By Sharon Kehnemui Liss
Fox News
WASHINGTON — One gift that Hillary Clinton is unlikely to enjoy on her 60th birthday Friday is the premiere of “Hillary Uncensored,” a scathing documentary whose 13-minute trailer has been No. 1 on Google Video since Oct. 10, with more than 1.1 million views to date.
The film’s first full-length showing is scheduled for Friday night at Harvard University, followed by viewings at universities through the weekend and a wrap Tuesday at the Metropolitan Club in New York City.
Among the allegations summarized in the documentary:
— Bill and Hillary Clinton solicited cash from Peter F. Paul, an international lawyer and businessman, even after Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager told The Washington Post she would not take money from him;
— FBI agents and U.S. attorneys colluded with the Clintons to keep Paul, who was convicted of cocaine possession and fraud, tangled up in the criminal courts for years;
— The Clintons later made sure Paul was kept in a Brazilian prison for 25 months, including 58 days in a maximum security cellblock nicknamed the “Corridor of Death,” while the Justice Department waited to extradite him;
— Hillary Clinton still hasn’t filed reports to the FEC enumerating Paul’s excessive contributions to her 2000 Senate campaign.
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign spares no kindness about its view of Paul, whose long arrest record, officials say, demonstrates his inherent deceit.
“Peter Paul is a professional liar who has four separate criminal convictions, two for fraud. His video repackages a series of seven-year-old false claims about Senator Clinton that have already been rejected by the California state courts, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee,” Clinton’s campaign said in a statement to FOXNews.com.
While it’s a coincidence that the film about the New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate is being released on her birthday, the movie’s producers say it is no accident the film’s trailer is getting such attention.
Douglas Cogan, a businessman-turned-associate producer and researcher for the film, said he’s made it his mission to expose what he calls “the greatest campaign finance fraud that ever has been committed.”
The Clintons think “they are truly above the law,” Cogan said. “My country has never seen anyone like Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
The allegations in the film are not new, although much of the video is. The film resurrects claims made by the thrice-convicted Paul that he unwittingly agreed to violate election-funding laws in exchange for a pledge from Bill Clinton to work with him in his new venture, Stan Lee Media, after Clinton left the presidency.
The documentary revisits Paul’s claim that, in exchange for Bill Clinton’s promise to promote Stan Lee Media overseas, for which Paul said he was willing to pay $17 million, he also agreed to produce an August 2000 fundraising gala in Hollywood for Hillary Clinton’s 2000 New York Senate campaign.
“My interest in supporting Hillary Clinton was specifically to hire Bill Clinton,” Paul told FOXNews.com in a telephone interview, noting that Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign “concocted” the whole idea of the fundraiser.
Paul said he believed that in exchange for organizing the gala, “I had accomplished the hiring of the president of the United States to work with me when he left the White House.”
The gala cost $1.2 million, which was under-reported to the Federal Election Commission and led to the arrest of Clinton’s then-Senate campaign fundraising chief, David Rosen.
Rosen was found not guilty; a co-host of the gala, Aaron Tonken, was sentenced in a separate case to more than five years in prison for misappropriating funds for charity to pay for fundraisers featuring Hollywood celebrities.
Paul never got to work with Bill Clinton. Stan Lee Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2001, long after it became apparent to Paul that Clinton wasn’t going to join the company and, Paul alleges, had stolen one of Stan Lee Media’s chief investors.
Paul writes off his convictions in the 1970s for cocaine possession and defrauding Fidel Castro of $8.7 million as part of an international anti-Castro effort gone wrong. He adds that the securities fraud plea that he agreed to cop in March 2005 was to get out of jail after 43 months in Brazilian and New York prisons. He still is awaiting sentencing on that plea despite being under house arrest since then.
As for the Rosen case, he calls that a farce aimed at getting a Clinton crony off the hook. The accompanying civil case, he said, also set a legal precedent Hillary Clinton later used to get out of being a defendant in his case against her and her husband.
“I am not the one-dimensional villain that I am portrayed to be, but I am the victim not only of the Clintons” but of their associates, who Paul says tried to steal his assets and wrap him up in a corrupt court system.
“Not only was the indictment and the trial (of Rosen) a scam, the judge … turned it into a referendum on the credibility of Peter Paul,” Paul said, also faulting the prosecutor for not objecting to Judge Howard Matz’s characterization of Paul as a con man during his instructions to the jury.
“You conclude either that the prosecutor is incompetent or, worse, that the prosecutor is dogging the case.”
Paul claims that while he has been prosecuted and marginalized by the Clintons, his video evidence proves his case against them — that the power couple defrauded him by falsely pledging the former president’s post-White House services in exchange for footing the bill for all the gala’s expenses.
That video documentation, however, may be worth only the revenue from copies sold. The California Court of Appeals last week upheld, 3-0, a lower court’s ruling to excuse Hillary Clinton as a defendant in that suit. The court also noted that the new video isn’t new evidence.
“In his motion to admit new evidence, Paul also seeks to admit the videotaped recording of the July 17, 2000, telephone call to demonstrate Senator Clinton had sufficient knowledge of Paul’s business enterprises and the president’s involvement with Paul such that it would not have been a ‘fishing expedition’ to depose her. While the recording itself may have only been recently obtained by Paul, the substance of the conference call is not new evidence,” reads the ruling written by Judge P.J. Perluss.
Nonetheless, the conference call with then-first lady Clinton is among the most compelling moments in the new documentary. The video, taken in Paul’s Beverly Hills office a month before the gala, shows on one end of a teleconference, Paul, Tonken and their business partner Alana Stewart, Rod Stewart’s ex-wife. On the other end is Hillary Clinton.
Clinton can be heard saying: “Whatever it is you’re doing, is it OK if I thank you? … I am very appreciative and it sounds fabulous. I got a full report from Kelly (White House adviser Kelly Craighead) today when she got back and told me everything that you’re doing and it just sounds like it’s going to be a great event. But I just wanted to call and personally thank all of you. I’m glad you’re all together so I could tell you how much this means to me, and it’s going to mean a lot to the president, too.”
Paul’s attorney, Colette Wilson, argues that Clinton’s conversation proves she was in violation of campaign finance rules preventing candidates from personally having a hand in coordinating fundraising events in excess of $25,000.
The appeals court’s ruling to dismiss Hillary Clinton as a defendant is flawed because “my evidence showed that this gala was coordinated between the candidate and Peter Paul,” Wilson said. “The whole basis of (Clinton’s motion to dismiss) was her right to solicit campaign contributions, so she admitted” she knew about the gala planning.
Wilson said that the appeals court also erred when it cited the lower court’s claim that they were on a “fishing expedition” by demanding to depose Clinton about her knowledge of the gala.
“I would attack that by saying that the case is defined as too broad [when it] is asking to take a lot of people’s depositions. A fishing expedition means you don’t have a clue whether the person has any evidence or not,” she said.
But Wilson acknowledged that it’s the court’s discretion to admit new evidence or not.
“They don’t have to allow it in. The cutoff is what was available during the lower court submission,” she said.
Wilson contends that several of the videotapes, including the would-be smoking gun, weren’t available to Paul because they were confiscated by the FBI when the securities fraud investigation began in 2001 and were withheld from Paul until April of this year, long after the lower court heard the case.
“They still have the originals,” she noted, adding that the FBI sent the videos to a vendor to be copied and sent to Paul.
Wilson said she’s not certain she wants to appeal for an en banc hearing of the entire appeals court or to ask the California Supreme Court to take the case because it could mean a delay of two years before they can return to the underlying case — the alleged fraud committed by the Clintons in pledging that Bill Clinton would work for Stan Lee Media.
Of that, Wilson and Paul claim to have plenty of evidence and still are able to depose Hillary Clinton as a material witness.
Paul said he also is prepared to keep open the case against the Clintons through other means. He is filing a new complaint with the FEC and is requesting that when Michael Mukasey is confirmed as U.S. attorney general, he investigate how the government could have prosecuted Rosen when authorities knew he did not commit a crime.
Cogan said he hopes the film also shines light on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“Hillary can no longer feign ignorance in what went on here,” he said. “I think she is absolutely an unthinkable commander in chief.”
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