The Final Days: The Last,
Desperate Abuses of Power
by the Clinton White House
by Barbara Olson

If rehashing Clintonian presidential scandals bores you, this is not the book for you. For readers interested in the historical record, as well as diehard fans of sleaze trivia, The Final Days is a slender, handy volume of facts from earlier media accounts, stitched together with suitably indignant commentary by the late Barbara Olson.

Olson was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack, when her hijacked airplane crashed into the Pentagon. The 46-year-old dynamo had accumulated an astounding resume including professional ballet dancing, Hollywood jobs, Yeshiva law school (she was a blonde Gentile from Texas), leadership in the Federalist Society, federal prosecuting, legal counsel to a congressional committee, television commentary, the bestselling book Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and marriage to current U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson. Her new book was in the last stages of editing when she died.

The Final Days devotes most of its pages to the scandalous pardons issued by Bill Clinton in the waning hours of his presidency. The pardons alone were enough to tarnish Clinton's legacy forever, and Olson lays out all their venal details as well as the outrage expressed in the media by many longtime Clinton apologists. The pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich after huge gifts to the Clintons and their organizations by his ex-wife heads the list. Close behind come pardons issued to Clinton's brother and alleged ex-girlfriend Susan McDougal, Jesse Jackson's cohorts, Puerto Rican terrorists and Hasidic swindlers whose grateful communities delivered votes to Hillary's Senate campaign, and a drug kingpin who reportedly paid Hillary's brother $434,000.

The author details numerous other abuses of the latter days of the Clinton co-presidency, including:

  • Hillary's $8 million book advance on the eve of entering the Senate
  • Her cushy house to establish residency in Chappaqua, NY, bought with other people's money
  • Bill's efforts to rent lavish office space in New York
  • Their joint shakedown of supporters for purchases of expensive clothes and furnishings (registered with stores like a bride's wedding list)
  • Their looting of the White House for furnishings that were government property
  • Eleventh-hour appointments to stack various boards and judicial seats with Friends of Bill
  • The settlement of the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky legal cases with public evasions of responsibility
  • Whopping land grabs for national monuments (to appease environmentalists by making the land off-limits to useful activity)
  • Numerous overreaching executive orders, international pacts, and regulations

Most of these events were covered widely in the press in 2000, but a few were news even to a faithful reader of the Wall Street Journal. It's useful to have access to them all in one place.

(Regnery, 2001, 258 pps., $27.95)