The Clintons' War on Women (31 page)

Jordan would go on to outline the very detailed and complex process that surrounds a presidential pardon: history of the case, substantive arguments for and against the pardon, written recommendations from the prosecuting team. Mr. Jordan asserts that, due to a lack of a written history or paper trail of such a process, Clinton and his team worked outside the framework to push through the pardon of Mr. Rich.

Below is Hamilton’s check list of requirements for a pardon during the Carter presidency.

• A formal, written analysis of the case by the Justice Department.

• A description of the crime and a history of the trial.

• The written statements and recommendations of the prosecuting team that won the conviction.

• A listing of the substantive arguments, for and against the pardon and a statement of any extenuating circumstances that justify the review of the case.

•
The formal and written recommendations of the Justice Department (usually the attorney general in high-profile cases like Patricia Hearst or Marc Rich) and of the White House counsel.

Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel, persuaded Clinton to pardon Rich, who was now a current client. It seems as though Clinton let his decision rest solely on the recommendation of the accused attorney, bypassing the process Jordan outlined in his analysis published by the
Wall Street Journal
.

According to congressional testimony, only Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Quinn discussed the Rich pardon, but even those conversations were said to have been limited and obviously lopsided in scope.

Neil A. Lewis’s account of the case and history surrounding presidential pardons also drew attention to Rich pardon.

‘’Things had plainly broken down in the last three or four months of the Clinton administration,’’ said Margaret Love, a Washington lawyer who spent many years in the Justice Department handling pardons and served as the main pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997.

‘’You knew that in certain cases over the years like George Steinbrenner there was always a certain amount of persuasion going on,’’ she said, referring to the principal owner of the Yankees, who had conspired to make illegal donations to President Nixon and was pardoned by President Reagan in his final days in office. ‘’But just about all the pardons still went through the Justice Department,’’ she said, including Mr. Steinbrenner’s.

Mrs. Love would surmise that during each previous modern presidency, pardons with the exception of Nixon and a few other high-profile instances, would almost entirely be handled by the Justice Department and not the White House.
422

However, during the Clinton presidency, Love argued that the White House took a much more active role in the pardon process and
utilized the presidential pardon more so than other modern presidents.

This change in tides and the eventual pardon of Marc Rich put Clinton in the hotseat with the most recent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.

Carter railed against the pardon and called it “disgraceful.”

“I don’t think there is any doubt that some of the factors in his pardon were attributable to his large gifts. In my opinion, that was disgraceful.”

From Arkansas to Pennsylvania Avenue, the Clintons’ appetite for graft and Boss Tweed–esque political quid pro quo arrangements never changed.

Trading favors, profiteering, and living outside the law are commonplace for House Clinton. Whether it’s the Marc Rich scandal, or the (insert scandal list here), fellow Democrat and liberal Hamilton Jordan is spot on in proclaiming the Clintons to be the quintessential grifters. It’s what they do.

Hillary’s love of money would also mar the Clintons’ early political career. In another example of elite deviance, Hillary would turn a one-thousand-dollar investment into a hefty return, courtesy of a wired businessman in Arkansas. This too was a precursor to the wholesale money grab that the Clintons would stage, utilizing the nexus of power at the State Department.

In one of the earliest scandals to outline Hillary and Bill Clinton’s bare greed and rampant disregard for the rules, Mrs. Clinton parlayed $1,000 into over $100,000 over the course of ten months trading cattle futures.
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The trading began as Bill Clinton was the attorney general for the state of Arkansas and would continue until he was elected governor. The original investment was worth a market value of $12,000 dollars, but records from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange show that Clinton had only $1,000 in her account at the time of the investments.
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So
how could someone with only $1,000 secure an investment in cattle futures worth $12,000? Relying on an experienced futures trader who was tied to one of Arkansas’s biggest employers, that is how.

James Blair, a friend of Clinton, advised her on the trades and confirmed that they were processed before the paperwork was complete or approved. But Blair was not the only industry insider who was known to underwrite investments on behalf of Clinton, as she had Blair’s business partner Robert L. “Red” Bone willingly approve of Blair’s orders on Clinton’s behalf … even if she did not have the cash to cover them.

Blair gloated that he had paid Bone over $800,000 in commission at the time, and that “he did not ask questions” when approached about the sweetheart deal he was brokering for Clinton, then a wife to a high-profile state official.
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Why would Blair go through so much trouble moving before approval of paperwork and funding Hillary’s investments? During the late seventies, Blair was also the lead legal counsel to Arkansas’s top employer, Tyson Foods. He claimed he advised Hillary out of friendship, but when have we known the Clintons or anyone surrounding them to do something as a “friend”? Observers rightfully acknowledged that the investment scheme was a quick way for one of the state’s largest employers and companies to curry favor with the attorney general, and eventual governor.

It’s extremely unusual given that the trends for that market during the time that the trades were placed were extremely volatile and unpredictable, yet Clinton walked away with a $99,000 gain. Her frequency of trades and net profit were also far outside normal returns for investors buying the same amount. Experts called the trades “unusual.”
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A first taste of how she and her husband, Bill, could parlay elected office into financial gain, it seems.

Clinton would go on to downplay the role that Blair and his associates played in placing and underwriting her trades, but experts have
debunked this and confirmed that it would be near impossible for Clinton not to have had a hand in the trades, even at a basic level that would allow her to understand the process.

The trades and the way in which they were handled speak volumes about the hypocrisy that the Clintons employ to this day. Since the start of their residence as public figures, both Bill and Hillary have long railed against the “gilded greed” of Wall Street and, more specifically, investors who trade futures.
427

But as with nearly everything involving the well-learned grifters from Arkansas, what they say and what they do are always two different things.

Billed as one of the “Top Ten Scandals Involving Hillary Clinton You May Have Forgotten,” the cattle futures debacle is something we should all be reminded of.
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PART 4

THE CRUDE AND CORRUPTIBLE CLINTONS

CHAPTER 17

PRISON BLOOD

I
n the 1980s, Bill Clinton’s political cronies were selling HIV- and Hepatitis C–laced prison inmate blood to the world blood market. Unscreened prisoners would sell their blood for $7 (in prison scrip) per plasma unit to politically connected blood brokers who would then put it up for sale on the world blood market for $50 per plasma unit.
430
The company that brokered the blood was Health Management Associates, Inc. (HMA).

By 1985, the business practices of HMA were coming under close scrutiny in regards to poor health assessment, record keeping, and unqualified staff hiring. Following a state investigation of HMA, the company was allowed to retain its contract because of heavy political influence and the “lobbying efforts of HMA’s president, Leonard Dunn, a Pine Bluff banker who later worked on Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign.”
431
That contract lasted through 1986 until it was finally doomed by a critical report.

The
problems with HMA were a warning flag.

Pine Bluff Biologicals took up and greatly expanded the low-cost blood acquisitions to include other Arkansas state prison units. “But donor-screening problems persisted. In 1989, a prisoner who had been forbidden to donate on account of disease was able to sell plasma twenty-three times after he transferred from the Pine Bluff Diagnostics Unit to Cummins.”
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The company was carelessly taking blood from Arkansas prisoners who had been infected with HIV and Hepatitis C, and the diseased blood was being sold on the world market, specifically to Canadians. A whopping 20,000 Canadians were infected with Hepatitis C and another 1,000 were infected with HIV from the contaminated plasma.
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In March 1991, reporter Mara Leveritt wrote a story for the
Arkansas Times
about the prison blood sales. Later in 1998, whistleblower Mike Galster, under the pseudonym Michael Sullivan, wrote the novel
Blood Trail,
based on the scandal. “Although fiction,
Blood Trail
evolved from Sullivan’s meditations on the true, tragic and ongoing story of a blood contamination that infected as many as 80,000 people in Canada,” the inside flap read. “Thousands have died, many more have death sentences, and still more will suffer for life.”
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In the 1980s, Galster was running orthopedic clinics in the Arkansas state prison system. Because of his access, Galster knew there were big problems.

Blood Trail
was Galster’s way of telling the world what really happened. In May 1999, as a reward for his honesty, Galster’s clinic was burned to the ground. On the same night, the offices of a Canadian hemophiliac victims’ rights group were broken into. Who was behind these crimes?

Around the time that Galster’s book hit the shelves in 1998,
Salon
published a detailed article on the blood scandal by Arkansas reporter Suzi Parker. Parker’s fine piece of reporting was an indictment of the Clinton administration in Arkansas, which looked the other
way while political cronies were making money selling dirty prison blood to the world blood plasma market.

Parker’s exposé pointed out that Arkansas was the last state in the union to allow prison blood to be brokered. The crooked business was practiced until 1994, when, after the Clinton years, the program was shut down. Parker fingered two Clinton cronies who played key roles in keeping the lucrative prison blood deal going: Leonard Dunn, a president of HMA who was very close to Bill Clinton, and a black lawyer, Richard Mays, who received $25,000 as an ombudsman for the troubled program. There were allegations that Mays’s compensation was basically a bribe paid by HMA to keep the blood program alive.

“Problems with the prison plasma program were well known to Clinton throughout the 1980s,” and “In 1986, Clinton’s state police investigated problems at the prison and found little cause for concern, while an outside investigator looked at the same allegations and found dozens of safety violations,” Parker wrote.
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Clinton allowed the dangerous program to continue unfettered because his cronies were making money off of it.

Parker interviewed Galster, who said the program was a “crime against humanity.” Galster attested that he had seen prisoners given illegal drugs as payment for their blood plasma. Galster told Parker that he saw inmates who “appeared jaundiced and very sick. When I would ask if they had just had a blood test, they would say, ‘No, I’ve just given plasma.’ It was clear they were sick.”
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Parker’s article quoted former prisoner John Schock, who was convinced that he got Hepatitis C from a dirty needle in the “pretty shoddy” program. “They had inmates doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. They would let people who was sick bleed … ain’t no telling what they had. They didn’t check all the time.”
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The article exposed corruption and carelessness that resulted in tragic health problems for tens of thousands of innocent people. Parker pointed out that most prison plasma programs were shut down in the early 1980s especially as the AIDS crisis was picking up
steam. The FDA asked companies making blood products to refrain from obtaining them from prisons and inmates because many inmates engage in risky behaviors.

Despite the FDAs warnings, Clinton allowed the prison blood program to continue. The FDA had also shut down the Arkansas plasma program for several months in 1983 because Arkansas prisoners with Hepatitis B had been allowed to donate blood.

In 1985, after the Arkansas Board of Corrections had hired the Institute for Law and Policy Planning (ILPP), an independent group, to investigate HMA, and after ILPP had issued a scathing report detailing the forty areas where HMA had violated its state contract, Clinton made sure that HMA kept getting the contract. That happened during the same year that, as stated above, Mays received $25,000 to be an “ombudsman.” Some said that money was a kickback from HMA to a Clinton insider to facilitate that HMA retain its contract. Investigators never found the contract for Mays that spelled out his official duties … they just knew he received a large amount of quick and easy money from HMA.
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“In so many ways it reminds you of Nazi Germany…. These guys had the power over a captive audience to make money from human beings,” Galster said. “This I know, without the governor’s support and protection, this disease-riddled system would have been shut down by 1982.”
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