This is a partial transcript from “Hannity & Colmes,” June 18, 2007, that has been edited for clarity.
ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: The Clinton family — looking to avoid a conflict of interest in Senator Clinton’s White House run — dissolved their blind trust in an account established to manage their money when Bill Clinton took office in 1993.
Now ExxonMobil, retail giant Wal-Mart, even our parent company News Corp.
Joining us now, the author of “Outrage” former Clinton advisor Dick Morris.
Now, Dick, this was a blind trust. They didn’t know what was in the trust. How do you go after them or anybody else that has a blind trust according to the ethics rules?
DICK MORRIS, FORMER CLINTON ADVISOR & AUTHOR: I know it’s prying into your childhood, but was there ever a time when you pretended to be asleep when your parents walked into the room?
COLMES: No, never happened, only during this show occasionally.
MORRIS: I suspect that blind trust may be a little bit like that. It’s too coincidental that Hillary served on the Wal-Mart board and now they are buying into Wal-Mart. I think that the — but the important question that I’m asking is, how did they get worth close to $50 million?
COLMES: Why did you say 10 to 50? It could be closer to 10.
MORRIS: I know, but it’s…
SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Closer to 50.
COLMES: Could be closer to 10, we don’t know.
MORRIS: Bill’s book was 12. Hillary’s book was 8. He has made 40 in speaking fees. They bought two houses, renovated them enormously.
COLMES: You don’t believe in capitalism?
MORRIS: I do. I’m saying that I think a very large portion of that money came from Dubai. And, unfortunately, I don’t think the Senator is going to release her tax returns.
But, when she does her presidential disclosure, we are going to see how much income Bill is making each year from Dubai.
COLMES: By the year, they did everything according to the ethics committee, the Senate Ethics Committee, the ethics involved with being…
MORRIS: The problem in America today, that I point about in my book, is most of what is corrupt is not illegal. But do you really want a president to the United States whose family has been supported for the last five years by an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Arab regime?
COLMES: Wait a second. Do we look at Rudy Giuliani and the $11 million he made on speeches on 9/11 and the money his companies have taken from Saudi Arabia? If it’s Hillary verses Rudy, do we look into all the ways he has made his money since 9/11? Has that become the big argument in this campaign?
MORRIS: A vast difference. Giuliani made his living largely through speeches. And I’m not criticizing any of the speeches that Bill gave. His law firm had some clients that it represented. Money went to the law firm. He drew on some of it, but a fairly limited amount.
It is all together possible — and I think we will learn that it’s true — that Bill and Hillary have been paid $10 million a year, according to the San Francisco newspaper, from the emir of Dubai. And that after five years, stand to make about $100 million.
COLMES: We don’t know if that’s true. You said you think it may be true.
MORRIS: Those kinds of figures — Well, the San Francisco paper reported that.
COLMES: It must be true then if a paper reported it.
MORRIS: No. Because they have an inside source there in Yucaipa, I think. The point is that we are dealing with the president of the United States who has been basically supported by a country that doesn’t let Israelis in and doesn’t — boycotts Israeli’s goods and provides Iran with half of its gasoline.
COLMES: This is all speculation. It’s all speculation.
HANNITY: First of all, she was really against big oil. Remember the comment she made fairly recently, would they redistribute that money. And she made her money from big oil and Wal-Mart, companies that liberals have demonized. They could always give it back.
MORRIS: Right.
HANNITY: Won’t happen. I want to go over internal poll numbers. There was The LA Times/Bloomberg poll. Interestingly, it shows the country by eight percent, a fairly large number, wants a Democrat elected president in the next election.
When there is a direct match up against any of the top three Republicans — I’m sure it would be the same for Fred Thompson — Giuliani wins by 10 points. That is an 18 point swing. How do you interpret that?
MORRIS: There are two elements. First, the American people prefer the Republican candidates, but prefer the Democratic Party. So they like Giuliani more than Hillary. They like Romney or McCain more than they like Edwards, let’s say. They probably like Obama.
HANNITY: Those are all against Hillary?
MORRIS: Against Hillary. But they are so upset about the war in Iraq and so furious at the Bush administration, and now mad about the immigration bill, that they’re determined to vote Democrat. And you really have a choice between a popular party verses a popular candidate. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
HANNITY: How do you couple that with…
MORRIS: But Sean, I just want to caution you about — and every poll you read is based on likely voters. Hillary’s candidacy is based on 100 million people that don’t vote, but can vote. Getting 20 million of them to come in and they are not in that sample.
HANNITY: Look at the feelings among even Democratic men towards her in recent polls, very negative views towards her. But couple that with — for example, as low as we keep hearing the president’s approval rating is, Congress is seven points lower.
MORRIS: It’s lower.
HANNITY: And Harry Reid’s is 19 percent.
MORRIS: And he absolutely deserves that. We talked about this last time. And I have a whole big thing on it in my book, that this guy literally was blasting the Republicans, Reid, for their connections with lobbyists, for the Abramoff scandal, for all of that stuff. And then they take over and Harry Reid has three sons, and a son-in-law who represent the mining interests and their job is to lobby daddy.
I was just looking at Debbie Stabenow, the liberal Senator from Michigan — real liberal. But she’d get — her son works for the banks as a lobbyist. She took $150,000 in campaign contributions from the banks. And she was one of the Democrats on the Banking Committee to support the emasculation of the bankruptcy law.
HANNITY: What have the Democrats accomplished, except the following? They hate the president, they want one, you know, anti-Iraq war vote after another. They want a guaranteed defeat. They are all on record raising taxes. Is that an agenda that — and in the general election, they moved so far to the left, how do they get back to the middle?
MORRIS: Well, I’m not sure they can. But what the main thing they have done in Congress is to permit the war in Iraq to continue. And that’s why they are losing their control over their own base.
HANNITY: Harry Reid actually said, “It was a mistake. We shouldn’t have promised we would end the war.”
MORRIS: Yes, right. I have a theory, Sean. I think they are no more going to end the war in Iraq than Nixon ended the war in Vietnam.
COLMES: Well, let’s hope they do. They did end the war in Vietnam, Nixon did.
MORRIS: Five years and 20,000 dead later.
COLMES: We also point out, by the way, Hillary did, in her last senate campaign, give $5,000 back to Wal-Mart they contributed to her campaign.
MORRIS: Awe, isn’t that nice.
COLMES: She said she had differences with company practices. She did that.
MORRIS: Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that cool. Buy stock in the company.
COLMES: The Dubai question, we don’t…
MORRIS: She served.
COLMES: We don’t know the exact amount. We don’t know all those details.
MORRIS: She served on the board.
COLMES: You are speculating.
MORRIS: She served on the board.
COLMES: Right.
MORRIS: Which is a big source of income in the 80s for her…
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: Since then, she has turned against them and given money back with Dick Morris.
MORRIS: OK. Wal-Mart didn’t use to offer health insurance…
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: More in a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNITY: As the race to the White House heats up, polls show which candidates are coming out ahead, which are falling by the wayside.
It seems Senator McCain is not doing well in South Carolina shows that he’s trailing behind Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
On the Democratic side, things are looking up for Hillary. There’s a new Barack Obama by double digits.
With more on the presidential election, we continue with former Clinton advisor, Dick Morris, author of the brand new book — and the book is terrific. I finally finished it.
MORRIS: Thank you.
HANNITY: Outstanding, “Outrage.” It talks about just the corruption in Washington.
MORRIS: It’s unique because it names names. It offers solution. And it attacks Republicans and Democrats equally.
HANNITY: And you know what, the Republicans deserve just about every shot that’s in there because they have compromised their conservative values, the things that they ran on.
MORRIS: Precisely.
HANNITY: Which raises the question about Hillary. Look at the amount of money in earmarks over the course of her short Senate career, just in the numbers of millions of dollars, 150 just in defense appropriations.
MORRIS: $2.2 billion of total earmarks since she has been in the Senate. And let’s explain what a defense earmark is. It’s money that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want, doesn’t need and can’t spend properly.
What she is doing then is saying I want $150 million that the Pentagon wants to spend on A, but I’m going to make them spend it on B. And I’m going to do that in order to get campaign contributions from those contractors in New York.
HANNITY: And you have connected the dots?
MORRIS: $148 million of earmarks, $250,000 of contributions, it almost works out to a precise one percent.
HANNITY: Really, and this goes to the heart of your book. There literally is corruption on a level where everybody out there — for example, you all pay taxes — your money is being used by presidential candidates, by Senators and Congressman, to bring money back to their districts, so they are basically buying votes?
MORRIS: Look at the magnitude of it. The federal budget is $3 trillion. One trillion is Social Security and veterans and other cash transfers. One trillion is defense and national debt. One trillion is discretionary money. You can do what you want with it. Earmarks are consuming close to one-tenth of the discretionary spending.
HANNITY: Let me shift gears on you here and go back to the last segment. There is a strong chance we will see war in the Middle East. What should Israel be doing? What should the world be doing about Iran?
If theIAEA is right and we’re three to eight years away from the possibility they have a nuclear weapon, with their connection to terrorism and their incendiary threats, what do we do?
MORRIS: It would be horrific for the world. There is something very specific we can do. California, Florida and Ohio, last week, passed legislation signed by their governors requiring that their state pension systems — and California is the largest in the world — withdraw their stocks, sell off their stocks in any company — there are 485 of them — that do business with Iran. Frank Gaffney is helping to push this. And California will sell off $2 billion of stock in those companies.
HANNITY: And you think it should be adopted?
MORRIS: Three weeks ago, I was with the head of (UNINTELLIGIBLE). He said they are scared to death that their stock will be sold off because of their dealings with Iran.
HANNITY: We don’t have very much time.
MORRIS: But the other 47 states should follow suit.
HANNITY: But do you really believe that that would create enough pressure to stop…
MORRIS: Yes.
HANNITY: They’ll stop threatening Israel; stop the pursuit of nuclear weapons?
MORRIS: I do. And Dennis Ross, in the Green Room, did as well. Because the Iranian government is dependent on passing out subsidies to a restive population. Do you know how much gas cost in Iran? Thirty cents a gallon.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: There’s lots of things we could be doing, Dick, besides this. Also, as you point out, these states have decided to do this voluntarily. You can also work with on opposition groups in Iran. There are a lot of things in our arsenal, if you’ll pardon the expression, besides war.
I want to go back what you were talking about in terms of where people get their money. I wish I had time to bring this up in the last segment when we talked about the potential lead candidates in each party, and Rudy Giuliani law firm lobbying for CITGO controlled by Hugo Chavez. Again, we can play that game with any one of the candidates if you want to look deeply enough.
MORRIS: There is a vast difference between a law firm getting some fees and a huge amount of money going directly into your personal bank account.
And…
COLMES: You are skating over who benefits how here?
MORRIS: And if you say that I’m supposing or I’m thinking — I’m hypothesizing, Hillary Clinton could prove me wrong by releasing her tax returns, which she has refused to do.
COLMES: Well, let’s hope — I believe in open government. I hope she does. The fact is, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In terms of earmarks, Don Young, Republican of Alaska, actually says…
MORRIS: Don Young is absolutely the worst.
COLMES: “I was proud of my earmarks,” he says. “I love earmarks.”
MORRIS: The three worst are Don Young in the House, Congressman, Republican from Alaska; Stevens, Republican from Alaska; and Thad Cochran from Mississippi, all Republicans.
COLMES: All happen to be Republicans.
MORRIS: They say they are fiscal conservatives, but they are more responsible for the growth in federal spending over the last couple of years than any other member of Congress.
COLMES: The other quick item — and we only have a second left here. Your book is good. It goes after both sides.
HANNITY: Especially, the liberal side.
COLMES: He’s fair and balanced in this book. Hillary or Obama bring more people into the process because these people who are not currently registered may be more inspired to do so. They change the dynamic and the poll numbers, ultimately.
MORRIS: But more important than that, American democracy is being redefined before our eyes this year and last year. It’s always had 100 million people voting and 100 million people that didn’t vote. And they were at the gates and they never got in. Now those people are going to vote now. Big difference.
HANNITY: By the way, you can get signed copies of your book at Dick Morris.com or send books — bookstores.
MORRIS: I signed them all.
HANNITY: Congratulations on the success of the book.
MORRIS: It’s number one, you know, on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, all week.
HANNITY: I know I saw that — all week.
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