Spectator's Journal: A New Lasater Connection
Adams, Jams Ring
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by James Ring Adams A New Lasater Connection T he suspension of the Kansas City Three stands out in the long list of administration efforts to stymie the Whitewater...
...In the now familiar pattern of preemptive leaks, it disclosed the Lasater probe, but with a pro-Clinton spin...
...He called the connection "tenuous" and argued against asking the independent counsel for a full-press series of witness interviews...
...The spin matched one of the administrative charges against Iorio...
...Someone widely believed to be acting for the administration leaked the minutes of the June 29, 1994 Washington meeting to Greg Hitt of the Wall Street Journal, and his story appeared a week before the 1995 House Banking hearings...
...She believed, incorrectly, that Objectivism had explained the nature of concepts...
...The three thrift investigators in the Kansas City Resolution Trust Corporation office certainly earned the hostility of Clinton apologists...
...He still calls this alleged incident his main concern at the June 29 meeting...
...Later he insisted on rewriting the minutes of the meeting to include the point, which he scribbled on the margin of his draft, "AT said give all evidence to Fiske...
...Loan...
...This concern may explain why the RTC imposed administrative leaves in August 1994 on the entire Kansas City chain of command dealing with the Madison criminal investigation, not just whistle blower Jean Lewis (see "What Jean Lewis Knows," TAS, July 1997...
...The axe fell in August, shortly after the wrap-up of the House Banking Committee's carefully limited first Whitewater hearings, run by the then Democratic majority...
...Tomback explained he wanted to get up to speed on the Madison case because it was the most political and sensitive one then facing the corporation...
...The field agents had prepared a list of twenty names...
...Although the Washington figures were frequently called from the room, Iorio and his staff went point by point through their ten criminal referrals, by that time safely in the hands of Independent Counsel Robert Fiske...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by James Ring Adams A New Lasater Connection T he suspension of the Kansas City Three stands out in the long list of administration efforts to stymie the Whitewater investigation, but it now seems that more was at stake than simple retaliation...
...When Tomback gave a deposition to the House Banking Committee, the Democratic minority lawyer—apparently as part of a cynical Democratic ploy —asked him about an August 241994 letter from Ellen Kulka to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr offering the services of Iorio's team during its suspension...
...Iorio himself isn't sure that his punishment was meant to shut down the Lasater probe, since his investigation at that point was almost wrapped up...
...An outcry from Congress and the public forced the RTC to back down quickly, putting all three back to work...
...His most Were Jean Lewis et al...
...Tomback calls it a "stretch" to connect the soft referrals with the administrative leave...
...Jim Leach, then the minority leader of the House Banking Committee, about an apparently orchestrated campaign to stifle the Madison investigation...
...RTC General Counsel Ellen Kulka recruited Tomback over lunch after meeting him at a barbecue put on by her daughter, who worked for him at Treasury...
...This statement backfired badly when Democrats introduced it in the hearing...
...The Stance Of Atlas provides the correct solution...
...44 Tomback emerged as the hatchet man toward the Kansas City Three...
...364 pages, including index...
...Tomback said in his deposition that then Independent Counsel Robert Fiske complained about their conduct...
...The charge of posing as FBI agents, always suspect for its vagueness, turned out to be completely baseless...
...But Tomback seemed especially interested in the additional "soft referral" on the alleged drug money laundering...
...But the message was clear...
...P.O...
...With one exception, the actual decision to impose the administrative leave, Tomback emerged as the hatchet man towards the Kansas City Three...
...Tomback reacted with a large bucket of cold water...
...not to attend...
...If it had come before, I would have said yes," he told TAS...
...She fully expected to pay a price...
...TOLL FREE: 1-888-492-2001...
...In a "discussion" with the RTC field staff, he warned against exaggerated claims or speculation based on "disconnected facts...
...But the whistle blowing and office politics weren't the only issues...
...The Stance Of Atlas supplies the solution to this problem and also that of induction...
...He returned in time to recommend extending the leaves...
...In that June 29 meeting, he sat for five hours with the two investigators he later accused of misconduct and never once raised the issue...
...In a lengthy interview with TAS, during which his memory of the meeting noticeably sharpened, Tomback said, "As I remember the meeting, I tried to identify for them where there were missing linkages and lack of logical reasoning, to strengthen their product, but in no way stopped it from going forward...
...When Starr's deputies shied away from this suspicious arrangement, Tomback portrayed them as not trusting the Kansas City trio, and Jean Lewis in particular...
...On June 29,1994, Iorio, the field director of the RTC's Kansas City investigations office, and Ausen, his department head, were summoned to Washington with their three Madison investigators for a comprehensive review of their criminal referrals...
...Although Tomback apparently knew in advance of the action, he was on vacation in Montauk, Long Island, when Kulka, his boss, led the meeting that recommended the leaves...
...This would have been a change in established procedure, although Kansas City had run into similar roadblocks in the Justice Department review of Jean Lewis's original Madison referral...
...Paperback...
...he was accused of turning two investigators loose in Arkansas to misrepresent themselves as FBI agents...
...But the field investigators read Tomback's challenges as a reluctance to forward referrals that weren't already an airtight case...
...Kulka and other senior RTC staff took the same stance, only to be overruled by acting RTC head Jack Ryan, badly seared by the intense political reaction...
...Other important issues are discussed...
...The dialectic explains why Marxism can survive the fall of Communism...
...Tomback took the lead in trying to discredit Iorio and Lewis before their 1995 congressional testimony...
...The Little Rock police department, they said, was providing material from its own investigation of Lasater...
...But Washington higher-ups in charge of their punishment were also nervous about their attempts to probe Clinton family friend Dan Lasater's suspected drug money laundering through Madison...
...At the same time, Tomback suggested that the internal review team seal the offices of Iorio's team and search their computers before they returned, advice spurned by the RTC inspector general...
...Tomback's own behavior showed that something was fishy...
...JAMES RING ADAMS is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...Again this version is hotly disputed: "a load of crap," Iorio calls it...
...4} The Stance Of Atlas by Peter F. Erickson Examines Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand According to a 1991 poll taken by the Library Of Congress, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was second in influence only to the Bible...
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...The American Spectator • September r997 57...
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...The investigators told him their suspicions that Dan Lasater, the Little Rock bond dealer, convicted cocaine distributor, and family friend of Governor Clinton, may have used accounts at Madison and elsewhere to make his drug profits reappear as legitimate money...
...The all-day meeting, held in the conference room next to the office of the RTC's general counsel, was called by Deputy General Counsel Andrew Tomback, an Ivy League whiz kid recently recruited to the RTC...
...The experienced agents also looked askance at Tomback's credentials...
...It did not...
...His hiring made the gossip columns of the Washington Post...
...PRICE: $19.95 + $4.00 for postage and handling...
...The call from Fiske, he said, came about because his team had gotten a little bit ahead of the IC's office on one avenue, and Fiske asked them to hold off...
...Their persistence kept alive criminal cases against the Arkansas political clique that plundered the Madison Guaranty Savings and...
...On February 18, 1994, the feisty Lewis briefed Rep...
...The true nature of Time and Space and Infinity are revealed...
...The story called it a "rogue investigation," led by a free-lancing Iorio...
...A meeting shortly before the congressional hearings and the suspensions showed that RTC headquarters was nervous about the money-laundering probe...
...Ayn Rand's attempt to solve the ancient problem of universals failed...
...He previously worked as an aide to the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for enforcement, where his duties included the internal review of the federal siege of the Branch Davidians...
...Our job was to turn over everything we were getting," said Iorio, a former bank president and FBI agent, who in his Kansas City position coordinated investigations in twenty-one states...
...56 September 1997 • The American Spectator noted achievement to date had come at Yale Law School (Class of '86), where he had helped to organize a boycott of the university's endowment for refusing to divest from South Africa...
...OR MAIL TO: HERAKLES PRESS, INC...
...The defense of fractional reserve banking made by Alan Greenspan in Rand's book on capitalism is refuted...
...The attack on Iorio and his staff stands as a powerful deterrent to any federal agent tempted to work too hard on a political hot potato...
...This is refuted...
...punished for probing drug money...
...The next day, Starr himself wrote the committee that he declined the offer "for the sole reason that the administrative leave of these three employees was and remains under active investigation...
...A subsequent internal review, recently obtained by TAS, called inter-office complaints against the supervisors "overblown" and insisted that since paychecks had continued, the three weren't really punished...
...Ayn Rand's basis for a new morality is shown to be false...
...Lewis, who had been taken off the case the previous November by "the powers that be," received word from D.C...
...Still in his early thirties, he had joined the RTC only that May, some fifty days before the meeting...
...Ayn Rand rejected philosophical skepticism, but held on to relativism in the form of "context...
...Surprising connections are traced between her philosophy and Lenin's ideology of Dialectical Materialism...
...Contrary to Rand's Objectivism, it is established that reason is open to the possibility of God's existence...
...But RTC headquarters surprisingly broadened the suspensions to Lewis's immediate superiors Lee Ausen and Richard Iorio...
...11 Another line of attack targeted Iorio alone...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
