Where’s Whitewater?
That’s the question David Kendall, President Clinton lawyer, and other Clinton supporters are asking as the nation finally gets to pore over Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s lengthy report on possible impeachable offenses committed by the president.
On Friday, Congress posted Starr’s report, alleging perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power by Clinton in hiding his 18-month-long affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, on the Internet.
Starr’s report mentions no impeachable offenses by Clinton as a result of the investigation into the Whitewater land deal, which took up the bulk of Starr’s four-year, $40 million inquiry into the president. Indeed, in the entire 445-page report, Starr alludes only once to the Whitewater investigation, citing suspicious parallels between Vernon Jordan’s efforts to help convicted Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell financially and to find Lewinsky a job, presumably to buy their silence.
Starr’s investigators “recognized parallels between Mr. Jordan’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and his earlier relationship with a pivotal Whitewater-Madison (Guarantee) figure, Webster L. Hubbell,” the independent counsel’s report states. “Prior to January 1998, the OIC possessed evidence that Vernon Jordan — along with other high-level associates of the President and the First Lady — helped Mr. Hubbell obtain lucrative consulting contracts while he was a potential witness and/or subject in the OIC’s ongoing investigation.” Starr’s office “also possessed evidence that the President and the First Lady knew and approved of the Hubbell-focused assistance,” the report says.
Citing these parallels, Starr won Attorney General Janet Reno’s recommendation in January to expand his Whitewater investigation into the Lewinsky affair. For several months, Starr’s investigation ran two grand juries — one in Little Rock, Ark., to continue its probe into Whitewater, and another in Washington to investigate the Lewinsky affair. In May, after 30 months, the Arkansas grand jury wrapped up its investigation with a contempt indictment of Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons’ partners in the failed Whitewater land deal and an operator of the Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan, which was involved in the land deal.
All in all, Starr’s Whitewater investigation produced only a handful of convictions for fraud and other charges. Those convicted included former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker; Susan McDougal’s husband, James, who also operated Madison Guarantee; and David Hale, a former municipal judge. Hale, a convicted felon, emerged as a central figure in the Whitewater investigation, alleging that Clinton pressured him to obtain an illegal $300,000 loan for Susan McDougal, which she then used to help bail out the failing Whitewater project. Clinton has always denied Hale’s allegations, and the expiration of the Arkansas grand jury without an immediate report of any wrongdoing by Clinton strongly suggested that Starr was unable to make a case against the president.
“Where’s Whitewater?” Kendall asked in a 73-page preliminary rebuttal that was released just minutes before Starr’s report went up on the Web. “The Office of the Independent Counsel’s allegations reportedly include no suggestion of wrongdoing by the President in any of the areas which Mr. Starr spent four years investigating: Whitewater, the FBI files and the White House travel office. What began as an inquiry into a 24-year-old land deal in Arkansas has ended in an inquest into brief, improper personal encounters between the President and Monica Lewinsky.”
While Kendall was clearly trying to highlight the time and money Starr wasted on his fruitless Whitewater investigation, Richard Benveniste, the former minority counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee, said it came as no surprise to him that Starr’s report included no Whitewater evidence.
“It didn’t surprise me because there was nothing illegal, much less noteworthy, about Whitewater after four years,” Benvenisti told Salon. “Secondly, they had long ago leaked that there wouldn’t be anything about Whitewater.”
Indeed, on April 20, two weeks before the Arkansas grand jury expired, New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton wrote that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” for Starr’s prosecutor’s to build a case against President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton because so much of the case rested on the testimony and credibility of witnesses like Hale. A month before the Arkansas grand jury expired, Salon published allegations that Hale had received payments and other assistance from right-wing enemies of President Clinton. The allegations, which Hale has denied, are now the subject of a separate investigation headed by former senior Justice Department investigator Michael E. Shaheen Jr..
Until then, however, Starr’s Whitewater probe dominated the media, providing Clinton’s hard-core political foes with a focus around which they concentrated their attacks. Emboldened by Starr’s investigation, Clinton’s political enemies leveled other charges against the president, including wild and unsubstantiated allegations that Clinton had murdered his friend, White House Counsel Vince Foster, smuggled drugs into Arkansas and used cocaine. These charges all proved to be spurious. Both Starr and his predecessor, Robert Fiske, ruled Foster’s death a suicide, and two congressional committees investigated the drug charges and found them false.
But one charge did stick. In December 1993, the American Spectator, a conservative magazine, published a story in which former members of Clinton’s Arkansas security detail alleged that he had extramarital affairs while he was governor. One of those with whom Clinton was linked was a woman identified only as “Paula.”
Out of that article came the Paula Jones sexual misconduct suit against the president, which the Supreme Court, in a controversial decision, ruled could proceed while the president was in office. By then, Clinton had had a sexual affair with Lewinsky, a former White House intern who confided her trysts with the president to Linda Tripp, a disgruntled Pentagon employee. The president’s lawyer for the Jones case, Robert Bennett, had publicly said Tripp was “not to be believed” when she told Newsweek that she had seen another woman, White House volunteer Kathleen Willey, emerge from the Oval Office with her clothing askew and claiming that Clinton had groped her.
To protect herself against further assaults on her credibility, Tripp has claimed, she tape-recorded Lewinsky’s account of her affair with the president, turned the evidence over to Starr, taped Lewinsky again wearing an FBI wire, and then shared Lewinsky’s story with Jones’ lawyers. On Jan. 17, when Clinton was deposed by Jones’ lawyers, he was asked if he had ever had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky and he said no. That denial, repeated before Starr’s grand jury, is now the basis of Starr’s allegations of perjury against the president.
But the Whitewater saga isn’t over. Under the law, Starr still must submit a report on his investigation of the land deal to the three-judge panel that appointed him. Only then will the public get to see if the results merited the political and media frenzy that surrounded the affair for so long. But it is widely believed the report, when it is delivered, will include no evidence of impeachable offenses by the president or Hillary Clinton.
Asked to reflect on the absence of Whitewater material in Starr’s report, the New York Times’ Gerth, who broke the first Whitewater story in March 1992, politely declined. “I don’t have emotional attachments to my stories,” he said in an interview. “I haven’t stayed on Whitewater as a crusade … I’ve written about a thousand different things in the last six years. I don’t have any books. I don’t go on TV. I don’t have anything invested in my stories.”
Gerth recalled that his first Whitewater story was written at a time when the country was still reeling from the Saving & Loan scandal and keenly interested in the connections between those banking institutions and politicians. “And Bill Clinton was a presidential candidate of whom the American people knew nothing,” he said. “I was writing for the first time about his associations and business dealings and regulatory dealings with a questionable S&L character. That was the context of that story.”
“But where things go is not anything that I have any control over,” he added. “Did I expect when I wrote the piece six years ago that there’d be some independent counsel six years later filing a report for possible impeachment over sex activities? Of course not. I couldn’t have contemplated that. But neither could have anybody else.”
Benveniste, the former minority White House counsel, takes it a step further, blaming Clinton for turning Whitewater into a drowning pool. “Clearly, on the eve of Starr’s closing down of his failed investigation after $40 million of taxpayer money, Clinton provided him with at least the basis to charge impropriety and make it stick. Whether it’s illegal or criminal or an impeachable offense is another issue, but you could say about Clinton that he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
WASHINGTON — In the wake of the U.S. cruise-missile attacks against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan, a predictable wave of anti-American fervor is sweeping the Middle East and the Muslim world. What is unusual is that the anger is coming from political moderates who loathe bin Laden and his brand of violent Islamic fundamentalism as much as the United States does.
Behind the images of angry mobs burning effigies of President Clinton is a vast hinterland of outrage and reluctant sympathy for bin Laden, populated not only by the poor and disenfranchised but also by articulate middle-class Arabs and Muslims who have the most to lose from the challenges posed by the wealthy Saudi-turned-Islamic warrior.
Railing for the removal of American forces from the Persian Gulf and a return by Middle Eastern governments to strict Islamic law and values, fundamentalists like bin Laden are widely regarded by Arab moderates as threats to the stability of their societies. To illustrate the consequences of bin Laden’s vision, moderates point to the civil war in Algeria, where fighting between militant Muslims and government troops over the past five years has left at least 80,000 dead. In Egypt, where Islamic militants have attacked tourists and intellectuals and tried to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, there is broad support among middle-class Egyptians for the government’s crackdown on violent fundamentalist groups.
Yet in response to the American attacks on bin Laden, Sanaa Al Said, a columnist for the Egyptian newspaper Al Wafd, wrote: “Overnight, the man has been transformed from an outlawed criminal on the run into a national hero standing against a hated superpower … which has come to our region and wreaked its own havoc here … Changes are on the way. U.S. hegemony will, one day, come to an end, and then the world will breathe more freely.”
Moderate Arab governments, many of them U.S. allies with terrorist problems of their own, have studiously kept quiet about the attack. But in their silence, other Arab commentators have echoed the same themes as Al Said: America’s clumsiness in dealing with bin Laden, its double standard when dealing with Israeli violence and its tendency to use force and embargoes when dealing with Arabs and Muslims. While such sentiments have long formed the core of Arab intellectual thought, the American attack has brought this anger to the surface, where it is likely to influence government leaders — and future U.S. policy.
“Among the Arab and Muslim middle classes, there is a lot of resentment toward U.S. policies, toward the status quo; and tremendous frustration that their governments can’t do anything,” says Shibley Telhami, a professor of Middle Eastern affairs at the University of Maryland. “Therefore someone like bin Laden, who challenges the status quo, is seen by the middle classes as a sympathetic figure, even if they don’t like him or his agenda.”
Resentment toward America by Arab elites also has become personal. Outside
American media circles, perhaps the biggest supporters of the “Wag the Dog”
interpretation of the U.S. attack — that Clinton struck to deflect attention
from the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal — are Arab writers, journalists and
intellectuals. In the Arab world, this interpretation flows logically from an
earlier conspiracy theory about the scandal, which holds that Lewinsky, who is
Jewish, was part of a plot hatched by Israel and its American Jewish
supporters to cripple Clinton’s ability to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
Telhami, who also writes a weekly commentary for the Arabic-language Radio
Monte Carlo, says he spends much of his efforts trying to convince Arab
intellectuals that such conspiracy theories are overheated fantasies. But from
the vantage point of the Middle East, he notes, it is difficult for Arabs to
view Clinton’s strike against bin Laden in isolation from the other components
making up America’s Middle East policy.
In addition to Clinton’s reluctance to confront Israel’s excesses, he says,
“Arabs look at the region and they see four countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya and
Sudan — under severe international sanctions that are U.S.-led and
unprecedented in [the] history of international relations. They see five Middle
Eastern countries [same as above, plus Syria] listed as sponsors of terrorism,
and they see American forces based on the territories of eight countries in
the region.” (Those eight are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, UAE and Oman.)
“So while conspiracy theories are crazy, there are still some objective
reasons why people think that the U.S. is targeting them. And they make a lot
of stories out of it,” he says.
Another chord that bin Laden has struck among Arab elites is their
nervousness about the phenomenon of globalization, which many view as a
thinly veiled attempt by the U.S. to Americanize the world by
expanding global markets and then filling its shelves with American products,
ideas and expectations. At a recent conference on globalization in Asilah,
Morocco, speaker after speaker from the Arab world portrayed globalization as
a new form of American imperialism, destined to gobble up their economies and
societies and incorporate them into a global landscape defined by McDonald’s,
the Internet and Bruce Willis movies.
“This globalization is a raging torrent that’s going to wash away our borders,
our cultures and our identities,” warned Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian who
teaches Middle East politics at Georgetown University. It is worth noting that
Fandy’s concerns are not that different from the warnings against American
imperialism issued by bin Laden himself.
With the Arab and Muslim worlds in an uproar over the U.S. attack, the
question now is what affect this anger will have on Middle East governments
and, by extension, U.S. policy in the region.
Some maintain that the outrage of the Arab elites doesn’t really matter at
all. These observers note that with the exception of the fall of the Iranian
shah, the authoritarian governments of the Middle East have learned how to
deal with popular unrest and know how to balance their need for survival
against their need for the United States. Others believe that the deep
resentments unleashed by the American attack eventually will destabilize the
regimes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other pro-American countries.
“The truth is always in the middle,” Telhami says, “and the truth is this:
What’s happening isn’t going to immediately threaten the Saudi regime or the
Egyptian regime. But it’s going to limit their options. It means that when the
United States faces a crisis with Iraq in the next few weeks, where the use of
force will be contemplated, the chances that the U.S. will get any cooperation
from Muslim and Arab countries will have diminished dramatically as a
consequence of this. The same applies to any coalition coming together around
the issue of terrorism.”
Many analysts of the region say the only way the United States can avoid that
lonely scenario is by addressing moderate Arab concerns. That means not only
punishing enemies like bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but also pushing Israel
harder on the peace process and encouraging moderates in Iran. And it means
demonstrating that globalization includes benefits for Arabs that go beyond
Big Macs and cyberporn.
Just as the U.S. cruise missiles sent an unmistakable message to bin Laden,
Arab moderates appear to be sending a message to President Clinton. That
message says the moderates don’t like bin Laden any more than the Americans
do. But it also warns that the societies of the region are fragile and could
fracture as a result of one-dimensional American policies. If that happens,
they seem to be saying, President Clinton’s new war against terror could
become a clash of civilizations.
Now that Monica Lewinsky has delivered her long-awaited account of her alleged affair with President Clinton to Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, a deep sense of uncertainty and foreboding has taken grip among Democrats over the long-term damage that the party may suffer as a result of the sex scandal.
Though Democratic Congress members are showing demonstrative signs of support for Clinton as he prepares for his own grand jury testimony on Aug. 17, many are feeling uncomfortably tentative when it comes to their reelection strategies only months before the fall midterm elections. Moreover, a host of unanswered questions about the president’s relationship with Lewinsky, coupled with the public’s unpredictable reaction should an affair be proven, has created another zone of political darkness as the party looks toward the presidential election in 2000.
“The reality is we are in uncharted waters,” says one Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified. “We are certainly where no human being has gone before. Nobody can say with any certainty what will happen under any scenario.”
To minimize those uncertainties, the clear preference among lawmakers, party activists and elders is for a presidential mea culpa if Clinton has lied, and for a political denouement that will end the Lewinsky scandal “with a whimper, not a bang,” as one congressman put it. Absent such an apology, Democrats regard Clinton’s testimony on Aug. 17 as some kind of political watershed, both for him and the party.
“Once he’s testified, we will have turned a corner,” said another pollster, adding fretfully: “Of course we don’t where that corner will lead.”
A major question for the Democrats is when Starr will send his report to Congress on his four-year-long criminal investigation of the president. Some Republicans are now calling for Starr to submit it before the midterm election, hoping it will discredit Clinton enough to cripple his ability to raise money for the Democrats. Reflecting Democratic concerns, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt has warned Starr he would be making a “grave mistake” if he submits his report before the election. “That would be very partisan, very unfair and demeaning to the process that I think all of us believe is important to this country,” he said.
Amid all this uncertainty over the president’s future, some in the party are taking temporary shelter in polling figures that show that, despite the fact that a majority of Americans believe Clinton had a sexual affair with Lewinsky and lied about it, they still continue to give the president high job approval ratings.
“I was in Florida doing focus groups earlier this week, and we asked people to assume the worst about the Lewinsky matter, and people just didn’t care,” says Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster. “They really think this is about sex. They disapprove of Clinton’s behavior, but they think it’s between him and his wife. Even on the question of perjury, they think he shouldn’t have been asked about it in the first place.”
If Clinton’s polls remain high, adds Mark Mellman, another party pollster, Democratic incumbents probably will not be punished for the president’s alleged sins in the fall midterms.
But party strategists say they have abandoned any expectation of recapturing Democratic control of the House from the Republicans, and they blame the media’s intense coverage of the Lewinsky affair for their dashed hopes. “The static from this scandal has drowned out all other issues,” complains Garin. “It’s impossible to have an argument about tobacco, saving Social Security, education and health care because the noise from this scandal is simply impenetrable. So it’s impossible to make a coherent political argument why voters should be for Democrats instead of Republicans.”
As the Democrats squirm uneasily through the uncertainty of the weeks and months ahead, party spinmeisters are trying to soothe concerns with some political logic that would have been unthinkable in the past. Says one Democratic consultant: “This is a president who, over time, has completely lost his moral authority. But in almost every other respect, he hasn’t lost a thing. And he hasn’t been an in a situation where he has had to call on his moral authority. So his political importance has not been diminished.”
That wishful formulation already is being challenged in the wake of the
terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. In such
moments, as counter-terrorism experts begin the long process of finding those
responsible, moral authority is often all a president can bring to soothe the
nation’s agony. And over the horizon, more challenges to the United States are
looming — the deepening economic crisis in Asia, a collapsing Russian
economy, a faltering Middle East peace process and now a new confrontation
with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. If Clinton, as commander in chief, needs
to send U.S, troops into harm’s way, he’ll need the moral authority to make
that decision.
But Democratic strategists no longer appear to be thinking about
Clinton’s political legacy. One prominent consultant, who asked not to be named, spun
out what he described as the probable outcome of the Lewinsky affair: Sometime before Aug. 17 — but no sooner than Aug. 16 — Clinton will make a public apology. After Starr submits his report, Republicans in Congress, facing the force of Clinton’s popularity, their vulnerability should their own sexual escapades come to light and the judgment of history, will opt not for impeachment but for some form of censure. To placate the inevitable Republican uproar in Congress, Clinton may have to apologize again. The final years of Clinton’s presidency will be the same as the end of the Reagan presidency after the Iran-contra affair. That is to say, it will limp along to its conclusion.
“Look, the public is going to think Clinton’s a schmuck,” this consultant said. “But if the economy keeps humming along, they’ll be willing to let him ride out his term.”
That may count as good news to some Democrats, but it cannot be a welcome scenario to Vice President Al Gore as he prepares his bid for the party’s presidential nomination for 2000. Gore’s fortunes are tied to Clinton, and if Clinton, having survived too many body blows, comes to resemble a political cripple in his last two years, Gore will be the big loser, say political analysts. “What counts in a presidential election is whether people are in a mood for a change,” says Mellman. “If they are, it’s obviously not going to be good for Gore.”
Perhaps the biggest fear gnawing at Democrats these days is their concern over another, even more serious scandal looming in the distance — the campaign finance morass.
Republicans in the House and Senate have been pressuring Attorney General Janet Reno to recommend an independent counsel to investigate alleged campaign finance abuses by Clinton, Gore and senior Democratic Party officials — a demand she has resisted so far. In the Senate, moves have begun to compel Reno to act, and in an extraordinary confrontation Thursday, a House committee voted to cite Reno for contempt of Congress for resisting its subpoena to turn over reports from two subordinates, including FBI Director Louis Freeh, that recommend the appointment of an independent prosecutor to look into the campaign finance allegations.
Reno has called the subpoena “a form of political tampering that no prosecutor in America can accept.” She also argues that giving the House the reports, which provide a blueprint of the Justice Department’s investigation, would blow the probe. She had asked for three more weeks to review the reports and has not ruled out a recommendation for an independent counsel. If she makes such a recommendation, Clinton, Gore and others could be asked to explain how money from Chinese intelligence found its way into party coffers in 1996. Even the best Democratic consultants anticipate problems spinning their way out of that one.
“There are not many people in America who believe that their well-being has been jeopardized in any way by the president’s conduct in the Lewinsky affair,” says one prominent pollster. “Sure, there are people who feel they can’t watch the news with the kids, but in terms of real well-being, most people are not affected. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about campaign finance. That’s going to be a tough one.”
Just before the 1988 elections, Republican operative Lee Atwater began spreading a rumor that Democratic House Speaker Thomas Foley was gay. When the rumor reached Rep. Barney Frank, at the time the only openly homosexual member of Congress, Frank acted quickly and decisively. He informed Atwater that unless the rumors about Foley ceased immediately, he would personally out six gay Republicans on the floor of the House.
The GOP whisper campaign halted dead in its tracks.
A decade later, as Kenneth Starr moves to wrap up his investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and submit his final report to Congress on his four-year-long criminal probe of the president, the lessons of that confrontation have not been lost on some Clinton allies. While Republican and Democratic lawmakers, pundits and supporters urge the president to apologize for a sexual relation with Lewinsky to avoid impeachment, these die-hard Clinton loyalists are spreading the word that a long-ignored but fearsome tactic has now resurfaced as an element in the president’s survival strategy: The threat of exposing the sexual improprieties of Republican critics, both in Congress and beyond, should they demand impeachment hearings in the House.
“We’re talking about the Doomsday Machine here,” one close ally of the president told Salon, alluding to the unstoppable chain of retaliatory nuclear strikes in the movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” “Once the Doomsday Machine is set in motion, there will be no stopping it. The Republicans with skeletons in their closets must assume everything is known and will come out. So the question is: Do they really want to go there?”
The threat to out the president’s critics is not new. It first surfaced on Feb. 8, when former White House advisor George Stephanopoulos, analyzing the then-2-week-old Lewinsky scandal for ABC’s “This Week,” said White House allies were “starting to whisper about what I’ll call the ‘Ellen Rometsch’ strategy.” Stephanopoulos then went on to explain that Rometsch was an East German spy who had slept with President John Kennedy as well as many other congressmen and senators.
“Robert Kennedy was charged with getting her out of the country and also getting [FBI Director] John Edgar Hoover to go to the Congress and say, ‘Don’t you investigate this, because if you do, we’re going to open up everybody’s closets,” Stephanopoulos said. Returning to the Lewinsky scandal, he added: “I think that in the long run, they have a deterrent strategy” (of gathering embarrassing details about the private lives of Clinton’s congressional critics and threatening to leak them to the media).
As part of his defense in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct lawsuit, Clinton’s lawyers retained private investigator Terry Lenzner, whose company, Investigative Group International, conducted interviews and public record searches to gather information on Jones’ sexual history. Clinton’s critics now believe IGI, which employs lawyers, former FBI, CIA and DEA agents, ex-cops and former reporters, was also hired to dig up dirt on the president’s accusers in the Lewinsky scandal as well. Lenzner could not be reached for comment.
Sources in the Clinton camp say they are focusing their attention not only on issues of marital infidelity but also on issues of character. Among those under scrutiny, these sources say, are House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who asked his wife for a divorce while she lay in a hospital bed stricken with cancer; and House Majority Leader Richard Armey, who, according to an article in the Dallas Observer, pressured female students for dates when he was an economics professor at North Texas State University.
Another known target is Dan Burton, one of Clinton’s most outspoken Republican critics. “Burton’s political enemies are investigating his background, especially with regard to women,” says Harrison Ullman, editor of Nuvo, a newsweekly in Indianapolis. The Clinton camp’s hunt for dirt also could extend to Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the man who will be responsible for holding impeachment hearings, knowledgeable sources told Salon.
With the reemergence of the “Rometsch Strategy,” along with Lewinsky’s long-forgotten stained dress, the political stakes have increased significantly in these days before crucial grand jury testimony by Lewinksy and Clinton himself. Lewinsky, who received blanket immunity from prosecution last week, could testify as early as this week. Clinton is scheduled to testify from the White House via closed-circuit television on Aug. 17.
The theory behind this scorched-earth tactic is simple: Who among the congressmen is pure enough to pass judgment on the president’s private life? That question is now resonating around Capitol Hill, where a number of key lawmakers have pledged to forego impeachment proceedings if Clinton simply fesses up to an affair with Lewinsky. Left unspoken in those appeals, some members say, is a growing concern that impeachment hearings will result in an avalanche of leaks about sexual indiscretions by Republican congressmen that could expose their hypocrisy and destroy their political careers.
“That’s one reason why they don’t want to touch the Starr investigation,” says Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. “It’s too close for comfort.”
Congress may sit on a hill overlooking the White House, but Clinton’s allies are well aware that Congress doesn’t hold the moral high ground. It is a fact of Washington life that testosterone levels run high on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers, working long hours far away from their home districts and families, find themselves tempted by the scores of female aides working in the House and Senate. Five years ago, Sen. Robert Packwood resigned from the Senate after accusations that he groped, fondled and kissed scores of female aides. His diaries revealed that he had consensual sexual relations with several aides. Other notorious philanderers on Capitol Hill include former Rep. Wayne Hays, who supported his lover at the taxpayers’ expense by putting her on his staff as a secretary with minimal clerical duties, and former Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, who was discovered to be having an affair with a stripper.
Clinton allies say the president’s strategy is based on the certainty that once Starr has submitted his report to Congress, probably sometime this fall, Clinton’s ordeal will move from the precise legal realm of subpoenas and sworn testimony to the unpredictable arena of politics. After the House Judiciary Committee has studied Starr’s report, it will have to decide whether it is going to hold public impeachment hearings. The theory is that if Chairman Hyde and other Republicans on the committee know that, metaphorically speaking, their arms will be broken, they will be much less likely to raise them in a vote favoring impeachment hearings.
“This is a scorched earth strategy,” says Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor who frequently comments on the legal aspects of the Lewinsky investigation for television news shows. “And it’s got people on the Hill very nervous because many of them are living in glass houses as well.”
But Zeldin notes that the strategy is also a risky one for Clinton. “Let’s say the Lewinsky dress comes back with sure-fire evidence of a sexual affair,” he says. “In that sense, Clinton may be no different from two-thirds of the members in Congress who have similar dalliances with interns or lobbyists or whomever. The difference, of course, is that none of them have been asked about it under oath. So you already have begun to hear members say that this is not about having an affair. It’s about lying under oath about an affair. So I’m not so sure about the vitality of that strategy.”
Another flaw in the president’s scorched earth strategy is that in the past, Congress,
when confronted with evidence of wrongdoing by its members, has been willing to judge its own, sometimes harshly. Packwood was censured for his sexual excesses, Gingrich received a reprimand and fine for ethical lapses. In short, the rules of Congress worked.
But in the event of total war, there are no rules and no way to prevent a frenzy of sexual tattling from hurting Democrats too. “On both sides of the aisle, no one wants to see it spin out of control,” says Rep. Joe Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who fell in love with a young staff member a few years ago, left his wife and annulled their marriage. “But anything could happen.”
Yet another political factor that could set the Doomsday scenario into motion is the influence of right-wing groups like the Family Research Council, headed by Gary Bauer, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. These conservative organizations, which are now driving the social and family values agenda within the Republican Party, are not happy with Republican moderates like Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who have offered Clinton forgiveness in return for a mea culpa. For these groups, adultery and lying about it, under oath or not, are sins, period. Republicans could suffer in the midterm elections this fall if they don’t demonstrate their willingness to punish Clinton for his alleged indiscretions. Clinton’s threat, therefore, also means that some Republican lawmakers could suffer at the hands of these groups when the details of their own sins begin leaking out.
The result of all this is a capital facing the prospect of a sexual Götterdämerung, a spectacle in which reputations may be strewn about like body parts in “Saving Private Ryan.” The bottom line is that if anyone thought this scandal hit bottom with the reappearance of Lewinsky’s telltale dress, think again. This scandal could get a lot nastier before it’s over.
If you want to watch the chickens of the Monica Lewinsky and campaign finance scandals coming home to roost, keep an eye on the Middle East.
In May, it should be recalled, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to revive the gasping Middle East peace process by delivering a clear and unambiguous ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Either accept a U.S. proposal for a modest Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or the Clinton administration would “re-examine our approach to the peace process” and go public with its disagreements with Netanyahu’s ultra-right-wing government. Albright and her aides made a point of reiterating that the American proposal, which calls on Israel to surrender 13 percent of the territory in return for concrete Palestinian steps to bolster Israel’s security, would not be “watered down.”
The peace process stalled because Netanyahu was offering only a 9 percent withdrawal. Albright’s threat to go public meant that for the first time Netanyahu would have been forced to explain to Israeli voters — two-thirds of whom support continued negotiations — why the other 4 percent of territory was worth killing the peace process and straining relations with the country’s chief ally. It would have meant exposing the damaging role played by his obstinate coalition partners, most of whom refuse to relinquish one more inch of West Bank territory to the Palestinians.
The administration’s tactic struck a nerve, sending Netanyahu, his American Jewish supporters and their amen corner in Congress into a froth. On Netanyahu’s instructions, the powerful pro-Israeli lobby complained to members of Congress about the administration’s tone, with the lobby’s well-known ability to influence Jewish campaign donations for the midterm elections an unspoken but unmistakable threat. As a result, 81 senators signed a lobby-dictated letter to Clinton, warning him not to go public with his differences with Netanyahu.
Though Albright, at least publicly, stuck by her refusal to dilute the American proposal, Netanyahu’s tactic of facing down the administration through Congress was working. The first sign was an extension of the two-week deadline that Albright set for an Israeli response. Then the deadline was extended again as the Israelis played for more time.
Then, in a hopeful sign last week, senior Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Tel Aviv for the first time in 16 months. The Israelis agreed to a further 1 percent withdrawal in addition to their original offer of 9 percent, but demanded that the remaining 3 percent of territory under the American proposal be turned into a “national park,” upon which the Palestinians would be forbidden to build. The Palestinians refused, and the talks ended in deadlock, with both sides urging the Clinton administration to step in to help.
Then came the shocker. The Clinton administration, mediators of the Middle East peace process since the Oslo Accords of 1993, refused to mediate. “They should stay engaged, and they should continue to work,” said White House spokesman Michael McCurry. “There’s no progress to report, true. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t make progress. And they ought to try harder.”
The Clinton administration’s refusal to intervene masked a much more craven cave-in. According to American, Middle Eastern and European sources, Albright’s ultimatum to publicize its differences with Netanyahu has been dropped altogether, on order from the president himself. Undermined by her boss, the gutsy and sharp-tongued secretary of state now appears to be what Texans would call “all hat and no cattle.”
Why the cave-in? First of all, the Lewinsky scandal has so weakened Clinton that he is perceived by Israeli leaders as wearing an empty holster. Prominent Israeli parliamentarians from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party openly deride Clinton as “up to his neck in scandal.” Therefore, the reaction in Jerusalem to his “accept or else” bluster goes something like: “Or else what? We have 81 senators on our side. How many troops do you have, besides your loud-mouthed secretary of state? Moreover, at this — ahem — delicate time in your presidency, do you really want to get into a fight with Israel over our security needs? No? We didn’t think so.”
If the Lewinsky scandal has tied one of Clinton’s hands behind his back in the Middle East, his Democratic campaign finance concerns have tied the other. As Democrats prepare to recapture the House this fall, and as Vice President Al Gore gears up for his presidential run in 2000, the party depends heavily on a small number of wealthy Jewish donors. No one likes to admit that fact, but the nation may learn more about this dependence if Attorney General Janet Reno recommends an independent counsel to investigate campaign finance abuses during the 1996 election.
Their donations underscore the corrosive effect of money on politics. Despite recent polls that show 80 percent of American Jews favor more administration “pressure” on Netanyahu to move the peace process forward, the small inner circle of Democratic Jewish donors do not. Their message to Clinton is simple: Take your hands off Israel, or take your hands out of my pocket. Clinton, knowing where his bread is buttered, has withdrawn the ultimatum that led so many to believe that he meant business in the Middle East.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the right-wing policies of Israel and its U.S. lobby were met by firm American resolve. In 1991, President George Bush refused to give Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees until Jerusalem pledged not to use the money to settle Russian immigrants in the occupied territories.
Outraged, Jewish lobbyists swarmed over Capitol Hill, three quarters of the Senate signed a letter warning Bush to stand down and American Jews even branded the president an anti-Semite. But Bush refused to stand down, and in the end he prevailed. The tension in American-Israeli relations caused Israelis to think twice about their right-wing leaders, and in 1992, they elected Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.
Clinton and his aides are fond of boasting how little the Lewinsky scandal has affected his job performance, how he’s able to “compartmentalize” and filter out the background noise of the scandal to focus on the important policy issues at hand.
If ever there was a need to demonstrate that ability, it’s now. If the Middle East peace process dies — and make no mistake about it: It is very close to death — renewed fighting between Israelis and Palestinians is as certain as the sunrise. This is not a good time to let things slip. Jordan’s King Hussein, 62 years old and perhaps the most moderating figure in the Arab world, is ill. Despite Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, Hussein’s successor may not have the stature to prevent the country’s majority Palestinian population from joining the fight. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty could snap as well, causing two decades of American peacemaking in the Middle East to unravel in an instant. And to punctuate that threat, Iran recently tested a medium-range missile capable of hitting Israel. For the United States, the consequences of such a war would be incalculable.
“Lame duck” is a term that doesn’t even begin to capture the result of Clinton’s Monica and money scandals. “The Cowardly Lion” would be more like it, accent on the lyin’.
Under increasing pressure from Senate Republicans, Attorney General Janet Reno is now facing an unprecedented attempt to force her to recommend yet another independent counsel, this time to investigate alleged campaign finance violations by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore during the 1996 election.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and the other Republicans on the panel are now studying a draft lawsuit against Reno, drawn up by committee member Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn, that accuses her of ignoring evidence of federal election law violations by Clinton, Gore and their staffs, and asks the court to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the evidence. Specter says he’s confident that a majority of Republicans on the committee will join the lawsuit and that this group will have standing to file the petition, as early as next month.
“I think the conclusions [of the lawsuit] are very strong,” says Specter, a former prosecutor.
Specter’s draft charges that Reno has ignored what he calls “overwhelming evidence” that Clinton violated election laws by raising money illegally from foreign contributors; that Gore improperly raised money with telephone solicitations from the White House; and that both directed so-called soft money to be spent on illegal election ads. The suit also accuses Reno of failing to act on evidence gathered by the Justice Department that the Chinese government may have funneled money into Clinton’s campaign to influence the outcome of the 1996 election.
Specter argues that under the law, such a wide body of evidence obligates Reno to appoint an independent counsel.
Pressure on Reno is building in the wake of a confidential report by the departing chief of the Justice Department’s campaign finance investigation. Thursday’s New York Times, quoting a government official, said the prosecutor, Charles La Bella, had concluded that Reno has no alternative other than recommending the appointment of a special prosecutor. Coming from a veteran prosecutor familiar with the evidence gathered to date, the report would be politically dangerous for Reno to ignore.
A Justice Department spokesman said Reno was studying the report and had no further comment.
“There is a limit to a prosecutor’s authority in not enforcing the law as it is plainly written, and there is a remedy that permits the courts to step in and require the prosecutor, in this case the attorney general, to enforce the laws of the United States,” said Specter’s press secretary, John Elliott.
Reno’s problems with the Senate Republicans over the campaign finance scandal are not new. Late last year, after Sen. Fred Thompson conducted lengthy hearings about election law abuses, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Reno a written appeal asking her to recommend the appointment of an independent counsel. Reno refused, choosing instead to have the Justice Department investigate the matter.
Senate Republicans, already frustrated by Reno’s refusal, grew even more perplexed when she appointed an independent counsel to investigate allegations of influence peddling against Labor Secretary Alexis Herman. At the time, the Justice Department said it could not determine if the charges against Herman were credible and that there was strong evidence she had not done anything wrong. The fact that Reno recommended an independent counsel anyway suggested to Senate Republicans that Reno was applying a double standard when it came to the president and the campaign finance issue.
Their suspicions grew when LaBella, the leader of the Justice Department’s campaign-finance probe, announced he would retire later this summer. Convinced that Reno’s investigation was crumbling, Hatch summoned the attorney general before his committee last Wednesday to try to convince her that only an outsider could effectively trace any White House involvement.
It was a bruising appearance for Reno, with Thompson quoting from a confidential memo by FBI Director Louis Freeh that refuted the reasons she had cited for declining to recommend an independent counsel. Specter accused her of a double standard. Hatch read a hostile editorial from the New York Times that warned that Reno’s legacy would be “the preservation of a cover-up.”
But Reno, as is her style, was unmoved. “I don’t do things based on editorials,” she said. “I do things based on the law.”
Describing himself and his colleagues as “disgusted” by Reno’s performance, Specter took the extraordinary and unprecedented step to begin preparations for the lawsuit that would compel Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the campaign finance evidence. Specter’s lawsuit would petition the Federal District Court for a writ of mandamus, a common law remedy that is used to force government officials to carry out the duties they are required to perform under the law.
At the federal level, the writ of mandamus is typically used by plaintiffs to collect unpaid Social Security benefits or to redress other technical complaints. This would be the first time ever that a plaintiff invoked the law to challenge the independent counsel’s statute, which was passed in 1978.
Until now, Senate Republicans had considered less Draconian ways to change Reno’s mind. But since Reno’s appearance, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are now actively considering Specter’s move, committee staffers say.
Even if Specter manages to gather the signatures of a majority of the committee’s nine Republican members — and that’s still an if — it will not be easy to convince a court to grant the compulsory writ.
“It’s very hard to get,” says Christopher Schroder, a law professor at Duke University. “The court has to be persuaded that there is absolutely no conceivable way that the official who is refusing to act could do so and still be behaving lawfully. It’s a very high burden of proof.”
Schroder says there are innumerable reasons why a prosecutor might decide not to indict someone, even if he or she had some evidence of a crime. “A judge won’t sit and listen to a petitioner who comes into court and says, ‘Look, if the U.S. attorney had only looked at this evidence in the right way, he would have seen that there is more than enough probable cause to indict.’ In other words, the court is not going to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the official unless it is overwhelmingly convinced that the decision is irrational or obviously contrary to law.”
A crucial piece of evidence in any suit that Republicans bring will be Freeh’s confidential memo, written in November 1997, a month before Reno’s earlier appearance before the Judiciary Committee. As described by Thompson, who was briefed on its contents, Freeh’s memo argues that the independent counsel’s statute was specifically created to avoid conflicts of interest — both real and apparent — when an attorney general investigates her superiors. Freeh also reminds Reno that this determination of a political conflict of interest requires her to appoint an independent counsel.
“Freeh’s arguments would be Exhibit A in Sen. Specter’s petition,” Schroder says.
But government lawyers familiar with the matter say Specter’s petition, if it materializes at all, has little chance of succeeding. To begin with, they say, it is arguable whether the independent counsel’s statute allows for any judicial review of an attorney general’s decision not to recommend an appointment. Within this context, the Freeh memo is irrelevant. “It’s her decision whether or not to recommend,” one said. “This is not a reviewable decision.”
If such review were permitted, several lawyers added, it could be challenged on the grounds that it violates the constitutional separation of powers.
“If review were taken away from the attorney general and put in someone else’s hands, you would have a real problem with the separation of powers because the power to execute the law is confined by the Constitution to the executive branch,” said one lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Government lawyers also could challenge the legislators’ legal standing to bring suit against Reno. Though the law says that a majority of members of the Judiciary Committee may request that the attorney general recommend an independent counsel, there is nothing in the law that says these legislators have standing to sue if a special prosecutor is not appointed, these lawyers say.
“To have standing, you have to show that you are personally injured by the action that you’re complaining of and that a favorable decision will redress that injury,” this attorney said. “Generally speaking, legislatures are not found to have that kind of injury.”
“I think Specter is grandstanding here,” he added. “Specter is a good enough lawyer to know that this is absurd.”
Senate Republicans dismiss such talk as wishful thinking. While no other members of the committee have yet signed on to Specter’s petition, “There have been some favorable discussions among the Republican members and we’re optimistic,” said Elliot, the senator’s spokesman.
“After last Wednesday’s appearance [by Reno], where well-reasoned attempts to get the attorney general to explain her unwillingness to read the law as it concerns the appointment of an independent counsel were unsuccessful, the likelihood of other members’ joining in this unusual move by Sen. Specter has increased,” he said.
