Marc Rich, Bill Clinton and Israel

"Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”

Congressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.”

Marc Rich was wanted for a list of charges going back decades. He had traded illegally with America’s enemies including Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, where he bought about $200 million worth of oil while revolutionaries allied with Khomeini held 53 American hostages in 1979.

Rich made a large part of his wealth, approximately $2 billion between 1979 and 1994, selling oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa when it faced a UN embargo. He did deals with Khadafy’s Libya, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Communist dictatorships in Cuba and the Soviet Union itself. Little surprise that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

Facing prosecution by Rudy Giuliani in 1983, Rich fled to Switzerland and lived in exile.'  NY Post

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IMO Marc Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton because the Israeli government pressed him repeatedly to do so.   Why would they do that?  At the time I was in the position of associating with quite a few international oil traders.  They laughed when they talked about Rich as an oil trader and assured me that for an individual like Marc Rich to enter the oil futures and spot oil markets was a virtual impossibility.  The amount of capital required was simply prohibitive.   Their belief was that Rich's traffic in petroleum had to be backed with the money of a sovereign state that wished to trade for profit in this commodity.  They insisted that the only state likely to have wanted to do this but inhibited by the state of its external relations was Israel.

If that was the case, then it is only logical that Rich's legal position with regard to his US taxes was badly compromised.  Would the Israeli government have wanted him to pay US taxes on profits made with its money?  I think not, but Israel would also not want it to be known that it had abandoned its agent.  This is common practice in the world of covert action and clandestine intelligence.  Such knowledge if spread around the Zionist community would reduce the willingness of others to take risks for Israel.  It is for much the same reason that Israel pressed endlessly for Pollard to be released from prison.  Were the Israelis sentimentally grateful for the invaluable services rendered by Rich and Pollard?  Maybe they were but as a cynical past practitioner of the dark arts of covert action and espionage I doubt that was their principal motivation.

Were there incentives offered to WJC other than the unrelenting political pressure from key members of the Zionist community?  Who knows?

And now the FBI has chosen to open at least some of their files on this matter to the public.  Can this be other than a warning to their betters in the elected government?  Is the sentiment "if you take action to stop our investigations or against us, what else will we release?"  pl  

http://nypost.com/2016/01/17/after-pardoning-criminal-marc-rich-clintons-made-millions-off-friends/

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/judicial-watch-documents-reveal-israeli-133212091.html

http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/foxman-helped-mobilize-wealthy-aipac-board-member-to-obtain-clinton-pardon-of-marc-rich/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Foxman

http://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Clinton-and-Israel--the-by-Philip-Weiss-130713-563.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich

Comments

[Cee]

IZ,

Mother Jones is rolling over in her grave.

[Cee]

James,

Mine too which also explains why we don't have the mass transit systems of others or electric cars.

[turcopolier]

mike allen

IMO you continue to ignore the actual function that Rich performed. The information he shopped around was nothing. It was the actual oil trading that made a great deal of money for Israel. pl

[Miletus]

Mike Allen,

I have nothing to back this up except for the words of his people who I worked with in WA. One of the names they dropped was as high-level as it got at that time. They claimed that he and Rich did business with one another. They could have been all talk, of course. This came up in conversation when we were talking about contemporary events and they were shrugging them off as nothing - 'If you think this is bad, you should have seen...'

My assessment is that they're interested in making money. I doubt they have any allegiance to anyone, even if they try to stay on the right side of them.

On the subject of Glencore, up until that time it was a pretty small outfit with a very large market cap. When it floated, every employee got a serious windfall, even down to the secretarial staff. The guys I was working with made 7 figures but were still out getting their hands dirty. I doubt that many of them would speak ill of Mr. Rich or his company.

[The Beaver]

@ Miletus

Now the FBI is looking into that Twitter a/c:
https://thinkprogress.org/fbi-launches-internal-investigation-into-its-own-twitter-account-8d5fc2a81fdc#.aen3048e5

[jld]

Lol, lol, lol, kinda difficult to shoot down a hasbara isn't it?

[turcopolier]

jld

His "guidance" seems to have been clear. pl

[Miletus]

Yes, I saw this earlier. ThinkProgress is a highly partisan supporter of HRC, and has been heavily compromised by WikiLeaks (Neera Tanden/Podesta emails). That said, the article names its sources as FBI officials who, by the way, are contradicting the official FBI line on the Twitter account. The official account is implausible, of course, but they're contradicting it nonetheless. Not everyone in the FBI is steering in the same direction...

I look forward to them trying to prove that the Tweets are an encrypted message.

[walrus]

According to my uncle who worked for Phibro all his life, Marc Rich left after his request for a million dollar salary at his annual review was rejected "nobody gets that kind of money" was the alleged response. His request was in his mind, justified by his oil trading profits for Phibro.

As for Marc Rich being "a spy" this is BS. All commodity traders do their level best to cultivate connected people and Hoover up all country specific information that may affect commodity pricing all the time. That includes all political gossip right down to who is sleeping with who. This information is shared within the firm via visit reports and also finds its way through well established channels to intelligence agencies and departments of state. As a child, I watched my uncle and my father regularly collect such information over many social occasions with people from many countries. I may even still have copies of the appreciations they subsequently wrote.

[mike allen]

I think you know better Colonel. I would hope so anyway. I never disputed your claim about Rich and Israel, I agreed with it. If that agreement was not strong enough in your opinion then I repeat it here: you are right on regarding Rich's oil trading for Israel.

jld - As for the hasbara moniker, I have agreed with the Colonel on the USS Liberty and agreed with him on the need to strip AIPAC and other Israeli lobbys out of Washington. You can search and check out my record on this blog. But on the hasbara insults you need to stretch your imagination and try harder. I am not thin skinned like some of the other guests here. I've been called better and I've been called worse, usually accompanied by lots of four-letter words.

[turcopolier]

mike allen

You are a brother to me as well as to your fellow Marines. pl

[Croesus]

On Sept 18 2016 Joe Conason was on C Span to talk about his bio of Bill Clinton. #1 topic is the pardon of Rich.
~ 6 min Conason explains (in tones that assume that Americans will be deeply sympathetic with the reasoning) that Ehud Barak had asked Clinton to pardon Rich three times. Clinton & Barak had worked "very closely" on I/P peace deal and got "closer than anyone ever before." Now, however, Barak was facing loss of his position.
Conason said "Barak told me when I interviewed him in TelAviv that Rich had been an asset of the Mossad for many years. He had done all kinds of work for Israeli intelligence, and some for US. But principally things like rescuing Jewish families in places like Yemen and Iraq . . . and Iran. He was able to get officials [in those hostile countries] to look the other way . . . In the eyes of the Israeli government he was a . . .sayin . . . and Barak felt that Israel owed him and asked Clinton to fulfill that debt for them."

https://www.c-span.org/video/?414974-4/washington-journal-joe-conason-clintons-campaign-2016

[Croesus]

Ronen Bergman has some interesting insights into Israel-Iran arms trading (rather, arms supplying) in his book, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World's Most Dangerous Terrorist Powerhttps://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Iran-Clandestine-Dangerous/dp/1400159822

As is obvious from the title, Bergman disdains hyperbole & the book is cooly objective in every particular.

He writes that even tho "Khomeini hated Israel," Israel sold arms to Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq war because Israelis felt profound consternation at being shut out of their former ability to acquire insider's knowledge of Iran's doings. Israelis had learned that selling arms to a "totalitarian" government was an effective way to stay close to the topmost centers of power. Besides, Bergman wrote, Israel was making money hand-over-fist; they didn't give the ethics of the situation a single thought: they just sold sold sold, and let the Iranians and Iraqis kill each other."

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[tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you ----)

[Croesus]

I wouldn't use the word "entertaining.'

Some of us have dear ones who have great abilities (and expensive educations) that put them in the center of this "entertainment." While I appreciate the stimulation such specialists derive from the "thrill of the chase," the chase is also fraught with moral and career hazards.

[Thirdeye]

I'm going to guess that the investigation will be a token effort because of potential countermoves exposing political interference from the likes of McCabe, Kadzik, and maybe Lynch.

[Thirdeye]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-finds-emails-related-to-hillary-clintons-state-department-tenure/

"These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server. At this point, however, it remains to be seen whether these emails are significant to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton." (emphasis added)

At the very least, they were not disclosed.

[mike allen]

The feeling is mutual Colonel to you and to your fellow Soldiers.

[Fred]

Cee,

You notice Hilary did not ask her 20+ year staffer Huma to release the emails.