Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently a candidate to replace retiring World Bank President Robert Zoellick. And that should frighten anybody who doesn’t suffer from severe memory loss.
Hillary Clinton, you’ll remember, was the driving force behind multiple financial scandals that plagued the Clinton Administration. There was Whitewater, a controversy in which the Clintons, along with their friends Jim and Susan McDougal, took out a large loan to buy a chunk of property. When the project ran into financial trouble, Jim McDougal illegally used a bank he was running to subsidize more property buying and development. Hillary Clinton acted as one of his lawyers. The bank eventually collapsed entirely, and the U.S. government picked up the tab to the tune of $73 million. Clinton himself, it was later alleged, pressured one of his supporters to give Susan McDougal a $300,000 loan. When Vince Foster committed suicide in 1993, chief White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum quickly headed over to Foster’s office and grabbed Whitewater documents, turning them over to the Clintons. The Justice Department initiated an investigation, and Hillary was subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury. Virtually everyone surrounding the Clintons was charged with criminal misconduct. Hillary escaped scot-free.
Then there was Travelgate, the scandal in which Hillary Clinton essentially ordered the firing of everybody inside the White House Travel Office, making way for friends of hers to clear lots of cash. The Clintons pressured the FBI to investigate the Travel Office to give her an excuse to clear away the old employees. The General Accounting Office reported that Clinton told a senior White House official to dump those employees in favor of “our people.”
Or how about Filegate, in which Hillary allegedly hired Craig Livingstone, the director of the White House’s Office of Personnel Security, who requested classified personal files from the FBI about political enemies?
And, of course, there was the New Square scandal during Hillary’s run for Senator for New York in 2000. In that case, the President pardoned four felons from the Jewish Hasidic community of New Square, allegedly in return for their votes for Hillary.
Does this sound a like a woman who should be running the World Bank? Everywhere the Clintons have gone, ruinous personal and financial scandal has followed in their wake. Should the World Bank appoint Hillary its head, there is little doubt that funds will find their way into the hands of Hillary’s friends and associates.
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