The End of a Presidential Term

Why is it that at the end of every Presidential term weather Democrat or Republican both parties throw out any since of decency when making decisions that will win favor for themselves once they leave office.

Here one of many scandals with the President Bill Clinton leaving office

By DAVID JOHNSTON AND DON VAN NATTA JR.
Published: February 23, 2001 New York Times Article

The furor over President Bill Clinton's pardons intensified today as Congressional investigators focused on Roger Clinton and his efforts to win pardons for friends and associates from his half brother.
In discussions with Bill Clinton, Roger Clinton sought clemency for about 10 people, although he had not been paid for his efforts, said Julia Payne, an aide to the former president. Ms. Payne added that all of the requests had been denied. Congressional officials said they were investigating Roger Clinton's assertions that he had pressed for the pardons without pay.
As Congressional investigators broadened their inquiry in Washington, federal prosecutors in New York in the office of United States Attorney Mary Jo White expanded their criminal inquiry to determine whether efforts were made to buy pardons in some cases, the officials said.
While the investigations rapidly accelerated beyond the initial inquiry into Mr. Clinton's pardon of the fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters today that she played no role in any of the dozens of pardons that her husband granted. She expressed chagrin that her brother Hugh Rodham accepted a large fee as a pardon lobbyist. [Excerpts, Page A15.]
In another development, Clinton aides said today that Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign treasurer helped obtain last-minute pardons for two convicted felons from President Clinton. The treasurer, William Cunningham III, a New York lawyer, is the law partner of Harold Ickes, an adviser to the Clintons.
In an interview today, Mr. Ickes said a friendcame to him in January, and asked him to help obtain pardons for James Manning and Robert Fain, who had been convicted in 1982 on tax evasion charges. Mr. Ickes said he told the friend that he was not practicing law, and so referred him to Mr. Cunningham, a former assistant United States attorney. A lawyer knowledgeable about the case identified the friend as Harry Thomason, a television producer and Arkansas friend of the Clintons.
Mr. Cunningham, who is with the firm of Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein in Mineola, N.Y., drew up the paperwork and on Jan. 16 sent it to the pardon office at the Department of Justice. Mr. Ickes's partner at the Washington firm of Ickes & Enright, Janice Enright, sent the pardon applications to the White House, Mr. Ickes said.
Mr. Ickes said that he had had no discussions with President Clinton or Mrs. Clinton about the pardons and that he had received no money. He said Mr. Cunningham charged the men on an hourly basis, receiving a total of about $4,000.
Roger Clinton's lobbying became known one day after Hugh Rodham, President Clinton's brother-in-law, agreed to return a fee of $400,000 that he had beenpaid to help two men who received a presidential pardon and a grant of clemency on Jan. 20, Mr. Clinton's last day in office.
Former White House aides said tonight that Roger Clinton had given the president a list of pardon candidates in 1998 and another list in December or January, when he made a personal appeal to his brother. None of those people received pardons.
The pardons, along with expensive gifts that the Clintons took with them as they left office, have clouded Mrs. Clinton's effort to establish herself as the new Democratic senator from New York. Even so, she swept into a Senate office building and coolly responded to reporters' questions.
''I was just heartbroken and shocked by it,'' she said of the payment to her brother. ''And, you know, immediately said it was a terrible misjudgment and the money had to be returned.''
Mrs. Clinton suggested that had she known in advance of her brother's lobbying effort, she would have tried to stop it.
Congressional investigators have asked Mr. Rodham to explain his role in the successful effort to obtain pardons for Carlos Vignali, a convicted drug dealer, and Almon Glenn Braswell, an herbal supplement marketer convicted of fraud and perjury. Prosecutors for Ms. White, the United States attorney in New York, are also investigating the pardons.
Mr. Rodham's lawyer, Nancy Luque, has said her client did nothing wrong.
Today, Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County issued a statement saying Mr. Rodham telephoned him in January during the effort to obtain a pardon for Mr. Vignali. Sheriff Baca said Mr. Rodham told him that he would soon receive a call from an unidentified ''staff assistant.''
When the staff assistant called, the sheriff said, he was asked his opinion of Mr. Vignali's father, Carlos Vignali Sr., and whether the pardon should be granted. He said he replied that he was not familiar with the facts of the case.
In a letter sent to Roger Clinton today, investigators on the House Government Reform Committee asked whether he had been paid by anyone seeking a pardon or commutation from his half brother.
Specifically, investigators asked whether Roger Clinton had played any role in the pardons and commutations granted to four people. They are Mr. Vignali, a California first-time offender convicted in 1994 of conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine; Mr. Braswell, a Miami businessman who was convicted of mail fraud and perjury in 1983; Philip Young, a Louisiana man convicted in 1992 of illegal transport of fish and wildlife; and Mitchell Couey Wood, who was convicted of cocaine possession charges in 1986 in Arkansas.
Congressional investigators said they had information that Roger Clinton received $30,000 from Mr. Vignali and $15,000 from Mr. Young. But the investigators cautioned that they had received no hard evidence of the payments. Mr. Young's lawyer, Gene O'Daniel, did not return phone calls to his office today.
A Clinton aide who spoke with Roger Clinton today said Mr. Clinton said that he did not know Philip Young, and that he had not received money in exchange for supporting applications for clemency. The pardon request for Mr. Young, the aide said, went to the Justice Department, then forwarded to the White House.
Mr. Wood and Roger Clinton were the subjects in a federal cocaine inquiry in Arkansas in the 1980's. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month, Mr. Wood said he had applied for a pardon several years ago and had not ''seen Roger in 15 years.''
On Jan. 20, Roger Clinton, 44, himself received a pardon for a 1985 cocaine possession conviction for which he had served one year in prison. Last week, Roger Clinton was arrested and charged with drunken driving and disturbing the peace after an altercation in Los Angeles.
In developments related to the initial investigation, documents given today to the House Government Reform Committee confirmed that Denise Rich, Mr. Rich's former wife, made three contributions totaling $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library. The records also show that Beth Dozoretz, the former Democratic National Committee fund-raiser and friend of Ms. Rich, promised to raise $1 million for the library.
But the library foundation declined to comply with requests for a number of other documents, including a a list of individuals who donated or pledged more than $5,000.
The documents turned over to investigators were heavily edited, eliminating the identities of all the donors except Ms. Rich and Ms. Dozoretz. The documents also included letters to Ms. Rich and Ms. Dozoretz, which asked them for still more contributions and fund-raising assistance to the library foundation. The letters are dated Jan. 16 and were mailed as Mr. Clinton was deliberating the pardons.
''As the Clinton administration draws to a close, it is time to reflect upon the tremendous accomplishments of his presidency and to thank you again for all that you have done over the past several years in support of the president,'' wrote Peter M. O'Keefe, the library's director of development.
David E. Kendall, a foundation lawyer, said the request for documents violated the First Amendment rights of the contributors and represented an ''intrusion'' into the operation of a presidential library.
Representative Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who chairs the government reform committee, said Mr. Kendall's answer was ''unacceptable.'' The committee made plans to subpoena Skip Rutherford, the president of the Clinton library.

We all know what Clinton did since then and now President George Bush is starting on his final exit with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince like Presidents before them of both parties the First Bush / Reagan / Carter / Ford /Johnson and further on with every administration they all seem to throw there morals out the door for money.

Why is the president of the United States entertaining Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at Camp David when his own State Department has singled out the Sheik’s homeland, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), for its continuing violations of human rights?Abu Dhabi is one of seven oil-rich — and anti-Israel states — in the United Arab Emirates. Using its massive sovereign wealth fund of over $875 billion, Abu Dhabi has been gobbling up American assets, buying considerable stakes in U.S. businesses like Citigroup, the Carlyle Group, Advanced Micro Devices, and Toll Brother and is now bidding on the Chrysler Building.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of State has singled out the U.A.E. for its continuing violation of human rights. Here’s what it said in its latest report for 2007:
“Citizens did not have the right to change their government. In some cases, security forces reportedly employed flogging as judicially sanctioned punishment. Arbitrary detention and incommunicado detention remained problems…”“The judiciary lacked full independence. The government restricted civil liberties, including freedoms of speech, press (including the Internet), assembly, association, and religion. There were limited reports of corruption, and the government lacked transparency.”“Domestic abuse of women remained a problem, and there were allegations that it was sometimes enabled by police. Trafficking in women and children and legal and societal discrimination against women and non-citizens also remained problems.”“The government severely restricted workers' rights, and the abuse of foreign domestic servants remained a problem…Political organizations, political parties, and trade unions are illegal.”Last year, Sheik Mohammed was dismissed from a Houston lawsuit brought by a former adviser to the U.A.E. royal family, alleging that he aided and abetted his brother Sheik Issa in brutal torture and false imprisonment. Without ruling on the merits of the plaintiff’s claims, the Court held that Sheik Mohammed had sovereign immunity and could not be tried because, among other things, such torture had not been demonstrated to be illegal in the U.A.E.And, apparently, torture it was: tapes provided to the Associated Press “showed a man who appeared to be Sheik Issa beating another man with lumber, firing an automatic weapon into the sand around him and forcing an apparent cattle prod into his anus. The victim also appeared to have been partly run over by a SUV and had salt poured on his wounds… Lawyers said the video also showed the victim's genitals being lit on fire. They said the abuse began because the sheik felt he had been overcharged in a grain deal.”The suit against Sheik Issa continues. After the release of the embarrassing tapes, the Embassy of the U.A.E. in the U.S. refused to comment on the lawsuit, since it is not actually against the government of the U.A.E., nor has the Embassy commented on the brutality of the documented torture. No action has been taken against the Crown Prince’s brother.The U.A.E. does not permit Israeli citizens to enter the country and gives special scrutiny to those with Israeli stamps on their passports. Here’s what the U.S. State Department reported on institutionalized anti-Semitism:“There was a small resident non-citizen Jewish population of unknown size. There were no synagogues. There were no reported acts of physical violence against or harassment of Jewish persons, however, anti-Semitism in the media was present in articles and editorial cartoons, which depicted negative images of Jews. These expressions occurred primarily in the government affiliated daily newspapers Al-Ittihad (government-owned) Al-Bayan (government-owned), and Al-Khaleej (pro-government, privately owned). The articles and cartoons appeared without government response.”So why is the Crown Prince at Camp David? Maybe they’re talking about the obscene price of oil. Or, if history is any guide, one outcome of the visit might be a big donation to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. If Bush follows Clinton’s example — and his own father’s — he’ll be spending a lot of time at Camp David with prospective rich donors in the next six months.One thing that is likely missing from the agenda is a discussion of human rights.

Trust me this will never end either. If McCain or Obama win the white house we will be talking about this again in 4 to 8 years. There is no party Exempt from being Stuck on stupied

Anthony Landaeta