Bilderberg Myths: Did Bill Clinton Go to Sintra in 1999?

By Will Banyan Copyright © 11 June 2015

Myths and unverified claims are the mainstay of Bilderberg reporting. They appeal to our suspicion that a great deal is being concealed at the highly secretive Bilderberg conferences and to our lack of trust in politicians and corporate elites to tell us the truth about who went and what was said. Numerous myths and unverified claims about Bilderberg have been bandied about in this past week ahead of the 63^rd Bilderberg conference, currently underway at the Interalpen Hotel, near the town of Telfs-Buchen in Austria. One that caught my eye was this little snippet in a report by Infowars reporter Paul Joseph Watson about how the Bilderbergers were backing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run for the White House:

Her husband Bill Clinton attended the 1991 meeting in Germany shortly before becoming President and he attended again in 1999 when the conference was held in Sintra, Portugal (despite Clinton’s lie that he had not attended in 15 years) (Infowars, Jun. 08, 2015).

That Bill Clinton attended the 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany is not in dispute. His participation was noted in a number of media reports at the time. Furthermore, Clinton devotes a couple of paragraphs to his participation at the conference in his autobiography My Life (2004), noting that he was “stimulated” by his conversations with the Europeans he met at the conclave (p.367).

Oddly, the seemingly well-qualified Watson missed another more significant Bilderberg appointment that was kept by Clinton: a visit to the Bilderberg Steering Committee, who were meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington DC on October 6, 1995. Evidence for that can be found in Clinton’s Daily Schedule for October 1995 and the Digest of Announcements.

Unfortunately and rather unhelpfully, Watson does not cite a source for his claim that Clinton was at the Bilderberg meeting held in Sintra, Portugal over June 3-6, 1999. But an earlier Infowars report by Kurt Nimmo, which claimed that “in 1999, Clinton attended a Bilderberg meeting in Sintra, Portugal”, cites as its source a report from World Net Daily (WND). The WND report claimed Bill Clinton’s name was on a “partial guest list” it had obtained from unknown sources for the Sintra meeting (WND, May 26, 1999). But the WND report fails to reproduce the document – assuming of course that they actually had it in the first place. But more importantly, there was no follow-up WND report to confirm that Clinton had actually attended. So it seems remarkable that Watson and Nimmo would make a claim that Clinton had lied based on nothing more than an unverified WND report that Clinton’s name was on a  “partial guest list”, when there is no copy of the original document and no evidence he went.

Their claim would have more credibility if there had been other evidence confirming that Clinton was in Portugal for the Bilderberg meeting.  Yet such evidence seems to be non-existent. Clinton’s name is missing from the list participants included in the leaked minutes for the Sintra meeting (which can be found on the Prison Planet website). Given that Hillary Clinton’s name was not included on the lists of participants for the 1997 Bilderberg meeting, which she did attend; the list could easily be discounted as unreliable. But in the First Lady’s case there were other sources confirming she was there. A report by the Associated Press (June 14, 1997) confirmed her presence at the Atlanta meeting, quoting a local official:

LAKE LANIER ISLANDS, Ga. (AP) – Hillary Rodham Clinton secretly met with international leaders at Lake Lanier Islands Friday at an annual behind-closed-doors meeting….

Hall County Sheriff Bob Vass said the first lady attended the meeting on Thursday and Friday.

The late Jim Tucker, Spotlight magazine’s Bilderberg gumshoe, also got wind of her presence as he noted in his Bilderberg Diary (2005):

Clinton was also given unofficial fill-ins by his wife Hillary, the only first lady to ever attend a Bilderberg meeting, and [George] Stephanopoulos.

Mrs. Clinton’s presence was kept off even Bilderberg’s own “confidential, not for circulation” list of participants. But her presence was confirmed by me at the Lake Lanier Islands, Ga., meeting site. In Washington, the White House reluctantly confirmed her presence, although the mainstream press obeyed orders not to report the fact (pp.138-139).

And of course, more recently, as noted by a number of observers, her presence at the 1997 Bilderberg meeting has been confirmed by documents released by the Clinton Presidential Library, and now held at the Clinton Digital Library. The same cannot be said for Bill Clinton’s alleged visit to the Sintra meeting.

Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary does not place Clinton at the Sintra conference. Tucker wrote that at the same time Bilderberg was occurring, Clinton was:

conferring with U.S. military leaders on plans for a ground war. Clinton and Bilderberg were only a phone call away (pp.149-150).

Despite the seemingly unshakeable certainty of Watson and Nimmo, there are no reports I could find confirming that Clinton was in Sintra.

A review of Clinton’s Daily Schedule for June 1999 also fails to disclose any sudden trips to Portugal. From June 3 to June 4 Clinton’s schedule is filled with appointments in Washington DC, most of them at the White House. The only window of opportunity for Clinton to make a quick dash to Portugal and back would have been from the evening of June 4, which he had off, and over the weekend June 5-6, where he was listed as being at Camp David. Although that seems unlikely, as he was reportedly forced to cut his stay Camp David short, due to the breakdown in negotiations over the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo (Reuters News, June 7, 1999). But even if this trip did happen, then evidence for it has been suppressed, for no such trip is included in the US State Department’s record of the “Travels of President William J. Clinton”:

TRAVELS OF PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON

Germany	Frankfurt, Ramstein Air Force Base, Spangdahlem Air Force Base, Bonn, Ingelheim	Addressed U.S. military personnel; met with Chancellor Schroeder; met with Kosovo refugees.	May 4-​6, 1999
Switzerland	Geneva	Addressed ILO Conference; met with President Dreifuss.	June 16, 1999

There is also no mention of a visit by Clinton to the 1999 meeting in the Clinton Digital Library’s inventory of documents on Bilderberg, which does summarise what visits did occur:

Then Governor Clinton attended the 1991 Bilderberg Conference in Baden-Baden, Germany (for which no records were available); and First Lady Hillary Clinton attended the Atlanta, Georgia Conference in June of 1997. President Clinton made brief remarks at the Bilderberg Steering Committee Meeting in October of 1995. Also, several National Security Council staff members have spoken at Bilderberg events.

The records listed in the document includes extensive files on the briefings prepared for Hillary Clinton’s visit to the 1997 meeting, and even for George Stephanopoulos’ attendance, but there are no files relating to a Presidential visit to the 1999 meeting. “Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence”, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to like saying, but when the claims about Clinton are based on nothing more than a “partial guest list” of unknown, but likely dubious providence, the absence is telling.

There can be no doubt that in his personal and political life, former President William Clinton has told a great many lies. Anyone who reads the late Christopher Hitchens’ book No One Left To Lie To (1999), will get a strong sense of the extent of his duplicity and deceitfulness. But in this case, the charge that Clinton has lied about his Bilderberg participation because he omits the Sintra meeting does not hold up.

So a word of advice to Messrs Watson and Nimmo: if you want your Bilderberg reporting to be taken more seriously, stop repeating a claim that is more fiction than fact.