© Jack Cashill
WND.com - February 12, 2014

Just when I think I am beyond the reach of shock, I come across some new revelation that makes my head rotate.

Disturbing enough was WND’s breakthrough discovery that the liberal, Soros-funded Urban Institute has an officially sanctioned role in the vetting of non-profits that seek tax exempt status through the IRS.

Almost equally disturbing is the revelation that the vice chairman of the Urban Institute Board of Trustees is none other than Jamie Gorelick. How does this lady manage it?

In her most recent public outing, Gorelick represented BP in the Gulf oil mess. Nor was this the first disaster with which the 58 year-old year-old Gorelick has been involved.

Indeed, bloggers have taken to calling Jamie Gorelick "The Mistress of Disaster" and with good reason. Now, she can add an IRS scandal notch to her multi-notched belt.

In 1993, as deputy attorney general under President Clinton, Gorelick served as “field commander” for the horrific government assault on a religious community in Waco, Texas, that left more than eighty dead, twenty of them children.

In 1995, she went on to pen the infamous "wall" memo that prevented intelligence agencies from sharing information in the run-up to September 11.

At the time, a dismayed FBI investigator wrote a memo to headquarters which included the sentence, 'Whatever has happened to this -- someday someone will die -- and wall or not -- the public will not understand why we were not more effective..."

In 1996 Gorelick stepped up her game, taking a lead role in the investigation of the TWA Flight 800 disaster. This was the 747 that inexplicably blew up off the coast of Long Island in July 1996 killing 230 people.

As deputy attorney general serving under a feckless Janet Reno, Gorelick's assignment was to rein in the FBI. This had become increasingly necessary.

Although putting a "bomb" spin on his leaks to the New York Times, Jim Kallstrom, who headed up the FBI investigation, had spent the first five weeks after the crash pursuing the truth.

At that juncture, five weeks into the investigation, even if Gorelick knew no more than what she read in the Times, she would have known that explosive residue had been found all over the plane and that the possibility of a mechanical failure was more "remote" than ever.

Gorelick surely knew much more, specifically that the FBI had already interviewed more than seven hundred eyewitnesses. At least 244 of these people provided highly specific accounts of a missile strike on the aircraft.

On Aug. 22, 1996, Gorelick summoned Kallstrom to Washington and served up a dose of political reality.

To be sure, no account of the Aug. 22 meeting provides any more than routine detail, but behaviors began to change immediately afterwards.

The FBI had already leaked to the New York Times information that would result in a headline on Aug. 23, top right: "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800."

This article stole the thunder from Clinton's election-driven approval of welfare reform in that same day's paper and threatened to undermine the peace and prosperity message of the next week's Democratic National Convention.

What followed in the next several weeks was the most ambitious and successful cover-up in American peacetime history.

At its center was Gorelick. With the help of a complicit media, she and her cronies transformed a transparent missile strike into a mechanical failure of unknown origin.

Given her role, the months after the crash had to have been emotionally harrowing. In May 1997, the Clintons appear to have rewarded Gorelick for her steely performance with a job that would pay her $877,573 in that first half-year alone.

According to a Lexis search, not one reporter even questioned why a middling bureaucrat with no financial or housing experience would be handed a sinecure that the Washington Monthly called "the equivalent of winning the lottery," the vice chairmanship of Fannie Mae.

One does not have to be a cynic to suspect that a grateful Clinton had something to do with it.

Six years and an incredible $25.6 million later, having done her share to wreck the American economy, Gorelick responded to the call of duty once more and took just one of five Democratic seats on the 9/11 Commission.

In testifying before that commission, anti-terror czar Richard Clarke asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about [aviation terror] given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

Almost assuredly, Clarke had downplayed talk of aviation terror during those years to take Flight 800 off the table. Almost assuredly, Gorelick took the 9/11 post to keep it off.

Now, Gorelick finds herself once again as the vice chair of an organization at the center of a major controversy. Time will tell what role the Urban Institute has played, but Gorelick’s presence offers no assurance that it was a benign one.