Читать книгу Texas Confidential - Michael Varhola - Страница 18

NOBODY LIKES TO ADMIT THEY HAVE paid too much for something, and it is certainly the kind of thing people fib about every day without fear of dire consequences. But when the FBI is conducting a background investigation on someone being appointed to public office and asks him how much money he gave to his mistress, it is a bad idea to lowball the amount. That is what the honorable Henry Cisneros did, and it caused him untold problems, tarnished a presidential administration, and cost the American taxpayers a lot of money.

Cisneros was one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, having served four successful terms as the mayor of San Antonio and as a key advisor to Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton rewarded Cisneros for his efforts by appointing him U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and he was confirmed in this position on January 22, 1993. He was, by all accounts, as passionate and competent in his new post as he had been in his previous ones.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, however, learned that Cisneros—labeled, along with Clinton, a “skirt chaser” during the campaign—had lied to the FBI about the amount of money he had paid to his mistress, a woman named Linda Medlar (aka Linda Jones). In March 1995, Reno secured the appointment of Independent Counsel David Barrett to investigate these allegations. Although he was married, the fact that Cisneros had a mistress was not that much of an issue, as this had been fairly widely known for some time.

Cisneros had been involved with Medlar since 1987, when she was a volunteer staffer for his mayoral campaign, and soon thereafter he began to support her. According to subsequent court records, from 1988 to 1992 Cisneros gave her a total of $250,000, and then continued to pay her even after becoming the chief of HUD, a whopping $79,500 in 1993. After a point, this money was intended to keep Medlar quiet and keep her from making any embarrassing public revelations.

While Cisneros was certainly guilty of poor judgment, his girlfriend was, by all accounts, an emotionally disturbed gold digger. In 1994, Medlar sued the mayor for breach of contract, fraud, and failing to support her, eventually screwing him out of another $49,000 (although she had been shooting for $250,000). She also sold secret recordings she had made of conversations with Cisneros to the Fox television program Inside Edition, which it subsequently aired, leading Attorney General Reno to unleash Barrett.

The independent counsel’s investigation of Cisneros went on until December 1997, when—eleven months after his term as the head of HUD ended—he was indicted on eighteen charges, including conspiracy, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. In September 1999, he negotiated a plea agreement under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI and was fined $10,000 but did not receive prison time or even probation. And some sixteen months later, in January 2001, Clinton pardoned his buddy as one of his last official acts in the Oval Office.

Former mayor of San Antonio Henry Cisneros had something to smile about after the six-year, $22 million investigation into his activities was brought to a close with a judicial order that kept its findings secret.

Prosecutors had granted Medlar immunity in exchange for testifying against her former sugar daddy. Being a dumb, greedy whore, however, she lied to them and ended up getting charged with multiple counts of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and obstruction of justice as a result of a bank fraud scheme she had entered into with her sister and brother-in-law in an attempt to conceal the source of the money she had received. She pleaded guilty to twenty-eight charges and was sentenced to time in prison.

His girlfriend was an emotionally disturbed gold digger.

Independent Counsel Barrett was by no means pleased with the outcome for Cisneros and persisted in his inquiries, broadening them to include a look into allegations that the Clinton administration, the Justice Department, and the IRS had obstructed his investigation. Year after year, he continued his witch hunt, right up until 2005, when a number of Democratic senators decided that the $22 million he had spent up to that point was more than enough and tried to pull the plug on the investigation. He continued, however, until the Special Division of the Court of Appeals, which supervises independent counsels, eventually ordered him to bring to an end the six-year investigation—by far the longest independent counsel investigation in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, Cisneros and Clinton had, in fact, been trying to obstruct the investigation, and their lawyers took legal steps to have as much as possible of Barrett’s final report suppressed before it could be released to the public. By the time the report was eventually revealed in January 2006, an estimated 120 pages had been removed from it as a result of judicial orders, and exactly what they may have contained remains a mystery to this day.

“An accurate title for the report could be, ‘What We Were Prevented from Investigating,’” Barrett said in a press release about it. “After a thorough reading of the report, it would not be unreasonable to conclude, as I have, that there was a cover-up at high levels of our government, and it appears to have been substantial and coordinated. The question is, ‘Why?’ And that question, regrettably, will go unanswered. Unlike some other cover-ups, this one succeeded.”