Judicial Watch to Investigate Sen. Fred Thompson

[Larry-Jennie]

j...@globaldialog.com wrote:
>
> Larry forgot, as he always does, to post information
> about Azima's rather intimate and much more recent
> relationship with the DNC.

The point of my post was that Iranian CIA asset Farhad Azima looted
a Kansas City S&L with the assistance of the Mob, followed with the Bush
Justice Department failing to prosecute him for the criminal violations.

A smart CIA criminal knows to bribe leaders of both political Parties,
especially Presidents with long CIA histories, or Senators with Oval
Office aspirations.

To illustrate the ubiquitous CIA corruption at the top of Washington power,
here are articles detailing the gifts Azima showered on the Democrats, as
well as details of the close relationship the CIA crook has with Sen. Fred
Thompson.

***************

Democrats say they'll keep Kansas City businessman's money
Kansas City Star
06/27/97 10:24:41 PM
By David Goldstein

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic National Committee, weighed
down by debt and committed to returning $1.5 million in questionable
donations, announced Friday that it was keeping $143,000 from
Kansas City, Mo., businessman Farhad Azima.

The committee said ``extensive documentation'' provided by Azima's
attorney showed ``no basis'' for the party to return the money.

``The submission demonstrates that Mr. Azima is a U.S. citizen of
significant financial worth, with a positive reputation in his industry, and
that the various allegations appearing in the press ... have essentially no
basis in fact,'' the party said in a written statement.

Azima has always said that his contributions were legal and
aboveboard. He expressed frustration at being singled out for simply
exercising his constitutional rights.

In an interview Friday, after learning that the Democrats had decided to
keep his money, Azima said: ``Through their own diligence, they found
out that they were wrong. From day one, there was no doubt in my
mind.''

He said the experience has not soured him on political giving.

``I always believed in the political process,'' Azima said.

His attorney, however, did not hide his anger.

``Here is a situation where an American citizen continues to support the
political process and basically ends up getting slammed as result of it,''
said E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., a former federal prosecutor.

Azima, the owner of a Kansas City-based aviation conglomerate, has
been an active financial backer of the Democratic Party and President
Clinton. But he got swept up in the fund-raising scandal arising out of
the 1996 presidential campaign.

In February, Democrats said they were returning $1.5 million in
donations. Included in that was $89,500 that Azima had given to the
Democratic National Committee in 1995 and 1996, plus $54,000 that
the committee said it was reimbursing him to cover the balance of the
costs of using his corporate jet.

Former party Chairman Donald L. Fowler had used Azima's jet more
than 40 times during the campaign for a cost of $211,000.

In the return of donations, Azima got lumped in with others, like John
Huang, who had solicited large amounts of money and whose name had
become well-known in connection with investigations into the scandal.

Azima's donation is the largest that the Democrats have decided to
keep.

The party stated that only about $256,100, or 19 percent, of the
refunds were due to legal questions. It returned the balance largely
because of ``insufficient information'' about the donors.

In February, party officials said they were returning Azima's donations
because they were ``deemed inappropriate,'' but they offered few
details.

Their investigation, however, involved a search of public databases that
carried information about donors such as Azima. Those revealed past
lawsuits and other stories about Azima's business dealings that
apparently led to the Democrats' decision to wash their hands of his
money.

According to a letter from Barcella, Azima's attorney, to the Democrats'
lawyer, those stories dealt with problems at the failed Indian Springs
bank in Kansas City, Kan., when Azima was a director and allegations
of ties to the CIA.

``In Mr. Azima's case, a lot of very titillating stories have shown to be
completely false,'' Barcella said in an interview. ``The stories keep
getting repeated and repeated and repeated. Unfortunately, he has been
a continuing victim of that really bad research.''

In his letter, Barcella said his client was the victim of ``linear journalism,
whereby any two people or two events can be connected if you simply
find the right number of intermediate people or events.''

Concerning the collapse of the Indian Springs bank, Barcella said only
one company connected to Azima owed money to the bank -- $62,000
-- at the time of its problems. He said no criminal charges were filed
against Azima as a result of the bank's failure and the federal
government settled its suit against him for $15,000 with no admission of
liability.

Of Azima's alleged ties to the CIA, Barcella wrote that his client's
former company, Global Airways, had contracts with the Department of
Defense and several newspaper stories suggested they were intelligence
missions.

But even if it were true, Barcella said it was hardly ``inappropriate'' for a
United States businessman to assist his government in an entirely
legitimate and legal manner. ... Some might suggest it was patriotic.''

He also said Azima has been linked to business dealings with rogue
former CIA agent Edwin Wilson, who is now in jail. Barcella said he
was the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Wilson in the early
1980s and that nearly half of Wilson's 54-year prison sentence is the
result of his conviction of conspiring to kill Barcella.

``Believe me,'' Barcella wrote, ``if there had been any connection
between Mr. Azima and Mr. Wilson, I would have known it.''

Azima also has been linked to the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal during the Reagan administration. Azima has always denied any
connection, but a plane linked to him allegedly was used in the affair.

Barcella said the plane belonged to a leasing company owned by
Azima's brother. And even then, he said, the airplane leasing business is
such that ``once you lease to a customer, you don't know necessarily
know who's on it or what they're transporting. You may be having
Mother Teresa, you may be having Mir Aimal Kansi,'' a reference to the
man accused of killing two CIA employees outside the agency in 1993.

(c) 1997, The Kansas City Star.

*****************

Thompson's Supporting Role: The Senator follows the script to preserve
corrupt campaign financing.
By Doug Ireland
The Nation
July 21, 1997

When chairman Fred Thompson gaveled to order the June 12 meeting of his
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, the Tennessee Republican was looking
grim. As the man in charge of the Senate's investigation into campaign
financing, Thompson had for weeks been the target of heavy slagging by his
Democratic colleagues on the committee, who were accusing him of running a
one-sided probe by blocking subpoenas for a raft of Republican front groups
and contributors. Thompson, after dismissing these complaints as "unedifying
squabbles" and "hollow accusations of partisanship," moments later got into
an acrimonious exchange with New Jersey's Robert Torricelli when the
Tennessean accused Democrats of a cover-up.

"People are leaving the country," growled Thompson. "People are shredding
documents. The White House and the Democratic National Committee -" "That's
outrageous!" interrupted a shouting Torricelli. "I demand an apology!" None
was forthcoming. It was all downhill from there, as staff-dependent senators
from both parties, with an inadequate mastery of the dossiers in front of
them, traded repetitive dissings for the TV cameras. After a lengthy,
closed-door executive session - "It got even nastier with no microphones
around," reported one participant - the senators returned to camp on their
positions: Democrats scuttled Thompson's request for immunity for eighteen
low-level witnesses, most of them Buddhist monks and nuns accused of
laundering foreign cash for an Al Gore fundraiser. The G.O.P. used its
majority to shoot down all but a handful of Democratic subpoenas for
Republicans.

The probe is now bogged down in bickering, but there was a moment earlier
this year when it appeared that things might have been different. Thompson
had originally agreed with his committee's ranking Democrat, Ohio's John
Glenn, to look at both "illegal and improper acts" involving campaign cash.
But when the Senate took up the authorization for the investigation in
March, majority leader Trent Lott torpedoed the agreement by ordering the
Senate Rules Committee to drop the word "improper" from the authorizing
resolution - thereby eliminating any look at influence-buying soft money
contributions, on which both parties depend.

An unprecedented eleventh-hour revolt in the Senate Republican caucus -
sparked by Maine's Susan Collins and Arizona's John McCain, with Thompson's
support - forced Lott to back down, the word "improper" was restored and the
Senate voted for the broader investigation by 99 to 0. Thompson took to the
Senate floor to deliver an effusive apology to Glenn in which he promised a
genuinely bipartisan, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may inquiry and reaped a
harvest of praise from the Washington punditocracy for his supposed
statesmanship.

Lott, however, was furious at having been publicly undermined, and directed
his rage at Thompson. Lott's hard-right colleagues in the G.O.P. Senate
leadership - Oklahoma's Don Nickles, the majority whip and a member of
Thompson's committee, and National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, both militant foes of campaign finance reform -
have been his instruments in bringing Thompson to heel. And they'll keep him
that way. Even after the revolt, Thompson's reluctance to dissect soft money
was palpable: "If the rules and regulations permit it, it was done in a
correct way, there was no collusion involved, it was not done from a federal
building...if someone gave a $20,000 soft-money contribution, I am not
prepared, today, to say that is improper," he said on the Senate floor.

So why did Thompson cave in to his party's Senate bosses?

No one has been as important to Fred Thompson's career as Howard Baker, the
former Tennessee Senator who fathered the state's Republican revival. It was
Baker who made the inexperienced young lawyer an assistant U.S. attorney
barely two years after Thompson's graduation from Vanderbilt Law School. It
was Baker who gave Thompson his first taste of big-league politics, managing
Baker's 1972 Senate race. The next year, Baker raised Thompson to national
prominence by making him Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate
Committee when Thompson was only 30.

As the nation marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Watergate, TV
retrospectives replayed the tape of Thompson asking Nixon aide Alexander
Butterfield the question that ultimately led to Nixon's downfall: "Are you
aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the
President?" But the existence of the tapes had already been discovered by
committee investigators, and Thompson got to ask the question before the
cameras only at the insistence of Baker, who wanted to give the impression
that the Republicans were as anxious to ferret out the truth as the
Democrats. According to former Democratic Watergate staffer Scott Armstrong,
"All of the investigating was done in private, then Thompson would try to
set it up so that if there was a kill, he'd look like he was in on it."

This bipartisan charade masked the fact that Thompson was an aggressively
sharp-elbowed player for his party. For example, Thompson later boasted of
how he'd saved the bacon of Pat Buchanan, then a Nixon speechwriter: The
Democrats "told him they had given him all the documents they were going to
question him on. I found out they didn't and I called Pat at home that night
and told him what was coming. And he ate 'em alive the next day," Thompson
told The Washington Post in 1985.

After Watergate, Thompson became a Republican gun for hire. Thanks to Baker
- by then Senate majority leader - he was brought in to help Senate
Republicans with damage control for Watergate-tainted Alexander Haig's
confirmation hearings as Reagan's Secretary of State, and later as counsel
to the Senate Intelligence Committee's whitewash of Reagan C.I.A. Director
William Casey's murky finances (despite a finding that Casey had withheld
information from the committee, it found him "not unfit" for the post).

Thompson registered as a Washington lobbyist in 1975, and his lobbying work
brought him some $500,000 over the next eighteen years. Nearly half that
money was earned thanks to his relationship with Howard Baker: After the
G.O.P. won contra of the Senate in the 1980 Reagan landslide and Baker
became majority leader, Thompson saw his lobbying income jump to more than
$100,000 in 1981. Lobbying provided from a third to a fourth of his income
through 1984, when Baker retrial from the Senate.

Thompson's biggest client was Westinghouse, which paid him some $200,000
over fourteen years to shill for nuclear power - most importantly for
federal funding to build the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, for which Westinghouse was a prime contractor. Even Baker
couldn't save this one when cost overruns spiraled out of control and
concern grew over the amount of super-lethal plutonium generated by
breeder-reactor technology. The project was eventually killed.

By the time Baker left the Senate, Thompson's lucrative acting career had
already taken off. (In 1992 alone, it brought him half a million dollars.)
His seventeen movies made him a celebrity in Tennessee, so when Baker went
looking for a candidate who could win the Senate seat vacated by Al Gore, he
turned to Thompson. Baker desperately wanted to beat the 1994 Democratic
nominee, Representative Jim Cooper, who had won his House seat a dozen years
before by whipping Baker's daughter, Cissy.

The sophisticated Thompson laid on the folksiness with a shovel,
crisscrossing the state in a bright-red pickup (rented) that he called "that
rascal" and referring to himself as "Ol' Fred." The act was phony, of
course, as Baker later admitted when he told a Tennessee paper that Thompson
"wore that role well." Cooper responded by calling Thompson "a
Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon - spreading
millionaire Washington special-interest lobbyist," but to no avail.
Thompson's slick act won him 60 percent of the vote (a landslide he repeated
two years later against an unknown Democratic opponent).

Thompson first won his Senate seat by campaigning against Washington (where
he'd been a fixture for two decades) and calling for a part-time "citizen
legislature" with the Baker-inspired slogan, "Cut their pay and send 'em
home!" (the same slogan employed by another Baker protege, Lamar Alexander,
in his 1996 presidential race). Another campaign crowd-pleaser was his
promise to seek a cut in Congressional pensions. All this was forgotten as
soon as Thompson was elected and joined the club.

In fact, Thompson has reaped enormous benefits from the same special
interests he used to rail against. In both his 1994 and 1996 campaigns he
solicited and received $10,000 - the maximum legal contribution - from the
Association of Trial Lawyers of America's PAC (and worked behind the scenes
to gut the Contract With America's product liability "reform" bill, which
ATLA opposed). Last year Thompson ranked seventh among all senators
receiving campaign cash from the gambling industry. In 1994 his campaign got
a boost from a $177,000 independent expenditure from the National Rifle
Association - one of the largest sums spent by a single interest group that
year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Thompson voted
against cutting U.S. subsidies to arms exporters, and raked in $67,175 from
the death merchants' PACs. In fact, 70 percent of Thompson's $5 million '96
war chest came from fat cats and PACs, including the pharmaceutical,
tobacco, chemical and timber industries.

Perhaps nothing better shows how deeply enmeshed Thompson is in the campaign
money-grubbing he claims he opposes than his long friendship with an
Iranian-born businessman, Farhad Azima. The son of a wealthy landlord family
with connections to the deposed Shah (his father had been a justice on the
Iranian supreme court), Azima has had close ties to the C.I.A., and one of
his several now-bankrupt companies was implicated in the Iran/contra
arms-for-hostages shipments.

In 1990 a series of articles by Houston Post investigative reporter Pete
Brewton alleged that Azima, along with organized crime figures, had played a
central role in the looting of a failed Kansas City savings and loan, the
Indian Springs State Bank. Azima was, at the time of the bank's collapse,
not only a director of the bank and its fourth-largest stockholder but its
second- largest creditor. A veteran assistant U.S. attorney with the Justice
Department's Organized Crime Strike Force charged that his attempts to
investigate Azima had been blocked because Azima had a "get out of jail free
card" from the C.I.A., and both the prosecutor and one of the F.B.I. agents
involved in the probe later confirmed this story to staff investigators for
Frank Annunzio's House subcommittee on financial institutions. But
Annunzio's attempts to explore these charges further came to nought when
then - C.I.A. Director William Webster refused to testify about them.

Loans to Azima-owned companies that later went belly-up also played a role
in the failure of two commercial banks - Utica National of Tulsa and
Republic of Kansas City - according to the newsletter "Money Laundering
Alert." Azima has had repeated run-ins with regulatory agencies, including
the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Another Azima company, Buffalo
Airways, is currently being sued by the Justice Department over a disputed
million-dollar bill for fuel used to ship medical supplies during the
Persian Gulf War.

Thompson has been a friend of Azima's since 1983, according to the Los
Angeles Times ("We've been friends for years and years," Azima's wife,
Linda, told the paper), and Thompson served both as Azima's lawyer and as a
director of an Azima-owned company. In 1996 Azima and his wife gave Thompson
$3,000 and threw the Senator a fundraiser at their Missouri home that
brought in $9,500. Thompson also leased one of Azima's jets for his
campaign.

The scandal-plagued Azima became a source of embarrassment to the Clinton
White House when it was revealed that he had attended three coffees there,
given $140,000 to the Democrats and arranged a Kansas City fundraiser
featuring Clinton that brought in a quarter of a million dollars just before
the 1996 election. Former D.N.C. co-chairman Don Fowler used an Azima
corporate jet forty-six times, at a cost of $200,000 to the party. Azima,
also a frequent visitor to the White House under Reagan and Bush, is a
registered Republican. In other words, Thompson's pal Azima is exactly the
sort of dubious bipartisan influence- buyer that Thompson's committee is
supposed to be investigating.

Thompson has since tried to cover up his fourteen-year friend- ship with
Azima by returning the $3,000 contribution - a ploy that seems to have
worked, for the national press quickly lost interest. But the question
remains: What does it say about Thompson that he accepted money and
fundraising help from the shadowy Iranian long after Azima's unsavory doings
had been exposed - especially since, as his lawyer and business associate,
Thompson could hardly have been ignorant of them?

To lead an investigation that would breach the money secrets of his own
party as well as of the Democrats, Thompson would have to be a maverick,
driven either by moral force - nowhere evident in his career - or by
presidential ambition. But Thompson owes his political existence to Howard
Baker, and Baker has already heavily invested in another presidential
candidate, Lamar Alexander, whom Baker and his law firm paid nearly $300,000
so that Lamar could run in 1996, an ethically questionable act [see Ireland,
"The Rich Rise of Lamar Alexander April 17, 1995]. Only if Lamar falters can
Thompson run in 2000.

Furthermore, says a friend of both Baker and Thomson, "You've got to
remember that Howard was once majority leader himself. And that makes him
very protective of the prerogatives of that office. He simply told Fred,
'You can't cut the legs off the leader 'cause he gave you the damn job in
the first place.' Or words to that effect." So Thompson will not contrary
his mentor by challenging Lott.

Moreover, by successfully insisting on a year's end cutoff date for
Thompson's investigation, the Senate Democrats made him even more hostage to
Lott, without whom he'll never get the votes to extend it. By the time the
committee finishes its examination of foreign campaign contributions - the
so-called first phase, whose public hearings begin July 8 - there'll be
precious little time to take up soft money, let alone anything else. And in
any case, that a subject few senators in either party really want to tackle.

Doug Ireland has been a columnist for The Village Voice, The New York
Observer, the Paris daily Liberation and New York His weekly "Clinton Watch"
column is syndicated by the Minneapolis City Pages.

***********

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