State Senators Sign Petition To Clear Larouche Document Demands Exoneration Of Fraud Conviction

Two Idaho state senators and a former justice of the Washington Supreme Court signed a petition demanding that President Clinton exonerate Lyndon LaRouche, the fringe presidential candidate convicted of fraud five years ago.

LaRouche, who has run for president in every race since 1976, was released on parole in January after serving five years in prison. He was convicted in 1988 of cheating tax collectors and his supporters, whose $30 million in loans were never repaid.

Many of those defrauded were elderly people whose credit card accounts were used without their permission.

LaRouche is famous for oddball international policy proposals. He is also known for reckless charges such as: the Queen of England is a dope dealer; former Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale was a “Soviet agent of influence;” and the Holocaust was a hoax.

In a full-page ad in the Aug. 11 edition of The Washington Post, LaRouche’s thinktank, The Schiller Institute, calls LaRouche’s conviction a stain on the honor of the U.S. justice system. It calls for immediate exoneration of LaRouche.

Among the hundreds of names on the petition are Idaho state Sens. Jerry Thorne, R-Nampa, and Atwell Parry, R-Melba.

Also supporting the petition was William Goodloe, a former Washington State Supreme Court justice, who now publishes a conservative newsletter in Seattle.

“Oh my gosh, where did I sign that, I wonder?” said Thorne, a 10-year veteran of the Idaho Senate who chairs the Taxation Committee, on Wednesday. “It doesn’t ring a bell at all. I really don’t know that much about it. I don’t know if he’s a political prisoner. The guy is a kook. There’s certainly no question about that.”

But, by Thursday, LaRouche supporters called Thorne to remind him he had signed the petition at the National Conference of State Legislatures convention in New Orleans last month.

“I think that Mr. LaRouche is a political prisoner,” Thorne said Thursday. “I suspect probably he’s guilty of something, but his jail terms are a little out of the ordinary.”

LaRouche is not victim of conspiracy. He’s just a high-profile convict, said U.S. Justice Department spokesman John Russell.

“He was tried in a court of law and convicted and went through the appellate process and was sent to prison and served his time,” Russell said Friday. “If he wants to ask for total exoneration, he can get a presidential pardon going through the normal channels.”

Efforts to reach Parry, who is the cochairman of the Legislature’s powerful budget-writing committee were unsuccessful.

Thorne said the two talked by telephone Wednesday and Parry reminded him that they signed the petition together. “We’re not of the mind of trying to run any political campaigns in this state for him or trying to run him for president,” Thorne said. “It’s just time to leave him alone.”

He said LaRouche’s fund-raising techniques were the norm. “You and I both know if we knew some of the fund-raising practices of both our main political parties of this country, some of them ought to be in jail, too. They’re just getting away with it, that’s all. LaRouche got caught.”

Goodloe said the guilty verdict against LaRouche was probably correct.

But Goodloe, who was a Washington state senator and Superior Court trial judge before he was elected to the Supreme Court, disagreed with the way LaRouche was prosecuted. “I just quarrelled with the procedure,” he said. “I thought that the trial tactics were a little bit brutal.”

Goodloe said he became interested in LaRouche’s case as a possible story for his newsletter. “I went over there (to LaRouche’s prison) to see if there was anything I could use in the report,” he said. “I spent the day with him and was very impressed with his intellectual capacity. This type of guy is too busy to worry about the mechanics of keeping an organization going.”

Marianna Wertz, vice president of the Schiller Institute, said she has signed affidavits from everyone on the petition and that she had to swear out a statement that she had permission to run the names before the Washington Post would run the ad.

LaRouche was convicted in 1988 on 11 mail fraud charges and one count of conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service by deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from supporters of his presidential campaign.

According to Schiller Institute literature, international bankers are guilty of “repeated injuries and usurpations” of the power of independent nations. The literature also claims LaRouche’s imprisonment was the direct result of political pressure applied to the Reagan administration by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.