Crooked Claims About Clinton

clinton.pauls.image It's false, though, that the Clintons feigned no knowledge of Paul. True, they hardly came rushing forward to volunteer the various contacts they'd had with him. But they didn't pretend not to know him. Paul's video makes deceptive use of a clip from an ABC "20/20" segment in which reporter Brian Ross asks Clinton if she recalls Peter Paul, and she turns and walks away. First, Paul's video doesn't tell us that the clip dates from July 2001, which is almost a year after The Washington Post item. Among many developments in the interim: Stan Lee Media had collapsed and Paul was living in Brazil, a fugitive from securities fraud charges. He had also filed a lawsuit against the Clintons. In addition, in the fuller version of the "20/20" story, we see that Hillary Clinton, confronted by Ross, simply says she won't discuss Paul. She never says she didn't know who he was.

Paul says on the video that privately, even after The Washington Post disclosures, the Clintons were still in touch, and he received from them signed photos from the gala and thank you notes for putting on the event. That much is true, if the photos on the Web site dedicated to Paul's allegations can be believed. As for his claim that, around that time, Hillary Clinton's "finance director faxed me a request for $100,000," that's mostly true, but a bit misleading. The money had been promised by Paul months earlier, was to be paid in stock, not cash, and was to go to a group called Working Families, which was supporting Hillary Clinton, not to Clinton's own campaign committee.

The video then takes us into allegations of business fraud by Bill Clinton. Cogan and Paul claim on camera that the president, through an associate, stole away a Japanese investor who had promised to put $5 million into Stan Lee Media. The Clinton associate, according to the video, cut a different deal with the investor that didn't involve Paul's company. Paul offers no evidence on the video to support that, and since it is currently the subject of a lawsuit, we'll let the court decide that one. We can say, however, that it's quite a stretch to claim that Stan Lee Media was forced out of business as a result:

    Paul: So that began to trigger a meltdown of the stock. The company collapsed as a result.

Not exactly. It's pretty clear that it would have taken a lot more than $5 million from any investor to save Stan Lee Media.

The price of the company's stock had soared in early 2000, and according to federal prosecutors and a later guilty plea by Paul, there was a reason for that: Paul was manipulating the stock, trading it through accounts that hid his ownership and paying stock promoters to execute trades that made it appear there was a constant demand for shares in Stan Lee Media. He also used the pumped-up stock to borrow millions of dollars on margin from the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. Things started to fall apart when Paul and his colleague started shifting money around in order to repay the brokerage loans, prosecutors said, and when the two stopped making payments to the stock analysts, the share price plummeted. On Dec. 16, 2000, virtually all of Stan Lee Media's 100-plus staff members were laid off. Nasdaq halted trading of the stock when the price fell to 13 cents.