Bill Clinton’s socialite pal Denise Rich disguised a $2,000 donation to Hillary Rodham Clinton by coercing her record promoter to make the contribution and later reimbursing him, a new $30 million legal suit charges.
The promoter, Jimmy Hester, who filed the federal lawsuit in Manhattan yesterday, is now at the center of the FBI’s long-running criminal probe into the circumstances surrounding Clinton’s last-minute presidential pardoning of Rich’s ex-husband, Marc Rich, The Post has learned.
It is illegal for a person to make donations in another person’s name to get around the $2,000 donation limit, Washington election-law expert Ken Gross said yesterday.
Rich, a wealthy songwriter, sparked a national scandal by helping her husband win the Clinton pardon in the last days of his presidency.
Marc Rich fled to Switzerland after being indicted on charges he evaded $48 million in taxes.
Can anyone say Campaign Finance Reform? Where’s McCain & Feingold when you need them? The whole Rich/Clinton association is suspect through and through. Remember the infamous Marc Rich pardon right before Billy left office? Let’s review:
The strange case started with the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973, which established a system of price controls on crude oil produced in or imported to the United States. In 1980 and ‘81, the Energy Department classified oil that came from wells that produce 10 barrels a day or less as “stripper” oil and exempted it from the price caps.
According to his 1983 indictment, Rich saw this regulation as a potential gold mine, setting up a scam to have his company’s oil relabeled “stripper” oil by a reseller, and thus seemingly exempted from the price controls.
To hide this activity and the illegal profits it produced, says Sandy Weinberg, the lead prosecutor in the case, Rich allegedly had a reseller claim Rich’s profits were really its own and then hand over the money through sham transactions to companies Rich controlled in Panama.
This led the government to charge Rich and his partner Pincus Green with fraud and the evasion of $42 million in taxes.
On top of that, Weinberg alleges, Rich bought crude oil from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran while Iran was holding U.S. citizens hostage. This was in direct violation of a U.S. trade embargo — and, in effect, helped to arm the Iranians by giving them needed cash.
Bring all of these activities together into a concerted effort to make illegal profits, and you’ve got what the prosecutor called racketeering — violating federal criminal statutes designed for busting the Mafia.
On Jan. 20, President Clinton gave Rich a chance for a third “do-over.” Clinton wiped all the criminal charges off of Rich’s record with a presidential pardon on his last day in power. The Rich pardon has received special attention because Denise Rich raised and donated more than $1 million to the Democratic Party in recent years and also provided the Clintons directly with a $10,000 contribution to their legal defense fund and $7,300 worth of furniture.
Even left-wing newspapers and columnists have rebuked Clinton for pardoning Rich. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., declared himself “troubled.” Bush White House lawyers looked into overturning the pardon, and House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., has launched an investigation.
Read the full pardon story here.
