What Fred Thompson Knows About Hillary Clinton

Barring the calamitous, former United States Senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, will be the next president of the United States.

Thompson’s masterful use of the online interview—a vastly smarter and cheaper way of campaigning for those with something to say—has all but secured him the Republican nomination.

In the general election, in a fair fight, either Obama or Hillary—or Gore for that matter--will have a hard time winning any five states against Thompson.

But for Hillary at least, it is too late in the game to fight fair. Desperation will push her and her soulless minions to fight otherwise. No fool, Thompson knows what he is up against.

In 1997, then Senator Thompson chaired a committee that investigated what he rightly called “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history.” Hillary’s fingerprints were all over that campaign.

Beginning early in 1995, the Clintons launched an unprecedented series of expensive, untruthful, arguably illegal TV ads. For cover, they laundered the campaign through the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

According to Clinton advisor Dick Morris, Hillary signed off on everything. The media, true to form, chose not to notice the ads or their financing. Here, the Thompson Committee report proves instructive:

The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well. Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.

Johnny Chung, who admitted funneling $100,000 from the Chinese Military to the DNC, would tell the Thompson Committee, “The White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates.”

No one understood this investment opportunity better than James and Moctar Riady, an ethnic Chinese father and son team who ran the powerful Indonesian firm, the Lippo Group.

The Riadys had sensed Clinton’s sleaze potential back in Arkansas and bailed out his 1992 primary campaign at it shakiest moment. As a quid pro quo, the Riadys sought a job for their “man in America,” John Huang.

Aware of his many talents, the DNC put Huang on its “must consider” list. And what were Huang’s talents? A letter sent by an Asian outreach advocate on the stationery of David Roberti, the president pro tem of the California state Senate, was frank to a fault.

“John is the Riady family’s top priority for placement because he is like one of their own.” The Riady family, in case anyone needed reminding, “invested heavily in the Clinton campaign.”

Huang ended up in Ron Brown’s Commerce Department as a deputy assistant secretary. Curiously, he got the job on the same day that embattled Clinton aide, Webster Hubbell, got a $100,000 check from a Riady company, and Hubbell “rolled over” once more.

Brown confidante Nolanda Hill would tell ABC’s Prime Time Live that, according to Brown, “the White House put [Huang] there,” and in this instance, added Hill, “The White House meant Hillary Clinton.”

Whoever was responsible, Huang went to Commerce not to advance America’s interests but those of the Riadys and, by extension, those of China.

“Over the past five years,” reads the Thompson report, “the Lippo Group has shifted its strategic center from Indonesia to the People’s Republic of China.” Those five years, by the way, backdated to 1992, the year of Clinton’s election.

On one particularly revealing occasion, Huang left a CIA briefing at the Commerce Department and walked across the street where, according to the Thompson Committee, he had “a secret office.”

This office was located within the larger offices of Stephens Inc., the Little Rock-based investment-banking firm with which the Riadys and the Clintons had a long relationship. There, in private, Huang proceeded to place a three-hour call to his former employer, the Lippo Group.

Lippo had a lot at stake. The CIA briefing concerned the development by an international consortium of a massive coal-fired power plant in Indonesia called the Paiton plant.

The Lippo Group just happened to control one of the only two commercially viable low-sulfur coal mines in the world, this one conveniently located near the Paiton plant.

At the Clintons’ urging, Ron Brown helped put the Paiton deal together, and the various players thanked him profusely for his help. Among the players, as usual during these years, was the Enron Corporation.

What happens next on the American end of this saga raises a host of troubling questions. The CNN.com report on the day it happened, September 18, 1996, well captures the general tenor of the reporting.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that using the Grand Canyon as “his picture perfect backdrop,” Clinton “unilaterally” declared a new 1.7 million-acre national monument seventy miles away in southern Utah.

“We’re saying, very simply, our parents and grandparents saved the Grand Canyon for us,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. “Today, we will save the Grand Escalante Canyons and the Kaiparowitz Plateaus of Utah for our children.”

To his credit, Blitzer did not shy from the implicit controversy. He reported the people of Utah were “furious.” They claimed it was “a land grab” by the federal government “at the economic expense of the state.”

The rationale for the move puzzled Blitzer as Clinton already had the environmental vote, and there were many safer gestures he could have made with less than two months left in the campaign.

Blitzer raised the issue of coal, perhaps $1 trillion worth of clean, low-sulfur coal that would never be mined. Just the year before Utah had approved an environmental-friendly mining contract on the Kaiparowitz Plateau with Dutch-owned Andalex Resources.

Said Clinton of this grand environmental gesture, “We can’t have mines everywhere, and we shouldn’t have mines that threaten our national treasures.”

No, not everywhere, just in Indonesia. In a stroke of the pen, Clinton had handed the Riadys a monopoly on the world’s supply of low-sulfur coal.

One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots between Utah and Indonesia. The FBI had made the connection as well. Consider the following field notes from an FBI interview with Huang:

Huang laughed in response to questions concerning j. riady’s interest in Utah coal restrictions. j. riady’s coal interests were minimal. Indonesia had significant infrastructure problems which prohibited the development of its coal resources.

Huang was lying. The Riadys had a powerful interest, and they would exploit it for all it was worth. In fact, at the Paiton plant, the price of the coal exceeded the price of the electricity produced.

In 1999, PLN, the state Indonesian power company, sued the Clinton administration. Its attorneys charged that U.S. officials knew the Paiton power plant contract to be awash in “corruption, collusion, and nepotism” from the beginning.

By this time, though, James Riady had fled the country, and Huang had pled the fifth.

Worse, Huang’s immediate boss, Charles Meissner, and Meissner’s boss, Ron Brown, had died in the “inexplicable” crash of an Air Force CT-43A on a Croatian hillside.

======================================== What Fred Thompson Knows About Hillary Clinton - Part 2 of 2

Last week I documented some of the consequences of what Senator Fred Thompson called “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history,” namely the Clinton re-election campaign of 1996.

In 1997, Thompson chaired the Senate committee that investigated the campaign. Here is how that campaign began.

Following the Democratic electoral debacle in November 1994, President Clinton’s approval rating dipped to an unnervingly low 45 percent. The rating of his most likely Republican opponent, Senate majority leader Bob Dole, was cresting at 62 percent. Bill Clinton was staring down the barrel of a one-term presidency.

“I can tell you,” DNC finance chair Terry McAuliffe would later testify, “the political mood at the time clearly was that he had no chance of winning again.”

The Clintons had few options but to fight on. In early December 1994, in the White House treaty room, Bill and Hillary Clinton held a secret meeting with the one man who could possibly turn the tide of battle, political consultant Dick Morris.

More than a decade earlier, Morris had helped Clinton regain the governor’s office after an embarrassing post-first term defeat. In 1990, however, Morris and the Clintons split over an incident that reveals both Bill Clinton’s capacity for violence and Hillary’s for covering it up.

To date, Hillary Clinton has shown no inclination to share unpleasant truths. Living History, her autobiography, is almost as free of conflict as her book on Socks the Cat. She casually attributes Morris’s refusal to work on the disastrous 1994 congressional campaign to his problems with their staff.

In an open letter to Hillary Clinton in National Review Online, Morris offered a more vivid accounting of the events of 1990 that caused their split.

Worried he was falling behind his opponent in a primary campaign, Clinton “verbally assaulted” Morris for not giving the campaign more time. When the offended Morris turned and stalked out of the room, Clinton followed.

“Bill ran after me,” Morris writes, “tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You [Hillary] grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me.”

Morris also volunteers that when the story threatened to surface again during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary told him to “say it never happened.”

Desperate times, however, called for desperate measures, and so Morris was summoned once again, this time by Hillary herself. At their first get-together, Morris insisted on weekly meetings thereafter, and the president agreed. For the first month, Hillary attended the meetings and then strategically withdrew.

As Morris relates, Clinton would share Morris’s advice and the polling data with Hillary, and “she read every word.” When he encountered Hillary, Morris adds, “She showed familiarity with every bit of it.”

The rules of the game, which had been only loosely followed to this point, were about to be scrapped altogether. In a more disciplined fashion than they had done anything else since coming to town, the Clintons set about getting re-elected.

From the beginning, Morris insisted on one strategy above all others: filling the airwaves with TV ads early and relentlessly. “Week after week, month after month,” says Morris, “from early July 1995 more or less continually until election day in ‘96, sixteen months later, we bombarded the public with ads.”

In the 1992 campaign, the unknown Clinton spent roughly $40 million on advertising. In the 1996 campaign, the incumbent Clinton would spend $85 million. Morris also insisted on a “virtually unlimited budget” for polling, and he got that too.

With the DNC broke and demoralized after the 1994 rout, raising this much money was not easy. “For the Democrats,” McAuliffe noted, “it was not a very optimistic time.” The lack of enthusiasm for Clinton even within his own party put the onus for raising money on the White House itself.

“You don’t know, you don’t have any remote idea,” Clinton would tell Morris, “how hard I have to work, how hard Hillary has to work, how hard Al [Gore] has to work to raise this much money.”

The bulk of the money went to TV. An adept strategist, Morris understood the sympathies of the media and devised a strategy to accommodate their willful innocence. It was painfully simple, and it worked.

To achieve “relative secrecy” he chose not to advertise at all in New York City or Washington DC and only occasionally in Los Angeles. “If these cities remained dark,” recalls Morris, “the national press would not make an issue out of our ads—of this we felt sure.”

“No one in the media really caught on,” confirms Robert Woodward in his book on the election, The Choice. The reason they did not catch on, as Morris well knew, is because they did not want to.

The story the media chose not to watch unfold was an extraordinary one. The Thompson Committee does a concise job of summarizing what that story was:

The president and his top advisors decided to raise money early for his re-election campaign. To accomplish their goal, the president and his top advisors took control of the DNC and designed a plan to engage in a historically aggressive fund-raising effort, utilizing the DNC as a vehicle for getting around federal election laws. The DNC ran television advertisements, created under the direct supervision of the president, which were specifically designed to promote the president’s re-election.

In the afterword to the paperback edition of The Choice, Woodward had the grace to admit he “vastly underestimated the significance of money” in the campaign. He notes too that the Clinton ads themselves “were deceptive enough to be appalling.”

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, primary author of Back from the Dead, also admits that “one of the great underreported stories” of the campaign was how the Democrats, not the Republicans, engaged in “the really effective negative campaigning.”

Neither Thomas nor Woodward explains why, during the campaign itself, no one in the major media chose to tell the true story. An unprecedented series of untruthful, arguably illegal ads, which reached about 125 million Americans three times a week, should have been obvious to the media and scandalous from the outset.

The scandal would have exploded if the media had asked where the money was coming from to pay for the ads—Red China, for instance--and how it was being raised. They chose not to. They collectively shuddered at the thought of giving hated House speaker Newt Gingrich a Republican president.

Expect even less from the media in 2008—and even more of the same from Hillary.

If Thompson or any Republican beat Hillary in the General Election ... "The Stolen Election of 2000" would be but a small ripple compared to Billary's response to her defeat.

If Hillary loses the Dem Convention to Obama or Edwards there would be H-E-Double Hockey Sticks for that Dem to pay. Billary would upset the Convention and degrade the candidate all the way to and during the General Election.

Hell hath no fury like a Clinton scorned! (sorry Ladies)

There’s nothing stopping him from revealing it to anyone.

...he let the Clintons skip.

I agree that he should have done more to stop the Clintons at those hearings. And I hope he supplies the winner of the GOP primaries with the ammo to take them on after the convention.

This article just flicked on the little light bulb in my head why the media was preprogrammed to chant the same tired phrases about Fred. "no fire in the belly"; "too little, too late" - these lines were parroted in all the reporting. The hearing connection just explains the coordinated effort to me. It was important to "swiftboat" Fred when he was only battling for the primary. In the general election, he has big guns. I only hope he (and others that have inside information) arm the GOP side with the weapons to take on the Clintons over the issues that really matter. It is the corruption, stupid. (Campaign phrase, not direct personal attack)

The Clinton’s are the reason I will support the Republican nominee regardless of who that nominee will be. No one can be as bad as a Clinton in the White House. I do pray it won’t be Paul or Huckabee or even McCain. I’m sure not a happy voter this time for sure.

What’s to stop him from revealing the secrets at the right time?

Nothing I hope.

It is great fun to watch the Dems fight it out for the primaries, but I hope the real fireworks will explode after the nominations are in. I think there was danger in revealing the dark side of Bill Clinton too early and leaving Hillary viable to run as the wronged wife. They have presented themselves as two for one again and therefore can be taken out together. I hope it is all revealed once and for all.

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