By Count Friedrich von Olsen
It goes without saying that I am a Republican. My sentiments are with the GOP, which will hopefully take back the White House after an interminable eight years of Democratic residence there…
I am bound by the Eleventh Commandment from speaking ill of any of my fellow Republicans. I have, at the moment, the inclination to speak ill of someone, so, quite appropriately I will frame my comments with regard to Hillary Clinton…
It may interest some that I have not rallied round the GOP standard as a recent series of attacks on the former First Lady and one-time Secretary of State have been made. That is because I think those attacks lack substance. She has been much criticized and was even the subject of Congressional Hearings over the so-called Bengazi Affair. As I understand it, a number of people want her head because as Secretary of State, she is deemed to somehow have been responsible for the outcome of chaotic events that occurred on 11 September 2012, when the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi was attacked by a heavily armed group of some 125 Ansar al-Sharia gunmen, what are described as Islamist militants. Before it was over U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service information officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors and former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed and ten other Americans injured…
I don’t buy it. I have been to Libya at less stressful times. It was never all that hospitable of a place for Westerners to begin with. The events of September 11, 2012, coming as they did in the aftermath of the dissolution of the rule of Muammar Khaddafi and as Libya was plunging ever deeper into chaos, were beyond the control of anyone. Yes, the State Department does speak with the authority of the U.S. Government in foreign countries and in diplomatic circles. The State Department and the Secretary of State indeed have influence. But that influence is not absolute and neither is the State Department’s authority. Even if she had been the Secretary of Defense, I do not believe she could have reacted to what was going on in Bengazi in time or with sufficient precision to stave off what occurred. Blaming her in that regard is disingenuous at best, intellectually dishonest and pointless. Would her critics have her order up surgical bombing missions against Libya’s second largest city accompanied by a special forces commando-style raid to pluck our diplomats, their staff and body guards out of harm’s way? She had neither the authority nor the resources to do this. When things rage out of control in places that are already inherently unstable, there is little anyone can do. Had the United States taken draconian action against citizens of another country inside that country and created collateral casualties, we would have been seen as Ugly Americans, which would have been a real setback to our diplomatic mission in numerous places around the world. My advice to my fellow Republicans is to drop this…
I am afraid I am a little too long in the tooth and unschooled in these modern and new-fangled means of communication to be prepared to condemn her over her use of her personal email server, whatever that entails, to communicate with others while she was Secretary of State. I have email, but it is handled for me entirely by my butler, Hudson, and my personal secretary, Miss Tompkins. I still own a typewriter. I am afraid that my understanding of the wonder of computerized technology that now engulfs the world has somehow passed me by. I appreciate, however, that emails are a form of electronic letter, the product of a modernized teletype, if you will, that is now pretty close to universally available. In using her own system, rather than the teletype link available to her through the State Department, Mrs. Clinton was apparently putting the security of her communications at risk, as there are today, of course, all order of pranksters, miscreants, thieves known as hackers and general mischief makers who take pride in tapping into these electronic communications. I appreciate that this could be a hazard when the person being tapped into is in the position of Secretary of State. So, perhaps she should have been a little more circumspect. But I consider this to be a pardonable sin. Certainly, Henry Stimson, who was the Secretary of War under one Republican president, William Howard Taft, and the Secretary of State under another Republican president, Herbert Hoover, was every bit as naïve as was this lady, Mrs. Clinton, who some 80 years later succeeded him as Secretary of State. Stimson elected to shut down the State Department’s cryptanalytic office saying, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail…”
Nor do I think that Hillary Clinton was having an affair with Vince Foster and that she murdered him…
Now, having said all that, let me unequivocally state that Hillary Clinton is absolutely unqualified to be President of the United States. In actuality, I think she has some nerve even running for the position…
How did she get into position to be considered a leading contender for the job? Let’s see: She was the First Lady. Her husband, who incidentally wasn’t that good of a president, publicly embarrassed her. Through a combination of sympathy votes, her name recognition and gender politics, she became a senator. Using much of the same formula, she wangled being appointed Secretary of State. After six lackluster years in that capacity, she thinks she merits being president. That is perhaps not surprising, given her arrogance. What is surprising is that a goodly number of the American population is abetting her in her arrogance…
Come we now to something of substance that should disqualify her: her involvement in the Whitewater Scandal…
In late 1978, Jim and Susan McDougal and Bill and Hillary Clinton borrowed $203,000 to buy 230 acres of undeveloped land along the south bank of the White River near Flippin, Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains. They intended to subdivide the site into lots for vacation homes they could sell to gullible Northerners from places like Illinois, Ohio and New York. They promoted it with paeans to low property taxes, fishing, rafting, and mountain scenery. They created the Whitewater Development Corporation, incorporated on June 18, 1979, in which all four participants had equal shares, to facilitate all of this. They soon gave up on actually developing the property, instead hoping to make the enterprise look like a going concern and then sell it at a profit. They built a single “model home,” with which they angled to lure in future suckers, er I mean, investors.
Bill Clinton, who was Arkansas Attorney General when this idea was hatched and then later Arkansas governor as it came to fruition, was in a vulnerable position because Jim McDougal could expose to the public, if he chose, that the governor was up to no good and involved in real estate fraud. He began pressuring the governor and his wife for money, checks to cover this and that. Bill Clinton also appointed Jim McDougal as his economic aide when Clinton was governor, in spite of the consideration that his advice with regard to the Whitewater deal was suspect, at best.
When Clinton lost his reelection bid in 1980, McDougal became a banker, acquiring the Bank of Kingston in 1980 and the Woodruff Savings & Loan in 1982, renaming them the Madison Bank & Trust and the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, respectively. Later, Bill Clinton was again elected Arkansas Governor and McDougal used his banks to help retire some of Bill Clinton’s campaign debt…
In 1985, Jim McDougal, with his business partner now again Arkansas governor, began investing in local residential construction, under the aegis of the Castle Grande project. This thousand acre venture south of Little Rock required $1.75 million up front, more than McDougal could manage on his own since financial laws would not allow him to borrow more than $600,000 from his own savings and loan, Madison Guaranty. McDougal brought in others, among them Seth Ward, an employee of the bank, who helped funnel the additional $1.15 million required. To avoid regulators poking their noses into the deal, they engaged in a shell game, in which the money was moved back and forth among several other investors and intermediaries. Hillary Clinton, then an attorney at Little Rock-based Rose Law Firm, provided legal services to Castle Grande…
In 1986, federal regulators learned that all of the funding for the real estate venture had come entirely from Madison Guaranty. In July of that year, McDougal resigned from Madison Guaranty. Seth Ward fell under investigation, along with the lawyer who helped him draft the agreement. Castle Grande earned $2 million in commissions and fees for McDougal’s business associates, as well as an unknown amount of legal fees by Hillary Clinton’s law firm. In 1989 the entire Castle Grande undertaking collapsed, at a cost to the government of $4 million, and triggering the failure of Madison Guaranty, which federal regulators then had to take over. Taking place in the midst of the nationwide savings and loan crisis, the failure of Madison Guaranty cost the United States $73 million…
On paper, the Clintons lost between $37,000 and $69,000 on their Whitewater investment, a lesser amount than the McDougals lost. This unequal distribution of the liability suggests that Bill Clinton, as governor was using his office to engineer some tawdry things to benefit the partnership instead of being directly financially involved…
After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, questions about the Whitewater matter became of national interest. Vince Foster, who was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, committed suicide in July 1993. Within hours of the Foster’s death, chief White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum removed documents, some of them concerning the Whitewater Development Corporation, from Foster’s office and gave them to Maggie Williams, chief of staff to the First Lady. Williams placed them in a safe in the White House for five days before turning them over to their personal lawyer…
There were several investigations into the matter that never really got to the bottom of things. One of these was the Pillsbury Report, a $3 million study done for the Resolution Trust Corporation by the Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro law firm at the time that Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan was dissolved. The report concluded that James McDougal, had acted as the lead on much of what went on. In time, with questions still reverberating around Washington and the country, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the failed Whitewater deal, with Robert B. Fiske being appointed by then Attorney General Janet Reno to carry out the probe. Fiske was replaced by Kenneth Starr…
Things at one point were looking bad for the Clintons, with one witness, David Hale, alleging that Bill Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal. But Starr somehow got sidetracked into the relationship between Bill Clinton and White House intern Monical Lewinsky. That so engrossed the investigators, Washington, the press and the country that the real substance of Whitewater was lost and never given a full explication. Had it been, Bill and Hillary Clinton might be in prison. Instead, Mrs. Clinton became the object of national sympathy, then a senator and then Secretary of State and we are now where we are today…