Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
At It Again, With a New Twist
by an EIR Investigative Team
In 1998, as her husband was being put through the pre-impeachment wringer by a Jacobin-led Congressional Republican majority-run-amok, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton fought back, assailing a "vast right-wing conspiracy" ("VRWC"), that, she charged, had abused the Constitution and waged a personal vendetta against President Bill Clinton. The charges stung, and to this day, some leading players in the Get Clinton effort can barely hide their rage when the name Hillary Clinton is uttered in their presence. No one, according to sources familiar with the matter, is more prone to bouts of hysterics, at the mere mention of the "C word," than Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire, overseer of the Mellon and Scaife family fortunes, and the number one sugar daddy of the radical and neo-conservative right wing.
Perhaps the only name that sends the VRWC gang more into orbit than either Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the name Lyndon LaRouche. The very same apparatus that waged a billion-dollar slander campaign against the President and the First Lady thoughout much of the mid- and late 1990s, has an even longer track record of venomous slander and frame-up campaigns against LaRouche and his political movement.
Richard Mellon Scaife was both the financier and a participant in a series of 1983-84 clandestine "Get LaRouche" salon sessions at the New York City offices of Anglophile spook-banker John Train. These played a pivotal role in the Justice Department railroad prosecution and jailing of LaRouche and associates, in what former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark called the greatest instance of prosecutorial abuse and a political witch-hunt he had ever witnessed. According to eyewitness accounts, Mellon Scaife picked up the tab for salon participants from all over the political spectrum, who all shared the goal of silencing LaRouche—including Dennis King, Chip Berlet, Russell Bellant, and John Rees.
With the 2008 Presidential election campaign already well under way, with Hillary Clinton a leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination, and with the worst economic and monetary crisis in modern history already shaping the terms of the next election, it is no surprise that the VRWC is up to its old dirty tricks—with a few new twists.
Sources in Mellon Scaife's orbit report that the Pittsburgh-based Anglophile political dirty trickster (he cut his teeth bankrolling the Richard Nixon CREEP apparatus of Watergate infamy, after running a London-based intelligence community proprietary, Forum World Features) has been ordered to keep a low profile, out of fear that the mere surfacing of his name in the planned smear campaign against candidate Clinton, will only invoke images of the original "vast right-wing conspiracy" and cause the whole effort to backfire.
As part of this new line of attack, Richard Mellon Scaife, through his political hit-man Christopher Ruddy, editor of the Mellon Scaife-bankrolled NewsMax.com right-wing wire service, has proclaimed that, in retrospect, Bill Clinton was a "pretty good" President, whose domestic policies were particularly praiseworthy, especially when he followed the advice of Dick Morris, now a political pundit with Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Fox TV News. On July 17, 2007, the Mellon Scaife flagship newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, editorially called for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq, a stunning break from the lame-ducked Bush Administration's failed war schemes.
Yet despite these choreographed public signals of a "change of heart," Mellon Scaife remains the dark financial angel of the same network of think-tanks, publications, and obscure private intelligence agencies, waging the same smear campaigns and worse against the same targets.
Avi Klein's Poison Pen
While the "Get Hillary" efforts are being largely run through such traditional VRWC outlets as the David Horowitz Freedom Center and its frontpagemagazine.com, NewsMax.com, and WorldNet Daily—all heavily bankrolled by the Mellon Scaife foundations—the evolving attack campaign against LaRouche is being sheep-dipped into a left-of-center, Democratic Party-affiliated publication, Washington Monthly, albeit through infiltrators from such Mellon Scaife domains as the American Spectator. The goal: to break the growing collaboration between LaRouche and many leading Democrats, who see LaRouche's campaign to revive the American System policies of Franklin Roosevelt as the only way to deal with the unfolding financial and economic collapse. Mellon Scaife and the other longstanding LaRouche-haters are also terrified of the implications of the growing LaRouche Youth Movement, which promises a long institutional life for the organization, for many decades after the 84-year old LaRouche's demise.
The purported author of the announced forthcoming slander piece against LaRouche, one Abraham D. "Avi" Klein, had been employed by right-wing Republican circles until the recent period, when he re-embarked on his Get LaRouche mission (on the eve of the 2004 elections, Klein had a false start at publishing a slander against LaRouche). Up until this Spring, Klein's main occupation seemed to be as "senior writer" for Homeland Security Daily Wire. Homeland Security Daily Wire is published by Analytica Wire, Inc.
The publishers of Analytica are Stewart Cass and Grant M. Lally. Lally, a Long Island, N.Y. lawyer, is otherwise the executive director of Irish-American Republicans. He is also listed as the director of the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, an organization whose chairman is former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, a pivotal figure in the mid-1980s Iran-Contra fiasco and a close associate of former President George H.W. Bush.
According to a posting on the Irish-American Republicans' website, "Grant Lally is an attorney and businessman, active in the Irish community. Grant is a former Republican candidate for U.S. Congress (1994 and 1996) who signed the 'Contract With America.' He served as National Chairman of Irish-Americans for Bush-Cheney in 2000 and 2004, and as GOP Floor Manager of the 2000 Miami, Florida Presidential Election Recount. He currently serves as National Co-Chair of the Irish American Republicans, and on the National Board of the Republican National Lawyers Association."
The website further boasted that it was the Lally-led Irish American Republicans who "played a critical leadership role in the 2000 Florida vote recounts, helping to elect President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. For election night 2000, several of the Irish for Bush/Cheney leadership: Grant Lally, Jeffrey Cleary, and Judith Hard, were invited to join then-Governor George Bush at his Election Night victory rally in Austin, Texas."
The website account continued, "Following the election, the Bush Campaign summoned the Irish American Republicans to take the lead in protecting President-Elect Bush's victory in Florida, against the Gore campaign operatives' relentless efforts to steal the election." Of course, the reality is that it was the Bush-Cheney campaign, backed by the Scalia Supreme Court, that actually stole the 2000 election in Florida. Not to be deterred by the truth, the IAR site continued its account: "The IAR leaders Grant Lally, Justin Driscoll, Brian McCarthy, Jeffrey Cleary, Brendan Quinn, Kenneth Curley, Judy Hard, Josh Toas, Robert Farley, Rick Nelson, Bruce Tague, Duane Gibson, and Congressman John Sweeney (R-NY), and many others, all flew to Florida at the request of the Bush/Cheney campaign, to take the lead in the recount efforts.
"Dubbed the 'Wild Geese of Miami,' the Irish Republicans successfully fought off the attempted theft of the Presidency," the IAR lied, in the best Orwellian fashion. "Grant Lally served as the GOP Floor Manager of the Miami Recount, battling to protect the integrity of the ballots. Congressman John Sweeney served as overall Bush political director for the south Florida recount, a role for which President Bush awarded him the knickname 'Congressman Kick-Ass.'
"The Irish American Republicans played a vital role in the peaceful protest that the media dubbed the 'Brooks Brothers Riot.' "
Four years, later Lally and company were sent into Ohio by Karl Rove, in what would become infamous as a massive vote suppression scheme, that ultimately determined the outcome of the Bush-Kerry Presidential contest, leading to the first Congressional challenge in history to the Electoral College results in the state. The IAR website proudly reported that they played a central role in yet another election theft: "The IAR trained over 2,000 GOP poll watchers, the front line of Republican anti-fraud efforts in Ohio. The Irish American Republicans are proud of our members who played a critical role in helping to win Ohio in 2004, and ensuring that President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were returned for a second term."
Grant Lally, his father, Lally's campaign committee, and Lally's lawfirm paid a $280,000 civil penalty in 1998 for major Federal campaign finance violations in Lally's campaigns for Congress. Lally utilized a variety of deceptions to disguise the fact that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars from his father, in contravention of campaign finance limits.
'Special Agent, Mossad'?
The president of Homeland Security Daily Wire is Ben Frankel, a Tel Aviv University-educated security and counterintelligence specialist, who has been described by colleagues as having had ties to Israeli intelligence. Frankel has his own ties into Bush-Cheney neo-conservative circles, through his role in Global Security Challenge, a security technology consortium that provides an annual prize for innovative start-up companies in the homeland security industry. Among the other outfits sponsoring the GSC: Paladin Capital Group, and Civitas. Paladin Capital lists as one of its managing directors former Central Intelligence Agency director and leading neo-con R. James Woolsey. As a member of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, under the chairmanship of Richard Perle, Woolsey was dispatched to London, right after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, to gather tainted "intelligence" from Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi, to pave the way for the Iraq invasion of March 2003.
Civitas director Charles Black is the former political director of the Republican National Committee, and spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaigns.
Ben Frankel, who obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was the founding editor-in-chief of Security Studies, a quarterly journal of international security affairs, published by the British company Routledge, a branch of Taylor & Francis Group. Among the publishing houses owned by Taylor & Francis is Frank Cass Publishers, a U.K.-U.S. publisher of national security books and journals, which promotes some of the leading neo-conservative "academic" writers. Stewart Cass, the son of the publishing house's founder Frank Cass, is the co-publisher of Analytica and Homeland Security Daily Wire.
Given this Anglo-Israeli pedigree for Avi Klein's recent position with Homeland Security Daily Wire, LaRouche associates took seriously a recent e-mail from Klein, which he signed as "Avi Klein, Special Agent, Mossad." A formal inquiry has been initiated through the Israeli Embassy in Washington, to determine whether Klein's self-description is accurate, or whether he has possibly violated Federal laws as the result of some psychological aberration. U.S. government officials have confirmed to EIR researchers that all actual Mossad agents operating inside the United States are required to alert the FBI and Justice Department in advance of their arrival.
Motives and Timing
Well-informed U.S. intelligence community sources have pointed to the upcoming Presidential elections, and the strong prospect of a Democratic victory, as the driving force behind the escalating slander campaigns, targeting LaRouche, the Clintons, and perhaps others. Among leading Anglo-American financier circles, there are nightmare recollections of the 1997-98 moves by President Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, to establish a "new global financial architecture," paralleling Lyndon LaRouche's own simultaneous in-depth proposals for convening a New Bretton Woods conference, to put the bankrupt global financial system through a bankruptcy reorganization, and revive the Franklin Roosevelt system of fixed exchange rates and massive issue of government credits for infrastructure development.
The sources emphasized the continuity from earlier Get LaRouche and Assault on the Presidency efforts, and confirmed the central role of the Mellon Scaife foundation nexus in the overall efforts.
Indeed, a review of Internal Revenue Service records on the three Mellon Scaife Foundations—the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation—confirms that they are heavily involved in bankrolling key players in the renewed Get LaRouche and Get Clinton efforts. And the Mellon Scaife financing coincides with a resurfacing of John Train's anti-LaRouche antics. Train, who was an operative of the post-war Congress for Cultural Freedom, through his founding of the Paris Review, now features an anti-LaRouche logo on his website. Train has also purchased advertising space on Google, to promote his smears. Dennis King, the former Roy M. Cohn poison pen, and former High Times magazine editor Chip Berlet, both fixtures at the mid-1980s Train salons, have been reactivated at the same time.
And Richard Mellon Scaife's emissary to the Train salons of the mid-'80s, John Rees, continues to enjoy the Pittsburgh billionaire's financial backing. Rees's Maldon Institute has, over the recent years, received nearly $5 million from Mellon Scaife foundations, as well as funding from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Virtually invisible, the Maldon Institute, like earlier Rees front groups including Western Goals and Mid-Atlantic Research, conducts private spying on political targets of the radical and neo-con right wing. Curiously, from 1999-2003, the secretary-treasurer of the Maldon Insitute was Jack Abramoff, the recently convicted Karl Rove bagman, raising questions about whether Mellon Scaife and Maldon were involved in some kind of replay of the Nixon-era CREEP.
Goebbels on the Campus
On the eve of the 2006 midterm elections, the LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) waged a nationwide campaign to expose the campus-based gestapo operations of David Horowitz and his string of front groups, including Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch. IRS records reveal that one of the largest sources of funding for Horowitz's right-wing crusades is Mellon Scaife. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, in one 2006 report, listed a $300,000 payment to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a $50,000 payment to American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), the closely allied agency founded by Lynne Cheney and Joe Lieberman, which is conducting a witch-hunt against university professors who challenge the neo-con orthodoxy. The Allegheny Foundation, in 2006, gave an additional $150,000 to Horowitz's Freedom Center.
All three Mellon Scaife foundations contributed to the Maldon Institute—a total of $509,000. Carthage gave an additional $125,000 to the Counterterrorism & Security Education and Research Foundation, an outfit that showcases Rees and other Maldon Institute associates.
All told, over the past two decades, Mellon Scaife foundations have pumped $6.45 million into the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and an incredible $4.287 million into the Maldon Institute.
Perhaps the prime target of the Horowitz apparatus in the past two years has been Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Horowitz Freedom Center Director of Research Richard Poe has authored a scurrilous biography titled Hillary's Secret War; and more recently, Poe and Horowitz penned a sequel volume, Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party. These books, in turn, have been promoted through other Mellon Scaife-bankrolled outfits, including WorldNet and NewsMax, which function as echo chambers for political dirty-tricks operations, run through the Horowitz groups.
Beware: The Murdoch Factor
On Oct. 16, 2006, The New Yorker published a profile of Australian-American media baron Rupert Murdoch, under the provocative title "Murdoch's Game: Will He Move Left in 2008?" Author John Cassidy highlighted the fact that the owner of Fox TV, the New York Post, the London Times, most recently the Wall Street Journal, and scores of other lesser news outlets, had hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's Senate re-election campaign in July 2006 at his midtown Manhattan News Corp. headquarters. The event, and a subsequent West Coast Murdoch soiré, attended by Bill Clinton, provoked speculation that Murdoch was preparing to back Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign—in much the same way that he had backed the mayoral campaign of Ed Koch, and the Labour Party candidacy of Tony Blair.
Murdoch's backing always comes with strings attached, and the second-generation protégé of the British oligarchy's 20th-Century propaganda baron, Lord Beaverbrook, is making a major move to corner the present and future news-manufacturing institutions of America, and turn them into a Brave New World of data mining, psychological profiling, and subliminal marketing, touching upon everything from toothpaste to Presidents.
Indicative of Murdoch's long-term plans were his 2005 purchases of two Internet entities, MySpace and IGN Entertainment, Inc. These youth-oriented, web-based corporations gave Murdoch a lion's share of the market in interactive video-games, and access, through MySpace, to personality profiles of an estimated 175 million people worldwide.
Murdoch is smart enough to know that the odds are that the next President of the United States will be a Democrat, and he does not wish to be left out. He also knows that the youth vote was the decisive factor in the 2006 Democratic Party midterm election sweep. In that context, Rupert Murdoch may be the most dangerous charter member of the VRWC.
