THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1994
May
- May: Saudi senior diplomat Mohammed al-Khilewi defects to the US after criticizing the despotic regime of King Fahd and calling for a redistribution of wealth to the Saudi people.
Middle East unrest
He is granted asylum in August, and goes undercover, protected against the death threats of his former government. Al-Khilewi brings with him some 14,000 documents detailing the rampant and overt corruption that characterizes the Saudi royal family and government, along with severe human rights abuses and financing of various Islamic terrorist organizations, particularly the Palestinian group Hamas. His lawyer says that FBI agents interviewed his client but refused to accept the documents. (Seymour Hersh) - May: Jerry Falwell begins heavily promoting a recently released video, The Clinton Chronicles, on his radio and television show, The Old-Time Gospel Hour.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
The video, among its other dubious achievements, makes Arkansas con man Larry Nichols a star in right-wing circles; Nichols and white supremacist Jim Johnson, an eminence among Arkansas conservatives, provide most of the narration. It alleges that the "Clinton machine" has secured "absolute power" in Arkansas and misused that power for sinister purposes. Johnson tells viewers that the evidence of Clinton's crimes is "more credible than the evidence of 90% of the people who are confined to death row across America." Investigative journalists viewing the tape find it laughable. The staunchly Republican Arkansas Democrat-Gazette sends journalist Carrie Rengers to look into the allegations made by the video; she is unable to find any evidence documenting any of the claims made on the tape, and debunks its most absurd allegations. The tape says Governor Clinton never balanced the Arkansas state budget once, instead drowning the state in red ink; in reality, Clinton had to balance the budget every year because Arkansas's Constitution forbids deficit spending. The tape says Clinton pardoned a political supporter, Dan Lasater, for a cocaine possession conviction; in reality, Lasater had pleaded guilty to a federal crime and Clinton had no authority to pardon him. Clinton's financial records of his political campaigns had all mysteriously vanished, according to the tape; in reality, they are duly on file with the Pulaski county clerk and the Arkansas Secretary of State. Poultry magnate Don Tyson contributed $700,000 to Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign in return for mysterious favors -- no, Tyson didn't contribute a dime to Clinton or to any Democrat in 1992. One of those favors for Tyson was a low-interest $10 million state loan which Clinton allowed never to be repaid -- no, Tyson never borrowed a cent from the state of Arkansas. (The New York Times's Jeff Gerth also reported this, but the Times later retracted the assertion.) - The video also asserts a raft of illicit financial misdoings by Stephens Inc., controlled by the Stephens family, lifelong enemies of Nichols's mentor Sheffield Nelson. Again, the assertions are demonstrably false. The company has the means to bring financial ruin upon Falwell -- it holds a number of debts taken out by Falwell's Liberty University -- but instead, merely asks Falwell to remove the assertions from the updated video, The New Clinton Chronicles. Falwell does so. Company CEO Warren Stephens says of Falwell, "...I don't mind telling you, he's a bizarre guy. Flat spooky."
- The video spends a great deal of time on scandals associated with the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, the agency which had fired Nichols in 1988. The assertions made by Nichols are wide-ranging and, again, entirely false. The ADFA was in no way a front group for Clinton to launder drug money, loot the state treasury, and finance out-of-state orgies. What can be checked is completely debunked. Nichols says that Arkansas lawyer and White House counsel Webster Hubbell co-wrote the ADFA's enabling legislation; Hubbell played no part in that task whatsoever. Nichols says Hubbell's father's company, POM, manufactures hollow aircraft nose cones for the stashing of cocaine; in reality, POM makes parking meters. POM did take out a $2.8 million loan from the ADFA, but, contrary to Nichols's assertions, POM paid the loan back on time. Contrary to Nichols, the Rose Law Firm, Hillary Clinton's old outfit, did not have an exclusive contract to represent the AFDA, nor did the governor's office play any part in approving ADFA loans. Nichols says the AFDA launders $100 million per month in illicit monies, or $1.2 billion per year; in its entire 9-year existence, the agency had made loans totaling only $1.7 billion.
- At the end of the video, Falwell himself appears, interviewing an "investigative reporter" who sits in darkness. Falwell asks, "Can you please tell me and the American people why you think that your life and the lives of others on this video are in danger?" The "reporter" replies, "Jerry, two weeks ago we had an interview with a man who was an insider. His plane crashed and he was killed an hour before the interview. You may say this is just a coincidence, but there was another fellow that we were also going to interview, and he was killed in a plane crash. Jerry, are these coincidences? I don't think so." The "investigative reporter" is soon outed as Pat Matrisciana, who is not a reporter, but one of the producers of the video. "Obviously, I'm not an investigative reporter," he tells reporter Murray Waas, "and I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry's idea to do that.... He thought that would be dramatic." Besides this direct lie to the audience, the video never reveals that, in direct contradiction to basic journalistic ethics, everyone who appeared in the video was paid for their appearance.
- Apparently, the rampant and systematic falsehoods throughout the video don't deter Falwell from promoting it. For the entire month of May, he treats his television viewers to selected excerpts from the video (and its predecessor Circle of Power), along with a half-hour infomercial selling the video for $40 a copy. Falwell follows up the video, whose sales are brisk, with a direct-mail solicitation for contributions to help him "produce a national television documentary which will expose shocking new facts about Bill Clinton." The film's owner, Citizens for Honest Government, will later claim that the video sold over 150,000 copies. A complimentary copy is sent to all 435 members of Congress and to a raft of influential journalists. Congressman Dan Nichols brings Larry Nichols to Washington and introduces him to a number of his fellow conservative colleagues (including Bob Livingston, who himself appears in the second edition of the video). Talk show host Michael Reagan invites Nichols time and again onto his show, where Nichols regales Reagan's listeners with tales of his life being threatened and solicits donations so he can live in secrecy. (In reality, Nichols is living large in his home town of Conway, Arkansas, cruising the streets in a new Lincoln Continental and moving into a large new home with a swimming pool.) Nichols also becomes a favorite speaker at "patroitic" rallies sponsored by a number of militia and Christian Identity groups. During one rally, which was videotaped, he waves a handgun in the air and screams, "I made a deal with Bill Clinton! In 1994, we're going to meet at high noon, and one of us is going to get out of town!" Through the applause, audience members can be heard screaming, "Shoot the b*stard!" (The tape is turned over to the Secret Service, which takes no action.)
- Nichols is equally fast and loose with his own history. Although in reality his military experience consists of four months' duty with the state National Guard, he tells listeners he is a former Special Forces combat infantryman. "Everything I did," he shouts at the rally, "I did for God and country. And when you're playing with commies, it ain't easy. In the old days before Clinton took over, communists were bad guys and I was trained -- I was taught -- to get in the other man's world and beat him at his game. I'm in Bill Clinton's world now, and there's not ever gonna be the day when the draft-dodging, lying, woman-chasing, dope-smoking, cocaine-using womanizer that exposes himself will be the president of this country!"
- In April, as the video begins making its impact, Clinton tells the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that an orchestrated effort by the right-wing media is damaging America's political discourse. "The radical right have their own set of press organs," he says, "They make their own news and then try to force it into the mainstream media. We [Democrats] don't have anything like that. We don't have a Washington Times, or a Christian Broadcasting Network, or a Rush Limbaugh, any of that stuff." On a St. Louis radio station, he is asked if he includes Jerry Falwell in the group. "Absolutely," he replies. "Look at who he's talking to. I mean, does he make full disclosure to the American people of the backgrounds of the people that he has interviewed that made these scurrilous and false charges against me? Of course not." Clinton's statements backfire somewhat in the media, which reports not only his words, but repeats the laundry list of baseless charges leveled by Nichols, Falwell, and other Clinton enemies. The media's response is perhaps best summed up by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that dismisses the video itself but restates a number of the allegations, even goes so far as to print additional names of people whom Clinton has supposedly had murdered, and asserts that even though it believes little of the allegations, it is its responsibility to print them all for the edification of its readers.
- The amount of money paid to the various participants in The Clinton Chronicles and its updated version is significant. Larry Nichols claims to not have made a dime from the video, but in reality was paid $89,000 between 1994 and 1996, according to the ledgers of Citizens for Honest Government. Falwell pays Matrisciana $5000 for allowing him to air portions of the video on his television show. Justice Jim Johnson gets a new pickup truck. Bringing up the rear of paid contributors are Paula Jones and her husband Steve, who net a measly $1000 for their appearance. "We did not pay people to tell lies," Matrisciana tells Waas. "We paid people so that they would no longer be afraid to tell the truth." A woman named Jane Parks, widow of a slain security-firm owner who blames her husband's death on Clinton, is paid $22,000 by CHG. Over the next few years, Parks is quoted in the American Spectator as saying she once overheard Bill Clinton snorting cocaine with his brother Roger through the thin walls of an apartment. She tells reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that her husband was murdered because of his involvement with Vince Foster in a massive drug-smuggling operation housed in Mena, Arkansas. She also says she found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in the trunk of her late husband's car, though she never says what she did with the money.
- One of the more interesting appearances on the videos is by former deputy sheriff John Brown, who nets $28,000 from Matrisciana but soon becomes disenchanted with Matrisciana's smear campaign. Brown is the source of one of the oddest claims of Clinton-connected murders, the tale of two young boys found dismembered on train tracks in 1987. Because of a foolish error by the state medical examiner, a Clinton appointee, the boys' deaths are initially ruled accidental, but that verdict is overturned by an outside pathologist who shows that the two were beaten to death before their bodies were run over by a train. Brown's suspects in the double murder are Saline County drug dealers. Brown's statements on the video includes information about the deaths that came from his undercover investigation of the Saline County drug ring; he briefs two FBI agents about his appearance on the tapes and the coterie of Clinton-bashers behind the video. Brown quickly realizes that Matrisciana and Nichols are little more than scam artists; he later reveals that both of his appearances were entirely scripted and electronically altered. Brown testifies in a 1999 lawsuit alleging libel and defamation against Matrisciana, where Brown's evidence of the fraudulence of the video is entered into evidence. The two police officers who bring the suit against Matrisciana, smeared as criminal conspirators hiding evidence of the boys' murder, win a unanimous verdict and win a nearly $600,000 judgment against Matrisciana. Matrisciana responds that "in Arkansas, I believe it's almost impossible for me to have a fair trial."
- Brown himself is interested in the number of extreme right-wing military intelligence officials involved with Citizens for Honest Government. Now heading a small private security and investigative firm with CHG as a client, Brown heads to Chicago at Nichols's behest to investigate wild tales of Hillary Clinton's membership in an underground circle of lesbian dominatrices. Later, Brown takes Nichols and Scaife-funded journalist Christopher Ruddy along to look into the suicide of Kathy Ferguson, the wife of Arkansas state trooper and former Clinton bodyguard Danny Ferguson. (Scaife, the right-wing billionaire funding the Arkansas Project, is also a covert backer of CHG.) Ferguson had backed out of taking part in what became known as "Troopergate," a licentious and libelous set of stories about Clinton's sexual escapades told by two of Ferguson's former colleagues. Ferguson's wife apparently killed herself over an adulterous affair that turned out badly for her, but within days her name appears on the so-called "Clinton death list." Brown persuades the local authorities to let him and Nichols examine their file on Ferguson's death; Brown is convinced that the story of suicide is valid, but Nichols has another view. "Aw, hell, they just doctored them pictures," he tells Brown. "No, they didn't," retorts Brown. Nichols replies, "Let them prove they didn't."
- Although Ruddy had not been able to look at the pictures himself without getting sick, he writes a story for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review based on Nichols's interpretation -- that Ferguson's suicide may actually be another Clinton-related murder. Brown is disgusted with Nichols's casual duplicity. Worse, in Brown's view, is Nichols's increasingly erratic behavior -- Brown learns that Nichols has become addicted to the painkiller Dilaudid. Dilaudid, an opiate derivative, has many of the same side effects as heroin, and in large doses can be fatal. By the time Brown got to know Nichols, the Clinton Chronicles star, who can be seen on the video ranting about the immorality of Clinton's drug abuse, is himself gobbling Dilaudid pills by the handful and staggering around in a hallucinogenic haze. After Nichols shocked Brown by running an electric guitar string through the skin of his scrotum (to prove his toughness), Brown severed their relationship and began distancing himself from CHG.
- But by this point Nichols has cultivated a relationship with "Troopergate" figures Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, signing them both to appear in The New Clinton Chronicles for a royalty fee of $1 per video sold. But while Nichols dangled the prospect of untold wealth in their faces, Perry later says that the only check Nichols ever gave him bounced. Plans for the second edition of the Clinton Chronicles, and at least two more videos, are well underway. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- May: The cover story of the current issue of the American Spectator features revelations by yet a third Arkansas state trooper, L.D. Brown.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
Like Larry Patterson and Roger Perry of "Troopergate" fame, Brown had provided security at the governor's mansion between 1983 and 1985. For a time, he looked up to the Clintons, but after Clinton broke a promise to name Brown the assistant director of the Arkansas crime laboratory, became disgruntled and is now ready to talk. Brown has already provided false information about Bill Clinton's adulterous escapades to Clinton nemesis Sheffield Nelson and, possibly, to Clinton's former lieutenant governor Jim Guy Tucker. Now he provides the Spectator with his own lurid tale. According to Brown, he solicited women for Clinton while at the mansion, enjoyed sexual "residuals" himself, and describes the Clintons as monstrously foul-mouthed snobs who hate "regular folks." Brown repeats the discredited rumors about an affair between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster; his particular hatred of Hillary Clinton is possibly motivated by the fact that Mrs. Clinton tried to warn Brown's future wife that Brown was an inveterate skirt chaser. - Brown finds the Spectator a conducive, and lucrative, place to be: while reporter Daniel Wattenberg works on the story, the magazine pays Brown $10,000 between February and March, listed as "travel expenses" in the Arkansas Project files. Brown particularly enjoys associating with the high-living editor, Robert Tyrell, not knowing that Tyrell is using magazine and donated funds to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
Paula Jones sues Bill Clinton
- May 5: Paula Jones files a lawsuit against Bill Clinton over his supposed sexual harassment towards her in 1991.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
She is funded by a number of right-wing sources, mostly organizations such as the Rutherford Institute which are funded by conservative newspaper owner Richard Mellon Scaife. Kenneth Starr, who will be named the independent counsel to investigate Whitewater, contributes pro bono work for Jones, in what will become a flagrant conflict of interest. - The coterie of right-wing agitators and Clinton-haters surrounding Jones realize that they need to move fast -- the statute of limitations for Jones to file the suit against Clinton is about to expire, and Jones's lawyer Danny Traylor is patently inadequate to handle such a matter. According to journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Jones's advisors feel it doesn't "matter all that much whether Jones ultimately wins or loses her case;" the idea is to publicly embarrass and besmirch Clinton. A second, underlying agenda is to possibly flush out other women who can mount their own complaints against him. Stephen Boynton and David Henderson, who between them are directing the Scaife-funded Arkansas Project (see 1993) through the auspices of the American Spectator, join in finding Jones new legal representation. Eventually they find Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert Davis through the auspices of the Landmark Legal Foundation, another Scaife organization, along with assistance from Richard Porter, the eminent attorney from the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, which boasts Kenneth Starr as one of its law partners. Porter himself turns down the offer to represent Jones (though he will contribute clandestine legal advice throughout the proceedings), but, through another brace of lawyers connected with Newt Gingrich and Oliver North, steers Boynton and Henderton to Davis and Cammarata.
- The lawsuit is filed by Traylor on the absolute last day before the statute of limitations kicks in; legal observers consider the filing poorly drafted and "dismissable on its face." That is irrelevant; reporters flock to the Little Rock courthouse to interview Jones, and the lawsuit itself can be amended by more capable lawyers later. Initially, reporters are not impressed with Jones, whom they describe as unreliable and self-dramatizing, a shallow flit of a girl who made herself a pest around Clinton's office, endlessly discussing the governor's sex appeal. Nevertheless, she makes a meteoric appearance in the national media.
- Cammarata and Davis consider themselves no match for Clinton's primary lawyer, Robert Bennett, but are cheered by the team of high-powered legal experts lined up to give them advice and assistance out of the public eye. The attorneys working with Cammarata and Davis are almost all members of the far-right Federalist Society, and include Porter, corporate litigator George Conway, Philadelphia lawyer Jerome Marcus, and constitutional law professor Ronald Rotunda, who would later coauthor an amicus brief in support of Jones for the Supreme Court. In addition, Kenneth Starr, a partner with Porter, appears numerous times in the media to press for the lawsuit to proceed without delay. Starr's public support is critical. He carries as much weight in Washington as Bennett -- formerly a US appellate court judge and solicitor general under George Bush, Starr had long hoped for an appointment to the Supreme Court until Clinton's election. He now spends most of his time representing tobacco firms and auto industry clients. Starr frequently discusses the case, particularly the consitutional issues of a civil lawsuit against a sitting president, with Davis, and even considers filing an amicus brief for Jones on behalf of the Scaife-funded Independent Women's Forum. He takes a strong personal interest in the case from the outset, though much of his involvement in the case is hidden from public view. (Executive Intelligence Review, H.R. Clinton, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- May 26: President Clinton signs into law the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) bill
Domestic terrorism
that bars antiabortion demontrators from blocking access to clinics or threatening patients. Abortion rights supporters say there have been 3,000 reports of violence, vandalism and harassment at clinics, including bombings and death threats; the actual number is probably far higher. (Washington Post)
Hussein becomes Prime Minister of Iraq
-
Middle East unrest
May 29: Saddam Hussein officially becomes Prime Minister of Iraq. (BBC)
