Most famous for being pardoned by Bill Clinton at the last minute of his presidency in 2001, international financier Marc Rich died last month and was buried in Israel. We did a post the other day noting that several Israeli leaders, including Shimon Peres, pushed Clinton for the pardon and that Bill Clinton lately made $500,000 off the Peres Foundation for a speech.
It is also true that some wealthy portion of the Israel lobby was pleased by the Rich pardon and is surely prepared to mobilize behind Hillary Clinton if she runs for the highest office. Follow the money, right? Here is a portion of a piece about the pardon called “The Clintons and the Rich Women,” lately posted by Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch. St. Clair says that Abraham Foxman, a strong supporter of Israel, threw himself behind the pardon and duly mobilized Denise Rich, Rich’s former wife and a good friend of Israel, and that she in turn mobilized Beth Dozoretz, who then served on an executive committee at AIPAC and has many ties to Israel. Bill Clinton is Dozoretz’s daughter’s godfather. Both women have given tons of money to the Democratic Party. When John McCain was once asked why we need campaign finance reform he answered with her name.
The story is a reminder of the fact that Obama was “absolutely livid” last summer when the Democratic convention was prepared to pass a platform that did not state that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel. He got the change, of course. Pro-Israel money is vital to the aspirations of Democratic politicians. St. Clair:
The scene shifts to a crowded restaurant in Paris. It’s Valentine’s Day. Two men are having dinner and drinking wine. They know each other well. One man has just received a $100,000 contribution from the other man’s boss. The man on the receiving end of the money is Abe Foxman, and the financial gift was for his group the Anti-Defamation League. The man picking up the hefty dinner tab is Avner Azulay [head of Marc Rich foundation] – though Marc Rich will soon reimburse him.
Rich has one last shot, Foxman advises. They need to get directly to Bill and Hillary. And the key to unlocking the inner doors of the White House, Foxman told Azulay, is Denise Rich. Foxman confided that he and Denise had flown together on Air Force II to the funeral of Yitzak Rabin.
There was just one problem. Denise Rich still loathed her husband.
Entreaties are made to Denise, now a New York socialite and successful songwriter, by Quinn and others on the Rich teams. Three times Denise Rich declines to come to the rescue of her former husband.Then suddenly, in November 2000, she agrees to help. What made her change her mind?
That remains open to speculation, but given Marc Rich’s history and Denise’s view that she was shortchanged in the divorce, it may well have involved a financial offering. This much is known. On November 16, Avner Azulay flies to New York and takes Denise to dinner. He pleads for her to back Rich’s pardon to her friends Bill and Hillary. Two days later Denise consents.
Denise calls her close friend Beth Dozoretz for help in the best way to handle the matter. Another rich Manhattan socialite, Dozoretz had been the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Dozoretz had contributed more than $1 million to Democratic coffers. Bill Clinton was the godfather of her daughter.
Dozoretz who, like Denise Rich, would later plead the Fifth at a Senate hearing in the matter, helped Rich craft her strategy. Almost immediately, a check for $25,000 was sent from Denise Rich’s account to the DNC. This was soon followed by Denise Rich’s first letter to the Clintons, imploring them to pardon her ex-husband. Dozoretz also helped Rich bundle a $450,000 contribution to the Clinton library fund. (A Democratic fundraiser told the New York Times in 2001 that Denise had also pledged another million in four installments over the next two years. This figure was disputed by Denise Rich. But the donor lists to the Clinton Foundation are kept secret.) In all, Denise Rich made at least $1.1 million in contributions to Democratic causes, including $70,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign and PACs, and at least $450,000 to the Clinton foundation.
For her part, Dozoretz kicked in another million of her own money to the fund. This is the same library that now refuses to release more than 300 pages of Clinton’s records relating to the pardon. She later lavished gifts on the Clintons as they left the White House, including antique furniture for the new home and golf clubs for Bill.
So, now we know how the Jewish Zionists in America have purchased Bill Clinton’s tax-deductible soiled underpants at a premium. We just add Hillary’s soiled bloomers to the tab. Not to worry, Dick and Jane have no clue.
There’s something infinitely depressing about once idealistic principled people reduced to taking dirty money for doing favours to obnoxious criminals…
“…and golf clubs for Bill.”
Where else to go for the cash Bill and Hilary needed for their celebrity lifesyles than to the Zionist honey pot? Bill understood that chasing Babs around the piano at one of his WH celebrity-slumber parties isn’t a priviledge enjoyed by a man with empty pockets.
The stuff that Marc Rich did in America is peanuts compared to the Rape of Russia that he, above all else, engineered(although he had many copycats, some more successful than he was).
An American-born Russian intellectual, Paul Klebnikov, wrote about these issues in the early 2000s in his magisterial book Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia..
Boris Yeltsin was a mere transmission vehicle for the looting of, in many cases, American-backed billionares like Marc Rich who was one of the most corrupt fishes you could imagine. The people he brought in to help him were mostly other Jewish magnates(he was very ethnocentric, as you could imagine, from being obsessed with being buried in Israel), people like the aforemented Berezosky. Many of these people later fled to London and other areas. People don’t understand the context in which Putin rose to power. Klebnikov’s book is a good reason to, and it’s also part of the reason why anti-Semitism in Russia has held intact, precisely because the people advising Yeltsin(Summers, Bob Rubin etc were friends with Rich and his pals) all came from the same background.
Clinton is so beloved by the lobby because he almost always gave into their demands, he almost always gave them what they wanted. Whether in America or in Israel, or in Russia(in the case of the lobby’s financiers and their wealthy friends).
The most interesting thing, however, was how non-descript the obituaries in the American press were. I think this is because it’d be impossible to talk about his life than to traverese into the most negative Jewish stereotypes people have and most editors, probably reasonably, thought the risk of an anti-Semitic backlash wasn’t worth it. Still, Mr Rich’s life is a very important windows into the inner sanctum of who actually funds the lobby, not the figureheads, and what their agenda is, how they operate etc.
Another good example would be Robert Maxwell, who was rumored to have been assassinated by Mossad, although that was never cleared up. He bought up a whole range of newspapers and was later to be revealed an agent to Mossad. Remember, this guy was one of the biggest newspaper titans of the 1980s and he was essentially a fifth column to a foreign power. Somehow, however, he must have gotten to arrogant and Mossad decided to cut him loose.
Still, pretty remarkable now that you think about it. And similarly, most of the press must have known these things, at least up on the editor levels, but we didn’t get to find out these things until much later, in books mainly for the consumption of academics and intellectuals.
Will it be the same for Marc Rich? I’m guessing so.