Controversy Follows New DNC Chairman
Media Monitor | By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid | January 8, 2001
McAuliffe is considered to be President Clinton’s best friend, and the choice of Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle and House Minority leader Dick Gephardt.
Terry McAuliffe is the presumptive choice to become chairman of the Democratic Party. The initial AP report said that McAuliffe, who chaired the Democratic convention last summer, was a Gore ally and that he would likely facilitate Gore's plan to land the Democratic nomination in 2004 if he wants it. But a day later, the New York Times had a different take on McAuliffe's appointment. It reported on the intrigue that helped insure that McAuliffe would get the job.
McAuliffe is considered to be President Clinton's best friend, and the choice of Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle and House Minority leader Dick Gephardt. Al Gore was apparently backing the incumbent, Joe Andrew. According to Richard Berke of the Times, "In pressing for McAuliffe, Clinton enraged some loyalists of Vice President Al Gore, who had installed his own ally, Joe Andrew, in the role of national chairman two years ago. Andrew, forty, had told several Democratic officials that he wanted to stay in the job, but... he backed down and threw his support to Mr. McAuliffe,"
Apparently Bill Richardson also wanted the job and expressed concern that he and Andrew were not being given a chance to campaign for it. McAuliffe qualified for the job by putting together a fundraiser last May that raised a record $2.6 million dollars, plus he raised money for the Clintons' legal defense fund, for Hillary's senatorial campaign, and for the Clinton library in Arkansas. But there is another side to McAuliffe that has gotten little attention in the media coverage of this story.
As the Times story pointed out, McAuliffe drew some negative publicity for some of his business and fundraising practices, including a loan guarantee for the Clintons when they were trying to secure a mortgage for their Chappaqua, New York home. That is considered to be an illegal gratuity. He backed off only when challenged by Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog organization with some seventy lawsuits against the Clinton administration.
Left out of the coverage we saw were even more serious scandals in which McAuliffe was involved while serving as the treasurer and chief fundraiser for the Clinton-Gore 1996 campaign. The scheme was a way to finance Ron Carey's campaign against James Hoffa, Jr. to head up the Teamsters Union, and to kick many times more union dollars back to a Democratic fundraising group.
Testimony of this was offered during a November 1999 trial that convicted William Hamilton, the union's political director, of diverting close to a million dollars of union funds into Carey's campaign. During that trial, the former finance director of the DNC testified that McAuliffe had concocted the scheme. Other leading Democrats confirmed McAuliffe's role in the scheme in testimony to the Senate committee investigating campaign finance abuse. However, Attorney General Janet Reno could find no reason to bring charges against McAuliffe. With his best friend running the DNC, Clinton remains the leading force in the Democratic Party.
Reed Irvine is the former Chairman of Accuracy In Media and Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.
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