NYT to HRC: Your Family's Fair Game

Loot, plunder, lie, and steal

The war between Pravda and the Clinton Crime Family has taken an ugly new turn. In a big Sunday takedown, the Paper of Progressive Record turned its big guns loose on another of Lady Macbeth’s many soft spots: her idiot brothers. The headline serves both as an appetizer and a warning:

Tony Rodham’s Ties Invite Scrutiny for Hillary and Bill Clinton

The heavyset 60-year-old man who walked with a cane seemed an unlikely speaker at the glamorous launch party for a cosmetics company held in Santa Monica, Calif., in March. But Tony Rodham appeared at ease among the special guests and well-heeled investors, offering them encouragement as well as an invitation. “If there’s anything I can ever do for any of you, let me know,” Mr. Rodham said. “I’ll be more than happy to do it.”

A promotional video of the party that the cosmetics company later released identified the speaker as “the youngest brother of former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton,” a relationship that has been Mr. Rodham’s calling card since the days of the Clinton White House.

On and off for two decades, the affable Mr. Rodham has tried to use his connections with his sister and his brother-in-law, former President Bill Clinton, to further a business career that has seen more failures than successes. The connections to the Clintons have given Mr. Rodham, a self-described “facilitator,” a unique appeal and a range of opportunities, like addressing Chinese investor conferences and joining an advisory board of a company seeking permission to mine for gold in Haiti.

But his business dealings have often invited public scrutiny and uncomfortable questions for the Clintons as Mr. Rodham has cycled through a variety of ventures, leveraging his ties to them and sometimes directly seeking their help.

For the Clintons, of course, “uncomfortable questions” are just part of the cost of doing Family business, and to which they always have a ready answer: “You can’t prove it!” But the Times, which has been sending warning shots over the bow of the sinking ship Hillary! for months now, is clearly losing patience, and is almost ready to start putting two and two together and declaring them, definitely, four — which just so happens to be the same as the number of letters in the word RICO:

•  When Mr. Clinton worked as a co-chairman of Haiti’s earthquake recovery commission, Mr. Rodham and his partners sought a $22 million deal to rebuild homes in the country. In court proceedings three years ago in an unrelated lawsuit, Mr. Rodham explained how “a guy in Haiti” had “donated” 10,000 acres of land to him and described how he had leaned on Mr. Clinton to get the rebuilding project funded amid bureaucratic delays. “I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials,” Mr. Rodham said, according to a transcript of his testimony. “I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from.”
• When Mr. Rodham was short on cash in 2010, Mr. Clinton helped get him a job for $72,000 a year raising investments in GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company then owned by Terry McAuliffe, an old friend of Mr. Clinton’s and now the governor of Virginia. “I was complaining to my brother-in-law I didn’t have any money. And he asked McAuliffe to give me a job,” Mr. Rodham said during the court proceedings, which were the result of a lawsuit over unpaid legal bills filed by his lawyer in a child support case.
• Mrs. Clinton’s other brother, Hugh Rodham, stumbled through an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in Florida during Mr. Clinton’s first term. Roger Clinton, the former president’s brother, served a year in federal prison on a cocaine distribution charge. And all three were involved in lobbying Mr. Clinton for pardons for their associates as he left office, prompting a congressional inquiry.

Because having close family members go to jail and “lobbying for pardons” is something every family experiences– every crime family, at least. (Hillary defended her brother at the time by saying he had not been paid for the lobbying effort, so it was perfectly okay.) And how do Clinton apparatchiks like the Ballerina react to this?

“They’re all colorful,” Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton aide who later became mayor of Chicago, said in an interview in 2001. “They’re all living large.”

Wel, ha ha ha! “Colorful,” certainly, in the sense that Al Capone and Owney Madden (Bill Clinton’s mentor in Hot Springs, Ark.) were colorful. “Colorful” the way Sandy Berger was “colorful” when he got caught stealing and possibly destroying incriminating documents from the National Archives relating to the Clinton Crime Family. “Colorful,” in other words, as in “criminal.”

But then the Democrat Party has long been a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, home to murderers, presidential assassins, mountebanks, curs, cads, enemy agents and garden-variety liars and thieves. The Clintons, who have made government “service” into their own private, lawless fiefdom, from which they have enriched themselves even beyond Bubba’s boyhood dreams of avarice back in Bubbles, are only its latest capos.

Typically, Hillary! can no more disown her bros than Obama could disown the Rev. Wright, right before he threw him under the bus:

“She loves her family more than anything,” said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton. “Her brothers have always been there for her, and she will always be there for them. Each, though, have their own lives, their own jobs, their own ups and downs.”

As the youngest of three children, Tony Rodham has lived in the shadow of his sister. He never finished college, and he worked at a variety of jobs — as a prison guard, private detective and at the Democratic National Committee — until after the Clintons were in the White House, when he became a consultant and deal broker. He was once married to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

Lest we forget, Tony was also involved in this, er, embarrassing incident. But back to the Times hatchet job:

He lives with his second wife, Megan, and two young children in a large house on a hill in Vienna, Va., a suburb of Washington. He declined to speak to a reporter who went to his door one afternoon in April, and he did not respond to other messages seeking comment for this article. But in a statement from Mr. Rodham passed on by the Clinton campaign, he said that he wanted to protect his family’s privacy and that he would not engage in disputing claims about him, which he said he considered to be political attacks.

 Be sure to read the whole thing, and then read between the lines. Here’s my favorite quote:

Mr. Rodham described his dire financial situation during the court proceedings in 2012. As a result of a series of failed business deals — including some in oil and gas, water, housing, tutoring and pharmaceuticals — he said he had not made a mortgage payment in 10 months and was fighting home foreclosure.

The Clintons, he said, had been generous, even paying for his son’s schooling, but they were not going to give him more money. “Hillary and Bill are done,” he said. “I mean, look at what they’ve done for me. They’ve given me money all the time.” Mr. Clinton’s willingness to assist in getting him work with Mr. McAuliffe was helpful, Mr. Rodham said, but at $6,000 a month, it was not enough. “It’s kind of like the job he got me a long time ago when I worked in the prison,” he said.

Funny how the words “Clinton” and “prison” just seem to go together.