Presidents Behaving Badly

American Thinker 

Before Washington, DC became America’s capital city, a large swath of land to the south was known as the “Dismal Swamp,” a place where insect-borne diseases and other perils felled early settlers. Construction since these early times has transformed the surface of the capital and nearby suburbs in the Beltway, but the threat posed by the festering swamp of unelected individuals who hold levers of power, important ones, in our vast government bureaucracy and infect the body politic has only risen.

Self-anointed “insiders” and their family members pull down compensation and other benefits from a maze of entities, posing as foundations or institutes, that boldly flout settled laws and regulations, but are never punished. If you’re wondering about what’s going on today, it’s worth looking back to how hard the George W. Bush presidency worked to protect his predecessors from scrutiny, especially on matters related to the Iran-Contra affair.

Days after the National Archivist worked with the Department of Justice and the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago, I wondered what a librarian might have to fear about Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025. For years, I also mulled over why President Trump repeatedly and haplessly managed to pick manifestly ineffective people to lead the Department of Justice as Attorney General, culminating in his first term with George H.W. Bush loyalist Bill Barr.

Back then, I was not aware of how far Presidents might go to bury inconvenient truths about their tenure in the White House. In the years that have passed, what former presidents say and what they do not write about in their overpaid memoirs has helped me get closer to the truth. The Clinton presidency and the decades since then help clarify this issue.

On his last day in office, Bill Clinton’s early morning pardons of Susan Rosenberg, Marc Rich, Pincus Green, and too many other despicable criminals ignited a firestorm. However, instead of pursuing an in-depth review of Clinton’s early morning clemency decisions, the FBI, Department of Justice, and IRS carried out a limited “investigation” into whether a supposed charity with the legal name “The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation” was used to exchange contributions for pardons. This demonstrably feeble effort began in February 2001 and vanished into oblivion by early 2005.

Looking back, the George W. Bush administration was remarkably aggressive about protecting Reagan- and Clinton-era information. When George W. Bush assumed the presidency, he did not provide access to certain sensitive records of the Ronald Reagan administration. He should have, for they were statutorily required to become public 12 years after Reagan left office.

Invoking arguably spurious requests for more time to review Reagan’s Presidential Records, Bush’s team waited until November 1, 2001, to issue Executive Order 13233, which flouted the clear intent and letter of the President Records Act. One of the most outrageous elements of this Executive Order (and there are many) was granting the right to assert “executive privilege” to heirs of presidents and to presidential designees who wished to block the release of sensitive records. So, during the entire W. Bush administration records through January 20, 2009, and Reagan-era Presidential Records that should have reached the public by January 20, 2001, were sealed up tight as a drum, as were Clinton presidency records.

Presidential Records for George H.W. Bush—due out starting January 20, 2005 —were also cloistered under Executive Order 13233, locking them up through January 20, 2009.

What do so many have to fear going all the way back to 1981? And why did relations warm up between the Clinton and Bush families? Bill Clinton gave us part of the answer decades ago.

The hardcover (2004) and paperback (2005) editions of Clinton’s My Life are actually quite revealing in numerous respects. Writing about the controversial pardons that his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, made on December 24, 1992, effectively ending investigations into and consequences from the Iran-Contra affair forever, Clinton noted (page 457 of the hardback):

President Bush gave a big Christmas present to some former associates, and potentially to himself when he pardoned [former Defense Secretary] Caspar Weinberger and five others who had been indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. Weinberger’s trial was about to get under way, and President Bush was likely to be called as a witness.

As an afterthought, Clinton observed:

Just two weeks earlier, Walsh had learned that the President and his lawyer, Boyden Gray, had failed for more than a year to hand over Bush’s own contemporaneous notes relating to Iran-Contra, despite repeated requests to do so.

Why did George H.W. Bush and his counsel work so hard to evade producing highly relevant evidence to Independent Counsel Walsh through 1992? What knowledge, if any, did Bill Barr have about these decisions?

If regime change (for the better) occurs soon in Iran, perhaps we may finally learn more about what actually happened under Reagan, Bush, and then-Governor Bill Clinton, when numerous parties defied the law to send money to Central American rebels through leaky foundations, including the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, the Nicaraguan Refuge Fund, and the Nicaraguan Development Fund.

Who cooked up these schemes, and how widely have similar schemes been employed by Republicans and Democrats alike?

The use of ostensibly tax-exempt organizations to siphon taxpayer funds back to the families of influential politicians and to the donor class, while also meddling in foreign and domestic affairs, should certainly be included in the expanded remit that Vice President Vance and Treasury Secretary Bessent have been given to fight fraud.

With the benefit of hindsight and the looming potential to gain deeper access into historical records in America and in relevant foreign countries, especially including Venezuela and Iran, the time has come to revisit how the presidency, until it hit the Trump wall, has spent decades embracing unregulated “globalism”—and how this rush has been aided with tax-exempt organizations tied to former presidents and their cronies.

Over the years, John Solomon has made steady progress unwrapping some of the ways that swamprats seem to have subverted elections, beginning with the election on November 6, 2012.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration should expand its mission to release sensitive files and expose how dynastic political families in both parties have used nominally tax-exempt organizations to augment power and attract personal wealth, especially including the Bush family; Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton; Joe and Jill Biden; and Barack and Michelle Obama.