Hillary's New Year Vow: Fight "Cover-Ups" (Except for the Peter Paul Affair)
Hillary Clinton Accountability Project
There probably has never been a New Year's vow broken faster by a politician than this latest vow made by Hillary Clinton to her donors. Marc Humbert wrote in "Hillary Clinton starts talking tough.." (below)
In a post-New Year's Day thank-you note to donors, Clinton assured them she would fight for "an end to cronyism, incompetence and cover-ups."
Clinton's assurance, first cousin to one of her infamous vows, seems to be designed to once again deceive and defraud her donors. Much like when Hillary vowed through the Washington Post a few months before her Senate election that she "would take no money from Peter Paul, and will return any she did receive."
Only seven days after the Post published that vow from Hillary's official spokesman Howard Wolfson, her finance director faxed a new request to Peter Paul for an additional $100,000 contribution to be made in negotiable securities rather than cash- so it could be hidden from opponent Lazio and the voters.
Hillary can now show her new commitment to "fighting cronyism and coverups" by coming clean on her campaign treasurer's admitted role in violating the Federal Election Law by filing false FEC reports hiding more than $721,000 contributed by Peter Paul. After five years of denying his responsibility for filing three false FEC reports that hid more than $1.2 million from Paul, lying about it to the FBI investigators that caused his subordinate David Rosen to be indicted and tried in May, 2005 for "causing" the false reports to be prepared and signed by Grossman, and then perjuring himself in the criminal trial of Rosen, he has admitted his culpability in an FEC settlement agreeement on December 13, 2005!
Hillary has been aware of this cover up since August, 2001, when she began directing it. She admitted at the time that the largest fund raising event of her campaign cost more than $1 million to produce.Yet eight weeks later, in her last FEC report before her election, she reported the event cost only $366,000, and that it was a contribution from a public company (that had told her finance director it was not contributing anything)
Hillary stood by as a third false FEC report was filed with her knowledge on July, 30, 2001,while she was working with her lawyer David Kendall in preparing a 300 page demurrer on a civil fraud suit she received from Peter Paul on July 3, 2001. She filed the 300 page pleading only five days after the last false report was filed. The civil fraud suit, accompanied by a demand letter, an FEC complaint, with all checks and invoices attached, two press conferences, and a syndicated story on the subject provided clear and convincing evidence that the amount spent on her behalf by Peter Paul was more than $1;6 million, not the $366,000 she intentionally misattributed to Paul's company. She covered it up and protected her treasurer crony until this very day!
So, bravo for Hillary's New Year's "resolution" to fight her own actions and proclivities. We can now expect that she will forthwith proceed to the Senate ethics committee and come clean about all the illegal and unethical things she did, with her cronies, in order to win her Senate election. Since the "cronies" that she will expose in this affair include two DNC Chairman and her then President husband, her fight will yield tremendous results in winning the war against the detestable culture of corruption that she castigates regularly.
The video clip above, showing a cover up in real time, should be delivered to the Senate Ethics Chairman with an apology from Hillary to all her fellow Senators, explaining how and why she covered up her relationship with her largest campaign contributor, how she stonewalled the media and the FBI investigators and refused to act in accordance with the legal and purported ethical requirements of conduct required of a U.S.Senator.
After she apologizes to her colleagues and the voters, then she should get out her checkbook and finally refund the money her campaign has now finally admitted she illegally hid. It illegally excessive and demanding of a refund. Not just because the law requires it, but because she vowed to the public that, ".. we will not be accepting any contributions from him," Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson vowed.
and she would refund any contributions received from that man, Peter Paul.
Hillary Clinton starts talking tough, turning up heat and anti-Bush rhetoric
17:35:38 EST Jan 19, 2006
MARC HUMBERT
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton has come out swinging.
Until recently, the New York senator has been under fire from the liberal wing of the Democratic party for refusing to join the call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and for her finely modulated criticism of President George W. Bush. But there is a new tough-talking Clinton these days.
At a Harlem church on Martin Luther King Day, she said that Bush's presidency would "go down in history as one of the worst" and that the Republican-controlled House "has been run like a plantation."
In a post-New Year's Day thank-you note to donors, Clinton assured them she would fight for "an end to cronyism, incompetence and cover-ups."
And during a foreign policy address Wednesday at Princeton University, she accused the Bush administration of "downplaying" the threat posed by Iran and its nuclear program.
The Harlem speech drew a rebuke from the White House, where spokesman Scott McClellan declared her remarks "out of bounds." On her way home from Africa, the president's wife Laura Bush called her predecessor's plantation remark "ridiculous." Even Dee Dee Myers, who was White House press secretary for part of former president Bill Clinton's administration, called the senator's choice of words "unfortunate."
Hillary Clinton's language is not much sharper than what other Democrats are saying as the midterm elections approach. But her words are amplified because of her status as the Democrats' leading contender for the 2008 presidential nomination.
One Democratic strategist suggested she is probably trying to show she is tough enough to move to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
"Presidents of the United States don't allow themselves to be pushed around," said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based consultant.
A potential Republican challenger to her Senate re-election bid this year, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, said there is also another agenda at work, given the powerful influence of liberals in the Democratic presidential nominating process.
"She's trying to appease the far left, keeping an eye on her national ambitions," Spencer said, adding that she is also working hard to portray herself as a moderate for the New York Senate race and for a possible national election. "It's Clintonesque - trying to be all things to all people."
Clinton campaign adviser Ann Lewis said any change in tone "reflects the change in current events," starting with the much-criticized federal response to the hurricane Katrina disaster and including the indictment of Tom DeLay, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and the exposure of the administration's electronic eavesdropping program.
A Clinton fundraising letter from October was tame in comparison to her recent writings. The harshest language: "I can't remember a time when our government has been more out of touch with the concerns of most Americans."
Sheinkopf, who worked on Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign but is not part of the senator's political team, said talking tough is important for Democratic presidential candidates in general, and for Senator Clinton in particular.
"We live in a very dangerous world. The president has to be able to deal with that, and that means being tough when you have to be," he said. But he added: "The problem here is, as a woman, she can't be shrill. If she's shrill, she loses the whole impact of it. So, being firm is what she's doing, and that works for her."
Republicans, though, see her stingers as a return to the politics of her husband and his allies.
"It's more of the scare tactics, negative attacks that we've become accustomed to from the Clinton campaigns over the years," said Ryan Moses, executive director of New York's Republican party.
Spencer said: "She's kind of morphed into Al Gore - ranting and raving." He called on her to apologize on the Senate floor for her "plantation" remark, calling it "race baiting."
Spencer particularly bristled at Clinton and her fellow Democrats' claims that Republicans have brought a "culture of corruption" to Washington.
"She got a track record there that hopefully people won't forget," he said, noting the scandals that plagued the Clintons when they ran the White House.
Polls have Clinton far ahead of any potential Republican competition for re-election. The initial choice of top New York Republicans, prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, abandoned her campaign last month after failing to raise much money or generate real interest.
That left Spencer, little-known statewide, as the leading Republican contender.
© The Canadian Press, 2006