Category 5 BS alert!!
Posted on 10/09/2005 11:40:21 AM PDT by beyond the sea
Ex-president Bill Clinton has dispatched convicted national security document thief Sandy Berger to rebut bombshell charges from former FBI Director Louis Freeh set to air on CBS's "60 Minutes" tonight.
The Washington Post reports that producers came under "strong pressure from former president Bill Clinton's advisers" to allow Berger to respond to Freeh's claim that Clinton shook down Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his presidential library after promising to go soft on the Khobar Towers bombing probe.
In a statement to be read on-air after Freeh details his allegations, Berger claims he was at the meeting and then insists: "The president strongly raised the need for Saudi officials to cooperate with us on the investigation into the attack on Khobar Towers at the time when the FBI was attempting to gain access to the suspects. The president did not raise in any fashion the issue of his library."
In April, Berger pled guilty to stealing and destroying top secret national security documents from the National Archives while helping Mr. Clinton prepare for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
He also admitted that he lied last year when he first called the crime "an honest mistake."
He was sentenced on Sept. 8 to two years probation and fined $50,000.
Just two days later, however - Berger was in legal hot water again, after Virginia highway cops clocked him doing 88-miles-per-hour in a 55-mile zone.
He was charged with reckless driving: a Class 1 misdemeanor in Virginia that carries a penalty of up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.
Appearing in court this past Wednesday, Berger was warned by U.S. District Magistrate Deborah Robinson that his sentence in the theft case could also be expanded because he had violated the terms of his probation.
Perhaps realizing that Berger's checkered past impaired his credibility as a character witness for Mr. Clinton, Clinton spokesman Jay Carson told CBS that he has accounts from five other former officials who received briefings on the Clinton-Abdullah meeting and who back Mr. Clinton's denial.
Don't know how I ended up posting this twice - Sorry.
Sandy Berglar as a character reference. ROTF. How apropos.
Category 5 BS alert!!
Can't to wait to see who these five are. I'm sure the briefings included how Clinton hit him up for money.
Isn't that rich, a convicted thief and destroyer of gov't property defending a convicted liar. Bwahahahahahaha! Now Burgler needs someone to vouch for him.
Am counting the hours 'til 60 Minutes today!!
g
Funny, I don't remember CBS allowing someone from the Bush Administration to be on the program to rebut charges made by the endless stream of Bush bashers (Richard Clarke, John Dean, etc.) they have had on.
This MUST be the work of the "vast Right Wing Conspiracy" -
Treacherous Thief Sandy Berger vouches for Putrid Perjurer William Clinton: Comedy of Errants!
The MEDIA continues to stage the Clinton farces.
And that is the way it was!
Hear no evil
Speak no evil
See no evil
Me, I'm the evildoer's handyman!
Is Carson serious? Five guys, loyal to Clinton who received a briefing?!?!? That's what passes for a rebuttal in today's MSM?
I did not take any top secret documents out in my pants & socks, either. /sarcasm
Daniel Benjamin, a former Clinton counterterrorism official & former JOURNALIST at Time Magazine & the Wall Street Journal, said Freeh is "factually wrong" and that the former president "pushed the crown prince quite hard," and eventually won Saudi cooperation that led to indictments in the case. "Freeh has been clearly discredited by the 9/11 commission and the congressional joint inquiry," Benjamin said.
THAT'S A LIE!!!
The Clinton camp says "60 Minutes" would not accept any surrogate to rebut Freeh on camera once the former president declined to be interviewed.
ANOTHER LIE!!!
"Bubba told us that all he did was press the Saudis to cooperate with the FBI. He didn't say anything about extorting them for a bribe to keep the FBI off their backs." Duh!!! Sounds a lot like, "Bubba told us he didn't have sex sex with that woman Lewinsky and we all believe him."
After all, why did Sandy Burglar jeopardize his reputation, freedom, and future career choices to steal those documents from the Archives?? Isn't it just possible that Bubba and the Witch have something a lot worse on him and they're blackmailing him to say and do anything they tell him to?
I would also venture to say that, if polled, most people wouldn't have a clue who Berger is, let alone what he's be found guilty of doing.
Now that's funny ... LOL!
What will of course be interesting here is to watch the timeline and whether or not the case can be made for direct linkage. Not trying to defend what went on here but there is a difference between a) a shakedown for contributions at exactly the same meeting where the Saudis received a 'go soft promise' and b) a request for contributions at some later date when it is less clear that one could make the case that it was a quid pro quo. Hopefully Freeh will says enough to address this tonight.
By Byron York, NR White House Correspondent
From the December 17, 2001, issue of National Review
In June 25, 1996, a powerful truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, tearing the front from the building, blasting a crater 35 feet deep, and killing 19 American soldiers. Hundreds more were injured. When news reached Washington, President Bill Clinton vowed to bring the killers to justice. "The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished," he said angrily. "Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished." The next day, leaving the White House to attend an economic summit in France, Clinton had more tough words for the attackers. "Let me be very clear: We will not resist" — the president corrected himself — "we will not rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to pursue them and to punish them."
As Clinton spoke, his top political strategist, Dick Morris, was hard at work conducting polls to gauge the public's reaction to the bombing. "Whenever there was a crisis, I ordered an immediate poll," Morris recalls. "I was concerned about how Clinton looked in the face of [the attack] and whether people blamed him." The bombing happened in the midst of the president's re-election campaign, and even though Clinton enjoyed a substantial lead over Republican Bob Dole, Morris worried that public dissatisfaction with Clinton on the terrorism issue might benefit Dole.
snip
snip From the start, Clinton approached the investigation as a law-enforcement issue. In doing so, he effectively cut out some of the government's most important intelligence agencies. For example, the evidence gathered by FBI agents and prosecutors came under the protection of laws mandating grand-jury secrecy — which meant that the law-enforcement side of the investigation could not tell the intelligence side of the investigation what was going on. "Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI had access," says James Woolsey, who was CIA director at the time. "It was all under grand-jury secrecy."
Another problem with Clinton's decision to assign the investigation exclusively to law enforcement was that law enforcement in the new administration was in turmoil. When the bomb went off, Clinton did not have a confirmed attorney general; Janet Reno, who was nominated after the Zoë Baird fiasco, was awaiting Senate approval. The Justice Department, meanwhile, was headed by a Bush holdover who had no real power in the new administration. The bombing barely came up at Reno's Senate hearings, and when she was finally sworn in on March 12, neither she (RENO) nor Clinton mentioned the case. (Instead, Clinton praised Reno for "sharing with us the life-shaping stories of your family and career that formed your deep sense of fairness and your unwavering drive to help others to do better.") In addition, at the time the bombing investigation began, the FBI was headed by William Sessions, who would soon leave after a messy forcing-out by Clinton. A new director, Louis Freeh, was not confirmed by the Senate until August 6.
Amid all the turmoil at the top, the investigation missed some tantalizing clues pointing toward a far-reaching conspiracy. In April 1995, for example, terrorism expert Steven Emerson told the House International Relations Committee that there was information that "strongly suggests . . . a Sudanese role in the World Trade Center bombing. There are also leads pointing to the involvement of Osama bin Laden, the ex-Afghan Saudi mujahideen supporter now taking refuge in Sudan." Two years later, Emerson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the same thing. In recent years, according to an exhaustive New York Times report, "American intelligence officials have come to believe that [ringleader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman] and the World Trade Center bombers had ties to al-Qaeda."
But the Clinton administration stuck with its theory that the bombing was the work of a loose network of terrorists working apart from any government sponsorship. Intelligence officials who might have thought otherwise were left out in the cold — "I made repeated attempts to see Clinton privately to take up a whole range of issues and was unsuccessful," Woolsey recalls — and some of the nation's most critical intelligence capabilities went unused. In the end, the U.S. tried six suspects in the attack. All were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Another key suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was released after being held by the FBI in New Jersey and fled to Baghdad, where he is living under the protection of the Iraqi government. Today, with many leads gone cold, intelligence officials concede they will probably never know who was behind the attack.
snip
From the beginning, the administration ran into significant Saudi resistance (the Saudis quickly identified a few low-level suspects and beheaded them, hoping to end the matter there). According to a long account of the case by Elsa Walsh published earlier this year in The New Yorker, FBI director Louis Freeh on several occasions urged the White House to pressure the Saudis for more cooperation. More than once, Walsh reports, Freeh was frustrated to learn that the president barely mentioned the case in meetings with Saudi leaders.
Freeh — whose own relations with the White House had deteriorated badly in the wake of the Filegate and campaign-finance scandals — became convinced that the White House didn't really want to push the Saudis for more information, which Freeh believed would confirm strong suspicions of extensive Iranian involvement in the attack. Walsh reports that in September 1998, Freeh, angry and losing hope, took the extraordinary step of secretly asking former president George H. W. Bush to intercede with the Saudi royal family. Acting without Clinton's knowledge, Bush made the request, and the Saudis began to provide new information, which indeed pointed to Iran.
In late 1998, Walsh reports, Freeh went to national security adviser Sandy Berger to tell him that it appeared the FBI had enough evidence to indict several suspects. "Who else knows this?" Berger asked Freeh, demanding to know if it had been leaked to the press. Freeh said it was a closely held secret. Then Berger challenged some of the evidence of Iranian involvement. "That's just hearsay," Berger said. "No, Sandy," Freeh responded. "It's testimony of a co-conspirator . . ." According to Walsh's account, Freeh thought that "Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing."
Ultimately, Freeh never got the support he wanted from the White House. Walsh writes that "by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he (Freeh)believed he had developed enough evidence to seek indictments against the masterminds behind the attack, not just the front-line suspects, he decided to wait for a new administration." Just before Freeh left office, Walsh reports, he (Freeh) met with new president George W. Bush and gave him a list of suspects in the bombing. In June, attorney general John Ashcroft announced the indictment of 14 suspects: 13 Saudis and one Lebanese. It is not clear whether any of them are the "masterminds" of Khobar; none is in American custody and no Iranian officials were named in the indictment.
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