New Year, Old Lies as David serves the Clintonian Goliath
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| Bill Clinton's brilliant defense counsel David E. Kendall is still helping him bury the truth more than 20 years later. |
The Democratic Party, the Clinton family, and their sycophantic media machine keep saying that their scandals are in the past and they're looking to the future. So why do they rehash the same people to cover up their crimes when anyone asks about them? My VIDEO BELOW
Kendall's Op-Ed came in response to another one by his former adversary, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr who had investigated the majority of charges against Kendall's client, President William Jefferson Clinton. You do not have to be an admirer of Kenneth Starr, who was an incompetent oaf or the Republican Congress of the 1990s run by gutless frauds like Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott to understand that David Kendall is the wrong person to complain about defamation of the special counsel. So for your convenience let me point out several of the details that Kendall, like a good defense counsel, left out in his apologia to Robert Mueller, which in fact barely even mentioned him.
1.) In his own time, Starr was a replacement.
When the Whitewater scandal broke out, the person appointed to be the special counsel was attorney Robert Fiske, a high-powered corporate attorney was chosen by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate. One point that Clinton Administration attorneys love to bring up is that both Fiske and Starr were "registered Republicans". This is an amusing statement, as if party affiliation empowers one to be a competent investigator or prosecutor. If you look at Fiske's actual record, he had very little actual experience or accomplishments as a prosecutor, and was more well-known as a white-shoe corporate defense attorney for the NFL, former Johnson Admin. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, and corporate bankers. Fiske's team was staffed at the top by his deputy Democrat Mark Tuohey III, another white-collar defense attorney who would later defend Enron, DC Police Chief Charles Ramsey, and political fraudster Jeanne Clarke Harris. Most recently he has served as the main legal counsel for the office of DC mayor Muriel Bowser. Does that sound like a leadership that has sought to bring criminals to justice? Quite the contrary. And indeed it became soon obvious that Fiske was ill-disposed to pursue investigations or prosecutions of Bill or Hillary Clinton on matters such as misuse of FBI files, the Vince Foster death, or the disappearance of documents concerning Whitewater. (Source: The Strange Death of Vincent Foster by Christopher Ruddy).
The Clinton investigations not only featured multiple prosecutors but multiple defense attorneys as well, due to the forced resignation of White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum in 1994 due to possible misconduct concerning the Vince Foster case.
Therefore Bill Clinton was forced in early 1994 to create an independent counsel to be appointed by a court rather than by the AG, ironically because Fiske had been chosen by the Clinton Administration itself through Janet Reno. That would have been the equivalent of having Jeff Sessions choose Donald Trump's prosecutor. As we now know the choosing of Robert Mueller was done at the behest of not only Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein but due to the leaking of a memo by James Comey with the specific intent of having a special prosecutor appointed. Based on this background, it is perhaps just as suitable for Mueller to be replaced as it was for Fiske.
2.) Replacing the counsel does not mean ending an investigation.
Even more obscurely, Kenneth Starr was replaced in 1999 by Robert Ray after Bill Clinton's impeachment trial acquittal by the Senate eventually led to Starr stepping down to return to private and academic work which would eventually lead to his disgraceful tenure as President of Baylor University. Ray continued the Whitewater investigation and a number of other ones, wrapping them up in the mid-2000s. However, by then as the Hillary Clinton had been elected to the Senate and Republicans had lost their faux zest for justice, his office was only in place symbolically. Oddly enough, Ray was the only one of the three prosecutors under Clinton to have been a career prosecutor. David Kendall knows very well that Robert Mueller's replacement would not necessarily mean the end of the Russia investigation just as Robert Fiske's and Kenneth Starr's weren't the end of Whitewater.
3.) In Kendall's time, trashing the Independent Counsel was part of the strategy
Throughout his tenure as IC, Ken Starr was attacked mercilessly for being a Republican. He had served as an appeals court judge under Reagan and Solicitor General under George HW Bush. And to be sure, it is not as if his tenure in the office was without blemish as he admitted years later when he publicly regretted taking the Lewinsky affair under his brief.
While leading Clinton's defense, David Kendall didn't have to worry about Ken Starr gaining public support, because Clinton's team of "masters of disaster" led by James Carville openly called for "all out war" on Starr's reputation. This was recognized by The New York Times in 1998 in the context of the then erupting Lewinsky investigation. While Carville was working to erode Starr's credibility including featuring Hillary Clinton in a now famous TV interview where she alleged he was part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", Kendall was helping Bill Clinton obstruct justice by inducing Lewinsky to sign a sworn affidavit denying ever having sexual relations with him. When DNA evidence to the contrary turned up due to the Linda Tripp leak of Lewinsky's blue dress with Clinton semen on it, the Clinton defense forces shifted into the "so what?" defense. Thanks to the public behaviour of Carville concerning Starr, the idea that it is fully acceptable to attack the prosecutor has been fully in bounds. This is not the first, and won't be the last instance where shenanigans that were done in defense of Bill Clinton serve as perfect precedents for the current environment surrounding the "Russia-gate" investigation.
4.) The Truth didn't matter in the 1990's because it was easy to make fun of stodgy old Starr.
In 1999 filmmaker Michael Moore was given a TV show by BBC Channel 4 in the UK and Bravo in the US entitled "The Awful Truth" (see video above) and its debut episode was "A Cheaper Way to Conduct a Witch Hunt". In it they mercilessly troll Starr by claiming that the only thing that he had only succeeded in creating a "sex-obsessed" witch hunt. He showed up at Starr's house with a crowd of Scarlet Letter pilgrims to "shame" him for publishing the salacious sexual details in the Starr Report.
And it was funny. But Moore didn't care that Clinton's actions had also violated numerous US Secret Service protocols by smuggling Lewinsky onto the White House grounds, nor that she had been induced by Clinton, Kendall and others to commit perjury by denying an affair that by their standards was perfectly fine. He didn't care that the Lewinsky Affair also threw the lid off of numerous other Clinton infidelities and sexual assault charges, such as the Paula Jones sexual harassment trial which was reopened due to the perjuring of Lewinsky's denials in testimony. In the course of that trial Clinton admitted to his affair with Little Rock nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers while simultaneously lying about his affair with Lewinsky.
During that era, Clinton jokes were all the rage, but no one thought it was off limits to publicly mock and even directly confront Starr as Moore did. And in all honesty, Starr's demeanour of a stoic, dour, middle-aged judge talking about sexual relations was an easy target. But in terms of competence in trial law, Starr and Mueller have similar qualifications the former as a former judge and Solicitor General and the other as a lifelong prosecutor and head of the FBI. And Starr does not have the taint of having been a George Bush/Patriot Act era leader that participated in the mushrooming of the surveillance state.
Bad Blood with the FBI and others.
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| In 1996 former FBI liaison to the White House revealed Bill and Hillary Clinton's hostility to the Secret Service in his book Unlimited Access. (Regnery Publishing) |
In his Op-Ed Kendall goes to great length to rationalize the behaviour of the group of FBI agents and Justice Department officials now revealed in the media to have possibly concocted the "Russia-gate" investigation as an "insurance policy" to subvert the Trump presidency should he have won. Much of the media, including the Washington Post has interpreted it as what they called in one piece an "assault on federal law enforcement". Trump's firing of FBI Director Comey and his sparring with him and other FBI/DOJ officials on Twitter are to be sure a new twist on conflicts between law enforcement and the White House. But they're not new as President John F. Kennedy and his brother AG Robert F. Kennedy both clashed with iconic FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a relationship so toxic that there have been theories that Hoover orchestrated or turned a blind eye to the assassination of either one or both of them.
To be sure, under both Bill Clinton and so far under Donald Trump leaks from within the administration have uncovered at times embarrassing details, but in only one of them did they uncover truly criminal activity (the Paul Manafort activity concerns a campaign official's activities years prior to the campaign, and the other Trump acolytes are so far only pleading guilty of lying to the FBI). There ARE some bizarre happenings in the Trump White House that should worry Americans, for example the Whitefish Energy scandal in Puerto Rico caused by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
Under Clinton, White House aides David Watkins and Craig Livingstone took the fall for the notorious Travelgate scandal. Clinton Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell, a former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice and law partner of Hillary Clinton, went to prison for stealing money from the Rose Law Firm. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was indicted in 1997 on charges of receiving improper gifts. Though he was eventually acquitted, Tyson Foods of Arkansas eventually pleaded guilty to giving him those gifts. Inexplicably, no one expressed the same degree of hysteria over impeachment as they do with Donald Trump.
However, according to former FBI liaison to the White House Gary Aldrich in his book Unlimited Access, the Clintons' paranoia with regards to the US Secret Service and leaking of information reached such a level that there was a proposal by Livingstone to dissolve it and merge it into the FBI (P. 140). In 1993 Bill Clinton fired FBI Director William J. Sessions the day following the death of Vince Foster. Sessions had improperly used an FBI plane and funds for personal use and protection so the firing can be called for cause . . . just like Comey's misconduct in the Clinton e-mail investigation and his leaking of a classified memo to the press through a friend. In 1996 it is reported that FBI Director Louis Freeh, Clinton's appointment in replacement of William Sessions, had lost faith in the integrity of the president to such a degree that he withheld a confidential intelligence briefing on China to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright due to his concerns that she would communicate findings with relation to the "Chinagate" controversy to Clinton. More on that soon.
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| The Washington Post in 1996 gave more credence to the words of disgraced American Spectator reporter David Brock than FBI agent Gary Aldrich. Nowadays, Brock has crossed the political divide to do his dirty tricks for Democrats instead of Republicans. (MMFA) |
If it is so concerned with maintaining the public reputation of the FBI and law enforcement, why is it that the Washington Post and other supposedly prestigious media organizations never stood up for the integrity of Aldrich or the later US Secret Service whistle blower Gary Byrne? In fact, they are more than willing to feature the work of Clinton spin doctors and hit piece artists like David Brock, including this one. It must seem very odd that in retrospect they believed the words of a notorious smear campaigner like David Brock who was just this weekend exposed for offering money for Trump sexual accusers over those of a veteran FBI agent with no known professional infractions. In the 1990s, David Kendall's
What David Kendall refuses to admit, because it is his job as it always has to deny it, is that the FBI has become merely one more part of a politicized federal government loyal to its own power. Previous presidents were willing to accept that in order to mold it in their image: George HW Bush at least kept his hands off of the FBI while being a CIA man through and through. But his son, Obama, and Clinton each used it for their narrow interests. Clinton by scaling them back following the Waco fiasco and then filling it with his appointees, Bush by using it under Mueller as an instrument for his Patriot Act, and Obama by having Comey cover for his cronies during the IRS Tax Audit scandal. Regardless of who would be elected in 2016, we would have had a politicized and unscrupulous FBI leadership. The only difference is that whereas under Donald Trump, Gary Johnson, Bernie Sanders, or Jill Stein we would see it acting at cross purposes of the administration, with Hillary Clinton they would have fit like a glove.
Russiagate is like kindergarten compared to Chinagate
Most misleadingly, David Kendall attempts to refocus the issue on the alleged but unproven claims that the Russian state led by President Vladimir Putin conspired to bring Donald Trump to power as a means to weaken the United States. He once again conjures the cryptic and unspecified claims shown here in a paragraph of his Op-Ed:
"More important, the proposed “Watergate solution” ignores the fact that in January, U.S. intelligence agencies, through the director of national intelligence, made public a formal assessment “with high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” whose goals were to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” while favoring candidate Trump. Much of the fact-finding that Starr calls for has been done.
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| Chinese immigrant and Arkansas restaurateur Charlie Trie was a conduit for Communist Chinese campaign bundlers giving money to the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1996. (Washington Free Beacon/Associated Press) |
What he fails to mention is that none of the actual evidence contained in any of those intelligence reports has been made public, and that has been stated repeatedly by the Obama era officials in question through the media including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC News. In the absence of such evidence Kendall apparently thinks that we should take it on faith that there is classified information that may indicate that Trump colluded with Russia, yet if that did exist why would the leak happy federal intelligence agencies not have released it yet?
If Kendall wants to talk about true collusion and subverting of the US electoral process by a foreign government he should speak to his client Bill Clinton concerning the activities of Communist China through James and Mochtar Riady of Lippo Bank, their employee and US Commerce official John Huang, and countless other officials. These Chinese government operatives were active in bundling cash often through straw donors like the Hsi Lia Buddhist Temple for the Clinton-Gore '96 campaign. One of the bundlers involved in this scandal was Ng Lap-Seng,a notorious Macau-based Chinese government official of the People's Political Consultative Conference and a billionaire that has been implicated in the Panama Papers scandal. USA Today acknowledged in 2015 that Ng had also been implicated in the 1990s in the Chinagate controversy for funneling money through Clinton Little Rock contact Charlie Trie to the tune of $1.1 million to the DNC for the 1996 election. This is all public record and was revealed in 1998 during Senate Finance Committee hearings in which Ng and others had already fled the country allowing Trie to take the fall. Another bundler, Johnny Chung, admitted under oath that the money had come from the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). When confronted with this evidence, the Clintons were not forced to resign or take any further action besides returning the money, and the FBI investigation under Louis Freeh was so hampered that whistle-blower Ivian Smith went public with his objections that it had been suppressed.
According to the Chicago Tribune, another character in this controversy Commerce Secretary Ron Brown (former DNC Chair until 1993) died in a mysterious plane crash in Croatia in 1996 to little media notice. According to lobbyist and ex-mistress Nolanda Hill, Brown was likely to have been indicted for several crimes related to the Chinese campaign finance fiasco. More on the Ron Brown connection can be found in Jack Cashill's investigative book Ron Brown's Body.
Call the exorcist
The fact that the Washington Post, which has already hired fellow Clinton stooge John Podesta as an Op-Ed writer, has given the job of defending special counsel Robert Mueller to a brilliant defense attorney like David Kendall that helped undermine special counsel Kenneth Starr in the 1990s is further evidence that the media, it's liberal establishment masters, and others have not let go of their craven images of Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as their holy trinity and royal family. Kendall's objective is to defend his master, not expose the truth. All of the evidence against Kendall's former client is already in the Washington Post's archives from the 1990s, yet rather than make a sober statement that it is time to move in they continue to be the willful instruments of disinformation for both parties' political establishments. If this is the source they use to support the maintenance of this flagging status quo of an investigation, there's no wonder that fewer Americans are trusting the press.
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