![\"jeb_bush_stern\"](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/jeb_bush_stern.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nNEW YORK \u2013 Just as the Bush family is about to put on a full-court press to save the failing presidential candidacy of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Nixon confidant Roger Stone and co-author Saint John Hunt, son of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, have published an expos\u00e9 titled\u00a0\u201cJeb! and the Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cVirtually every one of Jeb\u2019s failed business enterprises is a carried interest in which he put up no cash but used his family name and connections to secure loans, financing, waivers, or other financially significant benefits,\u201d Stone and Hunt write. \u201cNo less than five of Bush\u2019s former partners in these endeavors are in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n image: http:\/\/www.wnd.com\/files\/2016\/02\/jeb_and_the_bush_crime_family.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n With Jeb Bush recruiting his family\u2019s assistance in the South Carolina primary, Stone Stone and Hunt trace the family history back to patriarch Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush, presenting evidence of the role Prescott Bush played in financing the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.<\/p>\n Stone and Hunt write on Page 92 that shortly after Pearl Harbor, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, Franklin Roosevelt shut down Union Banking Corporation, a bank Prescott Bush ran as part of his duties at Brown Brothers Harriman for the benefit of Fritz Thyssen.<\/p>\n Thyssen was the German banker first introduced to Hitler in 1924 by Rudolph Hess, who went on to write a book published in the United States in 1941, \u201cI Paid Hitler,\u201d in which Thyssen described the key role he played financing Hitler\u2019s war machine.<\/p>\n Stone and Hunt write on Page 322 that prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks\u00a0on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, George W. Bush, together with his long-time adviser James Baker and former British Prime Minister John Major, visited Saudi Arabia to solicit a contribution of more than $80 million to the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based $16 billion private investment firms with ties to U.S. intelligence that was \u201cpaying huge fees\u201d to former President George H. W. Bush and Baker.<\/p>\n The authors report that the FBI was pulled off an investigation of the bin Laden family and Saudi royals after George W. Bush was elected president, ignoring evidence that on Sept. 11 Shafiq bin Laden, an \u201cestranged\u201d half brother of Osama bin Laden, gave the Carlyle Group $38 million to manage.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s therefore not surprising that the BBC reported<\/a> that FBI agents in London were pulled off an investigation of Bin Laden family and Saudi royals soon after George W. Bush took office,\u201d Stone and Hunt comment. \u201cIn addition to Osama Bin Laden, other members of the family had terrorist connections and were under investigation by the FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n Pot, CIA, failed businesses<\/b><\/p>\n Stone and Hunt on Page 15 take Jeb to task for his \u201cconservative\u201d stance on marijuana. They cite former New York Republican congressman John LeBoutillier, who wrote in 2013<\/a> that two former classmates who attended Phillips Academy at Andover told him at Harvard class reunions that Jeb, while attending, not only ran a marijuana and alcohol ring selling product to his classmates but also was a habitual marijuana smoker who was \u201cstoned all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone and Hunt write that Jeb Bush played a role in the Iran-Contra affair. In 1977, George H. W. Bush, as one of his last acts as CIA director, got his Spanish-speaking son to work at age 24 as a \u201cbranch manager\u201d and \u201cvice president\u201d at Texas Commerce Bank, then \u201can optimal cover for CIA activities.\u201d Jeb Bush, who knew the language as a result of his time as an exchange student in Guadalajara, was sent along with his Mexican wife, Columba, to Caracas, Venezuela.<\/p>\n Jeb Bush officially was Texas Commerce Bank\u2019s \u201ctop point man in the Venezuelan capital and, unofficially, the CIA\u2019s main financial liaison to the Venezuelan oil industry and the Colombian narcotics cartels,\u201d Stone and Hunt note.<\/p>\n \u201cJeb helped lay the groundwork for the future Reagan-Bush administration\u2019s 1980s covert war against Nicaragua and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador by establishing banking and money laundering links between the CIA and the Medellin and Cali drug cartels,\u201d Stone and Hunt continue.<\/p>\n \u201cJeb\u2019s friends in the Colombian cartels, particularly Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar, would help finance the Nicaraguan contras in return for CIA-supplied weapons,\u201d the authors write. \u201cWhile in Venezuela, Jeb cleverly managed to hide the Colombian cartel\u2019s drug revenues as oil industry revenues of \u2018front\u2019 companies. Texas Commerce Bank was the bank of choice for Latin American drug cartels. It was later discovered to have stashed $7 million in drug profits for the Gulf cartel of Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone and Hunt write that Jeb Bush served as liaison for the Nicaraguan contras when his father was vice president, citing evidence in Pages 17-21 that Jeb was deeply involved with the CIA-led operation to traffic cocaine into the United States and sell it to raise money to fund the Nicaragua Contras after Congress cut off the funding with the Boland amendment.<\/p>\n While Jeb\u2019s brother Neil was a board member involved in the fraudulent lending that bankrupted Silverado Savings in Denver in the 1980s, Stone and Hunt detail on Pages 40-41 how Jeb\u2019s business career involved the bankruptcy of Broward Savings and Loan.<\/p>\n Jeb and a business partner borrowed money from the bank to buy a building, with the federal government ending up repaying most of the loan after the bank went insolvent. The government paid $4 million to make the loan good as part of the bailout of the savings and loan industry, after Jeb and his partner negotiated a settlement with the regulators to repay only $505,000 to retain the building.<\/p>\n Profligate spending<\/b><\/p>\n On Page 5, Stone and Hunt cite the Cato Institute\u2019s analysis<\/a> of Jeb Bush\u2019s term as Florida governor from 1999 to 2007. Cato documented that Florida general fund spending increased from $18 billion to $28.2 billion, or 57 percent, and total state spending increased from $45.6 billion to $66.1 billion, or 45 percent.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no reason to think his appetite for big spending would be any different in the White House,\u201d Stone and Hunt argue.<\/p>\n Stone and Hunt note that while Florida governor, Jeb Bush directed $150 million of the public employee\u2019s pension fund to an alternative investment fund run by Goldman Sachs while Bush\u2019s cousin, George H. Walker IV, ran the firm\u2019s alternative investment division.<\/p>\n Jeb Bush directed another $250 million of the public employee\u2019s pension fund to Lehman Brothers. Then, when he left office in 2007, Lehman hired him for $1.3 million a year, paid to his consulting firm Jeb Bush and Associates. Two months after Jeb joined Lehman Brothers, the firm sold Florida hundreds of millions of dollars of toxic, mortgage-backed securities on which it lost more than $1 billion after the securities defaulted.<\/p>\n<\/a> seeks to make his new book every bit as relevant as the one he published last October with Robert Morrow, \u201cThe Clintons\u2019 War on Women,\u201d which spotlighted Bill Clinton\u2019s history as a serial sexual predator and his wife\u2019s role in covering up for him and attacking the victims.The new Bush family expos\u00e9 <\/a>follows in the tradition of Kevin Phillips\u2019 2004 bestseller, \u201cAmerican Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,\u201d and Russ Baker\u2019s 2009 book, \u201cFamily of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces that Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America.\u201d<\/p>\n