Clinton and Burkle

The former president has been hanging out a lot with the Bev Hills billionaire, and Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum tries, without much success, to get a handle on the relationship. But if it’s true that you can learn a lot about someone by the friends he keeps, well, it's best to steer clear of Bill. Burkle is part of the "fast crowd" that Clinton seems to spend way too much time with. Purdum writes of an elaborate wedding in Paris that both men attended last summer and where Burkle was accompanied by an attractive blonde, "described by a fellow guest as 'not much older than 19, if she was that.'" Here's more of the local angle:

Burkle’s usual means of transport is the custom-converted Boeing 757 that Clinton calls “Ron Air” and that Burkle’s own circle of young aides privately refer to as “Air Fuck One.” Clinton himself had arrived on the private plane of another California friend, the real-estate heir, Democratic donor, liberal activist, and sometime movie and music producer Steve Bing, whose colorful private life includes fathering a child out of wedlock with the actress Elizabeth Hurley and suing the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian for invasion of privacy, alleging that private investigators for Kerkorian swiped Bing’s dental floss out of his trash in a successful effort to prove that Bing’s DNA matched that of a child delivered by Kerkorian’s ex-wife, the former tennis pro Lisa Bonder. (The suit was later settled out of court.)

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A former Burkle associate told me that Burkle has always been careful to conduct his own social life discreetly in Clinton’s presence, but would not deny that the divorced Burkle leads what he euphemistically called a “European lifestyle.” And, the former associate added, “how many older guys wouldn’t want to hang out with younger girls, if they could? Would you rather hang out with a smart, good-looking 20-year-old, or a 45-year-old?” One person, who has worked at the highest levels for both Clintons, told me that Clinton’s association with such people “just shows poor judgment, for someone who understands political calculations the way he does, and the subtleties as he does, that he puts himself in that position.”

The piece delves into the Clinton-Burkle business partnership (some of the information has been reported before). Clinton has been paid to be an advisor to Burkle and also receives a stake in Burkle's investment funds. Since the Clinton finances are comingled, there's no way of knowing whether the money Hillary lent to her campaign actually came from the pockets of Ron Burkle. By the way, the article also mentions the various tabloid reports of Bill being in the company of women.

Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.