My memory is he’s not allowed to come back. That’s why his daughters have to go over there to get married, or he doesn’t want to come back. He’s subject to something. My memory on that is vague. Anyway, “Under the scam, hundreds of international political and financial figures from France, Russia and other countries were awarded middleman vouchers allowing them to purchase set quantities of Iraqi oil at discount rates. These so-called ‘non-end users’ could then resell the oil on the open market and make profits of up to 50 cents a barrel. Benon Sevan, who headed the U.N. oil-for-food program, is among those listed in Iraqi Oil Ministry documents as having been a recipient of the vouchers. Since most of the recipients did not have refineries or cargo ships, they needed to sell the oil to someone else who could ship the oil out of Iraq in order to cash in. Investigators now believe Rich and Pollner brokered many of the deals by finding buyers for the oil allocated to people who were bribed by Saddam. The discount Iraqi oil would be resold to major oil companies at higher prices and Rich and Pollner would pocket percentages of the profits, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sources said. ‘To make this work, they needed someone who knows what he’s doing and how to put these deals together,’ the senior law-enforcement official said of Rich’s role in the scandal. So intense is the interest of prosecutors in the Rich connection that Pollner was recently ‘grabbed’ and questioned by investigators from Morgenthau’s office as he was on his way to Kennedy Airport for an overseas trip, a law-enforcement official told The Post. In an angry confrontation that followed, Pollner told the New York investigators that they had no jurisdiction over oil deals that took place outside the United States and refused to cooperate, an official familiar with the interrogation said.
“In January 2001,” you remember this, “In January 2001, in the final hours his presidency, Clinton bypassed law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to wipe the books clean for Rich after being subjected to intense lobbying from former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Rich’s jet-setting ex-wife, Denise, who donated more than $1 million to Democratic campaigns ? including Sen. Hillary Rodham’s first Senate race ? along with an additional $450,000 to Clinton’s library fund. Investigators still do not know how recipients of the vouchers led to Rich, but say his relationship with Saddam goes back more than a decade. A report by the House Government Reform Committee on Rich’s clemency deal established that it was well known to the CIA and other U.S. law-enforcement agencies at the time of the pardon that Rich had been dealing with Saddam since the early 1990s ? after the Persian Gulf War when Iraq was the subject of an international embargo.”
Now, you can say what you want about Bernard Kerik — and I’m not trying to sweep it under the rug; after all we led off with that story — but here is a genuine, real scandal that goes very, very deep, and, of course, its root takes us right back to a Democrat administration which is why this thing is not going to be given a whole lot of attention outside certain media circles. But this pardon, people couldn’t figure it out at the time, why pardon this guy? Well, it was obviously for money, for the library fund, for Hillary’s Senate campaign, and who knows what else. So it stinks out there. It just literally stinks, and I wanted to make sure that in all this — because, you know, this stuff about Bernard Kerik, the interest in it is sort of salacious. You know, it’s soap opera-ish, pop culturish. But I mean this Marc Rich stuff, this is genuine, genuine scandal. It is genuine corruption. He is a central player in this stuff, apparently, and it all involved at the end of the day hampering and harming our efforts, the efforts of the United States of America. Everybody was in on this except Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton as I say.
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One of the reasons that Marc Rich did not come back to the United States and didn’t want to, is he didn’t want to be served with a bunch of civil lawsuits. This guy, folks, Marc Rich is as dirty as you can possibly imagine. I also recall one of the reasons why he needed the pardon from Clinton, there was an Interpol arrest warrant out on him. Remember, he was staying in one little country, and he couldn’t flee, couldn’t leave that country, couldn’t move around. I think it was Switzerland or something. He was hanging out in Switzerland, and there were Interpol arrest warrants for Marc Rich all over Europe. So everybody lobbied for him to get this pardon; he got the pardon and that wiped the slate clean for any actions up to that. Once he gets Clinton’s pardon and gives enough money to Clinton organizations and what have you, the Democratic Party, bammo! It’s back on the crime social circuit, traveling all over there arranging these oil-for-food deals. This is the single biggest scandal that the — well, I was going to say the United Nations. Hell, any organization I could think of. It’s up to 24, $25 billion now.
Now, late last week we didn’t have a chance to discuss it on this program. Late last week the Bush administration sort of stood up for Kofi Annan, gave him a vote of confidence, a show of support — and everybody was scratching their heads, “What is this? What in the world is this? Here’s an opportunity here to sweep aside one of our big obstacles, and everybody then started speculating, what could this be?” Everybody wants to go beneath the surface. It just can’t be what it appears to be. It just can’t be that this is diplomacy at work, and this is how it works. “Maybe we need Annan for the elections in Iraq. Maybe we need the UN to open an office in Iraq, get back in there.” You know, they fled to Cyprus after they waved the white flag and the terrorists attacked a building they were in and they haven’t been back since, not in an official capacity. Maybe we want them back. Some people said to me, “Nah, Rush, there’s a deal here. There’s a deal. Administration went to Kofi and said, ‘Kofi, you know what? It’s looking pretty bad for you, pal. You’re going to need some support here otherwise you’re out. We’ll stand by you if, A, B, C, D, and E,'” meaning we get what we want out of the UN. People are bandying that one about.
I’m not so sure about that. That just sounds a little bit too James Bondian for me, and it doesn’t strike me that that’s the way we play ball or ever have with the United Nations. It won’t be long before we find out if there is a deal because if all of a sudden Kofi gets cooperative and Mohammed ElBaradei — Oh, and that’s another thing! You know, I can’t believe this. We tapped his phone. We’re looking for evidence that he’s not doing his job out there, and this is a huge story in the Washington Post today. We tapped Mohammed ElBaradei’s phone, and I’m sitting there scratching my head. This is not news. Every diplomat’s phone is tapped. Our embassy is bugged. Do you remember our embassy? Embassies are bugged everywhere. I mean, the idea that it is unusual that a diplomat’s phone is bugged? We’re probably not the only one’s bugging his phones. Probably everybody in the country is bugging his phone, everybody in the world is bugging his phones. But the press is just insistent and they are just intent on doing everything they can to defile the Iraqi war effort. They continue in that regard, even these savage attacks trying to portray the U.S. military as corrupt and inept and incompetent while ignoring Kofi Annan, and now:
“How dare we! How dare we tap the phone of such a great worldwide servant as Mohammed ElBaradei?” He only missed the nuclear program in Libya. He only missed the nuclear program in Pakistan; he only missed the nuclear program in Iran. He only attempted to influence the U.S. presidential election with leaking documents of a false old story one week before the election about missing explosives. It’s amazing that we would we want to find out what this guy is up to. We are a nation at great risk in a dangerous world. We’ve even got some people suggesting — Madeleine Albright. I can’t remember who this is. Brett, tell me. I haven’t got time to go digging deep in the stack to find the details, but maybe it’s Russia. Russia is going to start trading arms with China so that we get counterbalanced as a superpower. Yeah, that’s right. They’re doing joint exercises and they’re having war games and the Russians are selling technology. I guess whatever the Clintons didn’t sell them, the Russians are making it up or whatever. Maybe the Chinese couldn’t read the Clinton handwriting. 
I don’t know what it is, but whatever they didn’t get from us during the nineties, they’re now getting from the Chinese and all this is being done to counterbalance us as a superpower. Now, don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting we can do anything to stop this. I’m using this as an illustration: We are a great nation at risk in a dangerous world. Everybody is going to be targeting us as they always have. We’re the great Satan. We’re the great enemy. We’re the engine of freedom, the engine of democracy. We are the economic engine that drives the world, and as such, that gives us great power — and, of course, we’re going to be in the crosshairs. So it makes total sense to me that we would be keeping an eye on people like ElBaradei, who seemed to just conveniently miss all these new nations going nuclear. It makes total sense to me. Why in the world we’re not applauded for doing this to protect the country instead of castigated. We’re portrayed as some evil.
There’s another story in the stack today about how we cannot can keep lying to our enemy. They’re back to that, too. Just can’t keep lying to the enemy. This is not good for our morality, because we can’t use American news networks to spread these lies. These stories just keep recirculating and recycling as the left grasps whatever little it can to attempt to discredit the Bush administration, and make no mistake, speaking of that, you know, now John Kerry wants his witnesses in there to look at 91,000 ballots that no choice for president was made on. You have the Reverend Jackson in there now saying the black vote was suppressed by a black secretary of state, Ken Blackwell in Ohio. Folks, don’t misunderstand what this is about. I predicted this to you before the election. This is not about reversing the outcome. The electors vote today. This is the day the electors vote. It’s over, and it’s not about that. It’s about doing everything the Democrats can to delegitimize the next four years of the Bush presidency. By again trying to succeed in casting into doubt the legitimacy and honesty of the election, pure and simple. That’s all they got.
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