[h=1]A brief guide to Clinton scandals from Travelgate to Emailgate[/h] By
Mark Tapscott | April 12, 2015 | 3:21 pm
Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton attend the Oscar de la Renta: American... Hillary Clinton is entering the presidential race in a cloud of scandal surrounding foreign contributions to the Clinton family foundation and her use of a private email account and server to conduct official business while secretary of state. But she and her husband are no strangers to scandal.
There often seemed to be no end of the scandals during President Bill Clinton's two terms in the White House and Hillary Clinton's campaigns for the Senate starting in 2000 and the Oval Office in 2008. Political experts began diagnosing "Clinton Fatigue" long ago.
As NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd said shortly after the email scandal broke, "if Clinton fatigue, which is already a disease in the press corps, actually becomes a problem with the voting public, and these polls, maybe this is the first time that it's becoming a problem, that's — that is doom for her."
Hillary Clinton may become America's first woman in the Oval Office despite the heavy baggage of her last name, but the scandals will surely play a dominant role in the 2016 presidential race.
To help readers keep track of them all, herewith is a list of significant Clinton scandals over the years. It is by no means a comprehensive list. The
Washington Examiner will update this list as needed in the months ahead.
Travelgate
Soon after her husband became president in 1993, first lady Hillary Clinton
allegedly engineered the firing of seven employees of the White House travel office and the hiring of a firm with ties to the Clintons to replace them. Multiple investigations absolved the president of involvement but Hillary Clinton was found to have made false statements to investigators.
Hillarycare secrecy
When first lady Hillary Clinton convened her task force to create her husband's national healthcare program, it included multiple representatives from government, the health and insurance industries and academics. Despite the obvious potential for conflicts of interest in closed deliberations, the task force's meetings were
kept secret throughout its existence.
Whitewater
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bill and Hillary Clinton were associates of Jim and Susan McDougal in the Whitewater Development Corp., an Arkansas real estate
investment firm that went under when McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan was closed by federal regulators for illegal accounting. Taxpayers lost $73 million due to Guaranty. The Clintons lost an estimated $67,000 on their investment, but McDougal helped pay off Bill Clinton's campaign debts, and Hillary Clinton's law firm received an unknown sum in fees for representing a Guaranty project that also failed.
Filegate
Hundreds of FBI background files on officials in previous Republican presidential administrations were improperly given in 1993 and 1994 to Craig Livingstone, the director of White House security who was a Hillary Clinton favorite. No
illegal activity was ever proven, and Livingstone ultimately resigned.
Removing files from Vince Foster's office
Vince Foster was President Clinton's deputy White House counsel and long-time friend of Hillary Clinton. He committed suicide in 1993, and his body was found in a park just across the Potomac River from the White House. Files were also allegedly removed from his White House office before investigators were
able to secure it as part of the official probe into his death.
Lost Rose Law Firm billing records
Congressional and Justice Department investigators began issuing subpoenas in 1994 for Hillary Clinton's billing records as a partner in the Rose law firm at the center of the Whitewater scandal. She said her role was incidental, but when the records
mysteriously turned up in the White House in 1996, they showed she met repeatedly with key figures in the scandal.
Commerce Department's "pay to play" junkets
Seats on Commerce Department international trade missions were sold to corporate figures in return for big contributions to President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who was reported to have opposed the scheme, died when one of the missions crashed in Croatia, leading independent counsel
Daniel Pearson to leave his investigation unfinished.
Renting Lincoln Bedroom
More than 800 people
stayed overnight in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House during President Bill Clinton's tenure. At least $5.4 million in campaign contributions from many of those guests went into Clinton's re-election effort. Among the paying guests were movie producer Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks SKG head David Geffen and long-time Hollywood powerhouse Lew Wasserman.
John Huang
A close associate of Indonesian industrialist James Riady,
Huang initially was appointed deputy secretary of commerce in 1993. By 1995, however, he moved to the Democratic National Committee where he generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions from foreign sources. Huang later pleaded guilty to one felony count of campaign finance violations.
Charlie Trie
Like John Huang,
Trie raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions from foreign sources to Democratic campaign entities. He was a regular White House visitor and arranged meetings of foreign operators with Clinton, including one who was a Chinese arms dealer. His $450,000 contribution to Clinton's legal defense fund was returned after it was found to have been largely funded by Asian interests. Trie was convicted of violating campaign finance laws in 1998.
Johnny Chung
Gave more than $366,000 to the Democratic National Committee prior to the 1996 campaign, but it was returned after officials learned it came from illegal foreign sources.
Chung later told a special Senate committee investigating 1996 Clinton campaign fund-raising that $35,000 of his contributions came from individuals in Chinese intelligence. Chung pleaded guilty to bank fraud, tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
No controlling legal authority
Then-Vice President Al Gore repeated the phrase "there is no controlling legal authority" at least seven times during a news conference called to explain his
multiple telephone calls from the White House to solicit contributions to the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign in 1996. In fact, the law was and remains clear that partisan campaign contributions cannot be solicited on or using federal property.
Monica Lewinsky and impeachment
President Clinton became only the second chief executive
ever impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 after being found guilty of obstructing justice and committing perjury in connection with a grand jury investigation of his sexual relationship in the White House with intern Monica Lewinsky. He remained in office, however, after the Senate failed to convict him. When the news of the Lewinsky scandal broke, Hillary famously blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
Pardongate
Shortly before leaving the Oval Office, Bill Clinton issued a number of controversial pardons for controversial individuals represented by lawyers with ties to the administration. The most controversial was
convicted tax evader Marc Rich who was pardoned after his former wife made big contributions to the Clinton presidential library and to Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign.
The Bosnia airport sniper lie
During her unsuccessful 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed to have come under sniper fire during her arrival as first lady at an airport in Bosnia in 1996. She recanted her claim after CBS News
broadcast video of the arrival that demonstrated there was no sniper fire.
The email scandal
While serving as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Clinton used a private email account and a server located at her residence in Chappaqua, N.Y., to conduct official government business. In a March 10, 2015, news conference at the United Nations, she said she did this as a matter of personal "convenience" and that she deleted thousands of emails she considered personal. Federal laws and regulations require government employees to
preserve personal emails that deal with official business.
The Clinton Foundation
After leaving the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton established a foundation in his name to raise funds for his presidential library. In the years since, the foundation — now known as the "Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation" — has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for worthy causes, with much of it coming from foreign governments, corporations and individuals. Critics claim the foundation is a tool for special interests to cultivate favorable relationships with the former and possible future president.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
