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Subject: Hillary Sells Her Soul to the Devil for a Chance of Becoming President
Richard M[ellon] Scaife and
Sen. Hillary Clinton talk at the offices of
the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
on Tuesday, March 25, 2008.
Sidney Davis / Tribune-Review
Hillary, reassessed
By Richard M[ellon]
Scaife
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, April
1, 2008
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_559659.html
"I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today
than before last Tuesday's meeting -- and it's a very favorable one indeed."
Richard M. Scaife is the owner of the
Tribune-Review.
--------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife
Scaife's publications were substantially involved in coverage against
then-President Bill Clinton.
Scaife was the major backer of The American
Spectator, whose Arkansas Project
set out to find facts about Clinton and in which Paula Jones' accusations
of sexual harassment
against Clinton were first widely publicized.
In a 1999 series of articles on Scaife and foundations that support
conservative causes, the Washington Post named a close Scaife associate,
Richard Larry, and not Scaife himself as the man who drove the Arkansas
Project.
Regardless of his role, the project not only
accused Clinton of financial and sexual indiscretions (some later verified,
others not), but also gave root to hyperbolic conspiracist notions that the
Clintons collaborated with the CIA
to run a drug smuggling operation out of the town of Mena, Arkansas and that
Clinton had arranged for the murder of
White House aide Vince Foster as part of a coverup of the Whitewater scandal.
So involved was Scaife in efforts against Clinton that many
Democrats believed Hillary
Clinton's statement condemning a "vast
right-wing conspiracy" against her husband was a direct
reference to Scaife himself. President Clinton later admitted to
sexual indiscretions, but all the other allegations that came out
of the Arkansas Project were never proven.
Coincidental to the Lewinsky scandal and
Clinton's impeachment,
Scaife endowed a new school of public policy at Pepperdine
University. Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr was named
the first dean of this school, although Pepperdine denies any connection.
Starr accepted the post in 1996, but in the ensuing
controversy, Starr gave up the appointment in 1998 before ever having started
at Pepperdine.
That same year Scaife's friend and Pittsburgh attorney, H. Yale Gutnick,
denied that there was any connection between Scaife and Starr:
I can tell you unequivocally that there is absolutely no linkage between
Scaife and Starr in any way, shape or form. Had Ken Starr's picture not
been
all over the television and newspapers in recent weeks, I don't think Dick
Scaife would recognize him at a social event. They have never communicated,
they have never seen each other personally, and there's no relationship
whatsoever.
Dick Scaife has been involved with Pepperdine I think before Clinton
became governor of Arkansas, and clearly long before he was president and
before the special prosecutor ever was even a dream in anybody's
imagination. His giving to Pepperdine has been consistent over the years
and
it's been generous.[13]
However, once the investigation was behind him, Starr was appointed to head
Pepperdine's law school in 2004.
In the fall of 2007, however, Ruddy published a
positive interview with former President Clinton on Newsmax.com, followed by
a
positive cover story in the magazine. The New
York Times noted with reference to the event that politics had made "strange
bedfellows".[14]
Newsweek
reported that Ruddy praised Clinton for his Foundation's global work, and
explained that the interview, as well as a private
lunch he and Scaife had had with Clinton (which Ruddy says was orchestrated
by
Ed
Koch), were
due to the shared view of himself and Scaife that Clinton was doing important
work representing the U.S. globally while America was the target of
criticism.
He also said that he and Scaife had never suggested Clinton was involved in
Foster's death, nor had they spread allegations about Bill
Clinton's sex scandals, although their work may have encouraged
others.[15]
It has been suggested that Scaife is motivated by a desire to improve his
public image in regard to his divorce,
or even that he may be motivated by a desire to oppose his
ex-wife's support for Barrack
Obama. [16]
Political
donations
According to campaignmoney.com, from 1999 through 2006, Scaife has, under
the name "R. Scaife," made 10 contributions of over $200 to political
campaigns, for a total of $19,000. Under the name "R.M. Scaife" he made 4
donations, for a total of $22,000. Under the name Richard Scaife, he made 23
donations over this period, for a total of $142,904. Besides donations to the
Republican
National Committee and various political campaigns such as Santorum 2000
and the Santorum Victory Committee for Rick Santorum, he has
also supported Political
Action Committees ...
Scaife funded the Western
Journalism Center, headed by Joseph Farah, who is connected to
reconstructionism, a movement to replace judicial law with Christian Old
Testament law. The organization is antigay, and would punish "practicing
homosexuals" by sentencing them to death.
Management of the Scaife family
foundations
When Scaife refocused his political giving away from individuals and toward
anti-communist research groups,
legal defense funds, and publications, the first among these was the Hoover
Institution
on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford
University.
Through contacts made at Hoover and elsewhere, Scaife became a major, early
supporter of the Heritage
Foundation, which has since become one of Washington's most
influential public policy research institutes. Later, he supported such
varied
conservative and libertarian organizations as:
American Enterprise Institute
Atlas
Economic Research Foundation
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Commonwealth
Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives - a Harrisburg-based
libertarian think tank [18]
Federalist Society
Foundation
for Economic Education
Free Congress Foundation (headed by Paul Weyrich)
Freedom House
GOPAC
(headed by Newt Gingrich)
Independent
Women's Forum
Media Research
Center (headed by Brent Bozell)
Pacific Legal Foundation
Pittsburgh World Affairs Council
Reason Foundation
By 1998 his foundations were listed among donors to over 100 such groups,
to which he had disbursed some $340 million by 2002.
[Other philanthropic support
Scaife is identified with his contributions to conservative and libertarian
causes. The Washington
Post dubbed him "funding father of the [Far] Right" in
1999.
However, he has also supported policy research groups which are not
explicitly conservative, such as the Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the National
Endowment for Democracy, and the Foreign
Policy Research Institute at the University of
Pennsylvania, among others.
In the late 1990s, during the height of the Clinton scandals, Scaife's
donations to restore and beautify the White House led to an invitation by
Hillary Clinton for a black-tie celebration. She warmly received him and
posed
for a photograph on the same day her husband's sex scandal hit the press.
Scaife told the New York Post that he
appreciated Mrs. Clinton's invitation. "I'm honored," he said. "Lord knows,
it's more than I got from George Bush."
--------------------
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/11/6195_the_real_reason_richard_mellon_scaife_has_embraced_bill_clinton.html
The Real Reason Richard Mellon Scaife Has Embraced the Clintons?
As Jonathan notes below, the Clintons seem to have won over
Richard Mellon Scaife. That's right, Scaife, he of the "vast right-wing
conspiracy," the man who funded the American Spectator and the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other publications and entites, to go
after Bill and Hill with a zeal not seen since the Comstock days, is now saying
Clinton is "very laudable" and, through his latest media mouthpiece
Newsmax.com,
is moreover "a political and cultural powerhouse" who is "part Merlin and part
Midas—a politician with a magical touch."
In reporting on this strange turn of events, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (who
broke the Monicagate
story) can only throw his hands up and say "cue the
apocalypse."
Well, I don't really have any idea either, but it's perhaps
worth noting that Scaife is going through a particularly tawdry divorce, one
that was hilariously detailed by the Washington Post's David Segal back in
October. It is more than
worth reading in full—this accompanying illustration gives you a sense of
Segal's itinerary of a divorce/travelogue device, but just to get you to
follow the link...
[Scaife] is best known for funding efforts to smear
then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he's given in excess of $300
million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list
of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has
published papers with titles such as "Restoring a Culture of
Marriage."
The culture of his own marriage is apparently past
restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of
Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a
night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of
adultery.
Oh, and there's the money. Three words,
people.
No. Pre. Nup.
Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe)
married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to
wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to
understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a
temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an
alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month.
Or
about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated
lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large
that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year
than
the salary of the President of the United States."
But wait, there's more:
At some point in late 2005, Ritchie started having
suspicions about her husband and hired a private investigator named Keith
Scannell, a specialist in high-end surveillance for insurance companies. In
December of that year, Scannell followed Richard Scaife to nearby North
Huntingdon, home of Doug's Motel, a place where the TVs are bolted to the
furniture and rooms can be rented in three-hour increments, for $28. (It's
now
under new management and renamed the Huntingdon Inn. Head east on Route 8,
then east on Route 30.) There, according to Scannell, Scaife spent a few
hours
with Tammy Sue Vasco.
Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug's Motel, of
all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall,
blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after
showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover
cop
for $225, the Post-Gazette reported.
Now could it be that the reason Scaife has formed a "mutual
admiration society" with Bill Clinton because he now sees Monicagate through
different eyes? As for Bill, his spokesperson has said of the new friendship:
"President Clinton believes in redemption and moving forward." Yes, and money
talks.
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