Could Marjorie Margolies' Sordid And Unbridled Corruption Derail Hillary Clinton's Presidential Run?

Disaster in the making?

Three weeks from Tuesday is election day in PA-13. Yes, it's the primary for the seat Allyson Schwartz is giving up to run for governor. But the district is such a healthy deep blue-- PVI- D+13; Obama won against Romney with 66%-- that no one doubts that the winner of the primary will be the next Member of Congress from northeast Philly/Montgomery County. Blue America endorsed state Senator Daylin Leach last year-- you can contribute to his Get Out The Vote effort here-- and we've been warning all cycle that his best-known opponent, Marjorie Margolies (AKA- Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky) is a lot worse than just a garden variety corrupt conservative Democrat. We've made the case so many times about her career of corruption and her conservative positions on the most basic issues that I don't know how to be clearer. So… Simon Van Zuylen-Wood and Politico to the rescue.

The profile of Margolies and the peek at her excruciating relationship with the Clinton family in their magazine is absolutely devastating. My heart goes out to the poor son, Marc, whose horrid mother is dragging his wife's family through the slime for her own out of control, monstrous ego-trip. "In interviews with me and other publications," writes Van Zuylen-Wood when he meets her at a fundraiser, "she’ll insist that her candidacy is not premised on her relationship with the Clintons. But tonight, it’s her entire pitch."

Her decision to run puts the Clintons in a difficult spot. Do they risk their political capital by publicly supporting a flawed congressional candidate in the sensitive run-up to Hillary’s likely presidential run, or do they turn their backs on a family member—and one to whom the former president owes a considerable political debt at that?

Sure enough that is exactly the theme of Margolies’s riff at the fundraiser, when she refers to the time Bill phoned from the Oval Office to beg for her vote. “When he called and said, ‘What would it take?’” she tells her well-heeled donors, “I did not say, ‘Your first-born.’”

She’s joking. Sort of.

Margolies’s career in electoral politics lasted only one term, but it ended twice. The first death occurred on Aug. 5, 1993, when Clinton was one vote short of passing a budget bill and convinced Margolies to change her mind… A couple hours before the vote, she had appeared live on Philadelphia television to explain her opposition to the bill. “I felt the budget cuts didn’t go far enough,” she wrote in her 1994 book A Woman’s Place: The Freshmen Women Who Changed the Face of Congress. “Especially in our out-of-control entitlements programs.” Then the president called. “I picked up the phone and said hello, then heard his voice, which sounded tired and drained,” she wrote. “‘What would it take, Marjorie?’” Clinton asked her.

…Her career ended for a second time in 2000. She had lost her bid for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 1998 and was in the midst of a run for Rick Santorum’s Senate seat when her husband, Edward Mezvinksy, a former congressman who represented Iowa in the 1970s, declared bankruptcy. Three weeks later, she declared bankruptcy too and dropped out of the race; creditors were asking the two of them for more than $7 million. It turned out a solid portion of the family’s money-- they owned a 15-room mansion in Narberth, Pa.-- belonged to other people. In 2002, Ed would plead guilty to 31 counts of bank fraud-- he had bilked more than $10 million from unsuspecting investors, including $309,000 from his 86-year-old mother-in-law. As one of the swindled told the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time, “Who expects to be taken to the cleaners when you’ve got an ex-congressman whose wife is running for the Senate?” Mezvinsky eventually got in so deep that he fell for one of the original Nigerian-guy-needs-cash email scams, losing up to an estimated $3 million just to try to feed the scheme.

By the time Mezvinsky went to prison in 2003, the conventional wisdom in Philadelphia political circles was that Marjorie’s political career was over. (The two divorced in 2007; Ed was released from prison a year later.) She was never charged with anything, and nobody I spoke with, from sympathetic former colleagues to bitter ex-friends, seems to think she was in on the fraud. Still, she was named in several lawsuits and her bankruptcy claim rested on the argument that she was too ignorant of the family’s finances to be held responsible for them. “What could she say?” one political operative told Philadelphia magazine in 2002. “I had no idea what was going on in my own household, but I’m equipped to vote on a $2 trillion budget! Vote for me!”

...A former friend of Margolies’s poses the question in a different way. “Can you really think the Clintons were happy to have their only daughter caught up in this complicated and not fully ethical family?” The degree to which the Clintons dive into-- and quite possibly make the difference-- in Margolies’s campaign might depend on the answer to that question.

…“There’s a sense of entitlement,” says one politico who used to work with her. “She asks a lot. I don’t know if there’s a lot of giveback.”

In this vein, the harshest indictment of Marjorie I hear comes from Mezvinsky’s former doctor Brad Fenton. Fenton and his wife were close family friends who often watched over Margolies’s son Andrew when she and Ed were away. Mezvinsky never asked Fenton to invest, and Fenton does not suspect Margolies was involved in his schemes. Rather, the fallout came after Mezvinsky was charged. In a last-ditch attempt at an insanity defense, he sued Fenton for prescribing him an anti-malaria drug that he said exacerbated his ostensible bipolar disorder, resulting in bouts of manic-depressive behavior, which in turn caused him to rob people.

The suit didn’t stick, and Mezvinsky eventually went to prison. What devastated Fenton, however, was not the outcome of the trial, but the fact that Margolies, who maintained that she was oblivious about her husband’s dealings, signed onto the lawsuit as well. The implication of this, Fenton tells me, is that “nothing is as important as what she needed personally, politically, and therefore she would have no problem conscience-wise to sign onto this lawsuit. It was sort of like that was the final affirmation that you know there couldn’t have been truly heartfelt, deep personal relationships.”

Dating back to the time Margolies invited him and his wife to Renaissance Weekend for the first time, the lawsuit confirmed his nagging feeling that everything she did was driven by political calculation. “It was a way you were indebted to her,” Fenton says. “And she would seemingly do something for you, but then call in the obligation at another time. You would feel used.”

There’s no question that the scandal and its messy fallout were damaging to Margolies as well. When she filed for bankruptcy, a judge rejected her assertion of ignorance in a scathing decision that, depending on how you read it, either calls her feminism into question or suggests she knows more than she’s letting on. “Her consistent response to questions asked by her creditors about the disposition of her assets is lack of knowledge or ‘my husband handled it,’ a mantra that is completely at odds with her public persona, background, and accomplishments,” the judge wrote.

…The night after the fundraiser I attended with Margolies, Hillary Clinton arrived in Philadelphia to give a speech to the Pennsylvania Conference for Women. Margolies was sitting in the audience and exchanged hellos with Clinton at the event. But when Hillary took the stage to praise a woman running for elected office in Pennsylvania, it was gubernatorial candidate Allyson Schwartz, the congresswoman Margolies is vying to replace.

…Perhaps the question to ask is not whether the Clintons will come—but whether it’ll make any difference if they do. Margolies is already being painted as the right-wing candidate running in her newly redrawn district, which is now considerably less suburban than it was 20 years ago. State representative Brendan Boyle is thought to have a lock on the urban part of the district, and state senator Daylin Leach is the favorite among progressive voters. While an internal poll showed Margolies as the frontrunner in August, it’s unclear what her natural voter base is. Indeed, if you scroll through her campaign donations, you’ll find that most of them come from tony suburbs like Bryn Mawr and Bala Cynwyd that are still located in her old district—not middle- and working-class Northeast Philadelphia, which now comprises more than half of the new seat. (When I float the possibility that some of her donors don’t know their district has moved, Margolies belts out a deep-throated laugh and says, ‘Thank God!”) And although she has gamely begun to Etch-a-Sketch—she told me President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus wasn’t big enough, a stark contrast to her “no” vote on Clinton’s $16 billion version in 1993—it might yet be her tony Main Line persona that does her in.

And the story, of course, doesn't stop there. Yesterday, Daylin Leach filed a complaint with the FEC noting that Margolies spent over $71,427 in general election funds from January 15th through the end of the reporting period on March 31. "Marjorie Margolies has broken the law and cheated in this race," said Leach. "She has broken the basic trust that all elected officials, or aspiring elected officials must have with the voters. That is why I am calling on Margolies, if she cannot explain how we are wrong about her finances, to finally, at long last, step down from this race and allow those who follow the rules to have an important debate about our country's future."