White House Hotelier and Barista Terry McAuliffe to Run For Virginia Governor

Posted by Bill Dupray on Jan 5 2009 Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Terry McAuliffe wants to be governor of Virginia. Which means we in Virginia get to relive the sleaze of the Clinton years all over again.

When Bill Clinton rented out the Lincoln bedroom in return for campaign contributions – that was Terry McAuliffe’s idea.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane to the White House Motel.

On Christmas Eve, 1994 DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe visited the Clintons at the White House. Clinton told him of a strategy he dreamed up for raising money. He was going to invite big money donors for a “sleep-over” at the White House. He expected his Hollywood friends would each kick in $25 to $50 thousand or more to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. . . .

Congress demanded an accounting and the White House staff was forced to scramble to assemble a list of overnight visitors—carefully sanitizing the list to make it appear that anyone who had a sleepover was actually friends and acquaintances of the Clintons and not just big donors. The list was a shocker. Nine hundred thirty-eight people paid anywhere from $25 thousand to $200 thousand for a sleepover. If everyone paid the minimum, the sleepovers netted the Clinton fundraising machine $23,450,000. The total is probably much closer to $87,000,000, but it is unlikely anyone outside the Clinton-Gore inner circle will ever know.

McAuliffe was also the genius behind the White House coffees with with the Clintons. Let’s just say that a Venti No-Foam Latte, even if they had served it up in an brand new Cadillac Escalade, still would have been cheaper than what McAuliffe was charging for a cup of joe in the Rose Garden canteen.

A total of 103 Coffees were held. Over $27 million was raised. One long-term fund-raiser confided to the Los Angeles Times that he was instructed by DNC Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen to sell presidential access for a minimum of $50 thousand a head. Several major American corporations later admitted to the media that they had been invited to attend Coffees at the White House for a minimum contribution of $100 thousand. Most said the calls, usually placed by the DNC but sometimes by someone claiming to represent the White House, left no doubt in their minds that it would be in their best corporate interest to drop everything and go to Washington and have a cup of coffee with the President, Vice President, or First Lady—or, at least, to send a check.

McAuliffe’s slippery ethical standards also earned him millions in the private sector as well. What is it with these Dems and their land deals?

So it was that in November 1990, McAuliffe approached Moore and his friend Grau with a proposal for a real estate partnership in central Florida with an investment company called American Capital Management, which McAuliffe owned with his wife Dorothy. The deal involved the purchase of the Woodland Square Shopping Center and five apartment complexes outside Orlando, Florida. It was a lopsided partnership. The pension fund put up $39 million to purchase the property. McAuliffe shelled out $100, yet he and his wife enjoyed 50 percent ownership in the project. He eventually parlayed his $100 investment into a $2.45 million profit.

Sounds like McAuliffe learned a lot from his buddy Hillary Clinton, the Cattle Futures Baroness.

And let’s not forget the Global Crossing deal (can you say Enron?) where McAuliffe once again made out like a bandit.

In 1996, McAuliffe met a young corporate tycoon named Gary Winnick, who had once referred to himself as the richest man in Los Angeles. Winnick ran Global Crossing, a fiber-optics company chartered in the tax-friendly haven of Bermuda. At the time McAuliffe met Winnick, Global Crossing was a privately held company, poised to cash in on the deregulation of the telecom industry and the new opportunities in China. In 1997, Winnick offered McAuliffe the opportunity to purchase $100,000 worth of Global Crossing stock.

When Global Crossing shares went public in 1998, the value of the stock soared. Operating with an acute sensitivity to the fluctuations of the market bordering on ESP, McAuliffe sold his shares at the precise moment the stock peaked. McAuliffe told the New York Times he pocketed $18 million in the deal. Within a few months, Global Crossing’s stock collapsed, the company plunged into bankruptcy and more than a third of its workforce were tossed into the ranks of the unemployed.

So this is the guy who wants to run Virginia. Everybody jump into the Wayback Machine, we’re going to spend the next few months reliving Bill and Terry’s excellent adventure.

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