FBIs Comey Has Been Covering the Clintons Asses for Decades Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment. It could easily be assumed these words were written in the days following FBI Director James Comey’s decision in July not to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton. While claiming the FBI found no intent of wrongdoing, the director nonetheless delivered a scathing assessment of Clinton and her staff’s use of a private email server to transmit classified information. But the words are, in actuality, from a TIME article published back in March of this year. And they aren’t in reference to the email controversy. They’re addressing a scandal from the 1990s many will likely be familiar with — Whitewater. Much of the hard truth in the case would become obscured once the Monica Lewinsky distraction was thrown into the mix, but at its heart the Whitewater investigation centered on failed real estate investments by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates. And because the subject is now so heavily associated with Bill, a blue dress and a cigar, most would be shocked to discover just how close Hillary came to having charges brought against her during the Whitewater inquiry — to the point where a draft for her indictment had been written As in the email controversy of today, Clinton’s honesty was a central question facing investigators in 1998 as they weighed whether what they saw as shifting stories from Clinton amounted to an attempt to cover up misconduct. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. Following law school, Comey had served as clerk for a federal judge before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York — yes, the same office Preet Bharara is, at the urging of Comey’s FBI, now using to go after Clinton — as a prosecutor in 1987. As we’ll see, Comey’s association with the Southern District will prove highly beneficial to the Clintons. In the end, and not at all surprisingly, no charges were brought against then-President Bill Clinton and his wife for their involvement in the Whitewater affair. Several of their associates were convicted, however, of crimes including fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. Fortunately — at least for a handful — Slick Willy managed to slide them a pardon in the last hours of his presidency. Marc Rich was a pioneering oil mogul in the 70s and 80s who, as a boy, escaped the wrath of the Nazis by fleeing Belgium with his family and relocating to the United States [Renegade note: oy vey!]. After years in Missouri, the family ended up living in New York, where Rich would learn the ropes of the international commodities game. He would go on to become the most successful — and notorious — businessman and trader of his time. He was so dominant in his field, in fact, that peers came to call him the “King of Oil.” To his critics he was a white-collar criminal, a serial sanctions breaker, whom they accused of building a fortune trading with revolutionary Iran, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, apartheid-era South Africa, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. In 1983, Rich was indicted on 65 counts of, among other things, tax evasion and racketeering. Facing a potential life sentence in prison, Rich fled to Switzerland. He would remain on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for years. Miraculously, however, Rich was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001, on his last day in office — yes, the same day he pardoned his old Whitewater associates Among the more glaringly questionable details surrounding the pardon are the fact that Rich’s ex-wife had donated $450,000 to the Clinton Presidential Library — as well as thousands more to Bill’s defense fund during the Whitewater hearings — and the allegations that then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder facilitated the pardon using underhanded methods in exchange for promises of becoming Attorney General in an Al Gore administration. The Justice Department immediately set up an inquiry to look into the Clinton pardons, which numbered 176 in total. Originally, U.S. Attorney for — you guessed it — the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, had been appointed to lead the investigation. White stepped down before the conclusion of the inquiry, however, and was replaced — rather conveniently — by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia James Comey. As it happens, Comey was one the prosecutors who’d helped successfully convict Marc Rich fifteen years before. So it was with intimate knowledge of Rich’s criminality that Comey would later tell Congress how “stunned” he was by the pardon of the oil magnate. Despite this — not to mention the overwhelming evidence of bribery and shady dealings regarding the Clinton pardons — Comey nonetheless determined in 2002 that no criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons had occurred. A week after Wilson’s article was published, conservative columnist Robert Novak ran a piece outing Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative and the person who recommended Wilson for the Niger assignment. Novak cited two senior Bush administration staffers as sources of the leak. It would later be revealed that those sources were State Department official Richard Armitage, acting as the primary, and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who confirmed. There was much speculation at the time that the Bush officials went rogue as revenge for Wilson’s op-ed in which he contradicted the president’s claims. Within months of Novak’s article, the Justice Department had opened an investigation as to who had blown Valerie Plame’s cover. To avoid the appearance of partiality, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case — which paved the way for the number two man, James Comey, to step into the top spot. As a Bush appointee, Comey also desired — seemingly — to avoid the appearance of bias. So, amid calls for an independent investigation, Comey appointed a federal attorney out of Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, to handle the affair. Fitzgerald, by the way, was a good friend of Comey’s — and godfather to one of his children. Some viewed the appointment as troubling, but the case proceeded. In the end, no one was charged for the leak, itself. Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, however, who testified during the trial, was convicted of perjury and obstruction. Libby, who’d been made privy to Plame’s role as a CIA operative by the vice president prior to Novak’s article being published, is thought by another witness in the case, reporter Judith Miller, to have fallen on his sword to protect Cheney. The whole affair came to be known as “Plamegate The trial revealed that top members of the administration were eager to discredit Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of doctoring prewar intelligence on Iraq We have known Hillary Clinton both professionally and personally for nearly 20 years, dating back to before President Bill Clinton’s first trip to Africa in 1998 — a trip they both acknowledge changed their lives, and gave considerable meaning to their post-White House years and to the activities of the Clinton Foundation. They go on to state that, in the midst of the scandal, “Hillary reached out to us. Her counsel during that tumultuous period was as timely as it was wise.” One of Hillary Clinton’s most frequent favor-seekers when she was secretary of state was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a longtime Clinton friend, an endorser of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and an Africa expert with deep business ties to the continent. Given these facts, one could be forgiven for finding it odd that James Comey — who’d by then proven himself thoroughly dependable in Clinton-related matters — ended up being the man in charge of the Plamegate investigation. Odder still, one might think, that the godfather of one of Comey’s children was appointed — by Comey himself — to conduct the trial. In July of 2004, the news broke that the Justice Department was investigating former Clinton aide Sandy Berger over allegations he removed and even destroyed classified material from the National Archives while acting as the Clinton administration’s hand-selected official in charge of reviewing documents for the independent commission on 9/11. Law enforcement sources said archive staff members told FBI agents they saw Berger placing items in his jacket and pants, and one archive staffer told agents that Berger also placed something in his socks. But others had more serious concerns. Some were asking if Berger, the longtime Clinton loyalist, had been sent into the archives not to prevent damaging information about 9/11 from reaching the commission, but rather, to destroy material that could potentially be harmful to the Clinton dynasty down the road. In any case, Berger was floated a sweetheart deal by the Justice Department in 2005. For charges that could’ve seen him behind bars, Berger was fined $50,000 and forced to give up his security clearance for three years. The Deputy Attorney General in charge of that case? James Comey. Within the last two weeks alone, Underground Reporter has written on both the recent spike in the so-called “Clinton body count” and the revelation that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich may very well be the source behind Wikileaks’ DNC leak — a suggestion made by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that had one Clinton strategist immediately calling for his death. http://www.renegadetribune.com/fbis-comey-covering-clintons-asses-decades/ continue in comments