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Tag: Bill Clinton
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Bush defies expectations on Libby, Milken pardons
When George W. Bush boarded the former Air Force One to fly home to Texas yesterday, he left behind a lot of disappointed felons, not to mention their lawyers.
Among his last official acts on Monday, Bush commuted the sentences of two former Border Patrol agents imprisoned for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler. The men, Jose A. Compean and Ignacio Ramos, both of El Paso, TX, are expected to be freed within two months, cutting short prison terms that had been slated to run at least eight more years.
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“I was shocked when I heard this was the only [pardon],” Margaret Colgate Love, a former Justice Department pardon lawyer who represented about 20 people seeking clemency, told the New York Times.
She was not alone. Former Vice President Dick Cheney told the Weekly Standard that he had lobbied hard for clemency for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whom he described as “the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice.”
“Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision,” Cheney told the conservative magazine.
The commutations for Compean and Ramos bring Bush’s total number of pardons and commutations to 200, the fewest of any two-term president in modern times. Bill Clinton, after all, had granted clemency to billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, among dozens of others, and Gerald Ford to Richard Nixon.
At the very least, many had expected Bush to grant clemency at least to Libby, and to financier Michael R. Milken. He was also said to have weighed action to shield former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials who might face future legal liability in connection with their roles in the war on terror.
Other politically-connected felons who may have hoped for eleventh-hour reprieves were former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards and former GOP congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
Two years ago, Bush had expressed personal interest in the border patrol case, telling a Texas TV station that he planned to review the facts to see if a pardon was warranted. “I just want people to take a sober look at the case,” he said then, adding that “Border Patrol and law enforcement have no stronger supporter than me.”
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This post is tagged with: Alberto Gonzales, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Edwin Edwards, George W. Bush, I. Lewis Libby, Ignacio Ramos, Jose Compean, Marc Rich, Michael Milken, Politics, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Recent Stories, Ted StensRead related stories: Politics · Recent Stories
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Former HUD colleagues Cuomo, Gillibrand, cited as Senate prospectsJanuary 22, 2009 at 12:40pm
With Caroline Kennedy out, who is the frontrunner to replace Hillary Clinton as New York’s representative in the U.S. Senate?
Top spymaster nominee Dennis Blair brings broad connections, experiences
By naming Dennis C. Blair as his nominee for the nation’s top spy post – director of national intelligence – President-elect Barack Obama gets a brainy, retired four-star admiral with an independent streak.
Blair is a 34-year Navy veteran and Asia expert who was reportedly passed over for the post of chairman of the Joint Chiefs by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who considered him too independent. His last job in the military was as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, the highest-ranking officer over forces in the Asia-Pacific region.
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He has also worked the intelligence business from virtually every angle – military commander, White House staffer and CIA official – but has no significant ties to controversial Bush administration policies like offshore renditions and harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, since he resigned from the military in 2002.
Born in Kittery, Maine in 1947, Blair is a 6th-generation naval officer and great-great-great grandson of Confederate chief engineer William Price Williamson of North Carolina. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968 with Virginia Sen. James H. Webb and former Reagan adviser Oliver North, and then majored in Russian Studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University with Bill Clinton.
He was a White House Fellow in 1975 and 1976, along with retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Marshall Carter, who later became chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.
Famous for his workaholism, Blair is not without a zany streak. Most famously, he tried to water ski behind a Navy destroyer while commanding the ship in Japan.
Blair was not a close adviser to the Obama campaign, but has reportedly impressed the president-elect with his intellect and his nuanced view of intelligence, as well as of U.S. power.
“The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived,” Blair testified before Congress in November, 2007.
Blair has handled intelligence in a number of capacities: He worked as the Central Intelligence Agency’s first associate director of military support, and served a tour on the National Security Council. He was also director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and commanded the Kitty Hawk Battle Group and the destroyer Cochrane.
After his retirement in 2002, Blair has served as president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research group largely financed by the federal government to analyze national security issues. He stepped down from that post in 2006 amid conflict-of-interest concerns.
The Pentagon’s inspector general concluded he had violated the institute’s conflict-of-interest standards by serving on the board of a military contractor working on the Air Force F-22 jet while the institute was evaluating the program for the Pentagon. However, the inspector general also found that Blair did not influence the organization’s analysis of the F-22 program.
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This post is tagged with: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dennis C. Blair, Institute for Defense Analyses, James Webb, Marshall Carter, News, Oliver North, Recent Stories, Wesley Clark1 Comments
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Your piece does not refer to widespread reports of Blair’s complicity in E Timor massacres. Failure to mention does not inspire confidence in your objectivity. Your readers need to know: are these reports are accurate? and if so, why this history is not disqualifying?
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Cohmad Securities, Robert Jaffe face tough questions about Madoff tiesJanuary 15, 2009 at 9:16am
Investigators probing Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50-billion scheme are looking at the role played by an investment firm that he co-founded with an old friend from Long Island that recruited hundreds of investors from New York, Boston and Florida.
Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s secretary, volunteers for Obama
Another fixture of the Clinton administration is helping Barack Obama make his move from senator to president.
The New York Times reports that Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s secretary for his eight years in office, is volunteering at the offices of the Obama-Biden transition team.
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“Of course I asked her because in the 30 years we have worked together, I have never known anyone with more grace, dedication and public spirit than Betty,” Podesta told the Times. “And she has one mean Rolodex.”
The paper did not report whether Monica S. Lewinsky’s name remains in that Rolodex.
In 1998, Currie had to appear five times before the grand jury investigating the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky.
After her testimony became public, some people faulted her for possibly enabling the relationship between the president and the young intern, adopting a “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance.
Others, though, saw her as yet another victim of Clinton’s recklessness.
“She didn’t deserve this – at all,” a co-worker told The Washington Post at the time. “She’s not a villain by any stretch of the imagination.”
Currie, 69, came to the White House after serving as the office manager of the “War Room” during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.
The room was the place where James Carville, George Stephanopoulos and other Clinton advisers planned strategy.
Currie also worked on the Clinton-Gore transition team.
And she took part in the 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign and the 1984 Walter Mondale campaign.
Previous to this, Currie had been an executive assistant and personal secretary in several federal agencies, including the U.S. Peace Corps and ACTION, the umbrella agency over the Peace Corps.
During this time, she was the executive secretary for three directors, Joseph Blatchford at the Peace Corps and ACTION and Michael Balzano and Sam W. Brown Jr. at ACTION.
Currie retired from the federal government at the end of Clinton’s second term.
In 2006, she became a member of the board of National Peace Corps Association. She recently became a member of the Alcohol Beverage Board of St. Mary’s County, MD.
She and her husband, Bob, a retired Environmental Protection Agency planning director, took Socks, the Clinton’s White House cat, into their home at the end of Clinton presidency.
The cat is now 19 and reportedly has cancer.
Currie remains in contact with the Clintons, the Times reported, and contributed $750 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
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Saudia Arabia, Norway, Kuwait donated millions to Clinton charityDecember 18, 2008 at 6:37pm
Former President Bill Clinton has revealed tens of millions in donations to his foundation from foreign nations that Hillary Rodham Clinton may have to negotiate with as secretary of state.
Janet Napolitano’s unlikely political journey
Janet Napolitano first came to Washington 17 years ago as part of the legal team that represented Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings.
Hill’s sordid testimony about sexual harassment may not have torpedoed Thomas’ career; still, Napolitano attracted notice as a smart, young Democrat who was going places. “Meet the PCTC, a post Clarence Thomas Candidate,” wrote syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, who urged her to challenge John McCain for his Senate seat.
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Today, the popular Democratic governor in a Republican-leaning state is said to be the top candidate for Homeland Security secretary under President-elect Barack Obama, whom she endorsed early in the primaries despite her ties to the Clintons.
Admirers describe the 50-year-old breast cancer survivor as a shrewd politician and problem solver, who is quick to size up people and issues. In 2005, Time Magazine called her one of America’s five best governors.
“Positioning herself as a no-nonsense, pro-business centrist, she has worked outside party lines since coming to office in January 2003 to re-energize a state that, under her predecessors, was marked by recession and scandal.”
By most accounts, Napolitano has navigated a centrist path on immigration issues in Arizona, which shares a 376-mile border with Mexico and where anti-immigrant fervor runs high.
During her first term, she sent National Guardsmen to the border – and forwarded the bill to the federal government. The policy of enlisting the Guard was later adopted by the Bush administration.
Last year, she signed into law the nation’s harshest penalty for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, a measure that would take away their business licenses for a second violation.
But Napolitano has also vetoed more extreme measures, for instance, a bill that would have made it a crime for day laborers to look for work on public streets. Earlier this year, she also yanked $1.6 million in state funds that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio had used to conduct roving immigration raids in the Latino community.
For critics, though, that action was too little, too late.
“My own conclusion is simple,” wrote Alfredo Gutierrez, a onetime Democratic rival sizing her up for homeland security secretary in La Frontera Times. “She’s a tough, smart, competent, ambitious law enforcement officer, a fundamentally moderate Democrat, who is willing to throw immigrants under the bus only when necessary.”
But Doris Meissner, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration who is now at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said Napolitano “would be an excellent choice” for Homeland Security.
“She has impeccable law-enforcement and leadership credentials,” Meissner told the Washington Independent. “And as a border-state governor, she has direct knowledge and experience of how our broken immigration system is affecting her state and the nation.”
Born in New York City in 1957, Napolitano grew up in Albuquerque, where her father was dean of the University of New Mexico Medical School. In high school, she was voted most likely to succeed.
After majoring in political science at her father’s alma mater, Santa Clara University in California, and attending the University of Virginia School of Law, she clerked for an appellate court judge in Arizona, and then landed a job at Lewis & Roca, a well-regarded Phoenix law firm with strong Democratic ties.
The firm got a call from Sen. Dennis DeConcini, an Arizona Democrat, in October, 1991, asking if it would represent Anita Hill, and Napolitano was put in charge of preparing the testimonies of Hill’s supporting witnesses.
Asked in an interview recently whether she considered herself a feminist, writer Dana Goldstein described how Napolitano looked down at her hands and said, “I just consider myself Janet.”
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Small donors played comparable roles in Obama and Bush campaignsNovember 30, 2008 at 7:28am
A new study by the Campaign Finance Institute shows that Barack Obama received about the same percentage from small donors in 2008 as George W. Bush did in 2004.
Rahm Emanuel agrees to be chief of staff
Fresh from his victory Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama has tapped a fellow Chicagoan to be the White House enforcer.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., announced today that he had agreed to be the president-elect’s chief of staff.
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“Obama wants a bad cop, so he can be good cop 90 percent of the time,” an unnamed Obama adviser told Politico.
The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Emanuel, 48, was first elected in 2002. He won re-election Tuesday with nearly 74 percent of the vote.
In 2006, he was the driving force behind his party’s successful effort to take back the House in 2006.
As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he vetted potential challengers to Republican candidates, making sure they had the money or could raise the money to run a real race.
His style, by all reports, did not include playing nice.
“Emanuel is hard-wired to go for the jugular,” Nina Easton wrote in Fortune at the time. “Politics Chicago-style are part of his DNA.”
Given that DNA, it’s not surprising that Emanuel has Democratic, as well as Republican, detractors.
“I love Rahm, but that’s a small group of us,” Democratic operative Paul Begala told Easton. “He’s not a beloved figure like Tip O’Neill or Dick Gephardt. Rahm’s there (at the DCCC) because they want to
win.”When Emanuel joins Obama, he will be returning to a familiar workplace, as he served as a senior adviser in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1998.
Before that, Emanuel was director of finance in Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
In January 1999, Emanuel left politics, joining the investment bank then known as Wasserstein Perella & Co. In four years, he made a reported $18 million before leaving banking to run for Congress.
Given his connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton and his friendship with Barack and Michelle Obama, Emanuel has emerged as a link between two factions in the Democratic Party.
“There are people that know the Obamas better than Rahm does, there are probably people who know the Clintons better than Rahm does,” Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker magazine said this spring in introducing Emanuel in a video interview.
“But I don’t think there’s anyone in American politics that knows both the Clintons and the Obamas better than Rahm does.”
This dual connection left Emanuel, a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention, unwilling to choose between Obama and Hillary Clinton until the primary season was over.
He endorsed Obama in June after Clinton conceded defeat and went on to work on Obama’s behalf.
In May, Emanuel told Lizza that he believed Obama’s first few weeks in office, if he were elected, would focus on the passage of the children’s health bill that President Bush vetoed last year.
“You want to show you can get something done,” Emanuel said.
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Obama convenes economic advisers, calls for swift action on economyNovember 7, 2008 at 4:37pm
In his first news conference as president-elect Barack Obama laid out the top priority of his first 100 days: A package of spending that he hopes will stimulate economic growth and aid a struggling middle class.
Elvis Costello Plans Tv Variety Show
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Vanity Fair Article on Bill Clinton Reveals Few Facts and Few Sources
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Ousted Sierra leaders tie suspension to Clorox criticism
At the very least, the timing raises questions: The biggest environmental group in the U.S. expelled 27 leaders of its Florida chapter shortly after the state committee accused the Sierra Club’s national directors of betraying their principles to endorse a “green” cleaning line by the Clorox Company.
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Willett noted another state chapter, Massachusetts, had also criticized the Sierra Club’s decision to endorse the new biodegradable cleaning line, “and no action has been taken against them, and there won’t be. That’s not how the Sierra Club works.”
First announced in January, the unprecedented partnership between the Sierra Club and Clorox has been hailed by supporters as a way to promote a green marketplace, and denounced by critics as a sell-out to a company most closely associated with Clorox Bleach. Under the deal, the Sierra Club gets an undisclosed percentage of profits from the sale of the new line, marketed under the name Green Works, in exchange for the use of its logo.
At least some ousted activists don’t buy the assertion that their suspension is unrelated to their criticism. Joy Towles Ezell, former chairwoman of the Florida chapter, told the Guardian that the same weekend in January that the chapter passed a measure condemning the deal, they were told of their impending removal.
She said that the new Clorox products should be named “Money Works” or “Toxic Works.”
“Clorox is the bad guy to me,” Ezell said. “. . .You sell your soul when you get involved with something like that.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope admits he was skeptical when first approached by Clorox. But after reviewing the ingredients of the cleaners, most of which are plant products, and contemplating Clorox’s market reach, he decided to take the gamble.
“One of the reasons green home cleaning products haven’t achieved much market penetration is if they came from an environmental brand, people had the sense they won’t work … And if it came from someone with a cleaning reputation the reaction was: They can’t be green.”
Green Works may be an even bigger gamble for Clorox’s new CEO Donald Knauss, who came from Cola Cola in 2006, and who has pushed the company to launch its first new product line in 20 years. Knauss has identified sustainability as one of three core consumer trends with which he wanted to align Clorox products, and hired “green” consultants, who led him to the Sierra Club.
Green consultant Joel Makower, who worked on the project, calls the launch a watershed:
It’s an intriguing moment. Green Works enters the marketplace with a near perfect storm of market conditions: growing mainstream consumer demand for green products that don’t require compromise or sacrifice; significant interest from Wal-Mart and other big retailers in pushing greener products to the masses; a product that seems competitive with the leading green brands; and endorsement from Big Green.
Naysayers, however, predict the endorsement will undermine the credibility of the environmental group, noting that a month before the deal was signed, Clorox was fined $95,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency for donating a mislabeled Chinese version of Clorox bleach to a Los Angeles charity.
“The Sierra Club has become little more than another corporate front group,”
said Tim Hermach of Native Forest Council in Eugene, Oregon in a piece in Corporate Crime Reporter.Hermach had special animus for the group’s executive director: “Carl Pope has sold out the Sierra Club’s mission of saving nature and now seems proud of his role as an obsequious and professional Uriah Heep. As a result, Sierra Club is getting lots of corporate appreciation, cash and favors.”
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