Convicted HUD Figure Phil Winn's Presidential Pardon

and the Missing 59 Billion at HUD.

March 7, 2002

www.almartinraw.com

You may have heard that convicted HUD felon Phil Winn was pardoned by Bill Clinton the other day.

People have asked me to explain the background. He was the one who bribed Federico Pena, the former mayor of Denver, with a $2.5 million bribe to get the Denver Airport project for the Winn Group. This was when Robert Josephs was head of M&L Industries. The check was actually drawn on M&L Industries and cashed. Then the money was brought back to Pena's office in a briefcase. The reason Winn was pardoned by Clinton was to protect Pena.

Winn was being reinvestigated for HUD fraud, as reported in the Denver Post. The Clinton Administration was frightened that Winn would blow the whistle on the bribe to Pena. So this was an effort to protect Pena. In other words, the Clinton Administration knows this HUD thing is going to break apart, and they want to distance themselves from it and make sure it all gets laid in the Republican lap.

That's why, at some point, you'll see Andrew Cuomo be made a scapegoat. He's going to have to be. There will be no choice, but to make him a scapegoat.

The State of Colorado has been pushing to reinvestigate a lot of old HUD cases at the Attorney General's instigation, now that Gail Norton is gone. Gail was the State Attorney General of Colorado and she blocked any attempt to reinvestigate HUD fraud, and now she's moved over to the law firm of Norman Brownstein.

How cute this whole deal is. It's the typical workings of the revolving door syndrome in action. Brownstein is one of the attorneys who represents the Winn Group and formerly M&L Industries which was part of MDC Holdings.

Pena was working under Clinton, and he was forced to resign. He tried to help Phillip Winn and Leonard Millman at HUD by suppressing information, by making information requested by the FBI hard to get.

If you can understand how cozy this all is... It's a perfect case of how everybody scratched everybody's back. And now the Clinton Administration at the end pulls the plug to protect themselves.

The problem with Pena is that if he ever got squeezed, he would begin to talk about that Flowerwood deal Hillary was involved in. It was called Flowerwood Real Estate Development in Colorado. She was one of the principals in the Flowerwood deal. This was one of the deals that the Independent Counsel was supposed to investigate and then all of a sudden -- didn't. And they kept focusing on Whitewater. And you only heard Flowerwood discussed three or four times.

Phil Winn was also one of those who paid for the defense fund for Bill Clinton.

Winn is also intimately connected with the Bush Family and with the Reagan-Bush Regime. You have to remember that Winn himself was a former Assistant HUD Director under Reagan. Then suddenly he gets an appointment out of the blue -- he wasn't even on the list -- as Ambassador to Switzerland -- an appointment that puts him out of the country in the 1988-89 time span, when there's a new independent counsel investigation on HUD activity. And he is conveniently out of the country with ambassadorial status, so he can not be subpoenaed.

You could say that this fraud begins 20 years ago and just continues along. Because nobody wants to cough up any of the missing money. Because it's long gone by now.

If this HUD scandal ever really breaks wide open, it's going to be one hell of a big deal. Particularly when the American People realize they're out Sixty Billion Dollars. Plus.

Did you know there hasn't been a General Audit of HUD done since 1984? The reason why is that everyone was afraid to do it.

But it's not that hard to imagine. The Department of Defense went twelve or thirteen years without an audit. There isn't any constitutional requirement, any lawful requirement, to audit any federal agency. That's a discretion of the executive branch.

You can see that the agencies of government -- where there hasn't been any audit -- that's where all the mischief is. HUD. DoD. CIA. NSA. Nobody wants to audit them.