Media miss what's missing in 'My Life'

Editor's note: Jack Cashill is the author of the newly released, "Ron Brown's Body," already in its second printing.

"The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well. Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources."

– The Thompson Committee on the Clinton 1996 re-election campaign

Throughout the day on April 3, 1996, the man who most fully embodied the historic corruption of that campaign lay face up amidst the mud and debris after his U.S. Air Force plane crashed into a barren Croatian hillside.

His name was Ron Brown, the United States secretary of Commerce.

For the two most desperate years of the Clinton presidency, 1994 to 1996, Brown had unwittingly found himself at the nexus of White House machinations, the central exchange, the point where presidential power alchemized into hard cash more crudely and less discreetly than at any time in a century. Here, Brown was both exploiter and exploited, victimizer and ultimately victim, the classic "man who knew too much."

Brown may have died in vain. In his much-publicized opus, "My Life," former president Bill Clinton gives us no clue about Brown's fate, nor about the whole sorry spectacle that led, directly or indirectly, to his death – what Sen. Fred Thompson rightly called "the most corrupt political campaign in modern political history."

In this extraordinary retelling, Clinton purges this campaign of all desperation, all corruption, and all those people who might have caused either. John Huang and his boss, James Riady, who helped finance Clinton's comeback in 1992, as well as in 1996, do not appear in his narrative. None of the Huang's 47 visits to the White House before he joined the Commerce Department proved memorable enough to be recorded – not even the one on April 19, 1993, when Clinton escorted Huang and Riady to the White House situation room to observe key staff then in the throes of mismanaging the Waco crisis.

No mention is made of the week-long series of meetings Riady and Huang had in June 1994 with Bill and Hillary Clinton and their now-disgraced crony, Webster Hubbell. No wonder. These meetings culminated at week's end with Hubbell receiving $100,000 from a Riady company account, Hong Kong China Ltd., on the same day that the treasonous Huang was hired by the Commerce Department.

These meetings may have also explained Clinton's shocking decision weeks earlier to "de-link" human rights from renewal of China's most favored nation status. Remember, on the campaign trail in 1992 Clinton had hectored Bush repeatedly for "coddling tyrants" in Beijing and conducting "business as usual with those who murdered freedom at Tiananmen Square." In "My Life," Clinton explains the abrupt about-face with the utterly disingenuous comment that "our engagements had produced some positive results." Understandably, he does not mention that the Riadys had begun shifting their massive investments to the People's Republic in 1992.

Few key players of Asian heritage escape Clinton's delete button. Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, Pauline Kanchanalak, Gene and Nora Lum – all of whom helped fuel the insatiable needs of the 1996 campaign – do not show up in "My Life." Brown, the unwilling "bagman" on so many of these Third World swap-and-shops, emerges only to be sanctified in death.

In "My Life," no grand jury investigates Brown for the bribe he solicited from the Vietnamese. No independent counsel targets him or his son Michael for the graft he siphoned out of Oklahoma. No executives from Enron await him at the Dubrovnik airport on his fatal mission. No apparent bullet hole is ever found in his head. And Lord knows, no black leaders rise up to demand an autopsy.

Sen. Fred Thompson does not grace the pages of "My Life," nor does his committee get a single mention. Missing too is any talk of the Cox Committee and its unanimous findings that the People's Republic illegally and successfully targeted the United States for satellite, missile and nuclear technology under Clinton's watch.

Oddly absent, too, is all reference to Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, who hounded Ron Brown and forced the White House's sale of trade mission seats into the open. Incredibly, Clinton consigns Chinagate – what Judicial Watch calls "the most serious scandal in the history of the United States" – to a half-page and dismisses it all as "possible attempts by the Chinese government to funnel illegal contributions to members of Congress in 1996." And even this "mindless search for scandal," he blames on FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Clinton does on occasion expand the reader's knowledge. In the Croat offensive against the indigenous Serbs in Krajina in 1995, what the Serbs not unfairly call their own "trail of tears," Clinton admits that "I was rooting for the Croatians." He acknowledges that his administration purposefully ignored the international embargo on weapons and authorized a "private company" to train the Croatian army.

If Ron Brown were murdered, as the evidence suggests he was, the Croatians almost assuredly did the dirty work. They obviously knew their way back to Washington.

The second bit of evidence concerns what may be the most egregious single moment of the Clinton presidency. As I relate in "Ron Brown's Body," the embittered, shell-shocked Clintons left for Indonesia – the Riady home base – immediately after the crushing November 1994 election. This trip had been planned in advance, but it was a good place for the Clintons to lick their wounds and raise some cash. In "My Life," Clinton dedicates one sentence to it.

I dedicate quite a bit more. It is on this trip that plans are made to build the notorious Paiton power plant that would be fueled by clean coal from one of the two commercially viable low-sulfur coalmines in the world – this one owned by the Riady family in Indonesia.

The second such mine was in Utah. On Sept. 18, 1996, Bill Clinton unilaterally shut it down when he announced "one of my most important environmental accomplishments," the establishment of the Grand-Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Clinton cites as his authority to do so the Antiquities Act of 1906. "My action was necessary," writes Clinton, "to stop a large coal mine that would have changed the character of the area."

At 1.7 million acres, the area in question is larger than the state of Delaware. It could have handled a coal mine, even a big one. The people in Utah thought so. As CNN reported at the time, they were "furious." No one had consulted its representatives in advance. Indeed, Clinton made the announcement in Arizona.

A move of this scope does not happen in American politics without significant prodding. If the people in Utah did not prod him to make this decision, who did?

As is his wont, President Clinton chooses not to share the stuff that might have made the book worth reading.

Editor's note: The sensational new edition of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine,"THE PARTY OF TREASON," rips the veneer of civility and compassion off the Democratic Party and reveals how the party of Truman and Kennedy has been transformed into "the enemy within."

Order your copy of "Ron Brown's Body" today.

Introductory series

Part 1: Did Ron Brown die for Enron's sins?

Part 2: How 'minority capitalism' undid Ron Brown

Part 3: Competing against the Clintons for cash

Part 4: Clinton's new "bagman"

Part 5: Second 'black president' likely to build on legacy of first

Part 6: Some dare call it treason

Part 7: Wang Jun's excellent White House adventure

Part 8: Sun peeked through 'worst storm in a decade'

Part 9: The bullet hole that should have shaken Washington

Part 10: How Monica buried Ron Brown and saved the Clinton presidency