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Commentary: Blumenthal on the record

By PETER ROFF, UPI National Political Analyst

WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- It has yet to be determined how history will regard the Clinton presidency.

Some believe his administration was marked by a series of scandals involving lust, greed and deceit that bordered on the criminal. Others, with equal fervor, believe a vast, right-wing conspiracy manipulated the media, the political process and the U.S. legal system to stop a progressive administration from enacting the reforms it had been elected to pursue.

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Most, perhaps, would just as soon forget the whole thing. As the old saying goes, where you stand depends on where you sit.

The publication of Sidney Blumenthal's memoir of the period, "The Clinton Wars," means the bidding war for history has officially begun.

A former journalist, Blumenthal sat at the right hand of power inside the White House, providing advice and counsel to both Clintons. That his passion for the subject has not dimmed was evident during a recent talk at Washington's National Press Club.

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The audience, mostly Clinton supporters, came to hear him set the record straight. They wanted to hear Clinton praised and the Republicans buried. Blumenthal did not disappoint.

A voluble balding man seated in the second row set the tone for the evening. Arriving early, he engaged an older woman behind him in a conversation that was loud enough for the other eight people in the room to hear.

George W. Bush, he said, "Was the product of three generations of a criminal conspiracy," involving the current president's father, a former president of the United States; and grandfather, a former U.S. senator. The current Bush reflects "the narrow-minded, bigoted xenophobia of west Texas," where he was raised.

No one who has come to hear Blumenthal this night appears to question their feelings about the whole business. The room is about half to two-thirds full as he enters at the appointed time. Soft-spoken yet earnest, he presents his case with all the conviction of a man who believes his view of events is, pardon the pun, unimpeachably correct.

Dressed in a dark suit that stands out against the institutional cream and dark blue décor suggestive of a meeting room in a Midwestern motel, Blumenthal seems a polished Washington operative rather than a rumpled former reporter.

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As a writer for The Washington Post, The New Republic and The New Yorker magazine, he wrote about politics in way that suggested he enjoyed skewering conservatives. He certainly acquired the reputation for not liking them very much. Some on the right still believe the principle reason he was brought onto the White House staff was to monitor and report on the opposition.

The audience hangs on his words. An occasional gasp pierces the silence as he lands an apparently telling rhetorical blow against former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

It is Starr and the Republican congressional leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde who are, according to this self-appointed Boswell, the villains of the piece.

For those not listening to hear their assumptions affirmed, the observations about Clinton seem hyperbolic and out of synch with the actual record.

He begins by briefly recounting their first meeting, in March of 1993, when Clinton made "a pilgrimage" to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt home and library in Hyde Park, N.Y. "Clinton sought to identify his innovations with the Rooseveltian spirit," Blumenthal says. "(He) had seen for himself the reliquaries, and now he could fix his sights on the road ahead. ... 'I belong here,' he remarked to me as he left."

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The crowd nods in silent assent as Blumenthal explains how Clinton, like Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, was "castigated" for his effort to expand the democracy. The attacks on these other progressives, he says, provide the context for understanding the events surrounding Clinton's presidency.

Eventually, he speaks the comparison everyone can see coming. Clinton and Kennedy, "who passed the torch to Clinton, shaking his hand as a young man," he says without any trace of irony. He gives no hint that anyone might find the linkage forced or melodramatic as he anoints Clinton as the martyred leader's successor.

There is also no reference to what some might think the most obvious similarity: Mimi Fahnestock, recently identified by historian Robert Dallek as having been a Kennedy mistress while a White House intern. Clinton's own dalliance with an intern is well documented.

The spin Blumenthal puts forward, masked as analysis, is the same as that uttered by countless operatives during Clinton's presidency.

Among the arguments:

-- The independent counsel behaved in an unethical fashion and leaked secret grand jury information to preferred reporters.

-- Starr himself pursued a case where none existed, driven by a religious zeal.

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-- The Clintons were "exonerated" many times by many agencies in the Whitewater matter but the national media failed to report it.

These statements, along with others he speaks and writes, are a matter of interpretation rather than fact.

Pro-Clinton spinners like Blumenthal typically ignore or downplay former Attorney General Janet Reno's finding that "substantial and credible" evidence existed that federal criminal laws may have been violated in the matter of Whitewater-Madison Guaranty.

Blumenthal does not mention this, proclaiming only innocence and exoneration.

Nor does he mention that the grant of jurisdiction to the independent counsel extended to whether there were violations of federal criminal law relating to James McDougal's or the Clintons' relationships to Madison, Whitewater Development Corporation or Capital Management Services, Inc. -- the investigation of which resulted in numerous guilty pleas and convictions to felony violations of federal criminal law by juries.

The idea that no crimes were committed and that the many investigations were all for naught, as Blumenthal seems to want others to believe, is a false flag.

Going back to beginning of it all, Blumenthal describes Whitewater as a small real estate deal on which the young Clinton, not yet governor of Arkansas, "lost all his money." This is separate and apart from the actual issue, something the spin machine did its best to obscure.

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As one former OIC attorney says, the real concern was illegal land transactions and loans to insiders in violation of federal bank regulations and subsequent efforts to hide those illegal transactions. When pressed, the attorney says the final OIC report is the authoritative source.

What does it say?

According to the report, one illegal series of transactions on which federal regulators focused involved sales of land in a project known as Castle Grande. McDougal would sell parcels of land among insiders, the report states, with each transaction resulting in artificially and illegally inflated values.

This was done in order to make Madison Guaranty's books appear healthier than they really were by booking artificial profits on the fraudulent transactions. Madison itself provided loans to the insiders to finance the transactions, and then paid insiders like Susan McDougal substantial "commissions" on fraudulent sales.

One such transaction involved Webster Hubbell's father-in-law, Seth Ward, who acted as a straw man so that McDougal/Madison could purchase a sewer utility that federal laws otherwise prohibited Madison purchasing. McDougal and Ward, the report says, engaged in a series of complicated financial transactions intended to pay Ward a substantial amount of money for playing the part.

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But, as the OIC report also indicates, the true nature of the transactions needed to remain hidden so that the regulators would not find out about the insider dealings -- or that they placed Madison at substantial risk of insolvency.

Madison ultimately failed, costing federal taxpayers more than $70 million to cover the federally insured institutions losses.

What does all this have to do with the Clintons?

One transaction involved a complicated option agreement and promissory notes intended to disguise the true nature of the transactions from federal regulators. This is, as the OIC report notes, a federal crime.

The bank regulators later testified that they were indeed deceived by these agreements.

Rose Law Firm billing records would later show that on May 1, 1986, Hillary Clinton, a firm partner, billed 2.0 hours of time for drafting this option agreement and discussing it with Seth Ward.

This is a critically important fact, as it can be used to test the veracity of statements Hillary Clinton made under oath. It would not, however, become known until 1996 because, until then, the records were missing. The subject of at least one subpoena dating back to before Starr's appointment, their whereabouts were unknown until they mysteriously reappeared in the Clintons' private quarters in the White House.

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Both Clintons and Hubbell, when questioned by investigators in the pre-Starr period, repeatedly asserted they could not recall the details of the transactions as they occurred too long ago.

The billing records provide documentary evidence as to what work had been done and for whom.

The OIC report says that, before they went missing, they were last known to be in the possession of future White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster and future Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell -- who had them on the 1992 Clinton campaign bus. Both men had worked at Rose with Hillary Clinton and, after The New York Times first wrote about Whitewater, it became necessary to come up with an official version of events.

When the records finally reappeared in January 1996, more than 18 months had elapsed since the original subpoena.

Foster's office, in the period immediately after White House insiders learned of his death, became a gathering place for friends and colleagues. The official line remains that they came to grieve. Nevertheless, there are those who continue to suggest what was actually going on was a search for these same records.

Blumenthal, responding to a question from the audience, shrugs the whole thing off with a laugh. He blames an older woman who came to the White House from Arkansas with the Clintons -- identified elsewhere as Caroline Huber -- for the inability to produce the documents. She packed and unpacked many boxes and they just got lost, he seems to say.

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When finally examined, the records did not, as some have implied, provide proof of her innocence. At best, they suggest further inquiry is warranted.

Blumenthal avoids the details, remaining focused on his belief that the Clintons were repeatedly exonerated, that they turned over every requested document "they were aware of." His near-Clintonesque parsing of words and phrases gives the skeptical plenty of reason to wonder if he is still spinning.

Recalling his experience with House managers during the Senate impeachment trial, Blumenthal speaks and writes how California U.S. Rep. Jim Rogan and South Carolina U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham approached him as he entered the chamber.

"Rogan and Graham came in. Rogan headed straight for me and extended his hand. I shook it. 'If there's anyone here who wants to be here less than you, it's me,' he said. 'Oh,' I replied. 'That's right,' he said. 'I'm, we're, on the wrong side of history," Blumenthal writes.

A nice gesture but, according to Rogan, it did not happen. Someone may have said those things, he says, but it wasn't him and it wasn't Lindsey Graham.

"I would not have knowingly given up my seat in the U.S. House of Representatives... if I thought we were on the wrong side of history," an incredulous Rogan says, knowing full well that his role as a House manager likely cost him his seat in his 2000 bid for re-election in an increasingly Democrat-leaning seat.

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Blumenthal's new book has given the Clinton wars new life. Partisans on both extremes remain hungry for new information, looking for the magic bullet that will prove them right and allow them to stamp "Closed" on the case file.

In truth, it will probably never end. Those with their own theories will, like those who are convinced a conspiracy was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, will never be persuaded otherwise. In documentaries 20 years hence they will quote chapter and verse from the reports, the documents and the depositions, speculating about this scandal's version of the gunman on the grassy knoll.

The scandals drove the public attitudes about the Clintons. Conservatives and liberals battled it out on the 24-hour "all Clinton, all the time" news channels in a "he said, she said" argument. It confused more than it enlightened, creating a complex web of spin. The rules in the court of public opinion are, after all, different from those in a court of law.

Blumenthal calls this period "The Clinton Wars." It was, he believes, a time when the presidency itself was under assault. His is only the first of what will likely be many efforts to shape the historical record. His book, and the subsequent promotional tour, nicely paves the way for the others who will soon follow.

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Once he has finished he work helping the public recall the facts of the matter, then they will be prepared to hear from former first lady Hillary Clinton. Her book, her memoir, is expected by summer's end. The small crowd at the press club this night seems eager for it to appear.

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