As often happens here at the home, while jotting about one thing, I'm led to another. So it was with James Leach.
Back in 1994, one of the very few congressmen to take note of bubbling
allegations about the Clinton's involvement in the Whitewater land
fraud, was House Banking member Leach. Unlike their handling of
publications (like the American Spectator) that were running pieces on
it, the media could not label the respected Congressman a Right-Wing
crackpot. Many of us were excited that somebody with balls was finally
willing to take on the Clinton Machine. Here's what I went to the
attic just now to find.
"...When he started investigating President Clinton 's Whitewater
dealings, Jim Leach knew he wouId be playing hardball. But the Iowa
Republican never expected to see Jack Palladino lurking around his house. But there Palladino was, scoping out Leach's Northwest Washington premises one evening as the congressman arrived home in 1994.
Palladino, a San Francisco private detective who had been paid more
than $100,000 by the Clinton campaign in 1992 to deal with what Clinton
intimate Betsey Wright called "bimbo eruptions," quickly scurried away,
and Leach never went public with what he saw. But the House Banking
Committee chairman privately told colleagues the intended message was
clear: You mess with us, we'll mess with you. William Clinger got the
same treatment.
When the now-retired Pennsylvania Republican congressman was probing
Commerce secretary Ron Brown's business dealings in 1995, a New Jersey
detective named Louis Stephens suddenly started snooping around.
Stephens had been hired by Brown's ex-business partner and mistress Nolanda Hill to
button up Clinger's sources. About the same time, a member of Clinger's
staff got a call from a reporter working on a Clinger profile. She'd
been tipped by a supposedly solid source that Clinger was a wife-abuser
who'd once viciously pushed his spouse down a flight of stairs in a
rage..... "Can I prove it was the White House behind the story? No,"
concedes a well-informed source. "Do I think it was them? Absolutely.
They do have a pattern of getting into your past." ....
The president's impressive people skills and abundant personal charm
mask a streak of political cold- bloodedness and score-settling worthy
of a Mario Puzo novel. That's particularly true in the way he and his
lieutenants deal with anyone-critic or innocent victim alike-who poses
a potential menace to the massive effort to keep the lid on the various
scandals dogging Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and his
administration...." Weekly Standard 8/4/97 Thomas M. DeFrank and Thomas Galvin
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