Reply #46: The cast remains the same...Robert Mueller and BCCI

[Aries]

(recounting an appearance on ABC's "Nightline" including Mueller, Kerry, and the author of The Outlaw Bank)

From "The Outlaw Bank", pp.119-121, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Random House, 1993:

"...Kerry and Mueller duelled politely over whether the plea bargain with BCCI in the Tampa money-laundering case was a giveaway. Mueller insisted that the Justice Department had won a major victory. He also disputed any charges that his department had not proceeded vigorously with further investigations, and he ignored Senator Kerry's attempt to bring up the subject of the missing tape of Blum's interviews with the former BCCI bankers who talked about political payoffs and BCCI's secret ownership of First American. When Koppel tried to point out that the assistant attorney general had not answered the Senator's question about the missing tapes, Mueller ignored him too and bragged that BCCI's offices in Florida had been shut down as a result of information the Justice Department provided the Florida banking regulators.

Kerry was beginning to sputter, and Beaty, outraged enough at Mueller's deceptive tactics to forget that he was on national television, jumped in. "But Mr. Mueller--I'm sorry, but the senator is quite accurate. You may have provided the reason for shutting down the bank by convicting it of money laundering, but then a very high-level person in your own department turned around and asked the State of Florida to keep this bank open, despite the fact that your own prosecutors had testified that drug-money laundering was a policy of the bank and that it wasn't a matter of employees taking some kind of independent action. When you plea-bargained out, you let the bank go and took the low-level employees, which is kind of in reverse..."

...Koppel <...> broke it up and turned to Time's charges that U.S. intelligence agencies employed BCCI as a means of funding covert operations and asked if that might have had something to do with the Justice Department's limited response to evidence. "That is absolutely incorrect...there is just no truth to the allegation and unsupported allegation that the intelligence community is in any way trying to shape or stop this investigation.," Mueller stated...

..."Mr. Mueller," Beaty cut back in, "we haven't made the accusation that this has been shaped by the intelligence community. All we have tried to do is point out the stunning lack of curiousity and aggression on the part of the Justice Department."....