Posted on 04/25/2007 9:43:23 AM PDT by doug from upland
Published by Richard Poe April 25th, 2007
Did Hillary Clinton win her Senate seat fair and square? Or did she lie, cheat and steal her way to the top; raising huge quantities of illegal campaign funds, and suppressing evidence of her wrongdoing? Growing evidence suggests that she did the latter.
In her 2000 run to become Senator from New York, Hillary raised more than $30 million, in one of the most expensive Senate races in U.S. history.(1) How much of that money did she raise illegally?
Hillary’s critics have long suspected that her war chest was packed with dirty money, but proof was scarce. The Pardongate scandal — in which Bill Clinton appears to have sold presidential pardons to criminals, in order to raise money for Hillary’s Senate run — has long cast a pall over Hillary’s 2000 victory.(2) Unfortunately, the scandal never received a thorough investigation. (3)
Now, a former Clinton donor and fundraiser has stepped forward with hard evidence of Hillary’s corruption. He accuses the junior Senator from New York of complicity in a massive scheme to conceal illegal fundraising. The man’s name is Peter Franklin Paul.
The Whistleblower
Mr. Paul was a loyal Clinton operative. He turned whistleblower when the Clintons allegedly cheated him in a business deal. Now he is spilling his guts, telling everything he knows about Hillary’s illicit fundraising tactics on a Web site called the Hillary Clinton Accountability Project (HillCap.org).(4) Mr. Paul is also suing the Clintons in civil court for fraud, coercion and conspiracy. (5)
Born in Miami, Florida in 1948, the son of a well-to-do international lawyer, young Peter Paul campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in 1964; travelled to England in 1968, where he became director of the Stop-the-Draft movement, a project of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; then returned to America where he briefly took part in anti-war activism, at one point working personally with Jane Fonda against the Vietnam War. Mr. Paul earned his law degree from the University of Miami in 1973, and became a successful businessman. He made millions in real estate development, built lucrative businesses in Latin America, and became a Hollywood impresario.
Mr. Paul met Governor Bill Clinton at a political strategy meeting in 1991, in Los Angeles. He did not join the Arkansas governor’s presidential campaign, but cultivated a cordial relationship with the Clintons.
In 1998, Mr. Paul joined forces with Stan Lee — creator of such comic-book superheroes as Spiderman, the X-Men and the Incredible Hulk — to form Stan Lee Media (SLM), an Internet animation company. Within six months of going public in 1999, Stan Lee Media was worth $370 million. Among other feats, the company acquired ownership of the Conan the Barbarian character, made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
According to Mr. Paul, his downfall came when he allowed former employee Aaron Tonken to talk him into entering the political fundraising business. Mr. Paul staged successful fundraisers for Al Gore and the Clintons, at the specific direction of then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Ed Rendell (now governor of Pennsylvania). Paul coordinated his efforts with such top-level Democratic Party leaders as Terry McAuliffe and Harold Ickes. (6)
Devil’s Bargain
Paul has testified under oath that, in July 2000, he offered a deal to the President through a Clinton operative named Jim Levin. He asked Bill Clinton to sign a one-year contract with Paul’s company Stan Lee Media to serve as a “rainmaker” — that is, as a person whose fame is expected to enhance the company’s prestige and attract new business. In return for this service, the former president would receive $17 million from Paul — some in stock, some in cash, some in donations to the Clinton Library, and some in political contributions. Mr. Paul has testified that President Clinton accepted his offer. Part of the deal was that Paul would produce and underwrite a major fundraiser for Hillary. (7)
For Peter Paul, it would prove a devil’s bargain.
Mr. Paul ended up paying more than $2 million to produce a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate race. Billed as “The Hollywood Farewell Gala Salute to President William Jefferson Clinton“, the event was held August 12, 2000 on the Brentwood estate of LA media mogul and real estate developer Kenneth Roberts. (8)
Admission to the concert and cocktail party was $1,000 per person. Dinner guests paid $25,000 per couple. A-list celebrities such as Cher, Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle and Paul Anka performed. Guests included the likes of Brad Pitt, John Travolta, Muhammad Ali, Whoopi Goldberg, Gregory Peck, Shirley MacLaine and many more. The party generated over $1.5 million dollars in “hard money” contributions.(9) It turned out to be the biggest fundraiser of Hillary’s Senate campaign, and Peter Paul became Hillary’s largest single, individual contributor.
Hillary’s Crime
Under federal law, the estimated $2 million which Peter Paul spent to produce the event constituted an illegal contribution to Hillary’s campaign. “I didn’t know it was illegal at the time, but Bill and Hillary did,” Mr. Paul told TheVanguard.org.
As a federal candidate, Hillary was forbidden by law to accept “hard-money” contributions — that is, contributions directly to her campaign — in excess of $2,000. Any donation over $2,000 was considered “soft money”, and could only be paid to the party or to a political action committee, not to an individual candidate.
This was the golden age of soft money, before the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002. At that time, donors were allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to a political party. The only catch was that this so-called “soft money” could not be used to campaign for a specific candidate. Soft money could only be used for the overall promotion of the party. For instance, a soft money donor to the Democratic Party might request that his money be used to fund a “get-out-the-vote” drive, or to buy “issue ads” on television promoting some Democratic policy such as universal health care.
Political candidates developed many tricks over the years for working the soft money system. Operating on the fringes of the law, they would quietly steer soft money into their campaigns. They might, for instance, persuade party leaders to buy issue ads in their home districts which promoted policies clearly identified with the particular candidate in question. Even if the ad avoided saying the forbidden “magic words” of “express advocacy” — such as “Vote for Hillary Clinton” — it would nevertheless help candidate Hillary gain visibility by touting an issue such as universal health care which everyone identified with Hillary.
In such cases, candidates bent over backwards to avoid any appearance of impropriety — especially any hint that they or their operatives were involved in the “coordination” of the ad campaign in question. Such “coordination” between federal candidates and soft-money projects was strictly prohibited by law.
In the case of Peter Paul’s Hollywood gala, Hillary and her team dispensed with these formalities. They worked directly with the gala organizers in reckless and flagrant disregard for the law. They behaved as if they considered themselves above the law. And perhaps they were.
Hillary and her team solicited funds from Peter Paul far in excess of $2,000, then actively “coordinated” with Mr. Paul and his partners, to oversee the use of that money. All of these crimes were carefully hidden from federal authorities. Hillary’s campaign treasurer submitted false reports to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which concealed Mr. Paul’s illegal contributions.
“They continue filing false reports to this day,” Mr. Paul told TheVanguard.org. “Hillary’s campaign has submitted four successive filings to the FEC since I produced the gala infamously known to federal investigators as ‘Event 39′, and none of those filings have been truthful. This has continued right up through Hillary’s latest FEC filing, dated January 30, 2006. In one way or another, all of her filings manage to hide more than $700,000 of my donations, and to falsify the identity of the donor. To this day, Hillary Clinton has refused to admit, either to the FEC, the IRS or the media, that I was her biggest donor or even that I contributed one dollar to her campaign.”
Peter Paul had been snookered into a gargantuan money-laundering scheme, whereby he poured some $2 million of illegal or dirty money — his own money — into a fundraising event, thus enabling Hillary to generate $1.5 million of “hard” or clean money from the proceeds of that event. Hillary’s campaign thus gleaned a $1.5-million profit from the Hollywood gala, while Peter Paul got stuck with two hand-written thank-you notes from Bill and Hillary, and a net loss of about $2 million.
Fighting Back
It was many months before Mr. Paul discovered that his contributions had been misreported to the FEC. However, his relationship with the Clintons had already begun to sour in the meantime. His $17 million “rainmaker” deal with Bill Clinton fell apart; his business floundered in the dot-com bust; and Mr. Paul found himself facing stock-manipulation charges arising from his desperate efforts to save his collapsing company Stan Lee Media, Inc.
This was not Mr. Paul’s first brush with the law. Like many Clinton allies, he had a checkered past. Between 1979 and 1985, he was jailed twice on felony charges. Paul served 40 months in prison for cocaine possession and defrauding Cuba’s Communist government; he later served an additional 15 months for giving a false name to U.S. customs officials as he crossed the Canadian border.
Mr. Paul claims that his legal troubles arose from his entanglement with U.S. intelligence agencies. “As an international lawyer representing political leaders in Latin America, certain government agencies saw me as uniquely useful to help them accomplish their agendas. In my naïveté, I did not understand how this sort of work could backfire on me the way that it did.”
By the time he met Hillary Clinton, Mr. Paul was thus no stranger to criminal prosecution. He was familiar with what he calls the “underworld” of covert and extra-legal activity. But he was determined not to take the fall for Bill and Hillary’s crimes. Hence he pressured the junior Senator to come clean.
On June 21, 2001, Mr. Paul filed suit against Bill and Hillary Clinton for fraud, coercion and conspiracy.(10)
The following month, on July 16, 2001, Mr. Paul sent a demand letter to Mrs. Clinton, by special courier, notifying her that she was in violation of federal election law, for failing to report his contributions to the FEC. His letter reminded Hillary that Title 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations requires the return of all “illegal contributions within 30 days of determining the illegality”, and demanding that Hillary return all the money he had given her. It was delivered directly to her Senate chambers, amidst great fanfare. Nevertheless, Hillary ignored the letter.(11) Indeed, her campaign treasurer filed a third false report to the FEC only two weeks later.
Mr. Paul’s 2001 lawsuit was ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds. However, he refiled it on October 17, 2003.(12)
Peter Paul’s timely actions may have saved him from becoming the Clintons’ scapegoat for “Event 39″. However, the Clintons simply chose another scapegoat — one David Rosen, former National Finance Director for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.
For reasons which remain unclear, the U.S. Justice Department fingered Rosen as the chief culprit in the scandal, even though he was plainly a low-level player. Rosen was charged with providing the misleading information regarding “Event 39″, which subsequently appeared on three false FEC reports, understating the cost of “Event 39″ by more than a million dollars, and misreporting the identify of the donor.(13) In October 2003, The Justice Department indicted Rosen on four counts of making false filings with the Federal Election Commission.(14)
Rosen Trial: The Fix Is In
As it turned out, the Clintons had nothing to fear from the prosecution of Mr. Rosen. The fix was in from the start.
The judge in the case was Clinton appointee A. Howard Matz. The prosecutor, Peter Zeidenberg, worked directly for Noel Hillman, chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Public Integrity. Hillman was a cover-up specialist. Appointed by Janet Reno to “investigate” the Clinton campaign finance scandal of 1996, Hillman swept the affair neatly under the carpet. Later, he delivered a wrist-slap to former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, after Berger was caught red-handed on videotape stealing national security documents from the 9/11 Commission.(15)
Given the cast of characters involved, the stunning irregularities which marred the Rosen trial hardly came as a surprise.
First, Rosen’s October 2003 Grand Jury indictment was kept secret for more than a year, evidently to protect Democrats from any negative influence the case might cast on the 2004 elections. It was not announced until January 2005. (16)
During a pre-trial hearing on May, Judge Matz announced, “This isn’t a trial about Senator Clinton. Senator Clinton has no stake in this trial as a party or a principal. … She’s not going to be a witness. She’s not in the loop in any direct way, and that’s something the jury will be told.” The Judge added that, in his opinion, Peter Paul was a “con artist” and a “thoroughly corrupt and discredited witness”. (17)
Prosecutor Zeidenberg seemed equally reluctant to allow any spillover from the trial to inconvenience high-placed Democrats — especially Hillary Clinton. “You will hear no evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in this in any way, shape, or form,” Zeidenberg told the jury as the trial in his opening statement on May 11. (18)
Rosen had actually admitted in a taped conversation with an FBI informant that he knew the concert had cost a million dollars or more — far more than the $400,000 Hillary’s campaign had reported to the FEC. But, on May 17, Zeidenberg stunned the court by announcing, “The government does not intend to introduce the tape or elicit any testimony from the witness about that conversation”. (19)
Why Zeidenberg voluntarily excluded his best evidence remains a mystery. However, the New Orleans Times-Picayune — alone among U.S. mass media — revealed on May 18, 2005 that Zeidenberg may have shrunk from playing the tape in open court because it reportedly included “embarrassing gossip about top Clinton donors and Democratic officials, including speculation that a wealthy Clinton donor was using cocaine and sent call girls to the hotel rooms of two top Clinton insiders.”
Also unique to the Times-Picayune story is the revelation that the FBI informant — a New Orleans political consultant named Ray Reggie — just happens Senator Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law. The Senator is married to Reggie’s sister. Charged with bank fraud, Mr. Reggie agreed to wear a wire for the FBI, in exchange for leniency. He taped the incriminating conversation with David Rosen on September 4, 2002, over a drunken dinner at Morton’s steakhouse in Chicago. However, the tape was never admitted into evidence at Rosen’s trial. (20)
Not surprisingly, David Rosen was acquitted on May 27, 2005. (21)
“While Rosen was a co-conspirator with the Clintons and their agents, he wasn’t criminally culpable on his own, because he had no legal obligation to provide information or sign any reports to the FEC,” Mr. Paul explained to TheVanguard.org. “The jury decided correctly that Rosen’s bosses were the real culprits.”
The Case Against Hillary
Peter Paul continues pressing his lawsuit against Bill and Hillary Clinton, with legal representation by the United States Justice Foundation of Ramona, California.
Government investigators have now acknowledged that Mr. Paul’s charges against Team Hillary are substantially true. The only remaining question is whether Hillary herself had personal knowledge of the crimes.
Andrew Grossman, who was Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign treasurer, admitted to the FEC on December 13, 2005 that he had failed to report $721,000 of Peter Paul’s contributions. This is the same crime for which David Rosen — Grossman’s subordinate — stood trial in criminal court. Had Rosen been convicted, he might have gone to prison for fifteen to twenty years. After confessing to the same crime before the Federal Election Commission, Rosen’s boss merely received a $35,000 fine.(22)
Not surprisingly, Senator Clinton claims to know nothing of any wrongdoing. She says that she does not know Peter Paul; that she had no idea that he paid for her Hollywood fundraiser in August 2000; that she took no part in planning the gala; and that she knew nothing of her campaign treasurer Andrew Grossman’s underreporting of Peter Paul’s $2-million contribution.
Massive evidence suggests otherwise, including sworn testimony from co-conspirators; written notes by Bill and Hillary Clinton; incriminating videotapes, and much more. Most of this evidence can be viewed HillCap.org.
The California Supreme Court ruled in November 2004 that Peter Paul’s suit will go to trial. Originally set for March 27, 2007, the trial has been delayed, as Mr. Paul and the United States Justice Foundation battle various pre-trial motions put forth by Hillary and her co-defendants, in an effort to buy time.
Time is not on Hillary’s side, however. The longer she stalls, the more evidence comes out against her.
On April 11, for instance, The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York unexpectedly released to Peter Paul’s attorney a copy of a videotape which it had confiscated from Mr. Paul six years ago. It depicts a meeting of the Hollywood gala planners, in which Hillary Clinton takes part by speakerphone, clearly “coordinating” the project and playing in active role in soliciting contributions. (23)
Peter Paul has kindly allowed TheVanguard.org to review the incriminating videotape of Hillary Clinton’s meeting, and to make available to our readers a thirty-second portion of it. Go here to view the videotape. |
Tags: TheVanguard.Org, Campaign Finance, Richard Lawrence Poe
Filed under TheVanguard.Org, Campaign Finance, Richard Lawrence Poe
Hate to sound negative but...call me when it’s over.
-bflr-
I will link 30 seconds of the tape when Peter has it on his blog.
“During a pre-trial hearing on May, Judge Matz announced, This isnt a trial about Senator Clinton. Senator Clinton has no stake in this trial as a party or a principal. Shes not going to be a witness. Shes not in the loop in any direct way, and thats something the jury will be told. The Judge added that, in his opinion, Peter Paul was a con artist and a thoroughly corrupt and discredited witness.”
Wonder how much that judge got paid. The corruption and power mongering by Hillary boggles the mind. God help us if she gets in.
Did Hillary Clinton win her Senate seat fair and square?
Of course not.
Or did she lie, cheat and steal her way to the top; raising huge quantities of illegal campaign funds, and suppressing evidence of her wrongdoing?
Of COURSE she did. That’s how any Clinton gets what they want.
I will be meeting in Los Angeles with a reporter on Monday. Should I drop by and show Judge Matz some evidence of her involvement?
PING!
Regards,
TS
bump for later
TSOA — put The Shrew on ping list
thanks
The FEC investigates allegations of election campaign finance irregularities/illegalities at the pace of molasses in January, and renders its findings and levies slap-on-the-wrist fines long, long after the ill-gotten monies have been used to achieve their intended purpose.
IATW, Queen Hellary will not ever be convicted of any felonious act. That’s just a fact of life.
Seriously though, Peter Paul has numerous skeletons in his own closet and will never be taken seriously with his I DIDN’T KNOW crap.
It’s just reality and nothing against Peter Paul.
Where is the DOJ?
Snicker
Just mail it to him.
Nothing will come of it thats for sure. Teflon Hillary.
POE ADDS MORE TO THE STORY: New Media Scoops Old Media
http://blog.thevanguard.org/392/hillarygate-new-media-scoops-old-media/
bttt
"Swift Vets."
That doesn't matter. What matters is whether Paul has evidence that Hillary committed a felony.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.