The Scooter Libby-Marc Rich connection

[okieredust]

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/s...onnection.html

Monday, October 31, 2005

The Scooter Libby-Marc Rich connection

As I pointed out on Friday, you can make a lot of money being a mob lawyer, but in return you normally have to sacrifice your ambitions for positions of power and trust in the government. Nobody would allow John Gotti's lawyer to become "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney," but, until very recently, there were few vocal objections to I. Lewis Libby, the long-time lawyer for world-class mobster Marc Rich, being a key player in the White House for the last half decade. Why the double standard?

Jim Pinkerton writes in Newsday:

... Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York flailed at Libby, declaring the alleged actions of Vice President Dick Cheney's now-former chief of staff to be "reprehensible."

Clinton must be careful, however, because Libby's past legal career is closely intertwined with her husband's presidency. During the 1980s and 1990s, Libby was a lawyer for Marc Rich.

And if you don't remember Marc Rich, you will be reminded of him soon enough. He's the American financier who skipped out of the United States in 1983, one step ahead of a $48-million tax bill and a 51-count indictment for various skullduggeries, including trading with Iran amidst the American hostage crisis. As Rich's lawyer over the next two decades, Libby collected, by his own estimate, some $2 million in fees.

Wait, there's more. In January 2001, outgoing President Bill Clinton gave Rich a pardon. Interestingly, Rich's ex-wife, Denise, donated more than a million dollars to Democratic causes around then, including $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign and $450,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Libby denied having anything to do with the pardon effort, but admitted he had called Rich on January 22, 2001 - which is to say, after he started working for Cheney - to congratulate him on his getting off. And Libby's powerful presence inside the White House - his title was assistant to George W. Bush as well chief of staff to Cheney - might help explain why the incoming Bush administration failed to pursue obvious threads of corruption trailing out of President Clinton's pardon of Rich and other dubious figures.

For his part, Rich shows no signs of behaving better. Still wheeling and dealing out of Switzerland, he is a featured nogoodnik in the new UN report on Saddam Hussein and the UN's corrupt Oil for Food program. Which is to say, investigators might wish to look into any continuing Libby-Rich links.

Back in 2001, Clinton wrote in the NYT to explain his pardon of Rich:

7) the case for the pardons was reviewed and advocated not only by my former White House counsel Jack Quinn but also by three distinguished Republican attorneys: Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; William Bradford Reynolds, a former high-ranking official in the Reagan Justice Department; and Lewis Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff;

After first scoffing at Clinton's citation of Libby's involvement, Byron York changed his tune in National Review Online after he listened to Libby's testimony:

Bad Night for the GOP: Lewis Libby comes to Marc Rich’s defense.

March 2, 2001 8:55 a.m.

Lewis Libby, a top Republican lawyer who is now vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told the House Government Reform Committee last night that he agreed with much of Bill Clinton's widely discredited op-ed article outlining the former president's reasons for pardoning fugitive tax evader Marc Rich.

In a session that stretched late into the evening, Libby, who represented Rich for several years ending in the spring of 2000, told the committee he believes Rich is not guilty of the tax and racketeering charges filed by federal prosecutors in 1983. Libby also said he "quite possibly" would have considered applying for a pardon for Rich had Rich asked him to do so.

Libby, who said his law firms collected as much as $2 million for representing Rich, testified he had nothing to do with the application that led to clemency for Rich. He declined to say whether he approved of the decision to pardon Rich, but he conceded that he called Rich on January 22, two days after the pardon, to "congratulate him on having reached a result that he had sought for a long time." Libby testified he made the call from his home to make clear that he was calling in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of the Bush administration.

In a particularly damaging exchange with Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski , Libby agreed that Rich might be characterized as a traitor for fleeing the country and renouncing his American citizenship. Kanjorski asked Libby why he would call a traitor to congratulate him on his good fortune in winning a pardon. Visibly uncomfortable, Libby had no answer.

For Republicans, Libby's testimony was a sour endnote to what had been a long day of revelations that made President Clinton's decision to pardon Rich seem even more inexplicable than previously thought.

Pinkerton served in the Reagan and first Bush White Houses, but I think he's being naive to think that the Libby-Rich connection will be given much of an airing in the press. They've had close to five years to discuss it and it's never gotten any traction.

Why not?

Clinton argued in defense of his pardon for Rich:

(8) finally, and importantly, many present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties and leaders of Jewish communities in America and Europe urged the pardon of Mr. Rich because of his contributions and services to Israeli charitable causes, to the Mossad's efforts to rescue and evacuate Jews from hostile countries, and to the peace process through sponsorship of education and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank.

That appears to be plausible. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff broke a story in August 2001 based on transcripts of phone conversations between Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak:

Barak first raised the issue with Clinton on Dec. 11, 2000, the same day Jack Quinn, Rich's newly hired lawyer (and former Clinton White House counsel) submitted a thick pardon application that included a personal letter from Rich's ex-wife Denise requesting the pardon be granted.

In that first conversation, Barak described Rich as a "Jewish American businessman" who was "making a lot of philanthropic contributions to Israeli institutions and activities like education."

Barak acknowledged that Rich had "violated certain rules of the game in the United States." But "I just wanted to let you know that here he is highly appreciated," the Israeli leader said. Clinton was not caught off guard by the information. "I know about the case because I know his ex-wife. She wants to help him, too. If your ex-wife wants to help you, that's good."

Barak raised the issue of a Rich pardon a second time on Jan. 8, 2001, with less than two weeks left in Clinton's presidency. "I believe it could be important (gap) not just financially, but he helped Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] on more than one case." [The word "gap" is typically used when note-takers cannot make out a garbled word or sentence.]

Clinton, who described the case as "bizarre," warned Barak: "It's best that we not say much about that." "Okay, I'm not mentioning it anyplace," Barak said.

In their third conversation, on Jan. 19, transcripts show the two leaders spoke by phone for 22 minutes, between 2:47 p.m. and 3:09 p.m., and that it was Clinton and not Barak who raised the Rich matter that afternoon.

"I'm trying to do something on clemency for Rich, but it is very difficult," Clinton said. "Might it move forward?" Barak asked. The president ruminated about the problems he was facing.

"I'm working on that, but I'm not sure. There's nothing illegal about it, but there's no precedent. He was overseas when he was indicted and never came home."

Clinton concluded that the question "is not whether he should get it or not, but whether he should get it without coming back here. That's the dilemma I'm working through."

The Forward newspaper of New York (formerly the Jewish Daily Forward), which provides better coverage of this kind of issue than the mainstream media, reported in 2003:

Marc Rich, the pardoned tax fugitive, has given away more than $100 million in the last two decades, according to an elegant, hard-bound history of his philanthropic work issued recently by his foundation.

It turns out, though, that even if recipients returned every penny, it still might not be enough to settle his tax bill. New York state tax authorities told the Forward that a two-year-old warrant seeking $137 million from Rich in unpaid state taxes and fines remains outstanding.

The billionaire financier is best known as the recipient of a controversial January 2001 pardon from then-president Bill Clinton. Rich had fled the United States for Europe in 1983 shortly before a grand jury indicted him on charges that he and his associates plotted to evade $48 million in federal taxes and violated sanctions against Iran while Americans were being held hostage there.

But the Switzerland-based Rich Foundation for Education, Culture and Welfare is highlighting another side of Rich's activities during the last two decades. In recent months, it has mailed out approximately 1,000 copies of a hard-bound, 105-page commemorative book detailing 20 years of Rich's charitable work. The book has been sent to other foundations, non-profit organizations and journalists around the world, said Avner Azulay, the Rich Foundation's Israel-based managing director, in an e-mail to the Forward.

Between 1981 and 2001, Rich's foundations gave approximately $115 million to nearly 1,200 organizations in more than 50 countries, according to the book. The majority of Rich's giving — $60.2 million — has been in Israel, where he has funded a diverse array of cultural, educational, social welfare and Jewish-Arab coexistence projects. Rich has also given widely to both Jewish and non-Jewish causes in Latin America and Europe, and he donated $395,000 to fund projects, such as public-health efforts, in the Palestinian territories....

Azulay, a former Mossad agent, said that questions about Rich's legal issues and personal matters are "irrelevant to the Rich Foundation's activity, before or after the pardon." Rich did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment.

One of Rich's most prominent gifts was to Birthright Israel, the $210 million Jerusalem-based partnership between Jewish communities around the world, the Israeli government and Diaspora Jewish philanthropists that has brought 40,000 young Jews on trips to Israel since 2000. As one of its philanthropic partners, Rich pledged $5 million to the program.

Rich, who has renounced his American citizenship, has been more modest in his giving to programs in the United States — such gifts total only $3.7 million...

Only 17 American Jewish groups and institutions are listed in the commemorative book as having received funding for American-based projects, including, among others, several yeshivas, the Center for Jewish History in New York and the Anti-Defamation League.

Rich's giving, and the suspicion that it contributed to the willingness of prominent American Jews and Israeli officials to support his clemency effort, sparked an uproar in some segments of the American Jewish community.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, blasted those who had supported Rich's pardon appeal after accepting his money. Writing in a February 2001 opinion article, the Reform leader argued that the fugitive's supporters "were bought" by his philanthropy.

Prominent individuals associated with Birthright Israel wrote to the president urging him to pardon Rich. So did the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, whose organization received $250,000 from Rich. Foxman later declared at a press conference that it had "probably" been a mistake to lobby Clinton for the pardon...

A new round of publicity regarding the pardon appeared to be avoided late last month, when U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler upheld the right of the Bush administration to deny public access to records on the 177 pardons and commutations Clinton approved on his last day in office.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

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Okie- prescient article, especially written as it is almost two years ago, eons before the Libby pardon. Looking through our archives on Libby, Sertorious in an old post was the only person here I could find that mentioned this connection.

Sounds like Libby was well experienced in getting pardons using both legal kill with the appropriate political connections.

[Blond Knight]

Okie, great post!

Squinty Eyed Pat nails a home run with his explanation of Shrub's giving Irving Libby a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-Card.

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http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/070705_scooter.htm

July 05, 2007
How Scooter Skated

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Why did Bush do it?

Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby?

For, from his own statement, Bush found the act deeply distasteful.

In that statement, Bush calls Libby's crimes "serious convictions of perjury and obstruction of justice." He praises Patrick Fitzgerald as "a highly qualified professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged."

Bush indicated no disagreement with the verdict.

"[A] jury of citizens weighed all the evidence and listened to all the testimony and found Mr. Libby guilty of perjury and obstructing justice. . . . our entire system of justice relies on people telling the truth. And if a person does not tell the truth, particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must be held accountable."

"I respect the jury's verdict," Bush added.

Bush went on to detail the punishments that will stand.

"My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. . . . The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant and private citizen will be long-lasting."

This reads like the preamble to Judge Reggie Walton's imposition of the two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Yet, this is contained in Bush's explanation for wiping out Libby's entire sentence. It is mystifying.

Why did Bush do it? Why did he intervene at all? Why now? Why not let Scooter go to jail and commute the sentence at Christmas, if he thought it excessive?

The suddenness of Bush's action is easiest explained. Hours before he tossed his commutation statement to the press, the court had turned down Libby's last request that he be allowed to stay out of prison as his appeal is heard. Bush's need to act was obvious. Scooter was on his way to prison.

But why did Bush rush to spare him even one day behind bars?

Three explanations come to mind.

The first is that Bush capitulated to intense pressure from the neoconservative commentariat led by The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

To these folks, Scooter is no felon. Scooter is a hero. In the neocon network, Scooter was the pivot man in the veep's office moving the cherry-picked intel on Saddam's WMD, Saddam's nukes, Saddam's ties to 9/11 and al Qaeda to a collaborationist press as determined as he was to smash Iraq and Iran, secure Israel and control the Middle East.

So what if Scooter lied to cover up the White House campaign to carve up Joe Wilson? If Scooter did it, good Straussian that he is, he did it for the highest of motives in the noblest of causes.

To the neocons, Scooter is, in Ahmed Chalabi's phrase, "a hero in error," one of the boys. And as they saved him from the slammer, they will not stop until they secure him a pardon -- to which Bush has now opened the door.

The second explanation is that Vice President Cheney went to Bush, closed the door, and asked, as a personal favor, that he spare Cheney's faithful friend and loyal aide the disgrace and pain of prison. And Bush did this distasteful and shameful act at the behest of a vice president to whom he feels an immense debt.

The third explanation is that Cheney, and perhaps the president, fears that if Scooter goes to prison, and is staring at disgrace and 30 months away from friends and family, he may think he has been abandoned by people whose secrets he kept at the cost of reputation and freedom. An idle mind being the devil's workshop, Scooter might sit down and write a book, or phone "Bulldog" Fitzgerald and tell him he just remembered something.

Whatever the motives of President Bush, this was a radical not a conservative act. Whoever pressured Bush to wipe out Scooter's sentence was more a friend of Scooter than a friend of Bush. For the president has damaged his reputation as a just ruler, so Scooter could elude what other men have to face.

Will the student deferments for these fellows never end?

The act reeks of cronyism. The perception is that Scooter Libby got preferential treatment, a get-out-of-jail-free card because he was chief of staff to Cheney and assistant to Bush.

That perception is correct.

Because of whom he knew, Scooter got preferential treatment, big-time. The Godfather took care of the consigliere.

Nothing new. After all, one recalls that the attorney who rustled up a pardon for Marc Rich from Bill Clinton was also a Beltway hustler by the name of Scooter Libby. The insiders take care of their own.

And that is how the game is played in the big city.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.

[okieredust]

Okie, great post!

Squinty Eyed Pat nails a home run with his explanation of Shrub's giving Irving Libby a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-Card.

Well he does make solid contact.

The third explanation is that Cheney, and perhaps the president, fears that if Scooter goes to prison, and is staring at disgrace and 30 months away from friends and family, he may think he has been abandoned by people whose secrets he kept at the cost of reputation and freedom. An idle mind being the devil's workshop, Scooter might sit down and write a book, or phone "Bulldog" Fitzgerald and tell him he just remembered something.

However, I don't think he nails the full depth of it.

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http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/070705_scooter.htm


Will the student deferments for these fellows never end?

The act reeks of cronyism. The perception is that Scooter Libby got preferential treatment, a get-out-of-jail-free card because he was chief of staff to Cheney and assistant to Bush.

That perception is correct.

Because of whom he knew, Scooter got preferential treatment, big-time. The Godfather took care of the consigliere.

Nothing new. After all, one recalls that the attorney who rustled up a pardon for Marc Rich from Bill Clinton was also a Beltway hustler by the name of Scooter Libby. The insiders take care of their own.

And that is how the game is played in the big city.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com.

Reading about Marc Rich one appreciates a little more "how they took care of one's own".

Clearly "Scooter" Libby is not just Cheney's equivalent of Nixon's Rosemary what-her-face, (who put that 17 minute erasure in his tape), as he sort of is decribed in the media. Rather clearly, he is in the same league as Rich himself (how else would he be his attorney).

But I don't blame Pat too much. Getting into the full depth of this is a little much for decent men's stomach.

[Blond Knight]

Here's more dirt on Irving Libby. Even if you do not agree with the conclusions of the author, it adds more fuel to the fire.

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http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot....n-and-911.html

Scooter Libby's Pardon and 9/11

Scooter Libby's pardon begs the question of what he would have talked about had he been truly faced with prison. Whatever it was, it was important enough for Bush to grant Libby a last-second reprieve so he wouldn't have to go to jail.

I thought back to something I had tripped upon a while ago, something that involved Libby, which happened on September 10, 2001, the day before the twin towers were struck.

On the CNN site, in a timeline available from this page, I found this stunning entry:

SEPTEMBER 10, 2001 A CIA plan to strike at al Qaeda in Afghanistan, including support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, is given to the White House. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asks for a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney. The California Democrat is told that Cheney's staff would need six months to prepare for a meeting.

When I read this, I was stunned on two levels.

First, read that again. The CIA was going to do BEFORE 9/11 exactly what it did AFTER 9/11 - strike at al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Since we hadn't been attacked yet, 9/11 provided a nifty justification for this plan.

But second, Feinstein is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a group that works closely with intelligence agencies and--ostensibly--provides oversight of intelligence activities. (I say ostensibly because the committee does not know of, and therefore has no option to approve or disapprove all intelligence activities). How could it be that, as the 9/11 Commission report states, when the "system was blinking red" on a possible terrorist attack on the country, and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee comes to say hey, something serious is afoot and we need to talk, the VP's office could blow off Feinstein by saying they couldn't review her plans for six months?

Curious, I called Senator Feinstein's office and asked, is it normal for the VP to blow off a meeting with Senator Feinstein for six months? The four people I spoke to in her office all said and did the same thing. They said no, that's not usual, what is this about? I said this is about the Senator's 9/10 visit to Cheney, the day before 9/11. At this, each staffer got nervous and transferred me to the next person. None of them would even confirm that this conversation had transpired, but in the end, I found it on a press release on Feinstein's senate site:

I was deeply concerned as to whether our house was in order to prevent a terrorist attack. My work on the Intelligence Committee and as chair of the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee had given me a sense of foreboding for some time. I had no specific data leading to a possible attack.

In fact, I was so concerned that I contacted Vice President Cheney's office that same month to urge that he restructure our counter-terrorism and homeland defense programs to ensure better accountability and prevent important intelligence information from slipping through the cracks.

Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff, the White House did not address my request. I followed this up last September 2001 before the attacks and was told by 'Scooter' Libby that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I told him I did not believe we had six months to wait.

This just begs the question. Did Scooter Libby know what was going to happen? Did he know just how busy they really would be over the next six months due to the coming attack the next day? It's hard not to see that as a possibility.

I was particularly interested that it was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby who put Feinstein off. Libby was one of the co-signers to the seminal document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In contrast to JFK's call that we seek a true peaceful co-existence with other countries, rather than a "pax Americana," the PNAC report calls for just that - ensuring a pax Americana. This is the same report that said,

...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

That quote gave rise to the notion that perhaps 9/11 was made or allowed to happen by the government as an excuse to get us back into a war. We know now that the administration tried hard to make that war one in Iraq, despite the fact that no evidence from 9/11 linked Iraq to the attack in any way. And the CIA already had plans to strike Afghanistan (as the CNN site showed) so instead we made a great show of taking down the Taliban, even as we let Osama Bin Laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora.

We had pinpointed OBL's location by radio. We could absolutely have picked him up. Several friends of mine in the black ops world have told me repeatedly that we've known were OBL was at all times. A man in Hollywood was approached by a CIA operative to do a documentary of the secret tailing of OBL. So it's not like we can't find him.

And if we weren't picking him up, why? Could it be because ties between his actions and those of our intelligence community might raise disturbing questions about 9/11? An intelligence asset told me of a friend of his that had just come back from handing OBL a wad of cash. "For attacking us, or so he wouldn't attack us again," I asked, but got (predictably) no response.

We know now too that not only were there no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but, as the Downing Street Memo tells us, that Team Bush knew there were no weapons, and were deliberately falsifying intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq anyway.

When Ambassador Joe Wilson tried to tell us intelligence was being falsified to justify the march to Iraq, what happened? Scooter Libby talked to Judith Miller of the New York Times about the fact that Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, was a covert CIA operative. Six days later, Robert Novak reveals this fact in a column that essentially broke the law by revealing the identity of a covert source.

I believe that Libby's blowing off of Feinstein on the 10th should be investigated. Why did he tell her it would be six months before they could review her proposal when such a timeframe was utterly out of keeping re a request from a high profile Senator to the Vice President? I can't help but wonder if the pardon is intended, in part, to keep Libby silent on that point.

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