Republicans Grasp at Straws

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Monday, October 6th 1997: This promises to be an amusing week in Washington.

Bill Clinton - tossing out some pork

The President will flex his line item veto muscles for the second time in history today; Harold Ickes will offer sworn testimony on White House fundraising Tuesday, and; the Senate will kill the McCain-Feingold bill later that afternoon, because of Trent Lott's poison pill anti-union giving amendment.

Harold Ickes - "Reagan taught me"

Look for Fred Thompson to show the latest "White House Coffee Tapes" at his earliest possible opportunity, although the networks already have copies of them and viewers may see them umpteen times before the Thompson Committee gets its opportunity to grandstand.

Rumor has it that Senate investigators have zeroed in on a section of tape where a guest can be heard offering a check to Don Fowler, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The problem for Republican scandalmongers, however, is that Fowler, true to the law, can be heard telling the guest that accepting a check then would be inappropriate. He added that someone would be in touch at a later time about the contribution.

So much for scandal.

Sources say that Ickes will batter Republicans, testifying that he patterned the Clinton White House fundraising efforts after the Reagan and Bush machines thereby placing Republicans in the embarrassing position of being "mentor" to the Clinton campaign with regard to pushing campaign finance laws to the edge.

Almost lost in the coverage of Janet Reno's extension of the Gore telephone call investigation is the fact that Reno has refused to honor almost all Republican demands for independent counsel against President Clinton saying that myriad GOP allegations had no basis in fact. .

What's left? Fund raising phone calls by the POTUS and Al Gore -- which most Capitol insiders admit is a tempest in a tea pot and for which Reno should not appoint outside counsel.

Outflanked this weekend, Republicans sent out their minions all touting the same line - "Reno' s memo on the President sounded like she was his defense counsel." But television pundits weren't buying it and pressed GOP lawmakers to the wire - with most admitting they would cease calling for Reno's impeachment or resignation.

Today is payback time. President Clinton will select more than a dozen military "pork barrel" construction projects to veto out of more than 200 identified by White House staff as possible veto targets. A list of the projects to be vetoed has not been released, but a good guess might be to look for GOP favorites.

This is the first of 13 appropriation bills that Clinton will have a shot at this fiscal year.

Republicans, now clinging to anything that might bolster their ludicrous charges that DNC fundraisers were laundering red Chinese money, will attempt to convince Americans that the late delivery of White House Coffee tapes is some kind of Nixonian offense.

Arlen Specter

As usual, GOP mouthpiece Arlen Specter was first off the blocks telling CNN's Frank Sesno "With the White House not turning over evidence again and again, I think you really may have crossed the line of obstruction of justice," he said, "If (the tapes are) so innocent, why didn't we have them a long time ago?"

Dan Burton, who refused to say he never fielded fund raising calls from his own Capitol Hill office said about the tapes -- "That's information that we should have gotten from our subpoenas in the first place. And we didn't even know about them, and that really bothers me." Burton added, "We're going to check very thoroughly into the logs at the White House to make sure that we get all of those videotapes." Burton chairs the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is holding hearings into 1996 campaign finance irregularities.

But on Friday, Attorney General Janet Reno had already said that the coffees, and a similar series of sleepovers in the White House by contributors, did not violate federal law. But because Reno hadn't seen the tapes before making her ruling, Republicans are hoping they'll find something in them to make her change her mind.

Good luck. There's nothing much new in the tapes and the basis for Reno's decision had little to do with what might be found on tape and more to do with the site of the events and the intent behind them.

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