A Former Clinton Adviser Exposes Hillary's History of Lies and Obfuscations (2004)

well thank you for coming thank you for braving the threat of rain first of all I'd like to introduce my wife Ilene Magan she is the co-author of this book it was written with Eileen Magan it's the third book she's ghosted for me but the first one she's let me put her name on and we are currently looking at possibly doing another book in which case we will be co-authors and I hope that that's a permanent feature of our of our life for two reasons when it means we'll write books together the other it means she won't have thrown me out of the house when we both read living history we both wanted to have a DNA test to be sure that this was the same lady that we had known for 25 years I mean everything about her was different I don't just mean physical appearance that was totally different she does not have turquoise blue eyes she has brown eyes she has very thick used to have very thick coke bottle glasses and well the cosmetic stuff you can know you I mean you can figure out but what was really disturbing about it is that there was a complete mask every politician wears makeup to cover a blemish or two but only Hillary really wears a complete mask where you have absolutely no clue what she's like reading her memoirs now I haven't read Bill Clinton's memoirs yet they come out tomorrow but I can assure you that if you read those memoirs you'll know all about Bill Clinton in fact you'll know far more about him than he ever cared to know because he goes on and on and on and on and on if that you know his various struggles in life and he doesn't hide things I mean he hides what he's doing with who when but I mean other than that he basically what you see is what you get and when you think about our other presidents throughout history that basically has been the with each of them we knew who Harry Truman was for goodness sakes and Eisenhower and Kennedy we didn't know everything about that he was doing but he was who he said he was Lyndon Johnson used to pretend he was this dignified guy till he lifted up the beagle by his ears and showed his appendix scar on national TV and that gave us a pretty good feel as to what he was like Ronald Reagan the irony is that Reagan was an actor who was used to playing other people but in the Oval Office he only played himself and Bush was too geeky and you know sort of awkward to to be anything other than what he was a sort of awkward Eastern preppy and W what you see is what you get a macho Texas you know cowboy turned president so but Hillary Clinton wears a mask just a complete alternate persona and in that she has in common with only one other politician of our time and that's Richard Nixon who had a persona that he presented to us that was completely different from the man that we ultimately met in the Watergate tapes the the one Nixon hated swearing Adlai Stevenson once used the word hell in the 1956 campaign and Nixon was offended and complained about it for a month and then you listen to him on the Watergate tapes and it's every other word is it was expletive deleted but the problem is that you get no clue no sense of who Hillary Clinton is by what she says in her books for example Hillary says the week after 9/11 she went on The Today Show and told Katie Couric and Jane Pauley that Chelsea had decided this would be a great day for a jog around the towers of the World Trade Center and that that day 9/11 Chelsea set out to jog around the towers stopped into a coffee shop and at that moment the airplane hit and that she actually heard the plane hit and Katie Couric moved by that introduced the segment by saying on 9/11 Hillary Clinton was not just a senator was a concerned parent and you know God I mean you you can just feel the goosebumps rising when when someone would say that that their own daughter's life was was in jeopardy well I hate to spoil the party but three weeks three months later Chelsea wrote an article for top magazine where she said she was staying at a friend's apartment to 29th and Park Avenue over four miles from Ground Zero and the friend called her and said turn on the TV it can't imagine what's going on she flipped on the TV saw the second airplane hit on television in the privacy of her of her room so why would Hillary do this why would she make up something of completely whole cloth and do it on the Today Show in national television why would she say that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest the problem was he did it five years after she was born and had like never left New Zealand at the time she was born why would she say she experienced the evils of discrimination playing junior high school intramural soccer well okay except for the problem that the her junior high school only started that program in 1982 at which point she was at the tender age of 37 now when Al Gore says that he's the father of the Internet okay that's a stretch but it's not whole cloth the internet began as a method for the Pentagon to stay in touch with its bases around the world basically as a cost-saving measure and the bill that set that up was sponsored by a guy named Al Gore so I mean he may not have been the father but he certainly was present at the birth and was love story after Al and Tipper well no but his roommate wrote love story his college roommate and there were scenes in it that were typical of Al and Tipper not any of the funny crazy ones but this is some of them and so I mean that's an exaggeration politicians do that but to completely make up a story especially about 9/11 in her home in her new home state one week after this catastrophe why would she do it so Ilene and I were batting that around and we decided that what it is is that she grew up politically at the knee of Bill Clinton and she saw this politician who relates effortlessly to anybody well he doesn't have to manufacture charisma he just uncorks the bottle and the charm flows out there's this attractiveness this ability to relate to anybody this almost antenna where he knows what you're thinking and he studies the faces and and relates to you and she can't do that so when she showed up at the rally at Madison Square Garden for the cops and the firemen and the rescue workers and the families of the 9/11 victims she was booed off the stage you couldn't imagine that happening to Bill Clinton he'd be biting his lower lip tears would be welling up in his eyes everybody would be sobbing and hugging everybody and we'll be a real bonding going on but Hillary can't do that so she has to invent an artificial construct to put her at the scene to say I'm just like one of you I'm the same as you I'm just a parent whose daughter was almost killed at 9/11 and I'm unbonded with you or when she tries to pretend that your name that she's adventuresome and her name is the name of the world's greatest mountain climber there's a need to sort of assimilate charisma by borrowing it by these stories now sometimes the stories are of minor consequence sometimes though they are a defense mechanism to deal with criticism that she gets and hear what she tries to do is to hide out and be one of the heard she likes to say oh you're not criticizing Hillary you're criticizing women or professional women or lawyers who are women or activists outspoken women that's who you're really criticizing not me so remember in the 1992 campaign she said that mothers who stay at home but bake cookies and serve tea and that that's all they do and that was just a very controversial comment well obviously the reason it was controversial was it was a put-down she saying that these women who stay home have nothing to do but bake cookies and serve tea but in living history here's how she defends that comment the attacks reflected the extent to which our society was still adjusting to the changing roles of women while Bill talked about social change I embodied it I had my own opinions interests in profession for better or worse I was outspoken I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society I had been turned into a symbol for women of my generation that's all true and it's to her credit that it is true but it has nothing to do with the criticism she got for that crazy comment it wasn't that she embodied social change it was the choose putting down people who didn't happen to share her particular priorities or when she was at the rose law firm in Arkansas and her husband was the governor of the state she happened to get a lot of state business at the Rose law firm so she was criticized for that and how does she defend herself against that criticism of a conflict of interest this is the sort of thing that happens to women who have their own careers in their own lives and I think it's a shame but I guess it's something we're gonna have to live with those of us who've tried and have a career tried to have an independent life to make a difference and certainly might like myself who has children you know I've done the best I can to lead my life what this has nothing to do with juggling career and family it has to do with your husband's the governor of the state and you're getting legal fees to represent the state if she were a 75 year old man she would have been criticized for the same stuff but there's this defense mechanism of pretending she's normal and kind of hiding within the herd by the way that story about the legal work is an interesting one the state of Arkansas was suing to stop utility rates from going up and Bill Clinton needed a really good lawyer to do that lawsuit so he chose iller II which made a lot of sense then I came home one night and I told Eileen that he had done that and Eileen said and she's getting paid for that and I said I guess she and says she's gonna get killed for that politically so I went back the next time I was in Arkansas and I said you know Eileen thinks that it's not a good idea for you to get paid for this and she erupts Hilary erupts and says our law firm has always represented the state we represented the state for years the only reason I'm doing it is so that we can win this case and we can make sure that it comes out okay and blah blah blah so I said okay Hilary that's cool that's fine why don't you continue to represent the state and just divide the firm into two parts one pot of money which is the state business that you don't share in and the other pot of money would be the rest of the firm's business that you would share in and she said fine that's great no problem about six months later Vince Foster sent a memo around that explained that she would increased her take from the portion of the pool that was not related to state business so that it all came out the same part of what Hilary does in living history if she goes through every one of the financial scandals of the Clinton years and of the Clinton administration and she repeats the same justifications and the same arguments and the same excuses that they used all throughout that time now it is perfectly rational when you're the first lady and you have your under attack and your husband is under attack to go ahead and do that I mean what else is she gonna do say oh I'm guilty she's not gonna do that but why but when she repeats all of this in her memoirs not for political gain but just to avoid just so she can make 8 million bucks and when she repeats all of the same justifications you have a real sense that she may have learned absolutely nothing so for example she says that when she turned a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand dollars in the commodities market by the way in her book signings I thought everybody should go to them just for financial advice I think you know name one other how-to speaker who tells you the ways of Wall Street who has a track record after that good she says in her book that she was exonerated in that well she wasn't she wasn't prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run it had elapsed and why had it elapsed well in 1982 Clinton was running for governor against Frank white the guy who had beaten him for governor in 1980 and I said hey you know Frank White's refusing to release his tax returns why don't you release yours we can really embarrass him and Clinton said yeah that's a great idea let's go do that and then when the time came to release the tax returns I said so what years Egan released 79 and 80 which was the years you were governor he said oh no not that not that I'll released last year 81 and I said what good is 81 you're out of office the goal is you release the stuff while you're in office and demand that he do the same thing I'm not going to do that I said but why not I'm not gonna do that bill it makes did you hear me I'm not gonna do that and then 10 years later I learned why he wanted to hide the Commodities winnings so that he would not so that the statute of limitations would have lapsed by the time anybody found out about by the way while we're on the subject of Bill Clinton quotes when I first met Bill Clinton it was 1977 and he was the Attorney General in Arkansas and I met with him in his office and we had a great meeting we just hit it off and there was electricity flying back and forth and and really the beginning of a of a long good relationship and at the end of it I had to go to the bathroom so I asked where it was and he said it's all the way in the back of my office you make a right there so I did and looked like a bowl it looked like a finished basement his office you'd swear there should be a pool table in the middle of the floor and so I went to the bathroom and I closed the door and there was this huge pin up on the door of this gorgeous blonde spilling out of a tiny white bikini so after I got out I said you know this is the Bible Belt sir you think it's cool to have this you know on the door and he said don't you know who that is and I said no I don't and he said that's Dolly Parton and I said who and he said oh man you really are from New York now some of the stuff that hilary obscures in living history is stuff that it's absolutely to her credit and a terribly important part of who she is and this was probably the most disappointing thing to me in reading her book which is the Hillary that I've admired the Hillary that I liked the Hillary that I that that I really felt was was excellent makes no appearance in this book this bland sort of goody two-shoes housewife subsumes it entirely the justice the time that I really got to know Hillary best and got really to like her was in 1982 when she stepped in and ran bills campaign after he had been defeated for governor in 1980 and she took over and she absolutely ran his life in the campaign and boy she is a great manager you know bill is not he's a procrastinator and inefficient and wandering and he thinks self-discipline is something he'd like to have for dessert one night Hillary is the most disciplined person I know so bill basically turned the management to the campaign over to Hillary and she was brilliant I felt like a good violinist in an orchestra with a great conductor she was superb but in the book there's no mention of that absolutely none she says oh the comeback campaign was a family endeavor we loaded Chelsea diaper bag and all into a big car as we drove around the state we started in the South was spring and snuck in under the pine trees and ended in Fayetteville in a snow storm I've always liked campaigning and traveling through Arkansas stopping at County stores sale barns and barbecue joints with Chelsea on my hip I walked up and down the streets meeting voters yeah maybe twice three times which she mainly did was sit next to me writing negative ads the whole campaign but no no indication that in the book in 1992 I would sit next to her at the mansion the governor's mansion which was the transition office and with the pencil we would work on the cabinet choices and she basically designed her husband's cabinet his administration and I think did a very good job with few bad apples but for the most part a pretty good cabinet in her book no credit for that at all she says that the the only comment she makes about the transition is we face the same problems most couples face when the husband is transferred and gets a new job we had to move to a new location and all our friends came and helped with the packing and Loretto event my good friend yelled up the stairs Hillary are we taking a bus pay you the rest but but this absolutely ridiculous scene that has nothing to do with who Hillary Clinton really is but it is very important that we find out who Hillary is because she might very well be our president and there is developing a perfect storm of elements that are laying the basis for a Hillary Clinton candidacy for president if John Kerry loses I think Hillary is virtually guaranteed of the Democratic nomination in oh eight and you know if Kerry loses they'll have been eight years of Bush and by then people will hate him even more and you know it'll be hard for him to for them for him to keep his hold on the public's imagination or for the Republican Party to do it there'll be a real sense of the need to alternate power and the country itself is becoming more Democrat at the rate of one half of one percent a year that's as a result of black and Hispanic in migration so you look at the election right now for Bush and the poor guy lost to gore by half a point in the popular vote Nader got three points and the country has gotten two points more Democrat so he's got to gain six points just to break even and just to have a tie election and in four years that's gonna be even more and in eight years even more the Clintons control the fundraising apparatus of the Democratic Party Hillary has not done much in the Senate there's no major bill or amendment nothing she ever introduced passed even the remotest amendment no hearings no initiatives and kind of nothing but what she's done is to go to a hundred and twenty seven fundraisers for other senators and other members of Congress and other governors in other states and develop io u--'s from those people that she can cash in when she runs for president so there's a very good chance that we could end up with a Hillary Clinton presidency if Kerry wins and goes for re-election in o8 regardless of how that turns out she's a very likely candidate in 2012 the polls show she could have won the nomination in oh four she had three times the vote of all of the can the other candidates combined at the start of the election so what is Hillary Clinton really like the book offers us no clue so glad we went beneath the book to the Hillary Clinton that Eileen and I have known for over two decades to really explore that well there's good news and there's bad news I believe that the time that I really began to break with Hillary the time that I really began to to worry about her was after the Monica Lewinsky scandal because Bill Clinton called me and told me the truth about the Lewinsky scandal he said we called me on the day the story broke and he said I didn't do what they said I did but I may have done so much that I can't prove my innocence I screw Lea screwed up with this girl and I had no idea what he meant until months and months later and then I said oh no you don't mean that yeah I guess you do but I knew that Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp were telling the truth because he told me that and then I watched as Hillary and these detectives that she kept on the payroll when after Monica went after Linda and just tore them apart they were stalkers it was a vast right-wing conspiracy they were blackmailing the president she brought presidential kneepads to Washington it was coercive poor Linda Tripps personnel file was illegally released she sued subsequently and collected half a million dollars from the Pentagon for the violation of her privacy rights she was indicted she was tried for the crime of why of taping Monica Lewinsky and thank goodness she was acquitted and imagine if the only person that went to jail and that whole thing was was Linda Tripp up and I looked at the way these detectives descended on these women now when I worked for Bill Clinton I had no idea if Paula Jones or Jennifer flowers were telling the truth okay I'd assumed they weren't because Clinton told me they weren't but then when I saw what they did to these women who were telling the truth it really began to raise concerns and then when he admitted that Jennifer flowers and he had had an affair a Hilary by the way still dismisses her allegations is a whale of a tale in her book and makes no mention of the tape recordings of conversations between Jennifer and Bill Clinton and Hillary and her book still denies the Paula Jones story and makes light of the fact that they had to pay her eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars to settle the case and in her book makes not one mention not one word about her husband being stripped of his law license for five years as a result of perjuring himself in the depositions in that Napoleon's case not one word about that that's not living history but when you look back at this record it is a record that reminds you of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon 30 40 50 women had their backgrounds dug up by these detectives every DWI every a custody case every divorce case every arrest record every property tax issue every everything that ever happened and these were an abortion all of this stuff came out and they would present these women with this information and say you have to sign an affidavit denying that you'd had a relationship with Bill Clinton and and it began to really make me sick and the big part of Hillary's of Hillary that gives me this tremendous pause is this ruthlessness this absolute determination to crush personally crush anybody that gets in her way and you have to understand why Hillary is that way it is because she honestly and deeply and sincerely believes in her own virtue and her own goodness Bill Clinton as somebody who's in politics because he needs it in his because of his neurosis he needs the attention he needs the affection he needs the reflected self-image unless somebody's paying attention to him the guy literally can't digest his food he has attention deficit disorder when he's not getting enough attention he's disordered so he's entered the only business where people are always paying attention to you sometimes he reminds me of a headlight reflector on the highway you'd swear that it was shining but it's not it's just reflecting your headlight beams coming back at you and bill enters politics for his own emotional needs he's a pragmatist if you don't like him call him an opportunist and once he's there he wants to do the best he can because he's there and he'll do the be the best president he could be but there's no guiding ideology people used to say what is Bill Clinton stand for he's a pragmatist he doesn't really have an ideology Hillary is very different she has a very clear view of what she stands for and it's a focus on the problems of women and children largely with government intervention and state activity and she is a very sincerely dedicated liberal ideologue and if you like that stuff she's your girl this is no act this is nothing she's putting on just to win elections something she deeply believes and it's one of the things that's so valuable and important about her and it makes all of this phone enos so sickening because underneath there's something really valuable and important there that she represents but she is so convinced of her own virtue and so convinced that anybody who disagrees with her can't possibly be righteous she once said I wonder if someone can be a Republican and a Christian at the same time and imagine that so she is so convinced of her own rectitude that she ends up being totally ruthless in the means she uses to achieve power her ends to her a so virtuous and so good that it's okay if Mother Teresa on the way to feed the starving kids in Calcutta hijacks a jet to get there sooner it's okay because of the purity of her me of her objectives the other problem is that that sense of her own virtue Kindles a sense of financial entitlement that leads her to dance on the edge of scandal now we really have not had a president who stole serious amounts of money since warren g harding but Hillary came very close now I'm not blaming her so much for the commodities stuff for the Whitewater stuff there was small amounts of money involved she says she was exonerated in whitewater she wasn't a Jim mcdougal was dead Susan mcdougal wasn't talking because bill was going to pardon her and she got a full pardon and got out of jail free get out of jail free card and the Bill and Hillary obviously weren't talking but after she had made money after that sense of financial insecurity that she writes up with Chelsea's birth had been ass waged after she had some reason to believe that things were okay and she had an eight million dollar book deal and he had a twelve million dollar book deal and he had a ten million dollar a year income she still felt the White House China and and registered a gift registry at a Midwestern department store and had friends or supporters or donors send in ten thousand dollar checks and buy a twenty four twenty four pieces of Spode China as well as silver and all kinds of other stuff to decorate her house whole this from a woman when the only house she ever lived in that she owned the 1981 home she lived in in between the governorships every glass was from a different mobil gas station you know there were no two plates that were alike every who was always pizza at night but yet they developed this sense of entitlement the sense of financial acquisitiveness this feeling that she had forsaken a blue chip law firm Wellesley Yale law to go to work in this godforsaken state and help her husband help people in that state by the way I don't mean New York so the negative side of Hillary is again quite nick Sounion I don't think there's any difference between Richard Nixon struggling to get every last campaign contribution and in 1972 before the campaign disclosure law took effect and Hillary struggling to get every last gift in before she took the oath of office as a senator and the gift ban took effect I don't think there's any difference between the plumbers unit burglarizing Daniel Ellsberg's office psychiatrist's office to dig up files to compromise the person who released the Pentagon Papers and Hillary hiring slew of private detectives to read through the garbage of these women literal and figurative and blackmailed them into silence but if that's all Hillary Clinton were this would not be nearly as important to discussion as it is because there's another figure that Hillary reminds me of the young Robert F Kennedy the Robert F Kennedy before JFK's death think about the similarities they hold the exact same seat in the United States Senate that's Bobby Kennedy's seat she's in one as a carpetbagger from another state after her namesake left the White House and was still very popular during whose administration they had each served as the alter ego sheltering their president from scandal Bobby Kennedy sheltering John Kennedy from Marilyn Monroe and Hillary's sheltering bill from Monica Lewinsky our standards are dropping what can I tell you and each disgraced themselves in office Bobby by wiretapping Martin Luther King by being chief counsel to the McCarthy Committee a minority counsel to the McCarthy Committee investigating imaginary communists violating the civil liberties of steel executives just because they raised the price of steel and of labor leaders and Hillary with all of these private detectives yet each served a fundamental function in broadening the outlook of their President Bobby made John pay attention to issues of race and poverty and Hillary made bill pay attention to the problems of women and children now when Bobby left office when JFK was killed he changed he became a very different person he began to understand that the purity of means and the purity of ends are closely interrelated that you can't have one without the other he began to understand that ruthlessness begets ruthlessness causes a cycle of violence and ended up in the assassination of his brother he began to understand the need to make gentle the ways of man was one of his most favorite quotes and one wonders if Hillary Clinton can go through a similar process of growth because there's something very important there inside of Hillary in 1995 Hillary went to the women's rights convention in China and she stood up there on the platform and she said women's rights are human rights and abort and pro-choice does not mean forced abortion and sterilization tremendous guts to say that in the middle of China and then she went on to condemn the murder of female babies you know China has about 10 percent more men than women because of that to condemn the murder of the burning of brides in India because their galleries were too small to condemn genital mutilation child abuse and all of the problems in other countries and in the United States other politicians don't talk like that you know she did and she was unique in the way that she does that she addresses the issues that nobody else touches because they're her issues they're important to her Bill Clinton's and issues are all abstract every one of Hillary's issues has a face and most of them have a name so this idealistic person who I began to really like in the 1980s who throughout the 90s developed this layer of funniness this veneer of a mask this root vicious ruthlessness this financial acquisitiveness none of which really was there at the beginning the question is will she be able to grow out of it and in the last analysis rewriting history is a clay Deker a kree of a cry of the heart to ask Hillary Clinton the real Hillary Clinton to plz emerge from these layers of paranoia and it asks the final question will she grow like Bobby Kennedy into one of our great heroes or will she descend further into this pit of enemies lists and paranoia and lying and deceit and coverup as Richard Nixon did will she grow thank you yes very interesting comment and I appreciate your being here to talk to us in your comparison with Hillary to Nixon it seems to me and you know much more about these people that I obviously but I think the Nixon had an inferiority complex and I don't think Hillary does and I think that was part of the Nixon that we that became a developed the point the question is does to what extent does Nixon had did Nixon have an inferiority failing and to what extent does that differentiate him from Hillary I think you're right there was a tremendous feeling that Nixon always had that he was from Whittier College in California and he had to compete with the glamorous Kennedys and the whole eastern establishment and that he was he had to do through great personal effort what they came naturally for them but every politician always has the seeds of resentment when everybody does we none of us grow up with it handed to us over some of us do but but most of us don't and we grow up with this chip on our shoulder about the difficulties we experienced when nobody paid any attention to us but then some dwell on it and become steeped in paranoia like Nixon like Hillary in a certain way like Bobby Kennedy did steeped in a personal kind of vicious ruthlessness back in the pre JFK assassination days and some of us begin to understand that that desire for that grudge is overtaken by a feeling of incredible gratitude for what we've had and we come to understand what we've had and see it and be grateful for it and to see the glass is half-full not as half-empty the question is whether Hillary will make that transition yes sir said an ironic condition that you referred to which I agree with the end justifying the means which has infected our political process and you described in the case of Hillary do you not see the same to the same degree in the other party and in Bush's absolutism real use of religion his you're either with us or your Guinness the the the the sickness of not understanding that every means is a result from a prior means and there is no real distinction between ends and means and if you sacrifice the quality of the means you're sacrificing the quality end at the same time but that's that that's one of other sicknesses in our country and I think you're being somewhat unfair to just pick out Hillary and I wonder whether or not your history with them doesn't create a spotlight on that one person well and it's really a general issue but the spotlight is created by the by them I mean I didn't write the memoir they did and I'm just commenting on it but your basic point I think is a very interesting one I think it's true that in politics to a certain extent the ends always do justify the means to a certain extent but I think that has its limits and I think that partially because they never engage in that kind of activity that requires that kind of cover-up I don't really see the same capacity for for playing fast and loose with ethics and morals in the Bush presidency now of course it's not appropriate to compare Bush and Clinton Bush was born to the purple he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth or silver foot his n Richard said so there was never an issue of poverty there was a never an issue of threat if Bill Clinton lost his footing on the ladder he'd end up in the mud back at hot springs if George Bush loses his footing on the ladder his grandfather was senator and his father was president and his family's is immensely wealthy so I'm not sure that the comparisons are appropriate I do feel that Bush clearly has a feeling of empowerment I in the war on terror and a feeling that he's dealing with a particularly vicious and ruthless foe and that that sanctions and necessitates a range of means that go beyond what you would normally do in peacetime but I'm not sure that that's inappropriate I'm not sure that when you're dealing with al-qaeda and flying into buildings that it isn't appropriate to to to be more aggressive and on your means but all of that goes back to your basic to two basic questions and let's talk about the substance for a minute the first is the Patriot Act and the second is the weapons of mass destruction I believe that it is out of the question that George Bush lied to the American people deliberately of a weapons of mass destruction because I worked in the White House and I know how hard it is to lie about something of that magnitude with tens of thousands of people have the Washington Post on their speed dial and could easily call them and drop the dime on you and tell that story I believe that Bush was misled by the CIA and I believe that he and Cole and Powell said what they believed to be the truth wrong as it turned out to be but let me just finish answering your question the the second part of the issue about ruthlessness relates to procedural issues like Guantanamo the prison in Iraq and also the Patriot Act one of the things I write about in this other book that I wrote off with their heads that was out last year and now is in paper is that there was a crucial moment in the Clinton administration after Oklahoma City when Louis Freeh the head of the FBI came to us and said right now I cannot wiretap I cannot search and seize anybody evidence from anybody unless I can get a warrant from a judge where I can name a specific crime at a specific date that I'm expecting them to commit and I can't do that with terrorists so can I just go after them if they're members of a terrorist group and Bill Clinton said no that'll violate the civil liberties you shouldn't be allowed to do that and that was appropriate then free came back and offered Clinton the same deal that Ashcroft offered Bush Bush took it Clinton turned it down the deal was okay let's be permitted a lower standard for searches and seizures if we don't use the evidence in court and we don't use the fruits of the poisonous tree in the prosecutions we'll use it for intelligence we'll use it to throw the guy out of the country we'll use it to stop the attack before it occurs but we won't use it for prosecution and Bush correctly I think said the 4th amendment and the 5th and the 6th to relate to prosecution protecting people against government locking them up or taking away their property they don't stop the government from gathering intelligence Clinton went the other way on that decision said no and the result was that when we arrested Zacharias Moussaoui the 20th hijacker for an immigration violation he came to our attention because he was learning how to steer an airplane not how to take off or had a land just how to steer it his laptop computer had on it the names of the 19 other hijackers and where they were taking flight lessons and we had that clue in our hands 30 days before and we couldn't access that laptop computer so when I go through each of the judgment calls that Bush is made there are some that I think might flirt with being over the line clearly the abuse scandal in Iraq does and it's the consequence of putting 21 year olds on prison guard duty they're just not equipped to handle it but I think that there is not the same quality of an unjustified ends justify the means now of course if Bush were president in normal times we'd know more about that but he's not a president in normal times well in yeah well for nine months yes sir there have been several books written I think Tom minature losing bin Laden Lieutenant Colonel I think Buzz Peterson wrote dereliction of duty and I know you you've written a book also on how Bill Clinton did not address the al Qaeda and the terrorist issue and I just wonder if you could reiterate why would you I enough with their heads I speak of four things that Bill Clinton could have done to avert 9/11 the first is the one I shared with you the decision about lowering the standards for search and seizure the second was that in March of 1995 I sent President Clinton a memo proposing the federal government banned the issuance of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and that it takes the position that a visa and a driver's license have to expire on the same day so if you're here pursuant to a visa the day your visa expired your license would half of all people that here illegally are here on visa overstays came here legally and their visa expired and we never throw them out Clinton rejected that I proposed it three different times because he was worried about the impact on his political base so when Zakhar when Mohammad Atta was pulled over here in Florida Dade County four months before 9/11 and was found not to have a valid driver's license the cup went back to his computer and saw that he'd made no illegal left turns but my proposal which was to integrate the I NS the FBI and the motor vehicle computers had not been adopted and as a result we couldn't hold and we didn't hold him and two other hijackers were also arrested for speeding and no action happened the third is that when the same people the al-qaeda attacked the same target the World Trade Center in 1993 Clinton did not treat it as an act of war he treated it as a crime and therein lies the key difference between clinton-gore and carry on the one hand and Bush on the other let me say I don't agree with George Bush on anything except for the war on terror and there I agree with absolutely everything that he's doing because he understood at that point that the that this was a war Clinton saw it as a crime so the resources that were allocated to that investigation were minimal Clinton never visited the site never made it a big deal of it but it was the first terrorist attack on American soil and the result was it wasn't until 1996 that we knew that bin Laden had been behind the attacks so when Sudan offered us bin Laden in 1995 we said we can't hold him we have no basis for holding him and we didn't accept him we said take him to the Saudis now Clinton in the CBS interview with rather denied that and said that was not true well his national security adviser sandy Berg has confirmed that we told them to take him to the Saudis his ambassador to the Sudan who is the intermediary in the negotiations has confirmed it and President Clinton himself in a speech about seven months ago that was caught on tape confirmed it so I think it's per I think it's true and the final thing was that in 1996 in the summer of 96 after TWA 800 went down there was a real sense of the need for air safety improvements and I had recommended to the president three steps that ultimately were adopted and in fact pulled them in August of 96 federalized the security personnel you notice how much better they are x-ray all baggage and photo ID to fly and Clinton and gore were about to adopt those steps when pressure largely from American Airlines that said it would freak out people if they if they if they did these steps those steps were not adopted so even if Bush knew that 9/11 was going to happen there was not the security infrastructure to stop it from happening it was not illegal to take a box cutter on an airplane for example you could have shown it to the flight attendant and say see how sharp this is and put it back in your pocket and fly there was no basis for excluding yes one Linda Tripp said that she was in the same office with Vince Foster the afternoon that he said goodbye I'm going home for the afternoon and Linda Tripp said there was nothing whatsoever that indicated to her that this was a man on his way out to go blow his brains out you've mentioned that Hillary engaged detectives too extensively call upon the former girlfriends of Bill Clinton is it conceivable that these detectives or in any way whatsoever there could have been a connection between Vince Foster and-and-and-and and Hillary at all secondly now I also asked just from your own experience with the Clintons it seems as though there's a script involved regarding their personal life and the script goes something like this that they're a couple that has marital bumps every once in a while but they seem to have a personal relationship and if if Bill somehow makes a mistake every once in a while well he's real sorry sleeps on the couch and she's the you know maligned a woman for a while and gets a lot of sympathy but on the other hand according to Jennifer flowers in her book Hillary has had more women than bill has had according to Bill and from what you have seen is Hillary a lesbian is it's sort of like a Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt relationship you were doing well till the very end but okay let me let me start with the with the kids with the Vince Foster thing I have a very high regard for Kenneth Starr I went I met him on a cruise in the in the Caribbean where I was invited to be a speaker and so was he and I didn't know he was gonna be on the cruise till he showed up and it was one week after Clinton left office so in my speech on the cruise ship I said I only agreed to give this speech because my boss relinquished control of the submarine fleet one week ago but and he gave up a Supreme Court nomination to be the special prosecutor and he went after packwood before that impartially and honestly a Republican senator and he was on the fast track to the Supreme Court would have made it heck of a Justice and he has assured me that there is nothing there about Vince Foster he said that in private and he said it in public and he's obviously not biased in their favor so I believe it if it was there he would have found it now your second question first I I don't know I have no idea what any of them do in private but let me just say this about their relationship together I believe that before Monica Lewinsky Hillary is a person who is capable of the full range of normal human emotions she's a normal human being in that regard bill is not because of his background perhaps he's emotionally stunted and the headlight reflector he gives you empathy and you'd swear it's emotion but it's really just empathy it's giving you back what you give him so I believe that hillarie genuinely and deeply loved bill and i believe that bill genuinely and deeply loved bill so I believe they had a great deal in common and I believe that it is no coincidence that this very elusive man very in a sense withholding man in private showered her with love and affection and attention and political power when she covered for him and she got health care reform and returned for Jennifer flowers and she got a Senate seat and returned from Monica Lewinsky you know some guys get necklaces but but the but the point is that I believe that exchange where she acquires power and affection and emotion is kind of like many abusive relationships and I think that was the cycle that was going on at the time I don't I haven't spoken to either of them since 1998 so I don't know the current state of play in the marriage but my impression is that they basically are not together in Chappaqua most people I've spoken to in the towns say they see him a lot but they never see her and I believe that but I believe they're closer than they've ever been because he is her fundraiser her advisor her political consultants or guide her liaison to the Democratic Party he is in a sense her everything and one of the really good things about Bill Clinton is he there's a lot of sexist bone in his body and he would willingly play the role for him that Hillary play for her the role that Hillary played for him last day in office Bill Clinton pardoned mark rich now normally the president pardons convicted convicts this guy was a wanted criminal though right yep was a fugitive a future right I'm not sure how did that come about and how come he got away with it well to understand the mark rich pardoned you have to understand the Clinton Library the Presidential Library is administered by Fort by a board that is appointed by the President and serves at his pleasure and he can replace them any time he wants he can name anybody he wants there's no confirmation and the board decides how that money's going to be spent so the presidential library was as close to it is to a slush fund as you can get and it for example is billed as an apartment for Clinton in Little Rock a summer house and goodness knows what in terms of staff and airfare and all of that so when Denis rich gave a million dollars to the Presidential Library that was about as corrupt as anybody giving a paper bag full of $20 bills to a president he could use it as he wished and I believe obviously there was a connection between that bribe and the pardon and Mark rich and Mark rich was pardoned by the way and has still refused to come back to the United States still refused to subject himself to the federal judicial process but that's not the pardon that bothers me the most and there are two that bothered me the most one is Carlos Vick Nally and Dan Rather should have asked that you know ultimately what mark rich did was deferred a bunch of people but what Vick now he did was to sell cocaine and crack to the city of Minneapolis and he was described by the federal prosecutor as being one of the drug kingpins in importing cocaine from California to Minnesota and he was given a very long sentence and he was let go completely pardoned sprung from jail because his father was a major contributor to many of the Clinton causes and Clinton funds in California that one disturbs me the most the other thing which is also not mentioned at all in living history all the three pardons that were given to Hillary's brothers clients one of whom was a carnival owner one of whom was a swindler one of whom was involved I believe in drugs but the point is they were all clients who paid the brothers and the brothers in return gave them pardons now Clinton claims or Hillary claims I in Clinton I don't think is spoken out about this that she did not know that her brothers were pushing for pardons well she didn't she was the only one in Washington that didn't know and if you're the president and you're about to pardon someone who is represented by your wife's brother and she's a politician you would tell her right you would go to her and you'd say it and if you wouldn't it would be because you figure they have a hold over her and you want her to be able to preserve deniability it is the refusal to mention any of those in the memoirs that that really gets me in terms of the pardon issue yes this lady should just wait a minute let her get the getting the mic over there pragmatist if Hillary Clinton called right now and asked you to manage your campaign and take her to the level that you want would you say yes no I'm not that pragmatic fascinated by putin's recent remarks agreeing with Bush's conclusion that Saddam was connected with the weapons and what fascinates me the most is the timing of that admission do you see anything in that well I was in Russia a couple of months ago or a year ago right around the time of the war and I said there's a three-cornered table in the Oval Office where Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt ran the world and Blair and Bush were waiting for Putin to occupy his place at that table but instead he went to the quedagh say we're with Germany France and Russia over beer and champagne and vodka they toasted their demise as world powers and I think that Putin understands that he missed the boat on this and I think that he understands the need for him to backfill I also think that Russia understands its vulnerability to the Muslim terrorists we're not the country that's within a couple hundred miles of them we're not the country the chairs of 500 mile border with Iraq with Iran and a and a 500 or more mile border with Afghanistan and borders with Pakistan they are and I believe that they understand that threat and let me say this about the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein is a weapon of mass destruction I believe terrorists are like HIV viruses that circulate in our bloodstream they swim around but they don't do you any real harm and so they actually latch on to a cell a terrorist by himself can blow up a mailbox can do a suicide bombing but they can't knock down buildings can't hijack planes and use them in that way they're not powerful enough but when the HIV virus hits a cell it uses the DNA of that cell to give you aids and make you terribly sick and perhaps kill you when a terrorist takes over a country they use the DNA of that country the conscript population the military the naval facilities the diplomatic corps the foreign aid the foreign currency foreign exchange reserves the diplomatic missions the import-export trade the secure training facilities behind secure borders they use all the accoutrements of nationhood to empower their terrorist act and when the nation you're talking about gets 100 million dollars a day of oil revenues that's a whole lot of empowerment that's possible now Sodom was effectively hamstrung until 1996 and 97 at which point under the French and Russian and Chinese initiative resisted by Clinton resisted by the United States he was permitted to export a million barrels of oil a day and then 2 million and then 3 million and then the inspectors were pulled out and we now know the bribery that accompanied that but the point is that he only recently got the money and he only recently got the money without the inspectors breathing down his neck and he only has had three or four years to do that so it took time for him to rebuild his inventory why didn't the United States wait until he acquired weapons of mass destruction to invade well first of all we thought he had him but secondly the impetus that 911 provided the absence of isolationism the understanding that these issues are important and come right home kindled the national energy that needed to be tackled needed to be tapped into to destroy these regimes that needed destroying there are seven or eight regimes and bushes growing one after the other to tackle them some he doesn't have to invade Libya Qadhafi flipped because he saw what happened to set him Hussein Syria's obviously cowed I believe that if Bush's re-elected Iran North Korea are gonna cave pretty quickly I think what's holding them up now is their fear is the feeling that they can get rid of Bush and nobody will take them that seriously they'll go back to the days of Clinton we just wink at North Korea and pretend everything's fine everything's fine but I do believe that ultimately you need to go toward each of these nation states and the fact that there may not have been a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-qaeda doesn't bother me a bit al-qaeda is only one of a number of terrorist organizations and Saddam Hussein himself is a terrorist organization so I believe that it was very ample that that invasion was very amply justified what I don't agree with at the moment is this insistence on staying there and committing our manpower to making Iraq a democracy I don't think making Iraq a democracy is worth the life of a single American soldier I could care less if Iraq is a democracy or not there are 22 members of the Arab League none of them are democracies their theocracy is because the Arabs come back at you and they say why should we accept the view of people who were inherently evil as opposed to following the will of Allah who was inherently good and you sort of don't have an answer for that if you accept that context so I believe that the United States should not be the world's policeman my brother-in-law Joe Maxwell gave me this line but should be the world's firemen it should intervene to put out the fires and then move on to another fire not dog ourselves down trying to administer a country and maybe we lose the oil revenues maybe we don't get an economic benefit for the invasion but who cares we didn't go in for oil and we shouldn't stay there for oil just wait a minute yeah go ahead you describe extremely well how Hillary is already running for 2008 with 127 io u--'s how will she position her support for John Kerry well clearly she's hoping for a defeat well I think that clearly Bill and Hillary do not want John Kerry to win because they want Hillary to have an open White House to run for so if you wanted John Kerry to lose and you couldn't come out and attack him because that would screw up your credentials in the Democratic Party what would you do well one of the things you might do is bring out your memoirs five weeks before the Democratic National Convention and suck all the oxygen out of the air get all the attention and the other thing you might do is under the guise of book signings come to a place like this on July 22nd and sign books and dominate the Miami media market when you're doing it and believe me comparing John Kerry and Bill Clinton that is no contest one is charismatic and warm and affectionate and polished and used to appearing in public and and has a tremendous base of support Kerry is uptight and inexperienced and new to this game in eight years maybe he could be half as good as Clinton but now he'll come across as definitely far far a second best you might do all of those things you might even schedule a book signing on the first night of the Democratic National Convention to distract attention away from John and Kerry you might do all of that stuff you might okay one more question yes which you haven't mentioned and Iraq I for one was totally in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan to take out the Taliban which was directly related to 9/11 and clearly related to it as opposed to attacking Iraq on the assumption that that Madhouse that's Hussein remember Baghdad Bob I mean that place was a man houses we well the question I believe that Afghanistan clearly was a more compelling and immediate target than Iraq obviously we had to deal with that obviously they were directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks but the United States government for 15 years has included Iraq in a very select list of eight or nine countries that we have characterized as countries that sponsor terrorism in 1995 I wrote a speech for Bill Clinton naming Iraq Iran Libya and North Korea as countries that sponsor terrorism Richard Clarke killed it took it out of the speech then I put and then two or three months later Clinton was speaking in San Francisco and I put the line back in the speech and again the NSC took it out and then Clinton called me from San Francisco and said you still have that language I'd like to put it in the speech so I faxed it to him and he included it and he said but don't tell the NSC that I did that but the point was that it was very clear and has been clear for 15 years that Iraq is a uniquely outlaw nation it is in fact in my judgment the third worst nation on the planet exceeded only by the Taliban now out of business and North Korea worse well not in control of a country worse by far than Iran worse than Saudi Arabia probably worse than even Libya and so I believe that it was absolutely a necessary action to invade Iraq and I believe that thank the Lord that we had Bush as misguided as he is on so many issues running the country when 9/11 took place and that's why I'm supporting him for re-election I'm the only guy in the world that voted for Gore in 2000 is going to vote for Bush and o4 thank you

Channel: Way Back

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Id: wsbWhFdlu8I

Length: 63min 13sec (3793 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017