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Banned
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Originally Posted by pan6467
First my disclaimer: I liked Clinton, I thought he had some good programs and truly tried to move the US forward.
That said, I feel that Congress abused its power to go after Clinton and to hold up important business for a year while they tried him for something 99.5% of American males would have done....... lie in court about having an affair. I know I would have, and it was truly noone's business. The GOP used this just to embarass Clinton.
Would we have been better off had he been left to do his job (the job the majority of voting Americans twice elected to do)?
Yes, I believe we would have been. And there is no doubt in my mind Gore would have won easily in 2000.
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The will and ability to hound and harass Clinton, almost from the moment that he attempted to run for the presidency, had it's roots much further in the past than is generally known......this initial reporting was filed twleve years before Clinton's 1993 inauguration:
[quote]
Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/199908232...1/4/scaife.asp
<b>July/August 1981</b>
Citizen Scaife
Press-shy publisher Richard Mellon Scaife has used his immense wealth to shape today's political climate. A close
look at the prime funder of the media-savvy New Right
by Karen Rothmyer
Rothmyer, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, teaches at Columbia's School of Journalism. Research for this article was funded in part by <a href="http://www.muckraker.org/cir_info.php">the Center for Investigative Reporting.</a>
Five years ago, George Mair was bored with his job as editorial director of KNX, the CBS radio affiliate in Los
Angeles. As Mair recalls it now, he and John E. Cox Jr., an aide to Republican congressman Barry Goldwater Jr., hit
on the idea of starting a nonprofit organization aimed primarily at improving relations between business and the
media. The one thing they didn't have was money, so when they heard that Richard Larry, an administrative agent of
the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, was coming to town, they called up to see if they could talk to him
''The only reason he agreed to have dinner with us is that he thought Jack was another man named Cox he was
supposed to be meeting," Mair, now an editorial columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, says with a laugh.
'But he was very polite and listened to our ideas. He came again a few months later and we had lunch. He gave us a
check. When we opened it, it was far, far beyond our wildest dreams -- one hundred thousand dollars."
Thus was born the Foundation for American Communications, one of a large number of organizations that owe their
existence to the generosity of one of the richest men in America, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife, a great-grandson
of the founder of the Mellon empire, has made the formation of public opinion both his business and his avocation.
Over the past twelve years, Scaife, whose personal fortune is conservatively estimated at $150 million, has bought
or started a variety of publications, mainly in the Pittsburgh area. But he has increasingly turned his attention
from journalism to other, more ambitious efforts to shape public opinion, in the form of $100 million or so in
grants from Scaife charities to conservative, particularly New Right, causes. These efforts have been dramatically
successful. Indeed, Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to
influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world.
Since 1973, Scaife charitable entities have given $1 million or more to each of nearly a score of organizations
that are closely linked to the New Right movement. These range from the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, a
Massachusetts think-tank that examines political and military issues, to California's Pacific Legal Foundation, the
oldest and largest of a dozen conservative legal groups, all Scaife beneficiaries, which function as mirror-images
of the Nader- inspired public-interest law groups.
The press has generally overlooked Scaife, even when reporting on organizations that are financially dependent on
him. For example, Scaife is the single largest donor to the Mountain States Legal Foundation - $200,000 toward a $1
-million budget in 1980 as acknowledged by Mountain States officials. Yet, earlier this year, when James Watt,
then-president of Mountain States, was up for Senate confirmation as Interior Secretary in the Reagan cabinet, the
press reported - on the basis of available information that Mountain States was primarily funded by timber,
utility, and mining interests.
Similarly, officials of The Heritage Foundation (see sidebar, below), a conservative think-tank that supplied
eleven members of the Reagan transition team acknowledge that Scaife is a far larger contributor than Joseph Coors,
whose name has been the only one mentioned in most press reports on the group. Scaife, who joined with Coors to
launch Heritage seven years ago, gave close to $900,000 - three times Coors's gift - to help meet the current
$5.3-million Heritage budget.
''They're playing all sides of the street: media, politics - the soft approach and the hard," says George Mair,
referring to Scaife and his advisers. Mair left the Foundation for American Communications just over a year ago,
forced out, he claims, over the issue of what he regarded as the group's increasingly conservative bias. FACS
president Jack Cox says, "The decision was made by the board of trustees to sever Mr. Mair's relationship with the
foundation and that decision was not based on any political or ideological disputes.''
Scaife himself has never publicly discussed his motivations or goals- Indeed, he has repeatedly declined requests
for interviews, as he did in the case of this article. (See sidebar) Officials of most organizations that receive
money from Scaife charities say they rarely if ever see Scaife himself, but deal instead with aides like Richard
Larry, who has also been unavailable for comment. Most of the more sensitive Scaife donations are made through a
family trust that is not legally required to make any public accounting of its donations, and most institutions
that receive money from Scaife, like their more liberal counterparts, do not volunteer information about their
contributors. The story of Scaife and his activities has to be pieced together from public records, such published
reports as exist, and conversations with people who for the most part decline identification - some because of
business or professional reasons - others because they fear retaliation. (Shortly after this article was complet,
the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a four-pan series on Scaife. Written by staff writer David Warner, the
late-April series detailed Scaife's publishing and some of his New Right connections, relying in part on
documentation also privately made available to this reporter.)
Scaife's secretiveness is but one aspect of a complicated personality. A handsome man in the blond, beefy style one
associates with southwestern ranchers or oil millionaires, the forty-eight-year-old Scaife dresses like a Wall
Street executive. His astonishingly blue eyes are his most striking feature. A friend from an early age of J. Edgar
Hoover and long-time admirer of Barry Goldwater, Scaife is said by those who know him to be fascinated by military
and intelligence matters. At the same time, he is so shy and so insecure about his intellectual capacities,
according to one business acquaintance, that "he never speaks business without two, three, four people around him.
David Abshire, who as chairman of the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major
Scaife beneficiary, has known Scaife for nearly twenty years, describes him as ''likable, enthusiastic, and a very
fine, public-spirited individual.'' A Democratic office holder in Pittsburgh, on the other hand views Scaife as a
"lone wolf" whose clout "is through his money and nothing else.'' Pittsburgh acquaintances add that Scaife is
rarely seen on the social circuit. and suggest that Scaife's relations with most of the other Mellons tend to be
less than cordial. Certainly that holds true within his own family: Scaife has only one sibling, Cordelia Scaife
May, and he has not spoken to her for the past seven years.
One small insight into Scaife's personality is provided by Pat Minarcin, a former editor of the now-defunct
Pittsburgher magazine, which Scaife financed. ''We were talking one time after a meeting and I said to him, 'Is
money power?' " Minarcin recalls. "He paused three or four seconds and looked at me really hard. He's just not used
to people speaking to him on that level. He said, 'I didn't use to think so, but the older I get the more I do.'
Certainly money is very much the stuff of which Mellon family history is made. Judge Thomas Mellon, the son of an
Irish immigrant farmer who settled in the Pennsylvania countryside, rose to prominence in Pittsburgh during the
latter half of the nineteenth century through shrewd real estate investments and a lending business that became the
Mellon Bank. In time, the family holdings came to include, in addition to the bank, substantial blocks of stock in
Gulf Oil and Alcoa, among other companies. By 1957, when Fortune magazine tried to rank the largest fortunes in
America, four Mellons, including Scaife's mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, were listed among the top eight.
In 1965, when his widowed mother died, Richard Scaife - in his early thirties, married, and the father of the first
of two children -- had no real career. After flunking out of Yale (he later finished at the University of
Pittsburgh), Scaife had followed in the footsteps of his father, a retiring man from a local industrial family, and
been given a variety of titles but little real power in several Mellon enterprises.
Just looking after his personal affairs could have become a full-time job. At the time of the last public
accounting, in 1978, Scaife was the second-largest stockholder (after his second cousin Paul Mellon) in the Mellon
Bank, one of the top twenty banks in the country. Until 978, he was a bank trustee, having been elected to that
post at the age of twenty-six. Among Scaife's other personal sources of wealth is the income from two trusts set up
for him by his mother - probably amounting to around $8 million a year. He has homes in Pebble Beach, California,
and in Pittsburgh, and a large estate in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and he flies from coast to coast in a private DC-9
- a plane so big that in commercial service it carries up to 100 passengers.
After his mother's death, Scaife began to take an increasingly active role in the family's philanthropic
activities. Scaife family entities currently giving money to charity include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, set up by
Scaife's mother; the Allegheny and Carthage Foundations, set up by Scaife; and the Trust for Sarah Mellon Scaife's
Grandchildren (who number only Scaife's two, because Cordelia Scaife May has none). Taken together, these four
groups have assets of more than $250 million, and current annual income of at least $12 million. (Eventually,
Scaife's children will get the income from their trust, as Scaife now gets the income from his trusts.)
Gulf Oil company stock makes up a large part of the Scaife fortune. If one were to count in not just Richard
Scaife's personal holdings in Gulf, but also those of the various Scaife charitable entities, the total would
probably rank as the second largest holding (after Paul Mellon) in the company. By the same rough yardstick, Scaife
and Scaife family entities account for about 6 percent of the stock (all nonvoting) of First Boston Corporation, a
major investment banking firm. Scaife was elected to the First Boston board last year. The Mellons and Scaifes as a
whole hold about 13 percent of the First Boston stock, an investment second in size only to that of Financiere
Credit Suisse.
The small bore publisher http://web.archive.org/web/200006050...aife_part2.asp
Overlooked Maecenas to the New Right http://web.archive.org/web/199911232...aife_part3.asp
Drawing up the agenda http://web.archive.org/web/199911240...aife_part4.asp
A bead on the media http://web.archive.org/web/200003250...aife_part5.asp
Sidebars http://web.archive.org/web/200006051...e_sidebars.asp
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<b>We've witnessed the "spin" these past two weeks that attempts to portray the investigation of the Plame leak and the subsequent indictment of the VP's COS, Scooter Libby, as the product of a two year investigation by an overzealous and partisan special prosecutor. The low tolerance for an investigation that began at the request of the CIA and was led by an evenhanded, U.S. Attorney appointed to that office by the current POTUS, who has described the investigation as "dignified". There have been no leaks from the office of this special counsel, who has avoided his broad authorization to widen the investigation if he chooses to, and who almost apologized for it's two year length, saying that it took twice as long as it should have because the accused acted similarly to a ball player who attempts to obscure the play by throwing sand in the umpire's face. Contrast this investigation over a leak of classified info to what Clinton was subjected to, over far less relevant investigatory areas, which were contrived, and financed, in the first place, by long time political opponents.</b>
Quote:
http://slate.msn.com/id/1007659/
chatterbox Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.
Whopper of the Week: Ted Olson
Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, May 11, 2001, at 12:15 PM PT
"Only as a member of the board of directors of the American Spectator. It has been alleged that I was somehow
involved in that so-called project; I was not involved in the project, in its origin or its management."
--Solicitor-general nominee Theodore Olson, testifying before the Senate Judiciary committee, in response to the
question, "Were you involved with the so-called Arkansas Project at any time?" The Arkansas Project was the
American Spectator's $2 million scandal investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton funded by conservative
philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. Olson's remarks were quoted on May 3 by Jake Tapper in Salon, and on May 10
by Thomas B. Edsall in the Washington Post. Tapper was following up on earlier Salon stories by Joe Conason and
Alicia Montgomery.
Continue Article
"[David] Brock, who was one of the Spectator's leading investigative reporters in the Arkansas Project but who left
the magazine after a series of disagreements, said Olson attended a number of dinner meetings at the home of R.
Emmett Tyrrell Jr., president and chairman of the Spectator, which were explicitly 'brainstorming' sessions about
the Arkansas Project.
"'There were several dinners at Bob Tyrrell's house, editorial planning sessions, on articles on the Clintons in
Arkansas,' Brock said. 'Ted [Olson] was sometimes there, occasionally Barbara Olson [Ted Olson's wife] as well.'
"Olson, according to Brock, was an active participant in discussions of possible stories, of methods to investigate
scandal allegations and of ways to cultivate sources who would be familiar with the Clintons' political and
financial dealings."
--Edsall's May 10...........
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...main050299.htm
<h4>Scaife: Funding Father of the Right</h4>
By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1
First of two articles
One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the
Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan
Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to
Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."
Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from
political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.
Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator
magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his
administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast
right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as
Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called
Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."
But people who know him well say that although Scaife is fond of conspiracy theories of many kinds, he is incapable
of managing any sort of grand conspiracy himself. And months of reporting produced no evidence of his orchestrating
any effort to "get" Clinton beyond his financial support. Indeed, focusing on his role in the crusade against
Clinton can obscure the 66-year-old philanthropist's real importance, which is not based on his opposition or
support for any individual politicians (though he once gave Richard M. Nixon $1 million). His biggest contribution
has been to help fund the creation of the modern conservative movement in America.
By compiling a computerized record of nearly all his contributions over the last four decades, The Washington Post
found that Scaife and his family's charitable entities have given at least $340 million to conservative causes and
institutions – about $620 million in current dollars, adjusted for inflation. The total of Scaife's giving – to
conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries – exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much
more than any previous estimate. ..........
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...ain050299b.htm
It is tempting to speculate that the routinization of Scaife's role might have prompted him – or his key aide,
Larry – to get involved in more adventuresome anti-Clinton activities. Their involvement in what became known as
"the Arkansas Project" – an aggressive and ultimately fruitless attempt to discredit a sitting president – marked a
clear departure from years of relatively anonymous philanthropy, and Scaife could not have foreseen the
consequences: He became a celebrity.
The full realization of the trouble he had made for himself probably came one day last September when he appeared,
under subpoena, before a federal grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark., that was investigating possible tampering with a
federal witness. On that day, Scaife could have felt he was being treated like a suspect – not the status a Mellon
from Pittsburgh worth perhaps a billion dollars expects. According to several associates, Scaife was furious.
The Arkansas Project was apparently cooked up largely by Larry, 63, who has worked for Scaife for 30 years. A
former Marine with a deeply ideological view of the world, Larry had developed a powerful dislike for Clinton. "I
noticed a change in Dick Larry – at the mention of Clinton he became almost hyperthyroid," said one prominent
figure in the conservative world who knows Larry well. A second prominent conservative close to him said: "I never
saw Dick Larry do anything like this before. The only thing I can figure is that Larry dislikes Clinton intensely."
As the chief administrative officer of Scaife's philanthropies for many years and the main contact for anyone
seeking a grant, Larry has long been a controversial figure among conservatives. They discuss him with the same
reluctance to go on the record that many demonstrate when Scaife is the subject. "Sometimes [Larry] makes you
wonder if it is the Richard Scaife foundations, or the Richard Larry foundations," said one source who worked with
both men.
In his written answers to questions from The Post, Scaife attributed his support for the project to his doubts that
"The Washington Post and other major newspapers would fully investigate the disturbing scandals of the Clinton
White House." He explained those doubts: "I am not alone in feeling that the press has a bias in favor of
Democratic administrations." That is why, he continued, "I provided some money to independent journalists
investigating these scandals."
The Arkansas Project itself relied on several private detectives, a former Arkansas state police officer and other
unlikely schemers, including a bait shop owner in Hot Springs, Ark. The two men running the project were a lawyer
and a public relations man. Scaife's role became the subject of a special federal investigation because of
accusations that the money he donated ended up in the pocket of David Hale, a former Clinton associate and
convicted defrauder of the Small Business Administration who had become a witness for Starr's investigation of the
president.
Sources at the American Spectator say it was Larry who played an instrumental role in the project. But there is no
doubt that Clinton had gotten under Scaife's skin.
Scaife's penchant for conspiracy theories – a bent of mind he has been drawn to for years, according to many
associates – was stimulated by the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., Hillary Clinton's former law partner and a
deputy White House counsel. He has repeatedly called Foster's death "the Rosetta stone to the Clinton
administration" (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics).
Last fall Scaife told John F. Kennedy Jr. of George magazine, "Once you solve that one mystery, you'll know
everything that's going on or went on – I think there's been a massive coverup about what Bill Clinton's
administration has been doing, and what he was doing when he was governor of Arkansas." And he had ominous
specifics in mind: "Listen, [Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He's got the entire federal
government behind him." And: "God, there must be 60 people [associated with Bill Clinton] – who have died
mysteriously."
Even before the Arkansas Project had gotten underway, Scaife personally hired a former New York Post reporter named
Christopher Ruddy to write about Foster's death for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the daily newspaper Scaife has
owned since 1969. Ruddy's stories about Foster's death – most of them challenging the suicide theory, without
offering an alternative explanation – began to appear in January 1995.
Scaife has funded other Clinton efforts as well: Two zealous and resourceful (and rival) public interest law firms
that have pursued Clinton and his administration relentlessly, the Landmark Legal Foundation and Judicial Watch,
have received more than $4 million from Scaife. Judicial Watch, which is aggressively suing several branches of the
government and has questioned numerous White House officials under oath, has received $1.35 million from Scaife
sources in the last two years, a large fraction of its budget.
<b>
The Fund for Living American Government (FLAG), a one-man philanthropy run by William Lehrfeld, a Washington tax
lawyer who has represented Scaife in the past, gave $59,000 to Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against
Clinton. FLAG has received at least $160,000 in Scaife donations. And lawyers who belong to the conservative
Federalist Society, which has enjoyed Scaife support for 15 years (at least $1.5 million), were members of a
secretive group who provided important legal advice to Paula Jones and who may have pulled off the key legal
maneuver in the Clinton case by connecting the Jones suit and the Starr investigation.</b>
Officers of the Scaife-supported Independent Women's Forum have appeared on many television programs as Clinton
critics. William J. Bennett, author of "Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals," is on
the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and has received Scaife support as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation
and other enterprises.
<b>
One of the most publicized allegations of a tie between Scaife and Clinton's enemies was the suggestion that Scaife
was trying to set up independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in a posh deanship at Pepperdine University in Malibu,
Calif. Starr briefly toyed with accepting the job early in 1997.
Scaife has been a generous supporter of Pepperdine, donating more than $13 million since 1962 (in personal gifts as
well as foundation grants), according to the school. But Scaife and the current president of Pepperdine, David
Davenport, both have said that Scaife played no role whatsoever in the offer to Starr. Scaife and Starr have said
they don't know each other, and have never met.</b>
Only the Arkansas Project has caused Scaife serious trouble. The possibility that money from the project had
tainted Hale, a federal witness, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen, a former senior Justice Department
official, as a special investigator. It was Shaheen who summoned Scaife to the Fort Smith grand jury.
Shaheen's investigation apparently is complete. Lawyers involved said they don't expect any indictments.
One result of the enterprise was to strain Scaife's relationship with Larry almost to the breaking point. "He
almost fired Larry," said one friend.
The other result has been the emergence of Scaife as a public figure and punching bag for liberals.
"I'm a very private person – I think I'm essentially shy," Scaife told Kennedy last fall. But now, he acknowledged,
he is recognized by passersby on the street – "thanks to CNN."
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Clinton enjoyed a 66 percent approval rating among Americans in Dec., 1998, when the republican controlled house of rep. was preparing to try Clinton in the senate, after successfully passing articles of impeachment against him.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/...-SearchStories
<b>It is interesting that Bush's approval polling in the latest <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175184,00.html">Foxnews poll</a> is the mirror opposite of Clinton's "pre-trial" number. Both numbers were in the 60's. I'm guessing the 34 percent who disapproved in '98 are on the side that is again misinterpreting or ignoring what the majority has decided.</b>
I've not even yet posted documentation of special prosecutor Ken Starr's conflicts of interest, including his relationship with Richard Mellon Scaife and a job offer that Starr has since taken and serves in today, or of the investigation into leaks from Starr's office that were intended to further compromise Clinton, and resulted in the order for a seperate investigation by the presding federal judge who ruled on all of Starr's prosecutorial activities.
My opinion is that Clinton, in view of his popularity and the circumstances of obsessive, rich right wing hatchetmen who engineered the investigation, the case that forced Clinton to testify under oath about a private, unrelated matter, and the conduct of a special prosecutorwho was influenced and compromised by the very same R.S. Scaife, <b>has been restrained in his response</b>....up until now. Clinton had justification to scream much louder than any of the noises that came from Howard Dean.
and.....djtestudo....did you happen to watch any TV footage when the folks iin Kosovo were driven, by Milosevic's troops, to the edge of their own province? To me, they looked wretched and in desperate straits....and those were the prosperous ones lucky enough to escape by car. Tell us again how many troops the U.S. lost in that humanitarian incursion....I think that it was zero. I also recall that Europeans were reluctant to intervene to aid the Kosovans, and Clinton appeared to inspire or shame them into action, and to lead them. Clinton showed the ability to help Europe act in it's own interest in it's own, "back yard". Contrast that with the influence that the current POTUS has with European, or Latin American, or with any current leaders of Clinton era, allied nations. The other heads of state, then, admired and responded to Clinton; they thought his impeachment was an amusing injustice. Clinton never lost the respect of those leaders. Bush has never worked to earn it. His "outreach" consisted of his "you're either with us or against us" warning.
Last edited by host; 11-11-2005 at 11:47 PM..
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