Billy Dale had worked in the White House travel office for three decades. He had served 7 presidents and one horse’s *ss (and we are not counting Jimmy Carter as the horse’s *ss). But Hillary Clinton wanted Dale and his associates gone. She wanted him gone very badly. Harry Thomason was owed a big favor for getting rape victim Elizabeth Ward Gracen out of the country on an acting gig during the 1992 campaign.
What had Dale done to Hillary? The answer is he had done nothing. Dale and six others were simply in the way of her plans.
Most Americans do not know that during the 1992 campaign, the Clintons used an Arkansas travel agency, World Wide Travel. They worked with a Clinton cousin, Catherine Cornelius. WWT provided a million dollars in deferred travel for the Clinton campaign, freeing up much needed cash for campaigning. Employees of the firm donated to the Clinton campaign.
It gets even better. The supposed investigation against Travel Office “accounting improprieties” was headed by…..are you ready…headed by none other than Cornelius herself just as she was planning with World Wide Travel for a reorganization that would put her in charge of the department. She gets a good job and Thomasson gets a hugely profitable business.
The Clintons had every right to simply dismiss Dale and the others and bring in their own people. Hillary, the brains behind the operation, not only had Dale fired, but also tried to send him to prison. Firing was not good enough. In May of 1993 the employees were given one hour’s notice to clean out their desks, and they were escorted away in a windowless van. The replacement was made without competitive bid.
Dale was very popular with the White House press corps. He knew them all and treated them very well. The firing and trumped-up charges against Dale became a public relations nightmare, so Hillary had to distance herself. Keeping in mind that the first instinct of the Clintons is always to lie, that is exactly what she did. She claimed that he had nothing to do with the firing.
The nightmare grew worse for Dale as the FBI was brought in and he was charged with embezzling money from the Travel Office. At one point, the cost of trial would have been so prohibitively expensive that Dale tried to do a plea bargain to just make it go away. Fortunately, the government did not accept a plea bargain. When it came to trial, Dale was acquitted by the jury in under 2 hours. What they did to him was in incredible injustice. Not surprisingly, as has happened to most of the Clinton enemies, the IRS also came after him.