© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
June 21, 2007 

Barring the calamitous, former United States Senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, will be the next president of the United States.

Thompson’s masterful use of the online interview—a vastly smarter and cheaper way of campaigning for those with something to say—has all but secured him the Republican nomination.

In the general election, in a fair fight, either Obama or Hillary—or Gore for that matter--will have a hard time winning any five states against Thompson.

But for Hillary at least, it is too late in the game to fight fair. Desperation will push her and her soulless minions to fight otherwise. No fool, Thompson knows what he is up against.

In 1997, then Senator Thompson chaired a committee that investigated what he rightly called “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history.” Hillary’s fingerprints were all over that campaign.

Beginning early in 1995, the Clintons launched an unprecedented series of expensive, untruthful, arguably illegal TV ads. For cover, they laundered the campaign through the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

According to Clinton advisor Dick Morris, Hillary signed off on everything. The media, true to form, chose not to notice the ads or their financing. Here, the Thompson Committee report proves instructive:

The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well. Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.

Johnny Chung, who admitted funneling $100,000 from the Chinese Military to the DNC, would tell the Thompson Committee, “The White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates.”

No one understood this investment opportunity better than James and Moctar Riady, an ethnic Chinese father and son team who ran the powerful Indonesian firm, the Lippo Group.

The Riadys had sensed Clinton’s sleaze potential back in Arkansas and bailed out his 1992 primary campaign at it shakiest moment. As a quid pro quo, the Riadys sought a job for their “man in America,” John Huang.

Aware of his many talents, the DNC put Huang on its “must consider” list. And what were Huang’s talents? A letter sent by an Asian outreach advocate on the stationery of David Roberti, the president pro tem of the California state Senate, was frank to a fault.

“John is the Riady family’s top priority for placement because he is like one of their own.” The Riady family, in case anyone needed reminding, “invested heavily in the Clinton campaign.”

Huang ended up in Ron Brown’s Commerce Department as a deputy assistant secretary. Curiously, he got the job on the same day that embattled Clinton aide, Webster Hubbell, got a $100,000 check from a Riady company, and Hubbell “rolled over” once more.

Brown confidante Nolanda Hill would tell ABC’s Prime Time Live that, according to Brown, “the White House put [Huang] there,” and in this instance, added Hill, “The White House meant Hillary Clinton.”

Whoever was responsible, Huang went to Commerce not to advance America’s interests but those of the Riadys and, by extension, those of China.

“Over the past five years,” reads the Thompson report, “the Lippo Group has shifted its strategic center from Indonesia to the People’s Republic of China.” Those five years, by the way, backdated to 1992, the year of Clinton’s election.

On one particularly revealing occasion, Huang left a CIA briefing at the Commerce Department and walked across the street where, according to the Thompson Committee, he had “a secret office.”

This office was located within the larger offices of Stephens Inc., the Little Rock-based investment-banking firm with which the Riadys and the Clintons had a long relationship. There, in private, Huang proceeded to place a three-hour call to his former employer, the Lippo Group.

Lippo had a lot at stake. The CIA briefing concerned the development by an international consortium of a massive coal-fired power plant in Indonesia called the Paiton plant.

The Lippo Group just happened to control one of the only two commercially viable low-sulfur coal mines in the world, this one conveniently located near the Paiton plant.

At the Clintons’ urging, Ron Brown helped put the Paiton deal together, and the various players thanked him profusely for his help. Among the players, as usual during these years, was the Enron Corporation.

What happens next on the American end of this saga raises a host of troubling questions. The CNN.com report on the day it happened, September 18, 1996, well captures the general tenor of the reporting.

“Clinton Declares Utah Canyons A National Monument,” reads the headline.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that using the Grand Canyon as “his picture perfect backdrop,” Clinton “unilaterally” declared a new 1.7 million-acre national monument seventy miles away in southern Utah.

“We’re saying, very simply, our parents and grandparents saved the Grand Canyon for us,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. “Today, we will save the Grand Escalante Canyons and the Kaiparowitz Plateaus of Utah for our children.”

To his credit, Blitzer did not shy from the implicit controversy. He reported the people of Utah were “furious.” They claimed it was “a land grab” by the federal government “at the economic expense of the state.”

The rationale for the move puzzled Blitzer as Clinton already had the environmental vote, and there were many safer gestures he could have made with less than two months left in the campaign.

Blitzer raised the issue of coal, perhaps $1 trillion worth of clean, low-sulfur coal that would never be mined. Just the year before Utah had approved an environmental-friendly mining contract on the Kaiparowitz Plateau with Dutch-owned Andalex Resources.

Said Clinton of this grand environmental gesture, “We can’t have mines everywhere, and we shouldn’t have mines that threaten our national treasures.”

No, not everywhere, just in Indonesia. In a stroke of the pen, Clinton had handed the Riadys a monopoly on the world’s supply of low-sulfur coal.

One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots between Utah and Indonesia. The FBI had made the connection as well. Consider the following field notes from an FBI interview with Huang:

Huang laughed in response to questions concerning j. riady’s interest in Utah coal restrictions. j. riady’s coal interests were minimal. Indonesia had significant infrastructure problems which prohibited the development of its coal resources.

Huang was lying. The Riadys had a powerful interest, and they would exploit it for all it was worth. In fact, at the Paiton plant, the price of the coal exceeded the price of the electricity produced.

In 1999, PLN, the state Indonesian power company, sued the Clinton administration. Its attorneys charged that U.S. officials knew the Paiton power plant contract to be awash in “corruption, collusion, and nepotism” from the beginning.

By this time, though, James Riady had fled the country, and Huang had pled the fifth.

Worse, Huang’s immediate boss, Charles Meissner, and Meissner’s boss, Ron Brown, had died in the “inexplicable” crash of an Air Force CT-43A on a Croatian hillside.

Yes, Fred, watch out for the calamitous.

[Next week, Part 2 of What Fred Thompson Knows About Hillary Clinton]