James Blair, the man who helped Hillary Clinton make over $ 99,000 in commodities trading, says he wasn't aware of any bid to manipulate the cattle futures market during the time he was advising Clinton on her cattle investments.
In an interview Sunday with USA TODAY, Blair denied knowing about, or benefiting from, any improper trading actions by Refco Inc., the brokerage firm that handled his trading account as well as the first lady's.
"There was nothing illegal about what I did, there was nothing improper about it, there was nothing unethical," Blair said.
Blair confirmed he gave extensive investment advice to Clinton between October 1978 and July 1979, while she was trading with Refco's Springdale, Ark. office. But he said he didn't offer specific tips from Thomas Dittmer, Refco's president.
"I don't know if she ever knew (Dittmer's) name," Blair said. "I may have told her things in a general way, that the (brokerage) house thinks cattle are oversold, or overbought. But I never told her I thought Dittmer was controlling the market."
Blair also said he didn't control Clinton's trades. "I passed on my advice. She may have taken it some times, and she may not have taken it sometimes."
Refco, Dittmer and Robert "Red" Bone, the manager of the Springdale office, were disciplined in 1979 by the Commodities Futures Trading Exchange for widespread trading abuses in the cattle futures market in 1978 and 1979.
In the early 1980s, dozens of customers and brokers in the Springdale office, including Bone, sued Dittmer and Refco, claiming Dittmer had masterminded a scheme to control price movements in the cattle futures market.
The lawsuits claimed that in the early fall of 1979, Dittmer encouraged Refco brokers and customers to place big bets the price of cattle would rise. But, the plaintiffs charged, he was secretly betting prices would fall. On Oct. 2, prices did plunge, causing huge losses in the Springdale office.
The suits say Dittmer, a part owner of several cattle feed lots, delivered a large number of cows to market Oct. 2, knowing that would drive prices down. Dittmer denied the claims. Guilty verdicts by Arkansas juries were later overturned.
The time covered by the lawsuits, September and October 1979, came after Hillary Clinton stopped trading. But several witnesses claimed market manipulation by Refco and Dittmer also occurred in 1978 and 1979, when Clinton was investing.
Blair now denies this, even though he suffered major losses in the Oct. 2 slump, and testified for plaintiffs in the Arkansas cases. Dittmer and Refco "might have been able to have some influence on the market on a very temporary basis," Blair said. "But the markets are too big for anybody to control.
In his 1984 testimony, Blair said he chose to trade with Refco because Bone convinced him the firm had "inside information" about the cattle market. Blair now says he wasn't referring to details about Dittmer's alleged market-rigging scheme, but rather to information about what meat packers, supermarket chains and other major players planned to do.
At the time, he said, trading on such information was legal. "The world was different in the 1970s than it is today," he said.
