Although I’ve had a
healthy political animus against Hillary Clinton for years, it was only after
reading Roger’s Stone’s Clintons’
War on Women (2015) that my. eyes were opened to the unspeakable extent of
the Clinton crimes and corruption. Indeed the book should be called: The Crimes and Corruption of the Clintons.
I had lately taken to calling Hillary “a monster,” largely due to the baleful,
destructive foreign policy outcomes that she oversaw in Syria, Honduras, Libya,
the Ukraine and the Maldives – and surely elsewhere. The Stone book showed me
that I had only scratched the surface of how deeply debased were the Clintons
and what might be the prospects if she reached the Oval Office.
Regarding Bill, I had a passing acquaintance from the work
of Christopher Hitchens of his history of his sexual assaults on women. From
Stone I also learned that it was Hillary who was Bill’s chief
enforcer; compelling the silence of many of Bill’s victims. Stone insists that it is
Hillary who is the dominant figure in their marriage, and his portrait suggests
that she is one of those larger- than- life figures – a force of nature that
overwhelms those who oppose her. Stone portrays her as intimidating, powerful, ruthless, and as corrupt perhaps, as anyone in
public life.
While I had assumed
that ethics was not the Clintons’ highest priority, I hadn’t realized the extent to which they were in the major leagues, scoring into
the hundreds of millions of dollars for
their various “charitable” and
non-profit organizations such as the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global
Initiative, the Clinton Health Access
Initiative and the Clinton Presidential Library. Stone alleges that some of the
funds from these organizations went to support their extravagant and grandiose
lifestyle. A measure of the Clintons’ brazen hypocrisy was exposed when Hillary
was forced to concede that it was “inartful” to claim that they were broke when they left the White House.
Stone’s credibility?!
Roger Stone is a long-time senior Republican operative
currently working for the Donald Trump campaign. Obviously, he has every reason to dig up as
much the dirt as he can. But since he eschews policy debates, and writes only
of their personal histories, I found him a more reliable source for the reality
behind Bill and Hillary than I could expect from Democratic Party operatives
and from Clinton supporters. Stone makes clear that he understands that it
would do him little good with much of his intended audience to print
accusations that are not credibly supported. He quotes from sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post and he includes the
traditional scholarly apparatus of an index, a ten- page bibliography and hundreds of footnotes.
Potential readers will decide for themselves whether to take
his charges seriously and whether to read his book. For the most part I found
Stone’s narrative persuasive, revelatory – and shocking. I was made aware that much of what I had known
about the Clintons was largely restricted to what appeared in the mainstream
media. I was also largely persuaded that the Clintons’ public relations and
intimidation campaigns were generally successful in that they have managed to keep
a great deal of damning information from acceptable public discourse.
Co –president Hillary of the sharp elbows
Stone alleges, and had little difficulty persuading me of
his finding, that Hillary was a sharp elbowed, foul-mouthed bitch, who
regularly cursed out her aides, not to mention her security detail. Nor was her
husband or colleagues spared her often brutal tongue lashings. A terrible
example may very well be the case of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, (her
former lover, claims Stone) whom she publicly humiliated in a July 1993 White
House meeting. According to FBI agent Copeland, at the well-attended meeting, Hillary
told Foster “that he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little
hick-town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time,”(208)
[1] It
was this public humiliation, opine insiders, that pushed him “over the edge”
to suicide. (see below)
According to Stone, when Hillary thought it appropriate, she
both verbally and physically abused her husband. Stone includes several pages
of examples of Hillary’s “outrageous, nasty, and even violent behavior,” which took
place both before and during Bill’s presidency. Among other examples, Stone cites
an article by David Brock for the American
Spectator entitled “His Cheatin’ Heart: Living With the Clintons: Bill’s
Arkansas bodyguards tell the story the press missed,” According to state
trooper Larry Patterson, once, when Hillary was unhappy with a quote Governor Bill
gave to the [Little Rock] morning paper, she unleashed her “garbage mouth”
calling him a “motherfucker, cocksucker, and everything else. (190-191)
One outburst of
“shrieking profanities” allegedly occurred on the day of Bill Clinton’s inauguration in January 1993
when Hillary made her feelings known when her husband stubbornly refused to
accede to her demand that he transfer to her Vice President Al Gore’s office. (190)]
In another example in March 1993, when Hillary learned that
her husband was partying in D.C. with Barbara Streisand while she and Chelsea
were in Little Rock, attending vigil on her dying father, Hughie, Hillary rushed
back to the White House and beat her husband to the point where Bill sported a
“nasty-looking scratch on his neck.” Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said that
“it was a big scratch, clearly not a shaving cut.” (192-193)
Bill’s and Hillary’s Co –Presidency
While it was public knowledge that Hillary wielded
great influence, I had not been aware of
Stone’s assertion that Hillary was effectively co-president. Stone claims that on
key issues she was very often or most often the decider. If that’s true, then at the very least she
shares responsibility for some of the worst of his politics. Prominent among Bill
Clinton’s presidential betrayals, were:
-- the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
of 1994 for which both Bill and Hillary have lately been forced to apologize in the face of the Black Lives
Matter movement and the Sanders
challenge for advancing the New Jim Crow.
-- The Gramm–Leach/Financial Services Modernization
Act of 1999 overturned New Deal banking and investment restrictions. Critics
have charged that the law opened the way for banks too-big-to-fail. Graham
Leach led to the “creation of giant financial supermarkets that could
own investment banks, commercial banks and insurance firms, something banned
since the Great Depression.” (Wikipedia)
-- the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 which many, not least this writer, have to thank monthly for our ever-rising
cable bills in exchange for mediocre service.
Among the lowlights of the Act are media
consolidation; the loss of scores if not hundreds of independent radio stations,
and the “corporate welfare” which freely
gave away valuable public digital
broadcasting licensees.
-- the Waco 1993 standoff and assault
Stone is particularly exercised by the ruthless role he
claims Hillary played in ordering the U.S. assault on the Branch Davidian
compound in Waco, Texas in April 1993 ending a 50-day standoff with the FBI.
The assault took the lives of 76 women, children (eighteen younger than eight)
and men -- some burned to death. Stone devotes a page to listing the names and ages of the victims at the front of
his book.
Stone’s charges that it was Hillary who was mostly
responsible for needless death
at Waco is
at variance with
official story claims
that Attorney General Janet Reno, representing the FBI, persuaded President
Bill Clinton to ok the attack. His allegation is bolstered by phone-log
evidence pointing to
Hillary’s role,
along with Vince Foster and Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell, who
together
coordinated the crisis. Stone
cites a source that claimed that an impatient Hillary, frustrated with the long
standoff, pressured a reluctant Janet Reno to act. (199-200)
Bill’s assaults on women
Stone goes into some of the details of Bill’s alleged myriad
assaults on women including details alleging three assaults, citing one rape (Juanita
Broaddrick, pp. 49-56) one inappropriate advance (Paula Jones, pp. 58-61)
and one assault/attempted rape (
Kathleen Willey 77–88). Stone alleges that these instances are a
fraction of the sexual assaults committed by Bill that Hillary and her team had
not managed to squelch.
As
Stone
put it on reddit, these accusations are not about consensual sex or merely
adultery or one night stands.
It's about sexual assault and rape. The number of women who
have accused Bill Clinton is staggering, and they are entirely believable. They
have not been paid by anyone to bear false witness against Bill.
Early in Stone’s book
we get a glimpse of where Bill might have picked up his “cavalier attitude
toward sexual conduct” and where both Clintons might have learned lessons
regarding the impunity that comes with high office. It seems that Bill told
Cliff Jackson -- one of his buddies during his Rhodes Scholar days at Oxford --
a story about how President Lyndon Johnson had sex with an anti-war hippie on
the floor of the Oval Office. It seems that they were in flagrante when a
secretary walked in on them. The lesson
Bill took away from the incident was: “How slick, how neat that Lyndon could
get away with this.” (p. 341)
Stone cites reports that
Bill was a notorious assaulter of women going back to his twenties. As a Rhodes
Scholar, Bill was one of the few who left Oxford without a degree when he was
expelled at age 23 in 1969 “for sexually assaulting a 19-year- old coed named
Eileen Wellstone … at a pub.” (40-41)
Stone alleges that it was due in large part to Clintonian political
influence that Epstein received a mere slap
on the wrist prison sentence of thirteen months during the course of which
he spent most of his time out of jail,
only retiring there in the evenings since the judge allowed him a sixteen-hour-a
day pass.
Hillary’s emails
Stone cites widely
quoted remarks by an exercised Mitt Romney, in April 2015, where he points to
some of the alleged corruption which could be the motivation behind Hillary’s
decision not to allow her emails to flow through government servers. Romney
said:
I mean, it looks like bribery. I mean, there is every
appearance that Hillary Clinton was bribed to grease the sale of [perhaps] 20%
of America’s uranium production to Russia, and then it was covered up by lying
about a meeting at her home with the principals, and by erasing emails. And you
know, I presume we might know for sure whether there was or was not bribery, if
she hadn’t wiped out thousands of emails. (352)
Stone claims that
Hillary never followed through on the promise she made to the Obama
administration to “disclose the names and seek approval on donations” to the
Clinton Foundation as a means of inhibiting conflicts of interest. (339-340).
In the most recent
flap over ongoing Justice Department inquiries regarding Hillary’s emails, the
mind boggles – even after reading Stone – at the Clintonian sense of impunity.
What could Bill have been thinking, one wonders, when he found or created an
opportunity to engage in a 30-minute “largely social” conversation with
Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her plane at the Phoenix airport on July 2, 2016? The New
York Times reported that, when the inevitable outcry exploded, an
all-too-obviously embarrassed Lynch joked that “she should have acted more
swiftly to keep [Clinton] from boarding.”
If, in the course of their conversation, Bill did indeed read
Lynch the riot act, spelling out her career prospects if she did not decide in
Hillary’s favor, then the Clintons may very well have made a cold calculation
that a few days of unpleasant headlines
is
a smallish price to pay for dodging a government indictment and a presidential
campaign in shambles. (See for example: “Former president delayed Phoenix takeoff to
snare '20-25 minute encounter' with Attorney General”)
The Clinton Foundation – A Cash Cow
I had heard of the
Clinton Foundation before I read the Stone book but I hadn’t realized how seemingly easy it has
been for the Clintons to brush aside regulatory restrictions intended to prevent charitable donations from leaking into
personal accounts.
Stone charges that while Clinton was Secretary
of State she oversaw large contracts to corporations like Boeing, G.E.,
Lockheed Martin which in turn made donations to the Clinton Foundation of $5 million,
$1 million, $250, 000 respectively. One example of extraordinary amounts going
to the Clintons was the $600,000 NBC (49% of which was owned by General
Electric) paid to Chelsea Clinton just before an enormous U.S. contract was
awarded to General Electric while Hillary was Secretary of State. (346)
Nor does Stone have many
kind words for Chelsea Clinton whom, he charges, is a “grifter” just like her parents. Stone cites witnesses
describing her as “loud and demanding,” offensive to top staff at the Clinton
Foundation resulting in a good deal of turnover. Nicknamed by them as “the
Princess,” she has been termed “opinionated and aggressive.”(347)
Stone spends several
pages detailing a number of complicated deals beginning when Hillary was a senator in 2009 and later
as Secretary of State which involved transferring control of uranium mining from Kazakhstan to a Canadian
company and finally to Rosatom, a
Russian state-owned company. Stone claims that Russia now controls uranium
mining holdings stretching from Central Asia to the American West; and that the
Russians control one-fifth of the uranium mining in North America.
In addition to the
national security implications of these uranium deals, Stone alleges
corruption, citing payments from these deals going to the Clintons. Stone points to, among much else, a New York Times April 2015 article
headlined: “Cash flowed to Clinton Foundation amid Russian Uranium Deal.” Stone
says that the New York Times
“confirmed” that investors who profited from the deal “’donated’ an astounding
$145 million to the Clinton Foundation.” Bill was paid a $500,000 speaking fee
by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment firm with ties to the Kremlin in
June 2010, the same month that a key contract was signed for Rosatom control of
the uranium holdings. (349-353)
Stone lists about a
page (of “instances in which the actions of the State Department benefitted the
immediate interests of the Clinton Foundation.” 341-342) Stone details the amounts in these cases that
flowed to the Foundation and to the Clintons.
-- a developer donates
$100, 000
-- Chevron donates
between $500,000 and $1 million
-- Swedish telecom
company Ericsson pays Bill $750,000 for a single speech
-- a Chinese firm
Rilin Enterprises pledged $2 million to the foundation’s endowment
The Haiti Earthquake Opportunity
Stone charges that the
Clintons were deeply involved the corruption surrounding recovery efforts
consequent to the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The Clintons were crucial brokers
“involved in every phase of the relief effort including a UN donors conference
at which 150 nations and organizations pledged an “astonishing” $9 billion. Stone
charges that the Clintons controlled the disbursement of this money and tapped it
for their own benefit and for the benefit of “their foundation and friends.”
(345) Stone writes that only 900 homes were built with the “millions and
millions” donated.
Stone notes that in
one Haiti-related case, a Clinton pal from Florida, one Claudio Osorio,
acquired federally backed tens of millions of dollars in 2010 to build hundreds
of homes there but constructed nothing and pocketed the money. He was a
contributor to Hillary’s 2008 campaign and also to the Clinton Global Initiative.
(374)
Along with Osorio,
Stone lists details of Clinton pals and
“crony-funders:” Vinod Gupta, Sant
Chatwal, Amar Sigh, Victor Dahdaleh, and Gilbert Chagoury who were all
variously charged with, and in some cases convicted, variously, of fraud,
illegal campaign financing, obstruction of
justice, illegal campaign donations, and tampering with witnesses..
Among the monies that went to Clinton and/or to the Clinton Foundation or to
the Clinton Global Initiative from these persons was $3 million from Gupta,
millions from Chatwal and Singh, and millions in fundraising for Clinton and/or
the Democratic Party from Chagoury. (374-375)
Clinton and Drugs and Mena and the CIA
While Clinton was president I had heard of CIA drug
smuggling at the airfield at Mena, Arkansas –about 135 miles from Little Rock --
that allegedly took place during the period of Clinton’s governorship -- 1983 – 1992. (Clinton was also governor of
Arkansas from 1979-81.) Not until I read Stone’s book, did I see allegations
that a portion of those drugs were for Bill Clinton’s personal use.
Stone’s evidence for Bill’s drug use comes from several
witnesses, including
-- Betsey Wright, his chief of staff when he was governor,
who said that Clinton had to be sent to drug rehab multiple times;
-- from “party girl” and self-confessed drug courier Sharline
Wilson, who saw him “messed up” one night (131);
--from his long-time lover Gennifer Flowers (who witnessed
him taking marijuana only);
-- from Sam Houston, “a respected Little Rock doctor” who
claimed that Clinton “was admitted to the University of Arkansas Medical Center
for emergency treatment for cocaine abuse and overdose.” (132)
The testimony from Betsey Wright comes second-hand from Larry Nichols, a Clinton former associate,
whistleblower, and Clinton nemesis. Nichols
went to work for Governor Clinton as
marketing director for the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (AFDA) in the
summer of 1988 and was fired a few months later in December 1988 after
confronting Clinton regarding the corruption he saw in the AFDA. (69)
Stone writes that like
the Clinton Foundation years later, the AFDA, an agency intended to provide low
interest loans to schools, churches and small businesses, was a cash-cow for
the Clintons. The AFDA turned out to be a vehicle for “grants” to wealthy
contributors, a portion of which came back to Clinton in campaign
contributions. Nor was Clinton, Stone alleges, averse to “dipping in to get
cash from the agency.” (68)
Clinton, the CIA, and GHW Bush
How did it happen that, as Stone alleges, Mena, Arkansas
became a major site for drug drops and distribution?” Stone alleges that Bill
along with the CIA and Vice President (and former CIA director, and later president)
George H. W. Bush, provided protection for Barry Seal, “one the biggest drug
smugglers ever brought before [a U.S. court].” (146) Stone reports that Clinton himself was a “CIA
asset recruited at the University of Oxford in 1968 as documented by authors
Roger Morris, Cord Meyer and … Christopher Hitchens.” (148)
40 Clinton Murders?
In his introductory
chapter Stone notes “widespread claims” of Clinton responsibility for 80
murders. Stone thinks that that is too large an estimate by half. ( 25) Does
Stone believe that Clinton oversaw 40 murders? Even Lyndon Johnson was accused
of fewer than a dozen murders.
In any event, Stone explicitly
examines circumstantial evidence of only one Clinton-related murder, that of
Jerry Parks, a decade-long associate of Clinton. Stone believes that it was
“Parks’s knowledge and participation in the Dixie Mafia/CIA drug running at
Mena. Stone’s claim is that what “Parks knew threatened the Clinton presidency”
and he was murdered in 1993.
In one other case, investigator
Robert Morrow, Stone’s co-author, charges that in 1992 the Clintons and Buddy
Young sent “three goons to beat up and
nearly murder Gary Johnson” the next door neighbor of Bill’s inamorata,
Gennifer Flowers, whose security camera happened to record some of Bill’s
comings and goings. (170)
The boys on the tracks
On the night of August
22-23, 1987 two teen-age boys – Kevin Ives (17) and Don Henry (16) were killed
under mysterious circumstances. Their prone bodies were run over by a train as
they lay on a stretch of track known to be a hub of “prolific illegal activity”
in Saline County Arkansas, not far from Little Rock, (137) Stone doesn’t
actually accuse Bill Clinton of their murder but presents evidence of his
participation in the cover-up and his close association with one of the key
players, Don Harmon.
At first the boys were
officially deemed to be killed by accident. They were incapacitated, claimed
Arkansas medical examiner Fahmy Malack, from “twenty marijuana joints” and they
fell into “a trance on the railway tracks … side by side.”(139). Later this account was seen to be a cover
for murder. The mother of one of the boys, Linda Ives, relentlessly pursued the
case and her story was told in a book by Mara Leveritt, The Boys on the Tracks.
A key player in these
events was one Don Harmon, a Defense Attorney who was named as special
prosecutor, presumably by Governor Bill Clinton. It turned out that Don Harmon
is likely to have had a deep conflict of interest. One witness, Sharline Wilson,
drug courier for Harmon, puts him at the scene of the crime on the night and
hour that it seems likely the boys were killed. Sharline Wilson claimed that
Harmon and his men were at the railway tracks, watching over a drug drop --
expecting to pick up three to four pounds of cocaine and five pounds of
marijuana. While she waited in the car some distance away she heard two trains,
then she heard screams. “When Harmon came back [she reported], he jumped in the
car and said, ‘Let’s go.” He was scared. It looked like here was blood all down
his legs.” (138)
Clinton protected Arkansas
medical examiner, Fahmy Malack (138)
whose controversial finding of accidental death for some time managed to cover up
alleged murder. Clinton subsequently gave
Malack a $14 thousand raise and when Malack became a political liability he was
moved to a new job at three quarters of his old salary. (140)
According to Stone
many “other witnesses, close to the deaths of Ives and Henry, also met brutal,
mysterious deaths.” (142) Stone details four other potential witnesses who died or disappeared in 1989 and briefly details
their connection to the incident. They are: Greg Collins, Daniel “Boonie”
Bearden, Jeff Rhodes and Richard Winters, a grand jury witness, whose murder, Stone
believes, was “staged to appear as if he were gunned down during a robbery.”
(142-143)
Vince Foster
Stone doesn’t
subscribe to conspiracy theories that the Clintons murdered Vince Forster.
Stone seems to agree that Vince Forster committed suicide in 1993. The
conspiracy theory that Stone does advocate, for which he provides persuasive circumstantial
evidence, is that after Foster committed
suicide in his White House office, his body was secretly and illegally moved to Fort
Marcy Park, a public park in nearby McLean, Virginia.
Stone deduces that the
body was rolled up in a carpet and moved
so as to keep investigators away from
his White House office which otherwise would have become a crime scene. In that case, the Clintons would not have been
able to retain control over Foster’s presumably highly sensitive files. Hillary
later wrote that “sweeping” Foster’s office [of Whitewater documents] was ok
because it wasn’t “a crime scene.” (213)
***
At the end of his
book, Roger Stone wonders why an aging Hillary (born in 1947, she’s nearly 68)
wants to run for president since doing so focuses intense attention on what she has been
attempting to hide throughout her career. My own guess is that she may be on the corruption
treadmill. Absent her candidacy she would lose the leverage she currently enjoys
with those seeking multi-million dollar favors.
A voter’s dilemma
This election has thrown up perhaps the worst two choices of
major party presidential candidates perhaps in U.S. history – although to some
it might seem that every quadrennial election does the same. Stone’s book has made
it that much harder for me to support the Democratic ticket. I voted Green in
NYC in 2012 though I supported President Obama’s candidacy to the extent that I
hoped he would defeat George Romney. I hoped that he might be constrained in
some cases by his party affiliation.
While I applaud Donald Trump’s attack on the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), I panic at the thought of him in the White House. As for Hillary, I’m
now less convinced than I might have been that the former Goldwater girl has
the least interest in working for any segment of the American people beyond
herself and the .01%
This is going to be a tough year and an even tougher future.
[1]
Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in Roger Stone and Robert Morrow,
The Clintons’ War on Women (New York,
Skyhorse Publishing, 2015)
