Reply #3: Kantor has some other questionable connections

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I spent much of the 90's trying not to believe the worst of the Clintons and their associates -- but lately it's getting harder and harder. Kantor, for example, is one of these people who keeps coming up in the sort of stories that suggest he may have been fairly corrupt even before joining the Bill Clinton administration. For example, there are suggestions that his lawfirm tried to squelch the investigations that brought down BCCI in 1992.

http://www.kentimmerman.com/news/1997_05_01tas-tamraz.htm

In July 1994, a crucial witness named Abbas Gokal decided to cooperate with Morgenthau's investigators; while en route to New York, police arrested him in Frankfurt in the name of Great Britain's Serious Fraud Office. The British had apparently been tipped off by the American State Department, and Gokal remains in British custody. That same month, the Justice Department sponsored a plea bargain with the BCCI's number two man, Swaleh Naqvi, provoking an unusual protest to the sentencing judge from Morgenthau. "Naqvi has consistently failed to proffer new information in a significant investigation or prosecution of unindicted individuals or anyone else in the United States," Morgenthau wrote. Privately, other investigators say Naqvi was rewarded for not talking.

One of the cases that Naqvi could have helped reached into the White House.A former BCCI official named S. K. A. Akbar left the bank in 1986 with about $27 million in hush money to found a commodity trading firm called Capcom. (Its major shareholders included Kamal Adham.) Capcom had extremely close ties to the Chicago firm Refco, from which Hillary Clinton made her killing in cattle futures.

Naqvi was represented by the well-known former prosecutors Joseph DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who were then partners in the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. The head of the firm, Charles Manatt, was a former Democratic National Committee head; another partner was Clinton fundraiser and trade representative Mickey Kantor. Internal BCCI documents are said to show that the bank used the Manatt firm to lobby the National Security Council in 1992 in an attempt to close down Morgenthau's Manhattan investigation.

And then there's the Riady-Lippo-Huang connection:

http://www.citypages.com/databank/17/828/article3000.asp

The Riadys and the Lippo interests gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Clinton's campaign for president, and in return got to place one of their top operatives high in Clinton's Department of Commerce. John Huang was vice-chairman of the California-based Lippo Bank until the summer of 1994, when he became deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international economic policy. Huang was appointed even though federal bank examiners had found evidence of Lippo banking law violations in April 1994, and the bank was under an order to tighten its compliance with anti-money laundering laws as late as last March. But Lippo had friends in high places: Clinton, who called Huang "my close friend," and his 1992 campaign manager, Mickey Kantor, whose law firm represented the Lippo Bank.

When Huang went to Commerce, he got nearly a million dollars in severance bonuses from Lippo. He earned his money: On a trip to China, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown (the former Democratic national chairman) announced a $1 billion power project deal between Lippo and Entergy Corp., the latter headed by Arkansas lawyer Joe Giroir, who had hired Hillary Clinton and was her boss at Rose Law.

This also ties in with Webster Hubbell and the Rose Law Firm:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/campfin/stories/cf032397.htm

Three months after he left his Justice Department job in disgrace in 1994, Webster L. Hubbell scheduled a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting in Washington with an old friend just in from Indonesia, James Riady. . . . What Hubbell and Riady talked about, and what transpired in a flurry of meetings Riady had at the White House every day that week, are now at the heart of a mystery investigators are trying to unravel. . . .

Hubbell was forced to step down from his job as associate attorney general in April 1994 after his former colleagues at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm, where he was a partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton, accused him of stealing from his clients and the firm. In December 1994, Hubbell agreed to plead guilty to mail and tax fraud and pledged to cooperate in the Whitewater inquiry, cooperation prosecutors felt he never provided. . . .

Among those who have worked to help Hubbell financially were the lobbyist for Arkansas-based Tyson Foods Inc.; billionaire Democratic fund-raiser Ronald O. Perelman; Clinton friend and prominent Washington lobbyist Michael Berman; James C. Wood Jr., who would later become U.S. envoy to Taiwan before resigning this year amid allegations he pressed Taiwanese businessmen to contribute to Clinton's reelection campaign; then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, and a host of other wealthy friends and supporters. . . .

Kantor, the former U.S. trade representative who recently resigned as Clinton's secretary of commerce, saw Hubbell on at least four occasions in the summer of 1994, for example. Kantor's old law firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, represents Lippobank in the United States.