Charges continue to haunt Hillary Rodham Clinton

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 1996 | by John Elvin

Hillary is not likely to get that wish except in regard to those already shredded. In addition to the many questions about Whitewater she has yet to answer, she undoubtedly will be asked to further explain the neat trick of parlaying $1,000 into a $98,000 profit in cattle futures in just nine months. In a market in which an estimated 75 percent of investors lose money, HilLary had the good fortune to be guided by a lawyer for Tyson Foods to the services of broker Robert "Red" Bone who, though subsequently disciplined for various violations of security rules, seems to have served her handily.

As quoted in Greenberg's book, Hillary explains that she "was raised by a father who had me reading the stock tables when I was a little girl, and I started doing it with my daughter when she was a little girl." But even given her own version of Operation Headstart, Hillary's haul seems incredible. In the Morris book Partners in Power, it is mentioned that economists from Auburn and North Florida universities determined that the probability of her making such trades legitimately would be less than 1 in 250 million. Morris adds that in talking to Hillary's friends he gets the distinct impression that she feels the windfall is a karmic payback for Whitewater losses and an entitlement in return for having abandoned Washington in favor of "this steamy, raw, backward place."

Whatever Hillary thought of Arkansas, critics say, she marched back into Washington victorious, put her "Rodham" centerpiece back in place, shut the public out of national health-care planning, shredded anything resembling incriminating evidence. And two FBI agents assigned to the White House say she adopted a veteran dirty trickster, Craig Livingstone, to be her creature in the underhanded exercise of raw power. All the while, critics complain, tut-tutting as she did to newscaster Jim Lehrer that "I think that unfortunately a lot of our campaigns have gotten nasty and mean-spirited in past years."

At a recent gathering of past and current members of Congress, author Zeifman told Insight, there were "a number of former members and former staff people from the Judiciary Committee at the time of Watergate. We had a conversation, and I said I felt that us Democrats had done the country a disservice because we knew what Bernie Nussbaum was and we knew what Hillary Clinton was way back in 1974, and none of us did a thing to hold them accountable."

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Jerry Zeifman, chief counsel to the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings, says that one of his subordinates was engaged in a dirty-tricks campaign to destroy Richard Nixon. Zeifman tells Insight that this young lawyer went so far as to hide a crucial study from the committee that shows the Nixon cover-up of the Watergate affair to have been activity of a kind so common by American presidents as not to constitute an impeachable "abuse of power." The name of that subordinate, says Zeifman, was Hillary Diane Rodham.