Bill and Hillary Clinton: Caught With Their Snouts in the Trough

It has been quite interesting watching the Clintons as they deftly trade political favors for money and other consideration. Hillary's law career was going nowhere back in the 1970s but then when Bill was elected Attorney General of Arkansas, she was hired by the Rose law firm in Little Rock. And then when Bill was subsequently elected Governor of Arkansas, she was made a partner in the firm.

Hillary took bribes from Tyson attorney James Blair in a complicated scheme that involved trading cattle futures. They received an interest in the Whitewater land development deal from James McDougal. Then when Bill left office, they traded pardons for campaign contributions. They even went so far as to grant a pardon to a man who was a fugitive from justice and had renounced his American citizenship.

Now we hear that Bill and Hillary have beeen the recipients of generosity from Vinod Gupta, of infoUSA:

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.
The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.
Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of infoUSA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests.

So what sort of consulting did Bill do to earn $2 million in four years?

Asked to describe Mr. Clinton’s consulting services, an infoUSA official said they were limited to making appearances at one or two company events each year.....

...The lawsuit says Mr. Clinton signed a consulting agreement in April 2002 to “provide confidential advice and counsel to the chairman and C.E.O. of the company for the purpose of strategic growth and business development.” InfoUSA made $2.1 million in quarterly payments to Mr. Clinton from July 2003 to April 2005, and in October 2005 entered into a new three-year agreement to pay him $1.2 million. It also gave him an option to buy 100,000 shares of infoUSA stock, with no expiration date.
The complaint asserts that the contracts with Mr. Clinton are “extremely vague” to the point of being wasteful. It says they state that Mr. Clinton will not lobby for infoUSA, and that the company cannot use his name, likeness or association for any business purpose.

So what about the free trips on the jets?

Ethics rules for senators and candidates require only that the recipient of a flight make reimbursement at a rate equal to that of a first-class ticket, a long-derided loophole that allows special interests to provide de facto gifts of expensive private air travel, which generally costs far more than commercial fares. Mr. Singer would not say what Mrs. Clinton paid for her flights.

Mrs. Clinton’s use of infoUSA planes appears to be mostly campaign related. In one instance cited in the lawsuit, Mrs. Clinton “traveled at the company’s expense aboard a private jet from White Plains, N.Y., to Detroit, Mich., and then to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and home to White Plains, N.Y., after calling the company the previous day in desperate need of a plane.”
InfoUSA paid $18,480 in January 2004 to fly Mrs. Clinton “and her four-person entourage” to New York from New Mexico, where she had made a campaign appearance and attended a book signing. Campaign finance records show that her committee, Friends of Hillary, made a reimbursement of $2,127 for that flight. It was not clear if any other candidate committees in New Mexico also helped defray some of the cost.

How nice! Hillary gets to travel on a private chartered jet for the price of a commercial first-class ticket.

Does anyone in their right mind believe that those two deserve to be back in the White House?