By Johnny Vedmore via NEWSPASTE Original
Stanley Pottinger played a central role in signing-off Watergate, the Kent State Massacre, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But as his time at the Justice Dept. came to an end, he also helped his good friend and CIA director, George H. W. Bush, in other ways. However, Bush was not Pottinger’s only connection to the world of intelligence during this period, he was also busy smuggling arms with Jeffrey Epstein himself. Welcome to the Pottinger Supremacy.
Pottinger had been the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice from 1973, eventually standing down in 1977, where he became classified as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General for a brief period later that same year. In that position, Pottinger was allowed to stay on under the Carter administration to finish his official investigation into the Watergate scandal. During the years which were to follow, Pottinger first worked as an attorney on behalf of very large companies, as well as some other rather sinister individuals, before going into banking soon after. However, during this period of Pottinger’s life, his association with a certain three letter US intelligence agency becomes unbearably obvious.
As J. Stanley Pottinger left government service, his mentions in the annuls of history decrease. He was no longer the public face of an influential government department, instead, he moved on to join a reformed private legal practice which was still finding its feet. On 5 August 1975, Troy, Malin and Loveland had been formed and was originally registered at 324 Datura St., West Palm Beach, Florida. The named directors of the legal firm, Joseph F. Troy, Ronald H. Malin and Joseph A. Loveland Jr., didn’t start by practising law in Florida, they had all been based in Los Angeles, California and that is where the practice had originally begun to see clients. Within a couple of years, Loveland Jr. became a Director, Vice-President and General Counsel for the hotel chain Ramada Inns, later going on to mange other successful enterprises and, by 1978, his old legal firm was being reformed into Troy, Malin and Pottinger (TMP).
In 1978, the State Bar Annual Report of TMP listed ten shareholders as part of the law firm, but by the following year TMP only registered two shareholders, Troy and Malin, leading to an eventual court case in 1984 to establish who actually owned shares in the firm.
The King of Compliance
The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), also referred to as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act, was passed by the US congress on 26 October 1970. The act had been successfully pushed forward due to the efforts of Rep. Wright Patman, a Democrat of Texas, who, in the early 70s, was the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. The law required financial institutions in the US to assist American government agencies in their efforts to detect and prevent money laundering.
In July of 1972, after an eight month delay, the Treasury Dept. officially put the BSA-related regulations into the Federal Register which enabled the law to take effect. However, by the 1980s many institutions hadn’t changed their behaviour, with various groups claiming that the act violated Fourth Amendment rights protecting against unwarranted search and seizure along with Fifth Amendment rights protecting due process. In 1977, the Treasury Department was pushed into action on enforcing the measures within the banking sector and the following year they were reportedly ready to take action.
In a New York Times article dated 23 January 1978, entitled: “US, After Lapse, Is Enforcing Bank Secrecy Act,” announced the action being taken against various organisations, stating:
“The Treasury, which last year fined Gulf Oil $229,500 for failing to report money it brought into the United States, is expected to bring further actions against other corporate violators including Lockheed and Phillips [sic], according to congressional sources.”
The article, written by Jeff Gerth, noted the recent troubles experienced by, among others, Chemical Bank which in 1977 had been indicted on 445 counts of failure to report $8.5 million in cash which they had moved into the US. Gerth writes that many banks were also guilty of moving cash which “involved laundered funds of suspected narcotics traffickers.”
To tackle the growing risk of more serious indictments, companies such as Chemical Bank were looking for a legal representative who had significant and confirmed influence within government. The latter article also states:
“Chemical Bank, in the wake of its indictment last year, instituted substantive changes in its operations. The bank, sixth largest in the nation, strengthened its auditing and compliance division and hired two former Justice Department officials —Harold R. Tyler Jr., former Deputy Attorney General, and J. Stanley Pottinger, former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the civil rights division. In an independent inquiry, the two men detailed various weaknesses in the bank’s monitoring and reporting techniques. As a result, the bank adopted new, tighter procedures.”
Pottinger was highly sought-after once he left the White House and, in expanding his horizons, it wasn’t only Chemical Bank which enticed Pottinger to represent them. After all, as advances in communication technology increased exponentially, so did the risk of negative public exposure with the potential to cause a scandal for any famous brand. This gave large corporations the impetus to revitalise their public image by creating highly skilled integrity checkers to examine their companies’ procedures for any potential significant issues. By early 1978, Pottinger had seen a growing gap in the market. The Atlanta Constitution reported on 7 May 1978 that:
“One government source, who has been closely tracking the upsurge in so called “corporate integrity investigations,” estimates that fully one-fourth of the nation’s “Fortune 500” businesses have hired outside law firms or financial detectives in an effort to rid themselves of everything from dishonest executives to infiltration by organized crime.”
The article goes on to say:
“Recently, for example, J. Stanley Pottinger, former head of the Justice department’s {sic] civil rights division, formed one such company in Washington with John Olszewski, the hard-nosed former head of the intelligence division of the Internal Revenue Service. When Pottinger’s law firm is hired to probe a large corporation, he simply contracts with his own company to do the actual investigative legwork.”
Pottinger had created a company with a former intelligence chief, offering large corporations internal investigations that could potentially reveal awkward revelations and prevent public exposure. This seemed to be where Pottinger shone the most. While in public office he had been the go to guy for when the government needed to investigate themselves and keep any potential revelations from becoming common knowledge. In relation to the Kent State Shootings, Watergate, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Pottinger had not only spearheaded the investigations, he had also been responsible for the official cover ups.
