Posted on 10/09/2002 7:27:27 PM PDT by Pokey78
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — Denise Rich, Malcolm S. Forbes, Nelson Mandela and other friends and supporters of the Clintons showered the couple with roughly $1 million in previously unreported gifts during the Clinton presidency, according to documents released by Republican Congressional investigators.
The gifts vary from tens of thousands of dollars in jewelry, rugs and furnishings to a $90,000 framed handwritten letter by President Harry S. Truman, a $10,000 Mickey Mantle trading card from 1952 and nine rare books, including a six-volume, first-edition set by Winston Churchill, according to the documents.
The gifts were not disclosed by the Clintons because the couple turned them over to Bill Clinton's presidential library, the investigators said. Under federal law, gifts that the first family do not keep for themselves are exempt from the public disclosure requirement on presidential gifts, the investigators said.
The findings are contained in a 319-page report that provides a detailed account of gifts that the Clintons received in the White House. The report was compiled after a months-long inquiry by Republican investigators on a House Government Reform subcommittee.
Responding to the report, James E. Kennedy, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said: "This story is so old, it's not just dated, it's carbon-dated."
Philippe Reines, speaking for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, also dismissed the report, saying, "Despite a concerted effort to turn a partisan preoccupation into a gift that keeps on giving, there is nothing new here."
The findings, compiled from information contained on the White House gift database, were released this morning during a meeting of the full committee. The report was commissioned by Representative Doug Ose, a California Republican, who is seeking to build support for legislation he has proposed to tighten the rules on gifts to presidents.
He suggested that the people who gave these gifts to the Clintons could have been trying to gain access to the White House and influence the administration's policy decisions.
"I believe that the American people have the right to know what gifts were received and retained by their president," Mr. Ose said.
In February the committee issued a preliminary report in which investigators detailed nearly $400,000 in gifts that the Clintons took with them upon leaving the White House. But the report said that the Clintons underestimated the value of dozens of those gifts.
The February report also said the Clintons did not report dozens of the gifts because their value was set below the threshold for reporting gifts on disclosure statements. The threshold was $250 from 1993 to 1998, and $260 from 1999 on.
The report released today contains a new round of potentially embarrassing information. It documents an array of gifts that the Clintons received and the names of the people who gave those gifts.
There was a $2,000 bronze statue of an angel from Denise Rich; a $9,000 hand-woven Navajo chief's blanket (circa 1885) from Larry Rockefeller; and an oil painted in a gilt frame, a cheese plate, a porcelain teapot, a gold cross and other items totaling $6,000 from Nelson Mandela.
Then there were other gifts that investigators say the Clintons may have used before donating them to the presidential library: nine custom-made tuxedo and dress shirts worth $900 from Walter and Selma Kaye; and four purses worth $8,680 from the handbag designer Judith Leiber.
The report also shows that the former first family received gifts from individuals who were at the center of the Clinton White House campaign finance scandals. To investigators and others, that suggests that the gifts became another avenue for influencing the administration.
There was a $2,100 sculpture of a goddess on a wooden base given by James Riady, an Indonesian businessman who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations last year and agreed to pay $8.6 million in fines for using foreign corporate money to back Mr. Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons also received two sculptures worth $1,550 from Johnny Chung, who was at the center of a 1996 campaign fund-raising investigation.
The report prompted sharp criticism from government-reform advocates, who said the Clintons acted inappropriately if not illegally, by not reporting the gifts.
"It's a serious allegation if it's true," said Gary Ruskin, the director of the Congressional Accountability Project, a watchdog group. "The least you can say is that they are trying to evade gift reporting."
PURSES????? $2170 per PURSE??? I've never paid that much on a morgage payment! My first car was vastly cheaper than one purse . . . . PURSES???????
Sorry,Presidential Palaces are off limits to the inspectors.
We should NEVER forget what they did to our country!!!
But Newt Gingrich using the Democratic copy machine is an issue?
He read "Catcher in the Rye" once.
Wasn't it Counsel to Vice President Cheney who tracked down a priceless Lincoln sculpture, said to have been part of the Gore furnishings? Understood it was "mispacked" and returned. In viewing the photos on rintense's Daily Dose, you can see that the sculpture resides over the left shoulder of the President in the Oval Office.
So how does this statue make its way out of the Oval Office, into Gore's office, and then into his packing boxes?
Paging the Ladies Guild ... what was the story of Hitlery re-gifting one of those expensive purses? And where is that beautiful blue bowl in the Clinton office photos?
Don't get me started !!
Best line of the day!
There is probably so much missing - they are still making the list.
The grifters sold their souls to the devil. I'm wondering when the devil is going to call in his mark and make them fulfill their end of the contract!
They are pigs.
Even that is not enough of an insult. Someone once told me that calling um pigs is a horrid insult to all pigs--and it is. It's just difficult to find a name low enough to describe them.
Don't you wonder how anyone could work for them, support them, vote for them, basically stand being around them? I feel dirty just thinking about what it would be like to be in the same room with them.
No, just sickened when further revelations of the criminality he brought to our Whitehouse show up in the news every other day. It's allmost two years and the scandals keep coming.
"don't you have better things to worry about?"
Yeah, like where Bin Laden will strike next. Shame Clintoon didn't take him when the Sudanese offered him up on a platter.
"He's gone,..."
Would that he were gone. He remains a constant and glaring embarrassment to this country.
"and despite the popular vote,.."
Which despite numerous counts and recounts, not to mention a pile of PROVEN democratic vote fraud, algore never lead or won.
"I can keep ranting about that through the whole damn century..."
Please do! Whining, crybaby, Sore/Loserman liberals who are unable to accept reality {let alone fathom the importance of character} are a constant source of amusement for us.
"I have better things to do than to waste my energy on ancient history... "
The criminal history of the first felon you worship is still being written. Every day some new story detailing the depths of his sexual or criminal depravity seems to break in the headlines. If it weren't for treason supporting, rape ignoring, constitution violating socialists like yourself, he would have long ago been serving time in an orange jumpsuit like he deserves.
BUMP
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