media whore".

Sometimes I'm slow & need things broken down like a child needing her meat cut. Thanks. You are right. He is a media whore.

:-)

[Pagey]

Well Stated C.F. That reminds me of something P.J. O'Rourke said in his book "Parliament of Whores" : "Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe.When you quit looking on the bright side,the catastrophe is still there." It appears to me,the G.A.O. is a perfect example.

[Mia T]

Q ERTY6 clinton & clinton were utter failures

kleptocratic REALITY-CHECK bump! 

 

PINCH CLINTON

 

by Mia T, 2.9.02

 

 

In a quainter, less enlightened time, if you had uttered "pinch" and "clinton" in the same breath, you would have evoked images of, as the wife put it, "hundreds of 'ministered to' troubled young girls," not roomfuls of stolen White House antiques.

 

And yet, according to a reliable-source friend of mine, even back in those days the wife had designs on the White House furnishings; she had already acquired the nasty habit of pilfering from the WH drapery fund.

 

Nonetheless, when I created the following metaphoric musing more than a year before the clintons -- uh -- "moved," I never imagined that she would -- that they would -- in real life -- in real time -- actually swipe the sofa.

 

 

Smaller objects neatly tuck-able in nuncupative deals & unnumbered Swiss accounts, without question...

 

BUT THE SOFA??

 

"I think the rock is still there, but I'm not sure," Helen quipped. Her punch line to clinton's response to her question about a -- (only in Helen's mind) 'fantasy' -- clinton kleptocracy, was in fact 4th-estate CYA-ing disguised as a joke. Unbeknownst to the always clueless Helen, the one-liner she was delivering was indeed a joke; it was the butt of the joke that was her misreport...

She said the press corps followed a "golden rule that if it didn't affect the running of the country, they didn't need to report on it. We weren't protecting anybody."   As President Bill Clinton reached his last days in office, Thomas asked him what White House possession he would like to take with him.   His reply: the rock Neal Armstrong brought back from the moon. Whenever tension filled the Oval Office, Clinton said, he would point to the rock and tell those present to "chill out." The rock was 3.6 billion years old, he said; they needed perspective.   "I think the rock is still there, but I'm not sure," Thomas said.    Helen Thomas: Bush a Work in Progress

In the end,

if clinton's arrogant, ruthless, reckless nature is restored to him,

it seems the joke will be on all of us,

for it will be a victory for infinite victimhood and irresponsibility,

for seduction, for violence, for nihilism, for anarchy.

 

We will have set apart clinton as the hero

by making his victims less human than he;

we will have allowed clinton to carefully estrange us from his victims

so that we can enjoy the rapes and the beatings

as much as clinton himself does.

Mia T, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

 

 

 

more

[jojonomo55]

Not a big fan of anything Republicans, conservatives or Christians do, are you?

I would have supported doing this a year ago as soon as the Bush people were in office. If there were crimes commited, he should have done everything he could to make sure that the people responsible were held accountable. But Bush decided not to make a big deal about it, he dropped it. Now it just looks like he is doing it (if it's true) for all the wrong reasons, to cover his own butt.

It's the timing and the current environment that makes it smell real bad.

[Stultis]

BTW, I believe that every time the Dems bitch about Cheney not turning over the records the Pubbies need to make it about the energy policy, and why the Dems are obsessing over the minutia of the policy's creation rather than engaging, rejecting or enacting the policy itself. The demand for the records must be aggressively exposed as an attempt to avoid dealing with the strategically essential question of energy policy, just as the Dems have done for the last nine years.

[palo verde]

Hi Prentice
lol I've moved on
my goal now is to stop the war on drugs
I did the right thing when I moved heaven and earth to get Bush into Office
we had to get that tyrant out of power
And the Pubbies demonstrated courage and trustworthiness during Impeachment
they deserved to hold power
But my heart is libertarian
I resonate to the idealism in BillofRights' posts
I want to expand liberties for our citizens
I appreciate meeting like-minded posters here on FR

[Irish Eyes]

Great title for the picture.

[palo verde]

hi nully
I wouldn't have even come on this thread if you hadn't pinged me
as I posted to Prentice I have moved on
Bush is an honest and decent man
I walked on broken glass to vote for him (and straight GOP ticket)
the Dems demonstrated corruption during Impeachment and deserve no position of public trust
But the threads which interest me now are 'bout stopping the war on drugs
I never even heard of the Libertarians until I tuned on access TV in Tucson 5 years ago
and heard them advocate stopping the war on drugs
It seemed so spectacularly sensible to me
(it was what I always wanted but never knew anyone dared say it)
Love, Palo

[IVote2]

"100 Aides Interviewed
The White House has granted every information and interview request — including 100 Bush aides, all the way up to chief of staff Andrew Card.
Card was interviewed for an "ample amount of time" in November, Ungar said.
Walker said he hopes to wrap up the 13-month investigation by spring."

This is unreported news. This has been an ongoing investigation, not something newly sprung out of a hat.

It's clear to me that the GAO is a corrupt arm of the Clintonoids as is just about every other part of the government.

[pankot]

The greatest pornography was Hill and Bill in the White House.

[IVote2]

I think other then the wholesale slaughter of innocent men and women and little innocent children burned to a crisp at Waco, taking little Elian at gunpoint is something I will never forget or forgive.

I almost lost my faith in God that horrific day, one day before Easter!

There was and is no excuse for what happened there.

I'm with you.

Jen

[Republic]

That is good to know....for sure we do not stand alone. It was devastating, I well understand your reaction that day. Horrific is not strong enough a word to describe that photo that reno and the clintons and greg craig and meissner and campbell must have hated with all their might. The photo that showed the WORLD the horror they had wrought.

[IRBlondie]

Me, too.

[MeekOneGOP]

Hee-hee!

[lucysmom]

If crimes were committed than it should have been pursued and pursued at the time. What I am questioning is why drop the matter a year ago only to bring it up again now?

[lucysmom]

If crimes were committed than it should have been pursued and pursued at the time. What I am questioning is why drop the matter a year ago only to bring it up again now?

[LouD]

Gish....that is so pathetic. Sad, too. We need the GAO to be cleaned up (or out) if this is true. We need a good overseer and it sounds as if Walker is a lapdog for an very sick group of leftists.

Actually, they need to be more of an accounting organization, and less a policy analysis organization. The shift to policy analysis is a relatively recent trend over the last 12 years or so. The problem with GAO doing something as frequently subjective as policy analysis is that the process inevitably becomes politicized. While I was there, the perspective was clearly liberal, which meant that underlying assumptions were as well.

Some examples:

-Global warming: One of the most read books by my colleagues while I was there was Algore's Earth in the Balance which many cited as though it contained incontrovertible scientific facts. Their assumptions regarding industry, energy, transportation, etc all reflected this environmental whacko point of view.

-Foreign trade and foreign direct investment: Their favorite author on international trade was Pat Choate, a far-left whacko economist. The people I worked with uniformly believed that the Japanese were buying out our country from under us, and would cite examples like the sale of marquis commercial properties as evidence of an impending economic U.S. collapse. After a decade of Japanes economic contraction, in part precipitated by their leveraged investments in overpriced U.S. real estate that they had to subsequently sell at a loss back to U.S. investors, we can see how moronic their views were. However, those beliefs colored a great deal of what passed for analysis coming out of GAO.

-In reviewing budgets of government agencies, I would inevitably come across blatant pork. I remember finding some particularly egregious pork-mongering by West Virginia's very own KKK porkmeister Robert Byrd. Language in my report which criticized those expenditures was repeatedly deleted, and I was told in no uncertain terms that it would not go forward with anything critical of Byrd's largesse included.

There were lots of other examples as well. GAO as a policy organization is not capable of serious analysis. They ought to stick to what they were supposed to be: A CPA/auditing arm of the federal government.

[Mudboy Slim]

This is all fine and dandy, but the more significant crimes committed by the previous administration relate to Abuse of Power, Campaign Finance Abuse, Dereliction of Duty, and, yes, TREASON...the DoJ needs to get humpin' on these crimes, including an IMMEDIATE INDICTMENT of DNC Chairman Terry "The PUNK" McAuliffe!!

Slyfox...would you be so kind as to post yer definitive list of Clinton Crimes, please?!

FReegards...MUD