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PINE BLUFFS – Now that Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has wrested the Republican presidential nomination from his able opponent, Mike Huckabee, he can look forward to the Republican Party’s 39th nominating convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in early September, and the race to the November election.
But in order to become the next President, he’ll need to first unite his Party. And he’ll need to do it while campaigning against the historic candidacy of either a woman or a black as his Democrat opponent, both of whom said, on the morning talk shows Wednesday, March 5, 2008, that they see a path to the Democrat nomination. To become McCain’s opponent, however, each faces approximately seven more weeks of grueling campaigning before the outcome will be known.
Buoyed by her two big wins in Texas and Ohio, an ebullient Hillary Clinton spoke to supporters: “Voters are finally focused on who they think would be the best commander-in-chief,” New York’s junior senator said.
She must now attempt to convince voters that SHE is best suited for that job. Actually, her campaign has already begun the task, painting her opponent as “inexperienced in foreign policy,” and claiming that she will be “prepared to be commander-in-chief from day one.”
Of course, only the politically naïve will believe that. Eight years as First Lady, while her husband floundered through two scandal-ridden terms, does not “a commander-in-chief make.” Nor, as the insignificant junior senator from the great state of New York, has she had much experience since then. But a look at Bill Clinton’s failed policies in just one area of foreign affairs may give us an idea of what Hillary Rodham Clinton might do if elected President in November.
On February 18, 2008, I wrote: “Pursuing his misguided policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the Chinese – which I described extensively in my creative non-fiction novel, The China Connection (Writers Club Press, an imprint of iUniverse, Inc. Lincoln, NE. December 2003), and fueled by millions in illegal campaign contributions from the Chinese and several high-tech American corporations, Mr. Clinton mounted a ferocious campaign to beg, borrow, or buy enough Congressional votes to give the brutal Chinese dictators the victory they wanted [most favored nation (MFN) status]. This, at the very time when Republican Congressional members were reminding him that Congress was about to examine the question of whether national security was compromised by the Clinton Commerce Department’s transfer of missile technology to China.
“These transfers prompted House GOP Conference Chairman John Boehner, a traditional MFN supporter, to say that even support for the annual extension [of Most Favored Nation Status to China] was in peril because Clinton had not swiftly put to rest suggestions that the missile technology waivers were connected to big Democratic campaign contributions from Loral Space & Communications, Ltd. chairman and CEO, Bernard Schwartz.” See The Hillary and Bill Show: Same Old, Same Old, www.quazen.com; also see my website, www.saccoservices.com and blog at http://anthonyjsaccosr.townhall.com.
What exactly was Boehner talking about back in 2000? What were “the missile technology waivers” to which he referred? Despite Justice Department officials’ fears that a satellite transfer to China might jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation into illegal campaign contributions begun in 1998, senior White House advisors – led by National Security Advisor Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger - had recommended that Mr. Clinton approve a waiver permitting “dual use technology” to be exported to China. The deal involved exporting by Loral of a communications satellite to China for launching, despite the well-known fact that China was surreptitiously examining and replicating our nose cone technology prior to each launch, in order to move its stalled military and civilian space programs forward. Documents revealed on May 22, 1998, showed that Clinton and his advisors were repeatedly cautioned that the transaction might have legal drawbacks, in that it would violate Tiananmen Square era sanctions against China. Many also feared it might harm U.S. national security interests.
When it became known that a similar transfer by Loral in February 1996, had helped China learn of and correct a serious flaw in its launching rockets, Congress became concerned that China could use this information to perfect guidance systems on its long range nuclear missiles. At that time, China had only a small number of missiles capable of reaching U.S. territory. Investigations revealed that Loral, with millions of dollars and business relationships in China at risk, had actually given a report to the Chinese detailing how they could improve their rockets, BEFORE consulting with State Department export licensing authorities. Loral insisted that no laws were broken and that the report did not violate our national security.
The matter was deemed so serious that Senate Foreign Relations Chairman, Jesse Helms (R-NC), said on Saturday, June 6, 1998, that he suspected a link between political contributions to Democrats and Clinton Administration decisions on missile technology exports to China. Later the bipartisan Cox Commission reported that, helped by these transfers of “dual use” technology, China’s military rocket program had been advanced by approximately 50 years.
So, what became of Sandy Berger? He went on to “bigger and better things.” What, exactly? Attempting to protect his friend Bill Clinton, Berger stole documents from the National Archives in advance of the 9/11/ Commission hearings in 2003. The documents, written by White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, were a “tough review” of the Clinton administration’s shortcomings in dealing with terrorism, Clarke’s lawyer told the Washington Post. Berger stole highly classified terrorism documents from the National Archives, destroyed them and lied to investigators. He was charged, tried and convicted in 2005, given a two-year suspended sentence, a $50,000 dollar fine, and had his security clearance suspended for three years. But that did not stop John Kerry (D-MA) from hiring him as his presidential campaign’s National Security Advisor. Such is the fervor to win among Democrats. However, when the scandal broke in 2004, Mr. Kerry, not always a stickler for following the letter of the law, was forced to fire him.
What’s Berger doing now? He has assumed a similar role in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign! This spectacular act of poor judgment on Hillary’s part is raising eyebrows even among Clinton’s admirers. Why? Because if Hillary wins the Democrat nomination she’ll be given National Security briefings, and Sandy Berger, a convicted felon whose security clearance may or may not be restored, will be at her side.
And what about Bernard Schwartz, Loral Space & Communications, LTD’s President and CEO? The revealed documents referred to above “raise some troubling issues . . . they make clear that Loral’s chief executive . . . was personally involved in pressuring the White House to approve the waiver,” said Benjamin R. Gilman, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Despite being involved up to his arm pits in this affair, Mr. Schwartz, whose company donated more than $1 million dollars to Democrats in 1996, and who personally donated more than $1 million dollars to Democrat candidates and $581,000 to the Democrat National Committee in that same election, became Hillary Rodham Clinton’s New York campaign manager during her initial run for the Senate from that state. In politics, money talks. Big money talks louder.
So, did President Clinton sell American foreign policy to the highest bidder in return for campaign contributions? And if he did, what of Hillary’s pledge while campaigning recently, “to restore conditions in the economy and the government to the way they were during her husband’s administration.” Do we really want that? If you’re not convinced yet that we don’t, read on.
The 1996 Campaign Finance scandal was, well ... big. Charles Ya Lin Trie, a former restaurant owner in Little Rock and long-time friend of Mr. Clinton, was also involved in campaign financing abuses during the ‘96 elections. In January 1998, he was indicted on charges of illegally funneling $600,000 dollars to the Democrat National committee (DNC). In 1996, he gave $640,000 dollars to President Clinton’s Legal Defense Fund, which was returned after the Fund said it did not know the source. The donations included checks with signatures that matched those on other checks and money orders numbered sequentially but from different cities.
Ng Lap Seng, a Macao real estate and casino tycoon was also involved in the 1996 scandal. According to FBI records, between 1994 and 1996, Trie received more than $900,000 dollars in wire transfers from Ng, who is based in Macao. A correlation between the wire transfers and money given by Trie to the DNC was established. But in February 1998, when congressional investigators sought permission to travel to Hong Kong and Beijing to examine financial records for Trie and Ng at the Bank of China branch offices in Macao and Hong Kong, the Chinese government blocked their efforts by refusing to release those records.
Maria Hsia, a Taiwan born immigration consultant in Los Angeles and one of Al Gore’s major fundraisers for 10 years, was charged in July 1998, with disguising illegal campaign donations to President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. She helped arrange a visit by then Vice-President Al Gore to a Buddhist temple fundraiser at the HsiLaiTemple in Hacienda, CA, which then made $65,000 dollars in donations to the DNC. The problems? Two. First, these were “conduit” or “straw” payments; those listed as donors – Buddhist monks and nuns – were illegally reimbursed by others. Second, the Temple, as a tax-exempt religious organization, was barred from making campaign contributions.
March 3, 2000, Hsia was convicted by a federal jury in Washington, D.C. of five counts of concealing the source of $109,000 in illegal contributions to Democrats. The stash included $65,000 in straw donations mentioned above, which Hsia funneled through clueless, non-English-speaking monks and nuns the day after Vice President Al Gore's 1996 visit to the Temple. Hsia faced up to 25 years in prison for causing false statements about the pass-through contributions to be made in Federal Election Commission reports. But U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman, a Clinton< appointee who was assigned the case by his superior, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, another Clinton appointee, presided at the trial and handed Hsia her sentence: a puny 90 days of home detention and three years of probation, along with a fine of $5,300.
Chief Judge Johnson had bypassed the court's computer-randomized assignment system and miraculously ended up assigning fellow Clinton judicial appointees to oversee six criminal cases involving Democrat fund-raisers and Clinton crony, Web Hubbell.
That’s not all. When he first got the Hsia case, Judge Friedman immediately dismissed all but one felony count against the Clinton-Gore rainmaker. An appeals court later overruled him, saying that he’d erred in dismissing those counts. Then, during trial, Friedman refused to allow crucial grand-jury testimony to be introduced. After the jury reached its guilty verdict, he dallied before entering a judgment of conviction (which usually follows a verdict immediately). And according to a BNA Money & Politics Report, a D.C.-based daily newsletter that first reported news of Hsia's reduced sentence, Friedman blocked prosecutors from securing tougher penalties. So much for strict enforcement of the Campaign Financing Laws by impartial judges.
Johnny Chung, together with John Huang, became the composite character named Johnny Chou in my afore-mentioned book, The China Connection. Chung, a California businessman, pled guilty in March 1998, to election law violations. The first to cooperate in the Justice Department’s campaign finance probe, he told a grand jury that China – specifically, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) - routed funds to influence the 1996 elections. He gave more than $350,000 dollars to the Democrat Party, which later returned the funds, but not until AFTER the Press had broken the story.
John Huang, a leading figure in the Justice Department’s investigation and, as mentioned above, one of the persons making up the composite character of Johnny Chou in my book, was not charged. The DNC returned $1.6 million dollars of the $3.4 million Huang raised in 1996, after officials determined that its sources were unknown or the money had come from foreign nationals. As explained in my book, Huang, a former official of the Lippo Group, also worked for the U.S. Commerce Department and the DNC, where he was a top fundraiser. The White House had arranged his DNC job.
James Tjahaja Riady, President of Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate, was a former employer of John Huang. Riady was also prominently mentioned in my book. He paid a record $8.6 million in criminal fines and pled guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the United States by unlawfully reimbursing campaign donors with foreign corporate funds in violation of federal election laws. Under the agreement jointly announced by the Justice Department's Campaign Financing Task Force and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles, Riady agreed to surrender himself to the court’s jurisdiction despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Indonesia. The fine was the largest ever imposed in a campaign finance matter in U.S. history.
In addition, LippoBank California, a California state-chartered bank affiliated with Lippo Group, pled guilty to 86 misdemeanor counts charging its agents, Riady and John Huang, with making illegal foreign campaign contributions from 1988 through 1994.
All in all, 26 people and two corporations were charged by the Campaign Financing Task Force, which was established by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate allegations of campaign financing abuses in the 1996 election cycle. The two corporations were Loral Space & Communications, Ltd and Hughes Electronics, although, as explained in my book, Lockheed-Martin was also implicated in violations of laws against the illegal transfer of “dual use technology” to foreign countries.
And now we have Norman Hsu.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, he arrived in the United States at age 18, obtained a B.A. degree in computer science from the University of California, and an MBA from the Wharton School in 1981. He made a small fortune in the garment industry, gained the trust of investors by his warm, friendly demeanor and educational credentials, but developed a reputation for changing addresses and leaving disgruntled investors behind. In 1990, he declared bankruptcy in Foster City, CA, and his wife divorced him. In 1991 California authorities brought fraud charges against him describing his operation as a Ponzi Scheme. In 1992, he pled no contest to one count of grand theft and agreed to serve three years in prison and pay a $10,000 dollar fine. However, he did not surrender to authorities, but fled to Hong Kong where he lived from 1992 to 1996, in luxury, until he again declared bankruptcy there. In the late 1990s he returned to the U.S. despite his fugitive status and in 2003 he began contributing to the Democrat Party.
By 2007, Hsu’s status within Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign had become that of a “Hillraiser,” someone who had demonstrated that he could “bundle” more than $100,000 dollars in contributions. He hosted a $1 million dollar fundraiser at wealthy Democrat supporter Ron Burke’s estate in Beverly Hills and was seen co-hosting several fundraising affairs with Loral’s Bernard Schwartz.
In September 2007, the Justice Department launched a formal investigation into campaign finance violations by Hsu and his associates. When it was revealed by the Wall Street Journal that Hsu’s outstanding warrant for failure to appear regarding his 1992 fraud conviction was still valid, he failed to appear for a bail hearing, and fled. However, he was arrested in Grand Junction, CO, after becoming ill on a train headed for Chicago.
In 2006, former President Clinton had referred to Hsu as “Our friend, Norman.” After indications of the scandal began to appear in he Press, and Hsu’s long time fugitive status was disclosed, 2008 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton began to disengage from Hsu. The campaign decided to refund $850,000 dollars in “bundled” contributions. Although she was the first candidate to give up “bundled” contributions from Hsu’s associates, her campaign had ignored earlier private warnings about Hsu. She was the largest recipient of such contributions from him, but her campaign did not begin to return donations until AFTER the scandal became public.
Has this type of activity contributed to Hillary’s recent string of primary losses to Barack Hussein Obama? After all, those losses just might say lots about the public’s desire to be done with the Clintons One would hope that Americans don’t want another soap opera presidency. Let’s hope the Clinton “magic” is now gone.
March 4 in Texas and Ohio should have driven a stake in the heart – and hopes- of Hillary Rodham Clinton to become the first woman president of the United States. It did not. She won Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island’s primaries to keep her floundering campaign alive. Yet, since Obama did not emerge a clear winner, the Democrat Party’s primary season will continue until at least June, in Pennsylvania. That should do it, although if I had my druthers, I’d prefer to see the two of them fight it out right up to the Democrat Convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver August 25-28, consuming energy and funds which might otherwise have been used to oppose John McCain earlier.
I think that we, but Democrats especially, don’t want to return to the non-stop scandal defense mode of the Bill Clinton years in Washington. Many Democrats sought to convince us that Bill’s nefarious actions were “all about sex” and nothing more. That’s absurd. We had the travel office caper, the subpoenaed billing records, Whitewater, Vince Foster, and the FALN; all of these kept special prosecutor Kenneth Starr running at top speed.
Paraphrasing a National Review writer whose name I cannot now recall, Bill and Hillary Clinton remind one of Nietzsche’s description of the will unbridled by ethical restraints. In the amoral exploits of Bill Clinton, we see grand ambition reduced to the pursuit of immorality and even treasonous behavior. Together, the Clintons make it difficult to believe that democratic politics can avoid the excesses of unbridled ambition, although I firmly believe that practiced by moral individuals, it can.
Any close analysis of the eight-year Clinton presence in the White House must lead to this conclusion: in this election year in which hollow, naked ambition draws closer to the presidency, we really do not want a repeat of the Clinton psychodrama as part of our daily lives – for another four years.
Anthony J. Sacco, a writer, licensed private investigator, author of two novels; The China Connection, and Little Sister Lost, and a biography, Echoes in the Wind, holds degrees from Loyola College of Maryland and the University of Maryland Law School. His articles have appeared in the Washington Times, Baltimore Sun, Voices for the Unborn, the Catholic Review, WREN Magazine and the Wyoming Catholic Register. E-mail him at AnthonyjSacco@hotmail.com and visit his blog at AnthonyjSaccosr.townhall.com. His work is also available at Triond, an Internet Magazine.