Hillary's fugitive fundraiser failed to appear for his bail hearing on a grand theft charge. No, not 15 years ago, but again today. A warrant was issued for Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, after he failed to appear for a bail hearing on a 15-year-old grand theft charge.
San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Robert D. Foiles ordered Hsu, Hillary's felonious fugitive fundraiser, held without bail.
Hsu, a fugitive from justice since 1992, was jailed Friday after a judge ordered him to post $2 million bail. Hsu, turned himself in after first news accounts, then his lawyer, identified the Democratic fundraiser as a fugitive.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Hsu's attorney, James Brosnahan, explained that he had lost contact with Hsu and that the financier had failed to deliver his passport as promised:
"Mr. Hsu is not here and we don't know where he is," Brosnahan said outside court. "We expected him to be here."Brosnahan told Foiles that a legal assistant for his law firm went to Hsu's New York City condominium last week and spent 90 minutes searching for Hsu's passport.
[. . .]
"We don't know if he has his passport," Deputy Atty. Gen. Ralph Sevilla said. "What we do know is that a bench warrant has been issued."
Back in 1992, before becoming one of the Democrats' go to bag men, Hsu disappeared after pleading no contest and agreeing to serve up to three years in prison for defrauding investors in a Ponzi scheme.
This is all sounding strangely familiar. We have seen unusual Clinton campaign contribution scandals before. The 1996 scandal saw 120 people connected to the Clinton fundraising efforts either flee the country to avoid questioning or plead the Fifth Amendment.
Clinton campaigns need to be scrutinized closely. The 1996 Clinton campaign wasn't and we had a situation which may have compromised American national security - the Chinese tried to influence our election.
Clintonites should have learned from 1996. The same people who worked in the 1996 Clinton campaign are running Hillary's presidential campaign, Terry McAuliffe, for example.
Hillary now says she is going to give some of Hsu's tainted money to charity. But why only two percent?
Clinton campaign contribution scandals don't start or end with Hsu. The George Soros-funded group, Americans Coming Together, headed up by a Clinton confidant and Hillary presidential campaign advisor, Harold Ickes, signed a settlement agreement with the Federal Election Commission to pay a $755,000 fine for campaign finance law violations. That fine was levied because over $137 million was improperly spent on Kerry's presidential campaign. This settlement was the third largest penalty ever paid to the FEC. The FEC released details of the agreement on August 29.
The Hsu campaign fundraising scandal goes beyond Hillary. Hillary's felonious fugitive fundraiser also contributed to Californicators, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, just to name a few.
UPDATE: More at Captain's Quartershttp://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/012574.php, Don Surber, Stop The ACLU, Suitably Flip and Wizbang.
The Clinton Donors
As of this writing, Norman Hsu, the latest in a long line of suspicious Clinton benefactors, awaits extradition to California, where he is wanted on bail jumping charges based on a 15 year old arrest warrant for charges of criminal financial dealings. Seems Mr Hsu has been a fugitive from justice for that long, apparently hiding in plain sight as a Democratic cash donor, most notably to Hillary Clinton. The Senator meanwhile, has announced that she is returning $850,000 to Hsu "in light of his legal problems". Since Hsu allegedly donated funds to Hillary and other Democrats using "straw donors", the money will officially have to be returned to numerous persons.
How could a major presidential candidate be receiving such large sums of money from a man who was a long-standing fugitive from justice? Well, being a fugitive never got in the way of people wishing to lay money on the Clintons. Just ask Marc Rich, the fugitive financier, whose ex-wife, the glamorous Denise Rich, dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clinton Library into Bill's lap (along with who knows what else). As a reward, Clinton pardoned Rich in his last days in office even though he was a fugitive from the FBI and prosecutors never gave their assent to the pardon. In the old days, we used to call that bribery.
But I digress. The Hsu story brings back memories of other shady characters, mostly with connections in Asia, that generously handed big bucks off to Bill when he was president and running for re-election in 1996.
Remember Charlie Trie? He went from running a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock to being a big cash donor to Clinton, first for his re-election, then for his legal defense fund. According to a Washington Post editorial dated August 3, 1997, Trie once delivered $460,000 to fund officials broken into $1,000 separate contributions, some of which appeared on consecutively numbered money orders-under different names but in the same handwriting. That same article reported that, according to FBI testimony, from 1994-96, Trie received wire transfers in the sum of more than $900,000 from a certain Macau businessman by the name of Ng Lap Seng. Further, that these transfers appeared to correlate with similar transfers by Mr Trie to the DNC. Later, according to the article, the Clinton Adminstration acknowledged that Mr Ng had visited the White House 12 times during the relevant period.
Mr Trie also allegedly acted as a go-between for the Clintons and an agricultural outfit in Thailand. According to the Post article, two representatives of that company were scheduled to attend a White House coffee with the president two weeks subsequent, an event arranged by major Clinton contributor, Pauline Kanchanalak and DNC fund raiser, John Huang. The article further reported that some, if not all of Kanchanalak's contributions to the DNC had to be returned due to questions about their source.
John Huang, originally from China and Taiwan, was at one time chairman of the Lippo Bank of Indonesia. After coming to the US, and working for the Worthen Bank in Little Rock, he made the acquaintance of Bill Clinton. With Clinton in the White House, Huang acted as a conduit between the president and the Lippo Group along with Indonesian financier, Moctar Riady and his son, James Riady. According to an article by Charles Smith in Worldnet Daily dated April 26, 2000, subsequent testimony before Senator Fred Thompson's committee in 1998 revealed that Riady and the Lippo Group were joint ventures with China Resources, a trading and holding company owned by the Chinese government and used as an espionage front.
According to Smith's article, Huang met Clinton on ten occasions at the White House between the dates of June 21 and June 27, 1994. Shortly after this, the Lippo group allegedly sent $100,000 to Clinton crony (and top Justice Department offical), Webster Hubbell, who himself was about to be indicted for financial crimes. Riady continued to funnel money to Clinton, once sending his gardener, Arief Wiriadinata, direct to Clinton in the White House with a gift of $400,000, according to Smith's article).
Most troubling of all, Huang then received an appointment as Asst Secretary of Commerce along with a security clearance. In that position, Huang was able to obtain secret information on trade transactions with Indonesia, Japan, China, and South Korea. As a result of the Clinton-Huang-Riady traingle, the Chinese government had a hook into the White House. Remember the scandals during the Clinton Adminstration involving missile technology going to China while laundered Chinese money was coming into the Clinton campaign coffers?
Want another example of what Riady et al got in return for their financial support to Clinton? How about the US-backed Paitan coal-fired electrical power plant in East Java, Indonesia? The Paitan Plant, which is owned by the corrupt Suharto family (as in corrupt President Suharto), also connected to Riady, obtained a financial windfall in 1996 when Clinton issued an order that declared a 1.7 million acre region of Utah off-limits to coal mining, thus removing one of the only major low sulphur deposits in the world from competing with Paitan.
Then there was Johnny Chung, Clinton buddy and Democratic fund-raiser, who made almost 50 visits to the Clinton White House, and on one occasion, gave Hillary's Chief of Staff, Maggie Williams a check for the DNC in the amount of $50,000. The check was actually given in the White House (in violation of the law). Two days later, Chung dragged in a group of Chinese businessmen, who were present when President Clinton gave a radio address from the Oval Office. (See article by Pierre Thomas, CNN in All Politics dated March 5, 1998. According to Thomas, the DNC eventually returned $300,000 raised by Chung due to questions about their source.)
In March of 1998, Chung pled guilty to election law violations in connection with illegal fund-raising in the 1996 elections. In December 1998, he was sentenced to probation and community service in return for his plea. He also testified before Congress in May 1999 that the head of Chinese military intelligence, Gen. Ji Shengde had told him that he wanted to send a gift of $300,000 to Clinton through Chung, a charge denied by the Chinese Government.
Personal note: At the time of Chung's plea deal, it struck me (as a DEA Agent who had been involved in countless plea deals in coordination with prosecutors) as odd why the Justice Department (under Janet Reno) did not include in the deal information and testimony from Chung that would have been damning against the very person (s) getting the money, namely the president and the DNC. Normal plea procedure for such a light sentence would normally include full cooperation by the defendant against his/her higher-ups in the conspiracy. Whatever statements Chung made failed to implicate those who got the money-possibly bribes.
So the recent news about Mr Hsu is not surprising. It is just the latest in a string of scandals that go back to the Clinton Adminstration. In spite of all the above dirt, the Reno Justice Department investigation never took it to the top nor tried to. It seems that the investigations focused on the middlemen who were funneling money to the president and not on the person (s) who were receiving the money in violation of the law. Nor did the investigations focus on what the donors were getting back in return. Was there a loud protest from the mainstream news media, coupled with demands to get to the bottom of it all? Hardly. Now that Mr Hsu has surfaced, let's see how much the mainstream news media digs into this story. Will this story have the legs that the Abramoff scandal had? (Most of Abramoffs payees were Republicans). Or will the Hsu affair just quietly disappear? Since the media has a vested interest in Hillary's election, no matter how corrupt she may be, I'm betting on the latter.
gary fouse
fousesquawk
Posted by: gary fouse | Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 08:27 PM