The Witches of Whitewater

Goldberg's boss Chotiner, as we shall show, was not only Nixon's campaign strategist from the beginning of his political career, but Chotiner was an attorney who was so ``mobbed up'' that between 1949-52, he defended 221 members of the Meyer Lansky syndicate. He was eventually subpoenaed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to testify before the McClellan Committee on his dealings with syndicate boss and money-launderer Meyer Lansky. Chotiner had long-standing ties with Lansky's ``Murder, Inc.'' lieutenant Benjamin ``Bugsy'' Siegel, with syndicate member Mickey Cohen, who took over Lansky's Hollywood and Las Vegas operations after Siegel's murder, and with Lansky lieutenant Morris Barney ``Moe'' Dalitz, who founded the La Costa Country Club in California, where President Nixon, Murray Chotiner, Sam Ehrlichman, and others met in 1973 to fix their Watergate cover stories. These associations with Lansky's ``Murder, Inc.'' apparatus make Lucianne Goldberg the ``Ma Barker'' of Clintongate.

Goldberg's son, Joshua, told this author that his mother also had a tie with Roy Cohn, who, like Chotiner became a Lansky syndicate attorney (in Cohn's case, after frying Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and then leaving his position as Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief aide). As FBI and Army Intelligence records attest, Cohn was a homosexual who ultimately died of AIDS-related Karposi's sarcoma.

Two of Chotiner's other Nixon-era cronies in the dirty tricks department were Marvin Liebman and William F. Buckley. Liebman, recently deceased, was also a homosexual, and Buckley publicly advocates legalization of drugs and pedophilia.

Hardly a crew to be consulted on matters of Presidential morality!

As for Lucianne Goldberg herself, who walks, talks, and acts like one of Chotiner's gangster molls, she wrote Madame Cleo's Girls, a 1992 novel with lurid details about a trio of high-class prostitutes.

Still, before Goldberg became the den mother for Bush-leaguer Linda ``Bad'' Tripp, she had reportedly represented Dolly Kyle Browning for a potential book deal about an alleged, early Clinton love affair, but critics debunked Browning's story.

Next, Goldberg tried to get a book deal for the Arkansas state troopers who alleged that they had procured women for then-Gov. Bill Clinton.

Goldberg and her son, Joshua, also confirmed that she has been a frequent collaborator of the two leading British intelligence operatives assigned to trash Clinton: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Lord William Rees-Mogg.

"I live for dish!"

When Goldberg decided to promote a convicted perjurer, former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, for a book on Vince Foster instead of Tripp, Goldberg suggested that Tripp should instead write a book tentatively called, Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw Inside the Clinton White House. The proposal, which many of Tripp's friend believe was ghost-written by Goldberg, because its language was so profane, featured chapter titles like ``Mrs. President'' and ``The President's Women.'' Unfortunately, ``Bad'' Tripp could not write the kind of salacious style that Goldberg wanted.

Tripp's name surfaced last summer in Newsweek, where she was a source for the claim that President Clinton had fondled a campaign volunteer named Kathleen Willey. Clinton's attorney Robert Bennett denounced Tripp as a liar.

After this, Goldberg went to Washington in October to renew her acquaintance with Tripp, who had been transferred to the Pentagon. It was on this visit that Tripp told her about her fellow Pentagon Public Affairs worker Monica Lewinsky. Tripp said that Michael Isakoff on Newsweek's ``bimbo beat'' was pressuring her, and Tripp was fearful of Bennett calling her a liar again, if she talked about Lewinsky's alleged affair with the President. Goldberg claims that it was during this October meeting that she convinced Tripp to begin taping her conversations with Lewinsky. However, a senior editor of Newsweek, interviewed on CNN on Jan. 17, 1998, reported that she heard tapes of conversations between the two women from August 1997!

According to Goldberg's questionable account, it was only when Tripp learned that her secret taping of Lewinsky had been illegal, that she went, on Jan. 12, 1998, to Kenneth Starr. ``They moved with snakelike speed,'' Goldberg told the New Yorker, describing the zeal with which Starr's office arranged for the FBI to wire Tripp for a face-to-face session with Lewinsky the very next day. Tripp was also instantly granted complete immunity from prosecution. At this time, Starr did not have any mandate to probe the Clinton-Lewinsky matter. Asked by the New Yorker why she got involved with Tripp, Goldberg sounded just like a gangster moll: ``I did it because it's f--king fascinating! I love dish. I live for dish.''

Behind Regnery's doors

But, James Moody, who had been hired as Tripp's attorney at the recommendation of Goldberg, said of the prospectus: ``It looks like something a senationalist would write. Linda wanted to write a nerd policy book about changes from President Bush's White House to President Clinton's. These look way too sensational for the way Linda talks.''

When Goldberg was queried as to whether she had written the prospectus, she said: ``I know what I know, and I don't lie. I never, ever would write anything for a client.''

And, of course, everyone knows that someone who worked as a CREEP ``dirty tricks'' agent for a ``mobbed up'' attorney, would never tell a lie.

As for Tripp, the Washington Post pointed out that, heretofore, people have waited until they left $88,000-a-year jobs with the U.S. government, before asking for a $500,000 advance to write a book.

Tim Weiner and Jill Abramson reported in the New York Times on Jan. 28, that Alfred Regnery had said: ``I know Lucianne Goldberg well. I introduced Lucianne Goldberg to Mark Fuhrman.'' Goldberg had been Fuhrman's agent for the bestseller on the O.J. Simpson case (published by Regnery), entitled Murder in Brentwood.

When the New York Times questioned Alfred Regnery about Clinton Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, he replied: ``I knew Ken Starr when I worked at the Justice Department.... I've known him since 1981, when I was a deputy assistant attorney general and he was a special assistant to the Attorney General, William French Smith.... We're friends. I see him three, four, five times a year.''

In what other age would this relationship between a CREEP dirty trickster agent, peddling fabrications about the President to a right-wing publisher, who was in close contact with the Special Prosecutor targetting the President, not be considered a potential criminal conspiracy that ought to be put under a microscope by the Attorney General?

It seems at the least an egregious violation of conflict-of-interest that Tripp, goaded by Goldberg, should seek a $500,000 advance for a ``tell all'' book on the Clinton White House (especially, while still part of the Executive branch) since her curriculum vitae states that from May 1993 until April 1994, she was Executive Assistant to then White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. States Tripp on her job: ``I kept informed of the Counsel's responsibilities, views, interests and current policies governing particular matters of importance.... I provided a close working relationship with the Counsel to effectively and efficiently handle the issues and items which arose for action and decision.''

Despite these seemingly significant responsibilities, ``Bad'' Tripp later testified that her complaint to Nussbaum that White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster was spending too much time on the Clinton family's personal affairs, fell on deaf ears. Certainly, Lucianne Goldberg thought Tripp could present some real ``dish'' on the Clinton White House Counsel Office, apart from having been the last person to see Vincent Foster alive.

It is also significant that Colonel Bridges of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office confirmed that Tripp has top secret security clearance on a need-to-know basis. She has had such security clearance for some time, since her curriculum vitae says of her 1988-89 job with Delta Force at Fort Bragg, North Carolina: ``The nature of this position is classified.'' Likewise, during 1987, she was an assistant to the Director of the United States Army Intelligence Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, which she states was a ``classified unit,'' where her responsibilities included ``tracking classified case files.''

Did Tripp violate her top-secret clearance with her crony and adviser, ``Ma Barker'' Goldberg? This would seem to be a top priority for U.S. counterintelligence units to investigate.

But, it gets worse.

"Consigliere" Murray Chotiner

NANA was founded by a high-ranking Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, Ernest Cuneo. The news agency had several CIA agents in it, such as Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had numerous CIA and State Department links, and who was working for NANA when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow.

As the New Yorker points out, after Nixon self-destructed, Goldberg never lost her hatred for Kennedy Democrats, becoming the agent for Leo Damore's 1988 Chappaquiddick exposé on Ted Kennedy, Senatorial Privilege.

In the mid-1960s, Drew Pearson became a partner in NANA, and Goldberg would eventually become the literary agent for his column's successor, Jack Anderson, who was a favorite leak spot for all branches of the intelligence community.

Once she was hired by Chotiner to travel as a ``journalist'' with the McGovern campaign, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Year, by Anthony Lukas, reports her as saying: ``They were looking for really dirty stuff. Who was sleeping with whom, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane--that sort of thing.''

It was just more ``dish'' to Lucianne Goldberg.

S. Weissman, author of Big Brother and the Holding Company, reports that it was also Chotiner's ``dirty tricks'' operation against the McGovern campaign that was responsible for learning that McGovern's running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had had successful electroshock treatment for depression 20 years earlier. More than anything else, ``the Eagleton affair'' convinced voters that Nixon's opponent had poor judgment and was indecisive.

Murray Chotiner had been with Richard Nixon ``at the beginning.'' According to the 1990 book Blue Thunder, by Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell: ``In 1946, Nixon announced his candidacy for Congress, and Beverly Hills attorney Murray Chotiner showed up as a consultant on his campaign staff. Chotiner counted Lansky's childhood friend and Las Vegas partner `Bugsy' Siegel among his numerous mob-connected clients. During the period 1949-52, Chotiner defended clients in 221 organized crime cases.''

Chotiner would eventually be summoned by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to testify before the McClellan Committee about why so many of his clients were members of the Meyer Lansky syndicate.

Chotiner also appealed to the Lansky syndicate to fund Nixon's campaigns. The 1975 book Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words--The Underworld Autobiography of Michael Mickey Cohen as told to John Peer Nugent describes how Chotiner arranged a fundraising dinner for Nixon's 1950 Senate campaign, which was entirely subscribed by members of the Lansky syndicate in Hollywood and Las Vegas, through Cohen. He described the event: ``So now I put together this dinner at the Knickerbocker Hotel.... Everybody around here that was on the pad naturally had to go to the dinner.... Nixon made a speech. He made a hop, skip, and jump speech because the guy that really done all the speaking was Murray Chotiner.''

If Lucianne Goldberg's assassination conspiracy friends--e.g., Christopher Ruddy and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who claim that Vince Foster was killed by a plot implicating the President--want to do a real service, they might probe how Goldberg's former ``dirty tricks'' boss, Murray Chotiner, died. What is known is that in January 1974, at the height of Watergate, Chotiner was killed in a hit-and-run automobile crash, and no one was brought to justice.

There is one story that Chotiner's death was related to a decision by Henry Kissinger, that Kissinger implemented through his deputy, Gen. Al Haig, to force Nixon's resignation by commissioning a report, in August 1974, on the President's organized crime connections, which would have put a spotlight on Murray Chotiner. There is no question, as EIR has previously reported, that Kissinger and Haig were plotting behind President Nixon's back throughout his administration.

Another report on Chotiner's death is that the hit-and-run driver that smashed into his car in McLean, Virginia was a Naval Intelligence officer. This version says that Chotiner survived the crash with only a broken leg, but was killed in the hospital a week later. And, the story continues that Chotiner's widow wanted to sue, but incoming President Gerald Ford gave President Nixon a blanket pardon.

It is certainly strange that so many questions could surround the death of White House Special Counsel Chotiner, without anything like the spate of books, Internet gossip, and newspaper ``tittle tattle'' that Lucianne Goldberg's friends have ``dished'' out over the suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. No special prosecutor ever investigated President Nixon or such top aides as Henry Kissinger for Chotiner's death.

The British are coming

Among the many right-wing conspiracy theories that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard foisted and then conveyed into the ``respectable'' press, was the Paula Jones case. It is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard whom Clinton-haters credit with helping Jones to shape her legal strategy. In the New York Times of Jan. 28, Evans-Pritchard confirmed what Josh Goldberg told me, admitting that he knows Lucianne Goldberg well: ``She was very nearly my agent,'' referring to his book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, which accuses President Clinton or his aides of having been involved, directly or indirectly, in mysterious deaths and conspiracies.

In a sense, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's collaboration with MI6 pales before his role as a journalistic hitman for the Hollinger Corp., which owns Telegraph PLC. Hollinger was reorganized by Canadian-born Tory Conrad Black, from the Argus Corporation of E.P. Taylor, which ran British arms procurement during World War II and provided a Canadian base of operations for British Security Coordinator Sir William Stephenson and for the Special Operations Executive. Some of the board members of Hollinger include: Kenneth Starr's heroine, Lady Margaret Thatcher; Sir Henry Kissinger; and Bilderberg chairman and co-founder of the spy organization Kissinger Associates, Inc., Lord Peter Rupert Carrington.

Lucianne Goldberg admitted to this author that she knows another leading British opponent of President Clinton, Lord William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of the London Times now owned by Rupert Murdoch. ``Of course I know Lord William Rees-Mogg,'' she said. ``I think he's been doing a great job against Clinton.'' Rees-Mogg's attacks upon the Clinton administration either appear in the London Times or in the U.S.-based newsletter Strategic Investment, which Lord Rees-Mogg co-edits with James Dale Davidson, founder of the right-wing National Taxpayers Union.

No sooner did the Goldberg-Tripp-Lewinsky scandal break, than Lord William Rees-Mogg sped to the United States, apparently in search of DNA samples and other dirt dished up by his admirer, Lucianne ``Ma Barker'' Goldberg.