Juanita Broaddrick revealed a shocking new detail
about her history with Bill Clinton.
She says that within a few weeks after Clinton
allegedly raped her, he started to call her repeatedly with the aim of meeting
again.
“I was shocked to say the least that he would have
the audacity to call me after what he did to me,” Broaddrick said, speaking on
“Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular Sunday night radio program.
She said that just a few weeks after the 1978
alleged sexual assault, “He called the nursing home that I owned and they
patched the call through to my office and I didn’t know that it was him. And he
immediately said, ‘Hi, this is Bill Clinton. I was just wondering when you were
coming back to Little Rock again.’
“This just caught me so off guard. I had not
expected anything like this at all. And I told him I would not be coming back
to Little Rock again and definitely would not ever be seeing him again. And I
hung up.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Broaddrick told
Klein that Clinton, at the time the attorney general of Arkansas and candidate
for governor, called the nursing home where she worked on numerous occasions
throughout the next six months.
And you would think that would have been the end of
it. But it wasn’t. About two or three weeks later, I was in a meeting and my
administrator came into the meeting and she said, “You are wanted on the
phone.” And she said it was Mr. Clinton. And I told her, I said, “please tell
him I’m not here.” She wasn’t aware of what had happened to me. Nor were the
nurses. The two directors of nursings [sic] were the only two who had known
what he had done to me. So she wasn’t aware, but she was very caught off guard
why I wouldn’t speak to him.
And I went into her office later and I said if
there are ever any phone calls from him, I can’t explain but I do not want to
have any phone calls from him. Whenever
he calls please tell him that I’m not here.
And then it happened a couple of more times. The
board secretary answered the phone. And she said, “Mr. Clinton is on the
phone.” And I just looked at her and I said please tell him that I’m not here.
And I think there was probably a total of maybe
four or five calls within a six-month period after the assault. And I think he
finally figured out I wasn’t going to talk to him again.
Klein asked Broaddrick what she thought Clinton
wanted from her.
Broaddrick replied: “I think he thought, well this
is just a usual occurrence. I probably was with him and I am wondering whether
I can get with this woman again. I was shocked to say the least that he would
have the audacity to call me after what he did to me.”
Klein revealed that he has separately heard similar
stories off the air from two other Clinton sexual assault accusers, including
one of the most famous of Clinton’s accusers. He said the accusers said they
never made that part of the story public because they just didn’t focus on it.
In a follow-up conversation, Broaddrick told Klein,
who doubles as Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief, that she also didn’t think
that part of the story was relevant.
Two weeks ago, Broaddrick tweeted about the alleged
assault, generating a new flurry of news media activity.
This after Hillary Clinton was repeatedly heckled
about Broaddrick at a town hall event in Derry, New Hampshire by Katherine
Prudhomme O’Brien, a GOP state representative from Rockingham.
Donald Trump helped to skyrocket the issue of
Clinton’s sex accusers to front-page status when the GOP frontrunner complained
about the former president’s “terrible record of women abuse.” Trump was
responding to Hillary’s claim that the billionaire exhibited a “penchant for
sexism.”
Speaking for the first time in nearly a decade,
Broaddrick broke her silence in November in an interview on Klein’s program.
Rape allegations. Bloody lip.
Broaddrick’s story begins when she was a nursing
home administrator volunteering for then-Arkansas attorney general Bill
Clinton’s 1978 gubernatorial bid.
She told Klein in November that Clinton singled her
out during a campaign stop at her nursing home. “He would just sort of
insinuate, you know, when you are in Little Rock let’s get together. Let’s talk
about the industry. Let’s talk about the needs of the nursing homes, and I was
very excited about that.”
Broaddrick said she finally took Clinton up on the
offer in the spring of 1978 when she traveled to Little Rock for an industry
convention along with her friend and nursing employee Norma Rogers. The two
shared a room at the city’s Camelot Hotel.
Broaddrick phoned Clinton’s campaign headquarters
to inform him of her arrival and was told by a receptionist that Clinton had
left instructions for her to reach him at his private apartment.
“I called his apartment and he answered,” she
recounted. “And he said, ‘Well, why don’t we meet in the Camelot Hotel coffee
room and we can get together there and talk.’ And I said, ‘That would be
fine.’”
Clinton then changed the meeting location from the
hotel coffee shop to Broaddrick’s room.
“Some time later, and I’m not sure how long it was,
he called my room, which he said he would do when he got to the coffee shop.
And he said, ‘There are too many people down here. It’s too crowded. There’s
reporters and can we just meet in your room?’
“And it sort of took me aback a little bit, Aaron,”
she said of Clinton’s request.
“But I did say, okay, I’ll order coffee to the
room, which I did and that’s when things sort of got out of hand. And it was
very unexpected. It was, you might even say, brutal. With the biting of my
lip.”
Broaddrick said she did not want to rehash the
alleged rape, explaining that the painful details are fully available in
previous news reports.
She told NBC’s Dateline in 1999 that she resisted
when Clinton suddenly kissed her:
Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time
he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. … He starts to, um, bite on my top
lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed.
And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him
“No,” that I didn’t want this to happen, but he wouldn’t listen to me. … It was
a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting
very noisy, you know, yelling to “please stop.” And that’s when he pressed down
on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip. … When everything was over with,
he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he
walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the
door, he says, “You better get some ice on that.” And he turned and went out
the door.
In the interview with Klein, Broaddrick recounted
the aftermath of the incident, when her friend Rogers came back to the room
after Broaddrick failed to show up at the convention.
“I was in a state of shock afterwards,” an
emotional Broaddrick said, clearly still impacted by the event. “And I know my
nurse came back to the room to check on me because she hadn’t heard from me. …
She came up and it was devastating to her and to me to find me in the condition
that I was in.
“We really did not know what to do. We sat and
talked and she got ice for my mouth… It was four times the size that it should
be. And she got ice for me and we decided then I just wanted to go home. I just
wanted to get out of there, which we did.”
The detail about Clinton allegedly biting her lip
is instructive. One woman who would later say she had a consensual affair with
Clinton, former Miss America pageant winner Elizabeth Ward Gracen, also
revealed that Clinton bit her lip when a tryst became rough.
Hillary encounter: ‘She knew!’
Broaddrick initially said that she shouldered the
blame since she allowed Clinton up to her room.
Three weeks after the incident, Broaddrick says she
was still in a state of shock and denial about what she said had transpired.
She said she attended a private Clinton fundraiser at the home of a local
dentist, where she had an encounter with the Clintons and was directly
approached by Hillary.
Broaddrick said a friend of hers who had driven the
Clintons to the fundraiser from a local airport informed her that “the whole
conversation was about you coming from the airport. Mostly from Mrs. Clinton.”
She recalled: “And so then about that time, I see
them coming through the kitchen area. And some people there are pointing to me.
He goes one direction and she comes directly to me. Then panic sort of starting
to set in with me. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what do I do now?’”
Broaddrick told Klein that Hillary approached her
“and said, ‘It’s so nice to meet you’ and all of the niceties she was trying to
say at the time.
“And said, ‘I just want you to know how much Bill
and I appreciate the things you do for him.’ And I just stood there, Aaron. I
was sort of you might say shell-shocked.
“And she said, ‘Do you understand. Everything you
do.’
“She tried to take a hold of my hand and I left. I
told the girls I can’t take this. I’m leaving. So I immediately left.”
Broaddrick said that “what really went through my
mind at that time is ‘She knows. She knew. She’s covering it up and she expects
me to do the very same thing.’”
‘I felt responsible until Bill came back’
Broaddrick said the climate of women’s issues in 1978
was such that “I felt responsible. I don’t know if you know the mentality of
women and men at that time. But me letting him come to my room? I accepted full
blame.
“And I thought, ‘This is your fault and you have to
bear this. There’s nothing you can do. He’s the attorney general. And this is
your fault.’”
She said all that changed in 1991, when she said
she was at a meeting at the Riverfront Hotel in Little Rock and Clinton
approached her there.
Clinton found out she was at the hotel “and they
called me out of the meeting and pointed to an area to go down around the
corner by an elevator area. And I walked around the corner and there he stands.
“And he immediately comes over to me with this
gushing apology. Like, ‘I’m so sorry for what happened. I hope you can forgive
me. I’m a family man now. I have a daughter. I’m a changed man. I would never
do anything like that again.’”
Broaddrick said she thought Clinton was sincere
until he announced his run for president the following week.
“But still I have to thank him for that day,
because the blame then went off of me and on to him. And I knew that it wasn’t
my fault. I knew that I didn’t use good judgement, but I knew that the incident
was no longer my fault.”
Big Government, 2016 Presidential Race, Hillary
Clinton, Bill Clinton, Juanita Broaddrick, Aaron Klein
Linda Tripp, a pivotal figure in the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, revealed on Sunday it was common knowledge while she worked
in the West Wing that
Bill Clinton had affairs with “thousands of women.”
Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,”
Tripp for the first time divulged that she personally knew another White House
staffer aside from Lewinsky who was also having an affair with Clinton. That
unnamed staffer was mentioned by Tripp in various depositions but she has not
spoken about it publicly.
She charged that Hillary Clinton not only knew
about her husband’s exploits, “She made it her personal mission to disseminate
information and destroy the women with whom he dallied.”
Tripp says she cringes at the sight of Clinton
presenting herself as “a champion of women’s rights worldwide in a global
fashion, and yet all of the women she has destroyed over the years to ensure
her political viability continues is sickening to me.”
Tripp documented evidence of Lewinsky’s phone calls
about her relationship with Bill Clinton and submitted the evidence to
independent counsel Kenneth Starr, leading to the public disclosure of the
affair. She explained to Klein that she did so because she believed her own
life and Lewinsky’s were in danger, saying that Lewinsky was threatening
Clinton with outing the relationship.
Tripp also used the interview to criticize what she
says is the news media’s unwillingness to investigate the Clintons. She singled
out and thanked Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, declaring that without him
“things would have been very, very different.”
Drudge’s website was the first media outlet to
break the Lewinsky scandal after Newsweek sat on the story.
Tripp had unique access to the Clintons because her
office was directly adjacent to Hillary’s second floor West Wing office for the
entire time she served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to the summer of
1994 with the exception of the first three months of the Clinton
administration, when she sat just outside the Oval Office.
Tripp’s nonpartisan position was a carryover from
the George H. W. Bush administration in which she served.
‘Monica Lewinsky is alive today because of choices
I made’
She told Klein that her role in the Lewinsky case
followed “years of alarm at what I had seen in the Clinton White House,
particularly Hillary and the different scandals, whether it was Filegate,
Travelgate, Whitewater, Vince Foster.”
“All of the scandals that had come before and were
so completely obliterated in the mind’s eye of the American people because of
the way all of them were essentially discounted. So I watched a lying President
and a lying First Lady present falsehoods to the American people.
“So my dismay predated the January 1998 period when
the Monica Lewinsky scandal surfaced. To me it was very important that the
American people see what I was seeing. My years with the Clintons were so
disturbing on so many levels.”
Tripp maintains that she went public with the
Lewinsky evidence to ensure the intern’s safety as well as her own.
She told Klein:
I say today and I will continue to say that I believe
Monica Lewinsky is alive today because of choices I made and action I took.
That may sound melodramatic to your listeners. I can only say that from my
perspective I believe that she and I at the time were in danger, because
nothing stands in the way of these people achieving their political ends.
I think that had it not become public when it did,
particularly in light of the Paula Jones lawsuit, which was coming to a head
with President Clinton’s deposition, that we may well have met with an accident.
It’s a situation where unless you lived it as I did you would have no real
framework of reference for this sort of situation.
Tripp said the young Lewinsky, 21-years-old when
she entered the White House as an intern, was unaware of the danger that she faced.
She described Lewinsky as a “young girl, smart,
clever … but in this one area she was blinded and she fancied herself in love.”
Trip continued:
He fancied himself entitled. It was nothing more
than a servicing agreement. She romanticized that there was an affair. And when
it didn’t pan out the way she had hoped it would – he had promised her he would
bring her back to the White House as soon as the 1996 election campaign had
finished. When he didn’t, she essentially lost her mind and started acting in
erratic and frightening ways. Threatening the president.
There came a point in July of 1997 when she not
only threatened to expose the affair, as she referred to it. But also she at
that time informed him that I knew all about it. So at that time it became
dangerous for Monica and for me. This was something that absolutely could never
see the light of day. And she never realized the implications of threatening a
president or her behavior. And I did.
‘Thousands’ of women
Tripp told Klein that “the biggest fallacy that
most people believed is that this was a unique occurrence. Monica was somehow
special. And regrettably that’s the farthest thing from the truth.”
She said, “Everyone knew within the West Wing,
particularly those who spent years with him, of the thousands of women.
“Now most of your listeners might find that
difficult if not impossible to believe. And I can tell you in the beginning I
felt the same way. But let me be clear here. This is a pattern of behavior that
has gone on for years. And the abuse of women for years.”
Asked whether Clinton was having affairs with
others in the West Wing, Tripp replied, “I know that to be true. One in particular
who I will not name told me this herself.”
“But as to the hundreds or thousands, remember I
worked closely with the closest aides to the president. And it was a
loosey-goosy environment so there was not a lot of holding back. So it was
common knowledge, let’s put it this way, within the West Wing that he had this
problem. It was further common knowledge that Hillary was aware of it.”
Hillary ‘instilled fear’
Tripp described the tense West Wing atmosphere
between what she characterized as two almost diametrically opposed Clinton
camps.
The dynamic between the two groups – the Bill
Clinton people and the Hillary Clinton people. It was as though they were
almost opposing forces. But I can tell you that the one with the power and the
one that instilled the fear in the other was the Hillary camp.
And the [Bill] Clinton people would cower if she
were coming into the area, just as an example, of the Oval without notice.
There would be scurrying around to make sure there was no one in the wrong
place at the wrong time, shall we say. It was a fascination to see the amount
of energy that was expended covering up his behavior. It was horrifying.
Hillary’s ‘war on women’
Tripp said Hillary personally targeted Bill’s
female conquests and accusers, with the future presidential candidate
exhibiting behavior that is “egregious and it’s so disingenuous.”
In my case, for instance, right after the Lewinsky
story broke, she was heard directing her staff to get anything and everything
on Linda Tripp. So the defamation of character and the absolute assurance that
my credibility would be destroyed began right away. And it happens with any
woman who is involved in any way, either with him in a physical relationship or
an assault or anything that can endanger their political viability.
Tripp recalled Hillary’s January 27, 1998
appearance on NBC’s The Today Show in which she was seen as standing by her
husband while blaming the Lewinsky scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy
that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for
president.”
“She didn’t do it in an honest way,” said Tripp of
Clinton’s NBC interview. “Instead she lied, which didn’t surprise me. And I
will give her credit. She is enormously effective. And became a victim. A wife
who was betrayed.”
“This is someone who had no real personal problem
with any of this behavior. The problem was in it becoming public. They had to
continue to become electable… She was the more aggressive one in ensuring that
the political viability was not endangered in any way.”
Tripp told Klein that Hillary “does not possess
integrity on any level. I just wish that your listeners could know the person
that I knew. Because if they did there is not a chance she would be elected
president.”
Disdain for military, classified material, email
scandal
Tripp’s ringside seat afforded her rare insight
into the scandals of the 1990s and perhaps alleged wrongdoings to come, with
the West Wing employee personally witnessing behavior that may have
foreshadowed Clinton’s email scandal, in which she is accused of sending
classified materials through her personal server.
Tripp said she noticed major differences in the
manner in which classified material was handled by both the Clinton and Bush
administrations in which she served.
President George H.W. Bush’s administration had “a
completely different way of operating on every level, including on classified
and secret material,” she said.
She continued:
All the regulations were followed, right down to a
cover sheet being essential if the document had had any sort of
classifications. The securing of classified documentation in safes. The burn
bags that were used if any sensitive material was to be disposed of. All of
this was familiar to me and followed every security protocol that I had
experienced in the past.
When the Clintons came in this was one of the
things that I found appalling right from day one. And it went hand and hand
with the disdain for the military. The military was present in the White House
in the form of presidential aides. The aide that carried the nuclear football,
just as an example. And in the Bush White House they were respected, as they
should be. In the Clinton White House, they were disdained. To see it treated
this way and to see these people treated this way was disturbing.
Tripp referred to Clinton’s private mail woes as
“classic Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.”
“She gets to decide what she does. Look, the rules
don’t apply to the Clintons. If you understand that basic premise you
understand the Clintons.”
For Tripp, Clinton’s use of a private server was
“all about control. She has a need to control every single aspect of her life.
And you know anyone in government knows that any key stroke on a keyboard
within a government agency belongs to the government… it is not up to the
employee on any level to control what happens to it for posterity.”
‘Eternally grateful to Matt Drudge’
Tripp said she was personally hurt by the way the
news media portrayed her as betraying Lewinsky when she says she was motivated
by a sense of duty to country and fear for the personal safety of Lewinsky and
herself.
“It was very sad to me to see that my children had
to see their mother, who had always sort of done the right thing, be destroyed
this way in the media.”
Although she never spoke to or met Drudge, Tripp
used the interview with Klein to state that she is “eternally grateful” to
Drudge for his historic role in exposing the Clintons and “for reporting things
that no one else literally in the mainstream media covers at all.”
It is a service to the country and it’s
something that we need more of. We don’t have enough Matt Drudges out there.
And he’s sort of a one-man show in my opinion that the mainstream media doesn’t
touch in any way. So just personally I would thank him for his work. And people
like me are dependent on people like him who get it out into the, over the
public airwaves and into the people’s homes and
Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon for Marc Rich,
the businessman who faced criminal prosecution for illegally trading with
America’s enemies.
From the New York Post:
Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his
last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive
Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s
political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of
presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is
often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”
Congressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real
betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do
something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.”
Marc Rich was wanted for a list of charges going
back decades. He had traded illegally with America’s enemies including
Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he bought about $200 million worth of oil while
revolutionaries allied with the Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979.
Rich made a large part of his wealth, approximately
$2 billion between 1979 and 1994, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South
Africa when it faced a UN embargo. He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya,
Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in
Cuba and the Soviet Union itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten
Most Wanted List.
Facing prosecution by Rudy Giuliani in 1983, Rich
fled to Switzerland and lived in exile.
What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency
to Rich reeked of payoff. In the run-up to the presidential pardon, the
financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton
Library and “over $1 million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era.”
As Judge Abner Mikva, a counsel in the Clinton
White House and mentor to President Obama, noted that even Obama “was very,
very dismayed by the Marc Rich pardon and the basis on which it appears to have
been granted.”
But does the story end there? Is it possible the
payoffs continued after he left office?
The stench of the scandal in early 2001 sent people
scurrying. Days after it was revealed that a senior UBS executive named Pierre
de Weck had written a letter to Clinton “to support his request for a pardon,”
the Swiss banking giant cancelled its discussions with Clinton about a
lucrative post-White House speech, apparently “worried that a large speaking
fee would create an appearance of impropriety.”
Even Bill Clinton eventually admitted that the
pardon had been “terrible politics.” “It wasn’t worth the damage to my
reputation,” he said.
But while the pardon was a political mistake, it
certainly was not a financial one. In the years following the scandal, the flow
of funds from those connected to Marc Rich or the pardon scandal have continued
to the Clintons.
Rich died in 2013. But his business partners,
lawyers, advisors and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons
in the decade and a half following the scandal.
Big Government, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton,
Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer, Marc Rich they can at least consider whether or
not they want to believe the other side of the story.
Big Government, 2016 Presidential Race, Hillary
Clinton, Bill Clinton, Juanita Broaddrick, Aaron Klein
Linda Tripp, a pivotal figure in the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, revealed on Sunday it was common knowledge while she worked
in the West Wing that
Bill Clinton had affairs with “thousands of women.”
Bill Clinton had affairs with “thousands of women.”
Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,”
Tripp for the first time divulged that she personally knew another White House
staffer aside from Lewinsky who was also having an affair with Clinton. That
unnamed staffer was mentioned by Tripp in various depositions but she has not
spoken about it publicly.
She charged that Hillary Clinton not only knew
about her husband’s exploits, “She made it her personal mission to disseminate
information and destroy the women with whom he dallied.”
Tripp says she cringes at the sight of Clinton
presenting herself as “a champion of women’s rights worldwide in a global
fashion, and yet all of the women she has destroyed over the years to ensure
her political viability continues is sickening to me.”
Tripp documented evidence of Lewinsky’s phone calls
about her relationship with Bill Clinton and submitted the evidence to
independent counsel Kenneth Starr, leading to the public disclosure of the
affair. She explained to Klein that she did so because she believed her own
life and Lewinsky’s were in danger, saying that Lewinsky was threatening
Clinton with outing the relationship.
Tripp also used the interview to criticize what she
says is the news media’s unwillingness to investigate the Clintons. She singled
out and thanked Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, declaring that without him
“things would have been very, very different.”
Drudge’s website was the first media outlet to
break the Lewinsky scandal after Newsweek sat on the story.
Tripp had unique access to the Clintons because her
office was directly adjacent to Hillary’s second floor West Wing office for the
entire time she served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to the summer of
1994 with the exception of the first three months of the Clinton
administration, when she sat just outside the Oval Office.
Tripp’s nonpartisan position was a carryover from
the George H. W. Bush administration in which she served.
‘Monica Lewinsky is alive today because of choices
I made’
She told Klein that her role in the Lewinsky case
followed “years of alarm at what I had seen in the Clinton White House,
particularly Hillary and the different scandals, whether it was Filegate,
Travelgate, Whitewater, Vince Foster.”
“All of the scandals that had come before and were
so completely obliterated in the mind’s eye of the American people because of
the way all of them were essentially discounted. So I watched a lying President
and a lying First Lady present falsehoods to the American people.
“So my dismay predated the January 1998 period when
the Monica Lewinsky scandal surfaced. To me it was very important that the
American people see what I was seeing. My years with the Clintons were so
disturbing on so many levels.”
Tripp maintains that she went public with the
Lewinsky evidence to ensure the intern’s safety as well as her own.
She told Klein:
I say today and I will continue to say that I believe
Monica Lewinsky is alive today because of choices I made and action I took.
That may sound melodramatic to your listeners. I can only say that from my
perspective I believe that she and I at the time were in danger, because
nothing stands in the way of these people achieving their political ends.
I think that had it not become public when it did,
particularly in light of the Paula Jones lawsuit, which was coming to a head
with President Clinton’s deposition, that we may well have met with an accident.
It’s a situation where unless you lived it as I did you would have no real
framework of reference for this sort of situation.
Tripp said the young Lewinsky, 21-years-old when
she entered the White House as an intern, was unaware of the danger that she faced.
She described Lewinsky as a “young girl, smart,
clever … but in this one area she was blinded and she fancied herself in love.”
Trip continued:
He fancied himself entitled. It was nothing more
than a servicing agreement. She romanticized that there was an affair. And when
it didn’t pan out the way she had hoped it would – he had promised her he would
bring her back to the White House as soon as the 1996 election campaign had
finished. When he didn’t, she essentially lost her mind and started acting in
erratic and frightening ways. Threatening the president.
There came a point in July of 1997 when she not
only threatened to expose the affair, as she referred to it. But also she at
that time informed him that I knew all about it. So at that time it became
dangerous for Monica and for me. This was something that absolutely could never
see the light of day. And she never realized the implications of threatening a
president or her behavior. And I did.
‘Thousands’ of women
Tripp told Klein that “the biggest fallacy that
most people believed is that this was a unique occurrence. Monica was somehow
special. And regrettably that’s the farthest thing from the truth.”
She said, “Everyone knew within the West Wing,
particularly those who spent years with him, of the thousands of women.
“Now most of your listeners might find that
difficult if not impossible to believe. And I can tell you in the beginning I
felt the same way. But let me be clear here. This is a pattern of behavior that
has gone on for years. And the abuse of women for years.”
Asked whether Clinton was having affairs with
others in the West Wing, Tripp replied, “I know that to be true. One in particular
who I will not name told me this herself.”
“But as to the hundreds or thousands, remember I
worked closely with the closest aides to the president. And it was a
loosey-goosy environment so there was not a lot of holding back. So it was
common knowledge, let’s put it this way, within the West Wing that he had this
problem. It was further common knowledge that Hillary was aware of it.”
Hillary ‘instilled fear’
Tripp described the tense West Wing atmosphere
between what she characterized as two almost diametrically opposed Clinton
camps.
The dynamic between the two groups – the Bill
Clinton people and the Hillary Clinton people. It was as though they were
almost opposing forces. But I can tell you that the one with the power and the
one that instilled the fear in the other was the Hillary camp.
And the [Bill] Clinton people would cower if she
were coming into the area, just as an example, of the Oval without notice.
There would be scurrying around to make sure there was no one in the wrong
place at the wrong time, shall we say. It was a fascination to see the amount
of energy that was expended covering up his behavior. It was horrifying.
Hillary’s ‘war on women’
Tripp said Hillary personally targeted Bill’s
female conquests and accusers, with the future presidential candidate
exhibiting behavior that is “egregious and it’s so disingenuous.”
In my case, for instance, right after the Lewinsky
story broke, she was heard directing her staff to get anything and everything
on Linda Tripp. So the defamation of character and the absolute assurance that
my credibility would be destroyed began right away. And it happens with any
woman who is involved in any way, either with him in a physical relationship or
an assault or anything that can endanger their political viability.
Tripp recalled Hillary’s January 27, 1998
appearance on NBC’s The Today Show in which she was seen as standing by her
husband while blaming the Lewinsky scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy
that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for
president.”
“She didn’t do it in an honest way,” said Tripp of
Clinton’s NBC interview. “Instead she lied, which didn’t surprise me. And I
will give her credit. She is enormously effective. And became a victim. A wife
who was betrayed.”
“This is someone who had no real personal problem
with any of this behavior. The problem was in it becoming public. They had to
continue to become electable… She was the more aggressive one in ensuring that
the political viability was not endangered in any way.”
Tripp told Klein that Hillary “does not possess
integrity on any level. I just wish that your listeners could know the person
that I knew. Because if they did there is not a chance she would be elected
president.”
Disdain for military, classified material, email
scandal
Tripp’s ringside seat afforded her rare insight
into the scandals of the 1990s and perhaps alleged wrongdoings to come, with
the West Wing employee personally witnessing behavior that may have
foreshadowed Clinton’s email scandal, in which she is accused of sending
classified materials through her personal server.
Tripp said she noticed major differences in the
manner in which classified material was handled by both the Clinton and Bush
administrations in which she served.
President George H.W. Bush’s administration had “a
completely different way of operating on every level, including on classified
and secret material,” she said.
She continued:
All the regulations were followed, right down to a
cover sheet being essential if the document had had any sort of
classifications. The securing of classified documentation in safes. The burn
bags that were used if any sensitive material was to be disposed of. All of
this was familiar to me and followed every security protocol that I had
experienced in the past.
When the Clintons came in this was one of the
things that I found appalling right from day one. And it went hand and hand
with the disdain for the military. The military was present in the White House
in the form of presidential aides. The aide that carried the nuclear football,
just as an example. And in the Bush White House they were respected, as they
should be. In the Clinton White House, they were disdained. To see it treated
this way and to see these people treated this way was disturbing.
Tripp referred to Clinton’s private mail woes as
“classic Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.”
“She gets to decide what she does. Look, the rules
don’t apply to the Clintons. If you understand that basic premise you
understand the Clintons.”
For Tripp, Clinton’s use of a private server was
“all about control. She has a need to control every single aspect of her life.
And you know anyone in government knows that any key stroke on a keyboard
within a government agency belongs to the government… it is not up to the
employee on any level to control what happens to it for posterity.”
‘Eternally grateful to Matt Drudge’
Tripp said she was personally hurt by the way the
news media portrayed her as betraying Lewinsky when she says she was motivated
by a sense of duty to country and fear for the personal safety of Lewinsky and
herself.
“It was very sad to me to see that my children had
to see their mother, who had always sort of done the right thing, be destroyed
this way in the media.”
Although she never spoke to or met Drudge, Tripp
used the interview with Klein to state that she is “eternally grateful” to
Drudge for his historic role in exposing the Clintons and “for reporting things
that no one else literally in the mainstream media covers at all.”
Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon for Marc Rich,
the businessman who faced criminal prosecution for illegally trading with
America’s enemies.
From the New York Post:
Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his
last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive
Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s
political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of
presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is
often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”
Congressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real
betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do
something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.”
Marc Rich was wanted for a list of charges going
back decades. He had traded illegally with America’s enemies including
Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he bought about $200 million worth of oil while
revolutionaries allied with the Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979.
Rich made a large part of his wealth, approximately
$2 billion between 1979 and 1994, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South
Africa when it faced a UN embargo. He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya,
Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in
Cuba and the Soviet Union itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten
Most Wanted List.
Facing prosecution by Rudy Giuliani in 1983, Rich
fled to Switzerland and lived in exile.
What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency
to Rich reeked of payoff. In the run-up to the presidential pardon, the
financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton
Library and “over $1 million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era.”
As Judge Abner Mikva, a counsel in the Clinton
White House and mentor to President Obama, noted that even Obama “was very,
very dismayed by the Marc Rich pardon and the basis on which it appears to have
been granted.”
But does the story end there? Is it possible the
payoffs continued after he left office?
The stench of the scandal in early 2001 sent people
scurrying. Days after it was revealed that a senior UBS executive named Pierre
de Weck had written a letter to Clinton “to support his request for a pardon,”
the Swiss banking giant cancelled its discussions with Clinton about a
lucrative post-White House speech, apparently “worried that a large speaking
fee would create an appearance of impropriety.”
Even Bill Clinton eventually admitted that the
pardon had been “terrible politics.” “It wasn’t worth the damage to my
reputation,” he said.
But while the pardon was a political mistake, it
certainly was not a financial one. In the years following the scandal, the flow
of funds from those connected to Marc Rich or the pardon scandal have continued
to the Clintons.
Rich died in 2013. But his business partners,
lawyers, advisors and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons
in the decade and a half following the scandal.
Big Government, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton,
Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer, Marc Rich they can at least consider whether or
not they want to believe the other side of the story.
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