Posted on 12/13/2004 1:14:49 AM PST by kattracks
POST WORLD EXCLUSIVEWASHINGTON — Billionaire Marc Rich has emerged as a central figure in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and is under investigation for brokering deals in which scores of international politicians and businessmen cashed in on sweetheart oil deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned.
Rich, the fugitive Swiss-based commodities trader who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton in January 2001, is a primary target of criminal probes under way in the U.S. attorney's office in New York and by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, sources said.
"We think he was a major player in this — a central figure," a senior law-enforcement official told The Post.
Investigators are looking into a series of deals that took place in the months after his pardon from Clinton.
[snip]
Investigators now believe Rich and Pollner brokered many of the deals by finding buyers for the oil allocated to people who were bribed by Saddam.
[snip]
So intense is the interest of prosecutors in the Rich connection that Pollner was recently "grabbed" and questioned by investigators from Morgenthau's office as he was on his way to Kennedy Airport for an overseas trip, a law-enforcement official told The Post.
[snip]
Investigators still do not know how recipients of the vouchers led to Rich, but say his relationship with Saddam goes back more than a decade.
A report by the House Government Reform Committee on Rich's clemency deal established that it was well known to the CIA and other U.S. law-enforcement agencies at the time of the pardon that Rich had been dealing with Saddam since the early 1990s — after the Persian Gulf War when Iraq was the subject of an international embargo.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
....Neither one was familiar with shying away from graft....
That is why I say Clinton was never President, he was Governor of America
Ehud Barak, then Prime Minister of Israel, intervened on Rich’s behalf by calling Clinton twice. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Council, pled for the Presidential pardon in a letter written on the stationery of the sacred organization he heads. Calls went out to Clinton from Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem; from Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti Defamation League; and from dozens of other Jewish and Israeli leaders and philanthropists
Please excuse me if I bridle my enthusiasm until someone finally gets prosecuted and put in jail. Real jail, not "Martha Stewart" jail.
check out post 81 and 83, thanks for the link BARLF
oops post 82 and 83
Follow the Money!
It leads to the Clinton's.
Buying friends around the world to get the sanctions removed.
Maddy did whatever clinton told her to do. Neither she or Saddam had the smarts to come up with this moneymaking scheme.
The clinton people were carefully chosen for the clinton agenda. One & All. MOO
Thanks
"Since he committed these crimes AFTER the pardon doesn't that mean he can be charged for them?"
My guess is that he could be indicted for any crimes committed after the pardon providing the statute of limitations has not expired. If Rich is in Switzerland, this could really test any extradition treaty we have with the Swiss.
Is former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak tied into this scandal as well?
I never doubted for one minute that Clinton and the Commucrat Party were involved in 9/11.
You ask, what would they gain? They expected this to hurt Bush and not make him a hero. These people are the enemy.
I knew this Food For Oil thing would turn out to have Clinton somehow involved in it.
I can guarantee you that Slick Willie knew about this and prospered from it. In fact, it is probably a big part of the reason he wants to head the U.N. Bill and Hillary like to say money isn't important to them. However, their actions show that to be a lie. They are constantly skimming money from anywhere they can. So what if people die so the Clinton's can be rich? They both think nobody is as smart or as important as they are. May they someday get what they really deserve.
Krauthammer said it best.
Barbara Olsen in her book,"The Final Day's" PP 202-203 commentator Charles Krauthammer condemned the Clinton pardons precisely because the power he had abused was so unique and absolute.
"The pardon power is special," he wrote. "The American people feel it. Bill Clinton, oblivious as he was to the reverence due every other power of his office, from the Lincoln bedroom to the Oval Office, was supremely oblivious to the sacredness of this one." Because the pardon power is God-like, Krauthammer concluded. "It was not bad judgment. It was sacrilege." 14 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That's plural.
He sold 19, (I think), pardons.
What an excellent question! Applies to Paribas, too. Paging Mr. Spitzer...
Ping
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