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HenchPAC NewsThursday March 16, 2000; 10:04 AM EST
Hillary Tapping Whitewater Friends for Campaign Cash With fifty-six percent of the funding for First Lady Hillary Clinton's US Senate campaign against New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani coming from outside the state, it's not surprising that some of her most prominent contributors should hail from her previous hometown, Washington, DC.
But what does surprise is the number of DC donors with connections to Whitewater, Chinagate, Sexgate and other White House ethics battles; turning the list of Hillary's Washington backers into a veritable who's who of Clinton scandal figures.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Williams and Connolly attorney Robert Barnett kicked in $500 to Hillary's campaign coffers last October. Barnett was the Clintons' personal lawyer before Whitewater hit the fan. He was summoned to the White House a week after Vince Foster's death to take possession of documents that had been secretly removed from the Foster's office and stored in Hillary's bedroom closet.
James Hamilton, another Washington lawyer who played a central role in the Foster case, contributed a total of $2,000 in two installments just a little over a month apart last fall. By some accounts, Foster himself had selected Hamilton to fight allegations he expected to emerge from the Travelgate scandal.
Other testimony suggests that Hillary's disgraced ex-Rose Law partner Webb Hubbell recruited Hamilton to keep the police and the media at bay after the deputy White House counsel was found shot to death in an out of the way Virginia park.
Hamilton, for instance, refused to let investigators question Foster's widow for nine days.
Lloyd Cutler, one the Democratic Party's legal wise men, gave Mrs. Clinton $500 in December. Cutler was hired to replace White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who was forced to resign after questions arose about his conduct in the wake of Foster's death.
Nussbaum had searched Foster's briefcase and declared it empty as FBI agents and Park Police looked on. Four days later Nussbaum produced a suspect suicide note from the same briefcase, which he claimed to have overlooked during his first search.
Bob Nash, who succeeded Patsy Thomasson as White House personnel director, has given Hillary $250 so far. Thomasson had been chief lieutenant to Dan Lasater, a longtime financial backer of Bill Clinton who did jail time for cocaine distribution.
Nash was an officer in Clinton's controversial Arkansas Development and Finance Authority; the economic development agency that ended up creating a paltry few hundred jobs -- despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in state bond business it awarded to Lasater & Co, Stephens, Inc. and other favored investment houses.
Nash was grilled by Senate Whitewater probers about his knowledge of Castle Grande, the Little Rock land development covered in the First Lady's mysteriously disappearing Rose Law billing records.
Nash is one of four current White House employees listed on Hillary's DC donor list. Clinton underling Maria Echaveste gave $1,000. White House workers Janis Kearney and Marjorie Tarmey gave $500 each.
Onetime Watergate wunderkind Richard BenVeniste was resurrected as the Democrats chief Senate Whitewater Counsel. You'd think battling committee chairman Sen. Al D'Amato and opposing counsel Michael Chertoff to a stalemate would be service enough. But BenVeniste is still pitching for the Clintons, ponying up $1,000 in December to make Hillary a senator.
In between Watergate and Whitewater, BenVeniste represented Mena, Arkansas drug-smuggling kingpin Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal.
White House counsel Lanny Davis, who cut his teeth as a Clinton scandal spinner during the campaign finance probe, gave Hillary $1,000 last December. Davis weathered the Monicagate storm, then resigned after his boss was acquitted on impeachment charges in the Senate. An inveterate Clinton apologist, Davis continues to spin away freelance on cable TV.
Earlier this year, Davis was named in a Privacy Act lawsuit filed against the White House by Clinton rape accuser Juanita Broaddrick.
The appearance of another Chinagate figure on Hillary's DC donor list is something of an eyebrow raiser, given the costs of his family's involvement with the Clintons. Michael Brown, son of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, gave Hillary $250 in December.
Michael Brown pled guilty to campaign finance charges in 1998 and received a slap-on-the-wrist sentence. But questions about his father's 1996 plane crash death while on a trade mission to Croatia compelled the Brown family to hire their own private pathologist to examine photographic evidence. Despite indications of a possible gunshot wound, Clinton officials had refused to conduct an autopsy on Secretary Brown.
Michael Brown's sister Tracy has publicly complained about the Air Force's failure to thoroughly investigate her father's plane crash.
Mrs. Clinton has also put the touch on her chief political guru Harold Ickes, who kicked in $2,000 last December. Ickes, Bill Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, has been suboenaed as a witness in just about every Clinton scandal and narrowly missed having an independent counsel assigned to look into his own suspect fund-raising practices.
When it comes to playing political hardball, no one has a tougher reputation than Ickes. In New York City's 1974 mayoral race Ickes got into a brawl with a political rival and bit him on the leg.
Vernon Jordan ponied up $1,000 for Hillary last July, just six months after he escaped indictment for his role in Monicagate. At the president's behest, Jordan tried to find Lewinsky an out-of-town job after she was subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case.
When that didn't work out, Jordan recruited Washington lawyer Frank Carter, who helped the White House intern prepare a false affidavit denying a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. Carter is currently defending Carl Derek Cooper, the accused killer of another White House intern, Mary Caity Mahoney.
$1,000 contributor Mickey Kantor helped manage Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and reportedly recruited private eyes like Jack Palladino to handle "bimbo eruptions." Some say he was instrumental in luring former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen out of the country with acting jobs that kept her too busy to testify in the Paula Jones case.
A Gracen friend told Jones investigators the beauty queen tearfully confided that Clinton had raped her.
Mack McLarty, the longtime presidential friend who broke the news about Foster's death to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, isn't on the list of Hillary's DC donors. But his wife, Donna, is -- with a cool $2,000 in contributions last October.
So is Terry Lenzner, the White House's favorite private investigator, who dug dirt on Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey and other women linked to Clinton. Lenzner was good for a $1,000 donation last August.
Brooke and Derek Shearer, who are both linked to Lenzner as onetime employees of his Investigative Group International, ponied up $1,000 and $500 respectively. Brooke, who happens to be the wife of Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, is said to be reknowned for her evidence gathering prowess, described by some as "dumpster diving."
Former Arkansas Senator David Pryor forked over a mere $250 to Hillary in October. But he made a substantial contribution to both Clintons' political well-being in 1997, when he tried to talk Paula Jones Judge Susan Webber Wright into going easy on the President. Wright said she tried to halt the unethical conversation but was powerless to stop the determined Pryor.
Six months later Wright tossed the Paula Jones case out of court.
Hillary's DC donor list brings to mind an old New York saying popular in the city's pre-Giuliani days: No matter where you go, you're never more than a few feet away from the scene of a crime.
HENCH adds: Could you come up with a scummier list of sleazeballs? Nope, I didn't think so.
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