18 U.S.C. 607(a):
"It shall be unlawful for any person to solicit or receive any contributions in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties any person who violates this section shall be fined not more than $5,000, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."
There are no exemptions granted in the above law. Even the President and the Vice President are bound by it's prohibition.
This has created a problem for the U.S. Congress.
Both the President and Vice President, as well as the First Lady's Chief Of Staff, have broken the above law. The whole world knows that they have done so, and now all eyes around the planet are watching intently to see if the United States remains a nation of law, or if (as has been proven by the Vincent Foster affair) murder and corruption are rights the elite enjoy with impunity.
The clear reluctance of the Republican Congress to fully investigate the crimes of the Democratic Executive has created the impression that Congress is afraid. Afraid of what larger crimes may lurk behind the smaller ones. Afraid that an executive branch that took cash from everyone, may have taken it from even more unsavory sources than merely foreign donors;drug lords.
Such a revelation, that the 1992 and 1996 campaigns were contaminated with drug money, is sadly, not lacking in precedent. The President of Columbia faced charges in his own nation of accepting money from drug lords, and like O.J. was acquitted but not exhonorated. Likewise, the family of ex-President Salinas of Mexico, including Salinas himself, has ben linked to drug running.
This brings us to our own nation and the very strange circumstances which swirl around the current occupant of the White House.
Those of us who recall the Iran-Contra scandal will recall that the American side of the gun running operation was located at the airport in Mena, Arkansas, at the time when Bill Clinton was governor of the state. The operation to support the Contras was illegal; a violation of the Boland Amendment. The CIA was at Mena, officially to train Contra pilots.
Also at the airport was Barry Seal, whoes own surviving paperwork shows was a contract CIA operative flying guns down to Nicaragua and drugs back.
The CIA has a long history of tolerance for and even protection of drug runners who are of value to them. This dates back to the Korean War when the fledgling CIA, caught off guard, used the existing networks operated by the opium warlords to gain valuable intelligence as to Chinese intentions. The Opium Lords were not shy about exploiting their connection to th CIA to further their drug profits.
This incestuous relationship with opium continued up to the days of Viet-Nam, when Kuhn Sa's opium found it's way to the coastline via the aircraft of Air America, the Florida based CIA proprietary airline. Following the end of the Viet-Nam war, one of the Air America cargo planes was sold to Barry Seal, who used it to fly drugs into Arkansas on his return trips from Nicaragua.
As a side note, every instance where the CIA has blocked other law enforcement agencies from approaching their drug-connected "assets", it's been under the assumption that the drug connected assets provided some part of the National Security agenda. There is no way to know, and no reason to doubt, that some CIA upper echelon officers directly profited from the drug running that took place on their "turf".
But, I digress. We were speaking of Arkansas.
Although one of the poorest states in the nation, Arkansas enjoyed an economic boom during the 80s, while Bill Clinton was governor, and needless to say, while the Iran-Contra pipeline was in full swing.
But most of that boom was in a very small circle, largely those companies whoes owners were friends of Bill Clinton, who signed the paperwork for an entity called the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, from which the boom times flowed; cash seemingly without end. From the recipients of the AFDA largesse came back contributions to the Bill Clinton for President Campaign.
But along the path to the White House, some strange things started to happen. Four, count 'em, FOUR, key 1992 Clinton/DNC fund raisers died under suspicious circumstances, three plane crashes and one "Fosterization".
The most famous of the four was Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash in what the media trumpeted as the "Worst Storm In A Decade", a storm which, according to the Dubrovnik Airport Tower weather office, never happened.
Then there is the case of Vincent Foster, the man in charge of putting together the Clinton's blind trust. The blind trust is required to be in place on inauguration day, but for some reason, Foster was still working on the trust declarations 6 months after Clinton took office, and was preparing to resign leaving the trust unfinished when he died in a murder made to look like a suicide. Carolyn Huber's testimony during the Whitewater hearing makes it clear that the trust, as completed three days AFTER Foster's murder, does not include all the Clinton assets.
While the media, led by Bob Woodward, fully explores the flow of cash coming from China, the media remains steadfastly, deafeningly silent on more domestic sources of those funds that had to be laundered through the cluster of banks and land deals and government offices centered on Little Rock, and through other places such as a California Buddhist Temple.
The Chinese make a great scapegoat. They can never be investigated in their own nation. They will never have a day in court to prove their innocence. Their protestations of innocence fall on the ears of a media no more willing to tell the truth about fund raising than they are to tell the truth about the murder of Vincent Foster.
As scandal after scandal emerges from the 1992 and 1996 elections, as laundered donation after laundered donation emerges amidst ever escalating claims of outright election fraud, the apparent (and much touted by the Democrats) reluctance of the Republican-led Congress to press the investigations reveals that the congress is clearly afraid of what they may find, and how it may trace back to themselves.
But now, all the delays are over. Title 18 607(a) makes it clear. The President and Vice-President (as well as Hillary's Chief of Staff) have broken the law, and I can assure you, having just returned from overseas myself 2 days ago, that the overseas press are watching quite closely how the Congress handles the present situation.
If the Congress does nothing, it will be seen as a sign that the Congress is weak. Coupled with a White House mired in it's own scandals, that will mean an entire nation with no real political will, no longer able to meet it's treaty obligations in the face of foreign adventurism.
This would be a foreign relations disaster.
It is time for the Congress to recognize, as does every other nation on Earth, that the actions of the CIA have not been in the best interests of the nation, but in the best interests of the CIA, and more specifically those powerful few in the CIA who wrap their thievery and drug running in the red, white, and blue, and who care not what kind of President we have so long as he's _their_ President.
If Congress fails to act swiftly and decisively in the present crises, the whole world will know that the principles that the United States a founded on exist no more; that the CIA, bereft of it's cold war enemies, has secured it's own future well being by subverting the American government with the same enthusiasm with which it subverted so many others.
It remains to be seen just what the Congress will do.
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