The Bush administration has quietly done an about-face on allegations that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton broke campaign finance laws in 2000 - with the Justice Department preparing to extradite one-time Clinton fund-raiser Peter Paul to the U.S. as part of a plea deal for his testimony.
Facing charges of stock fraud in the U.S. himself, Paul told reporters in 2001 that Sen. Clinton failed to report $2 million in in-kind contributions to her 2000 Senate campaign - expenses he incurred producing a gala August 2000 fundraiser-tribute to Bill and Hillary in Los Angeles.
Upon his indictment in June 2001 Paul fled to Brazil, where he was promptly arrested by local law enforcement. He has languished in jail there ever since, trying through his lawyers at Judicial Watch to arrange a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony against the New York Democrat.
In a troubling development, Paul was relocated last month to Brazil's maximum-security state penitentiary in Brasilia, where he was placed in the infamous Block F, also known as the "Corridor of Death."
Judicial Watch complained to the Justice Department last week that Paul's life was now in danger. The group's president, Tom Fitton, warned that 16 prisoners have been killed in Block F in the last year alone and that Americans are not very popular among Brazil's most hardened inmates.
"He's already been threatened," Fitton told the New York Post on Sunday.
"It's a mystery why Paul remained in a Brazil jail even after that country's Supreme Court decided he should be extradited last December," the paper noted. "After that, Fitton says he continually pressured officials at the U.S. Embassy to fetch Paul, but they told him they needed 'official' notice from the Brazilian foreign minister before they could do so."
When official notice finally came in mid-August, however, authorities didn't release Paul. Instead he was transferred to the Brasilia lockup while U.S. authorities declined yet again to intercede on his behalf.
But now, apparently fearing a repeat of what happened to key to Whitewater witness James McDougal, the Bush Justice Department has turned on a dime.
McDougal's testimony was to be the basis for an indictment of Mrs. Clinton in 1998. But he died in prison after guards confiscated his heart medication and threw him into solitary confinement, where he suffred cardiac arrest.
The sudden action on Paul's case comes just weeks after reports surfaced that former Hollywood fund-raiser Aaron Tonken has supplied damaging testimony about Hillary Clinton's fund-raising practices.
"I'm a star witness against President and Mrs. Clinton," Tonken claimed in a recent report on his case in Vanity Fair magazine, explaining that prosecutors wanted his testimony about" "fundraising activities that I've done on behalf of the Clintons."
The exact nature of Tonken's allegations against Sen. Clinton remains secret, the magazine said. But the celebrity moneyman is known to have been involved in the August 2000 fund raiser that is at the heart of Peter Paul's allegations.
Paul's extradition to the U.S. is set for Sept. 12 - "if he lives that long," says the Post.
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Editor's note:
FBI Agent Gary Aldrich reveals how the Clintons helped cause 9/11 – Click Here Now!
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