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Will Reno Be Gored?
by Mac MacArthur
Attorney General Janet Reno
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3RD 1997 -- NEW YORK (APJP) -- "I have determined there are no reasonable grounds to believe that further investigation is warranted of allegations that the president violated federal law by making fund-raising telephone calls from the White House," Janet Reno told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals yesterday .
And that was that, or so you might have thought, but the plot just sickens (and I don't have a lisp).
Reaction from the White House? Nada -- save for a one liner issued from the POTUS: "The attorney general made her decision based on a careful review of the law and the facts, and that's as it should be." Of course the mainstream media, surprisingly including David Broder got it all wrong theorizing that President Clinton was terse because he was worried about what might happen with regard to campaign finance abuse allegations in future.
But the pundits have it all wrong if they think Bill Clinton hushed his staff in order to "sneak off into the night." Quite the contrary. Clinton has never been one to flaunt a victory. It's not part of the Southern upbringing or the Clinton charm. In fact, Clinton knows that nothing in Reno's and Freeh's continuing investigations will implicate him or Al Gore personally. They weren't involved.
What Republicans are hoping is that, regardless of implication, the IMPACT will destroy Gore once and for all as a presidential contender amidst a covey of weak GOP hopefuls thus far.
Al Gore was more forthcoming than the President: "Well, obviously I'm very pleased by the decision today of the Justice Department," Gore said in Connecticut. "Now that there's been a full and independent review, we can put this issue of the phone calls behind us once and for all."
Reno explained her action in a press conference timed for network evening news saying:
So much for the Freeh resignation fantasy that Orrin Hatch was pushing on Sunday's pundit television.
Bill Clinton
Clinton telegraphed earlier yesterday that the pressure others have tried to apply on Reno, including calls for her impeachment were misguided. "It should be a decision based strictly on the law, and not outside political pressure," Clinton said, "and I have scrupulously avoided saying anything one way or the other, publicly or privately, that would be that kind of thing.
"There's a statute here," the President remarked, "...And we cannot get in the position in this country of basically bringing politics to bear on every legal decision that has to be made. That's not the right way to do this."
You bet.
But that won't stop the presses or the GOP spin doctors from mauling Reno, Clinton and Gore as early and as often as possible. Television and print journalists across the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief when Reno said the campaign finance task force would continue its work in high gear - signaling a compromise with Director Freeh.
But not one national commentator nor opinion writer pointed out that the task force is focusing equally on Republican malfeasance and that likely candidates for the Grand Jury are Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and a raft of other GOP non-profit officials who participated in the widest money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated in United States history.
A great reason to undo the self-gratifying laws passed too hurriedly in a congressional knee-jerk reaction to the Nixon/ADM White House of the seventies.
That's not to say that Democrats are off the hook. But the investigations won't touch the President or his cabinet, save Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt who along with smooth-talking Harold Ickes may have to pay a dear price for Babbitt's nix on an Indian gaming casino license -- ostensibly done as a quid pro quo for massive campaign contributions from a competing tribe. Also on the hot seat is former DNC chairman Don Fowler and a variety of DNC fundraising executives who have admitted converting soft money donations solicited by Gore (and without his knowledge) into hard money cash without donor approval. It will be tough for the Attorney General to pass on that -- and she probably won't.
Republicans, so blind to their own shaky position here, continue their diatribes with Senators Thompson, Specter, Hatch and Lott and chief House Fool Dan Burton spinning Reno's decision to make it appear she has now broken the law.
One wonders aloud just how stupid Republican strategists can be, and I find myself longing for the pre-Gingrich days of RNC Chairman Bill Brock and chief strategist Dennis Whitfield. They may have been conservatives but they ran a clean show and didn't engage in Neo-Nazi thought control designed to confuse and convert voters. They were respected then and now -- on both sides of the aisle.
One thing's for sure, Brock and Whitfield will have the last cross-pressured melancholy laugh when American voters wake up to the realization that they've been had by one of the most insipid propaganda machines conceived by man in a Democracy -- and vote straight Democrat, Reform or Independent "tickets" as a result.
That will happen. And it won't be pretty for incumbents.
Trent Lott
Senate Majority "Neater" Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said it was "tragic" that Reno decided against an independent council in the campaign fund-raising case. In a statement, he said her decision was "pre-ordained" because the investigation focused on a "minute aspect" of the case, rather than "the whole pattern of patently illegal actions."
Tragic? Patently illegal? Does Lott believe Americans are that stupid. Of course, he is from Mississippi - land of the illiteratti. So maybe he does believe he can stand in his office, ironing his shirts like a teenage priss, and make up moronic statements which he thinks most anyone will buy.
Dan Burton
Indiana Republican Dan Burton, who is truly so unstable that even Speaker Gingrich has had to put watchdog house members on his campaign finance committee, plans to "grill" Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh who wants to expand the probe. Reno better wear body armor and a fire suit because Burton is most infamous for shooting at watermelons, in his Indiana backyard, shaped like Vince Foster's head. Why? To prove that Bill and Hillary Clinton had Foster murdered. So when Burton says he gonna "grill you", you better grab the matches and run.
"We anticipate next Tuesday that we will have both Louis Freeh and the attorney general come before our committee to explain their differences so that we can understand why they have these differences and also the American people will know," said Burton.
That was bright.
But what if Reno refused to appear? And she could, citing her reluctance to discuss ongoing investigations in public and certainly with Chairman Burton who would be considered "unstable" by Jeffrey Dahmer and a national security risk by Ethyl Rosenberg. FBI insiders already are saying that Freeh won't discuss the task force's operations with Burton -- a target for investigation himself for shaking down a lobbyist for Pakistan and threatening to ruin his career if he didn't give Burton $5-10,000 immediately.
Burton, just as everyone thought, will end up looking like a fool once again. Freeh and Reno will show up, but say nothing and allow Burton to rant on -- sealing his destiny to be voted out of office come November. Already, there are reports of a growing, but small movement in his Indiana home district to recall him. Of course, those are the smarter people, who aren't really a big enough ratio of his constituency to do him damage.
Saying he was "disappointed" with Reno and calling her decision a "tragic mistake," Burton said, "The American people have a right to know why they have this blanket of secrecy over the White House, and I intend to get to the bottom of it."
Oops there's that "tragic" word again. Wonder who settled on that "message?"
Tragic is Kent State, tragic is the stupid pose of not letting the President make phone calls from the White House, his house, no matter which room he's in. The same goes for the House and Senate. Let them call openly rather than close those mahogany doors.
Senator Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) suggested that legislative and legal action may follow. "I think you may have a response by Congress in a couple of directions. I think we may amend the independent statute to authorize the appointing court to put an independent counsel in, even if you have an attorney general who just overlooks the law and the facts," Specter said.
Hah. I wonder what that "court" would do about Specters own dubious financial entanglements? If anything, the congress will sunset the independent counsel statute - a shoo in if a Republican occupied 1600 Pennsylvania right now.
Specter also said an 'abuse of discretion' case could be made in court "to get an independent counsel appointed even though she refuses to do so."
Sure Arlen, and you're the best looking Senator in Washington -- the world for that matter. Talk about judicial abuse - that would take the cake - Oh, sorry, that was a pun.
"It is no surprise what [Reno] has done," Specter sniveled. "You have to recognize that she owes her job to the president and she serves at his pleasure." Specter, on the other hand, owes his job to his wife's money and people who voted for Dick Nixon and still would.
Senator Charles "Chuck" Grassley (R-Iowa) said the spat between Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh was a "public spectacle... a further blow to public confidence." Of course he forgot to mention that the public has nearly zero confidence in the Congress to which he's been elected and about 65% confidence in the White House. Now, why do you suppose that is,? -- Chuck.
"There are no winners in this matter," Grassley said in a written statement. "As I see it, a pox on both their houses." He was referring to the Congress here, I suppose, not the FBI and the Justice Department -- which by the way is ONE "house."
Then we have newcomer Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire - a state that no one ever visits for more than a couple of days. "The conflict of interest is so thoroughly obvious," he says. "Anything she does cannot be viewed as objective. This is especially true as the FBI has found itself in an untenable conflict of interest because it is being directed by political appointees of President Clinton to investigate other political appointees."
Hey, nitwit, did you ever think that most people in the world are in conflict because they owe their jobs, position, future and most everything else to at least one other person? Does that make them all untrustworthy and eager to break the law? Gregg would like a country where the FBI could just run around helter-skelter "investigating" anyone or anything they chose -- even on a whim?
But there's more. "It's not healthy for the law enforcement agencies to be put in this position," Judd adds. "It undermines their credibility as fair arbiters of facts which they are supposed to be." Arbiters of facts? Gee, where did that come from. People living in the ghetto might say "inventers of facts" which might be more true.
Orrin Hatch, who has came pretty close to being an inmate himself , whines that Reno has now "changed her standards."
"In the past, she has said that any apparent conflict of interest will do," said Hatch. "But think about it -- in Whitewater, Attorney General Reno concluded an independent counsel was needed because it would involve James MacDougal and other individuals involved with the president. It was simple back then."
Orrin Hatch
Hatch conveniently forgets that after years of investigating and tens of millions of wasted dollars, Malibu Ken Starr has yet to find a single illegality on the part of the Clintons and in doing so makes Hatch looks foolish. Here is classic Orrin - making the opposing argument against himself. I'm sure he would have failed high school debating.
Here he is saying that Jim MacDougal was convicted and that's the reason Reno should compound her original mistake by launching a new multimillion dollar witch hunt on behalf of Hatch and his GOP cohorts. Why would he want another $50 million wasted on a yet a 7th special prosecutor?
Some real nutball groups which "monitor" fundraising and the political process got in their two cents as well . Ann McBride, spokes-bimbo of Scare Monger Group "Common Cause," which has five or six members, including the scholarly acting Baldwin Brothers, has called for an overhaul of campaign finance laws because no one would listen to any of their other sob stories. McBride, whose often referred to by congressional staff as "McLied,"said that the attorney general acted more like a defense counsel for the White House than a prosecutor.
That's a typical McBride statement. Bash the people on your side urging passage of your weak campaign finance legislation stalled, forever, in the Senate. McBride thinks she'll be a star come this Spring when the House takes up her and other losing side campaign finance bills. But in reality she'll be exposed as the spotlight-seeking dyed-blonde pseudointellectual she is, and will most likely be asked to leave by a frustrated membership of Common Cause who have seen their money dry up and wasted by McBrides personal crusade to control American politics - her way.
She said that Reno's efforts to narrowly interpret the law on the legality of the telephone solicitations made by Clinton and Gore was "an affront to the American people." Of course what would Ann know about the American people. She's a "limosineois' who hasn't got a political friend in the world -- save the most ineffective.
Bob Torricelli
Democrats were so quiet last night that you'd think Reno had indicted every donkey in the country. Senator Bob Torricelli made the only coherent statement defending Reno's decision, but it was not up to Torricelli par and not worth printing.
Two by-line journalists one well-known and the other unknown decided to trash Al Gore this morning - probably because they couldn't think of an angle to please muckraker-motivated readers.
The first, a writer with Reuters named Laurence ( With a "U" no less ) McQuillan led with "Battered by months of questions and controversy, Vice President Al Gore finally has won a key round in the fight for his political future -- but the blows to his image still have him staggering."
You can almost hear the Stephen King background music.
It gets better. "Although Clinton could ill afford yet another independent counsel looking into his past actions, for Gore such an investigation could have amounted to a kiss of death for his own dreams of the presidency."
Now wait a minute, I can understand Reuters - which depends on fat-cat business to support it's ailing network of stringers and now concentrated in Washington for the scandal value alone - going after a Democrat White House, but to do it using this kind of drivel is just too much. Bill Safire looks less senile next to this clown.
Read on with McQuillan --- "...a relieved Gore used an appearance in Middletown, Connecticut, to quickly hail the decision and proclaim the matter "has been put behind us once and for all." Knowing his wishful thinking, however, would not made it so. Gore then fired a warning shot for his critics, declaring: "Bear in mind that the same people who are making the partisan attacks are blocking campaign finance reform."
Oh my. So McQuillan, brilliant political analyst, just conveniently leaves out part of the quote where Gore explicitly says "we can put this issue of the phone calls behind us once and for all.", and then goes on to write that Gore is firing warning shots. A warning shot it wasn't .Otherwise the Veep would have called out Barbour and Gingrich names and told them , "Watch out, you're next!"
McQuillan then quotes the well-known Stephen Wayne of Georgetown University. "It takes him off a pedestal that he had been put on in comparison to Bill Clinton," said presidential scholar Wayne. "I don't think he has been severely damaged in what counts, and that is the perception of the administration," he said, noting the strong state of the economy and the low unemployment rate. "That's the thing that could derail him," he said of Gore, "if the economy changes then he's in real trouble."
Of course, what McQuillan forgot to ask Professor Wayne and what the Professor forgot to say himself was that any incumbent candidate is always hurt by a poor economy. Is Wayne a creature of Reuters too?
No, I telephoned Wayne just few minutes ago and he agreed with my presumption and adds that Gore, like any Vice President is a "sort of half-incumbent," and not the chief credit taker or defender of the "faith" which has always made life difficult for Vice Presidents historically seeking the Oval Office. Check your history. Most have been unsuccessful.
I asked Professor Wayne is he would consider himself "right of center." He didn't, and what's more said he was "left of center" so I assumed, wrongly , that writer McQuillan used him as a litmus test against Stephen Hess who described himself to me as a "flaming moderate."
The Brookings Institution,
where Steve hangs his hat
Steve Hess is a presidential expert at Brookings and a decent guy
Hess' expertise includes elections, media, political campaigns, political parties, politics, the presidency, and White House organization. But if you look closely, you might believe something else. Hess worked for Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford with a brief stint in the Carter Administration to help reorganize the executive office.
Steve Hess
Hess offered this wisdom to McQuillan who promptly perverted it by putting it in the context of his article, "...long ago Gore has been tarnished by the whole campaign finance business and his Boy Scout image has been skewed." Hess went on, "Gore and Clinton almost single-handedly destroyed the campaign finance system that was put in place after Watergate," Hess added. "They did it by finding a loophole in the law ... and driving a Mack truck through it."
What Hess forgot to mention, conveniently or not , and that which he defended again to me this morning, in what I consider a benign lapse of his memory, is that it was the Republican National Committee that first discovered the "loophole" and used it effectively , along with other more 'dastardly' means to rake in huge amounts of money from unsuspecting "donors" and "laundries" as early as 1979. The RNC tactics were methods that the DNC only dreamed about in those days. During the Reagan years the DNC did not even have a computer system. But the RNC was drowning in high-tech goodies and armed with a virtual candy store of purposely "designed to mislead" voter-targeted accouterment -- the stuff of campaign mega-cash.
So when Hess says what he says here, think about the messenger. He's a 64 year old scholar and a man whose work is admirable, but the "loophole" he suggests is not a loophole at all, but instead it's the law of the land as interpreted by the Federal Election Commission and more than one judge. While Clinton/Gore '96 may have driven a Mack Truck through it, readers should know that the Dole and the RNC must then have followed in 747!
And by the way, I know. I was trained at the Presidential level by the ultra-private RNC presidential campaign college in Virginia under the aegis of then Senator John Heinz. I spent months after that with the RNC up on First Street putting together mailing lists of wealthy Jews with a protégé' of Kit Bond's to be used for money-mining from that traditional Democrat voting and funding bloc. The "outreach" program -- as the RNC called it in those days-- was very effective with Jews and many flocked to dump money into the Reagan '80 and the re-election campaign as well as the Republican House and Senate campaign committees.
The "Outreach" effort with American Blacks did not do so well.
Let's end with David S. Broder and Peter Baker of the Washington Post who write today that , "By declining to seek appointment of an independent counsel, Reno spared Clinton and Vice President Gore a potential disaster. But the controversy surrounding the financing of their 1996 campaign seems likely to dog Clinton for the remainder of his presidency and still threatens Gore's bid to succeed him."
Okay, so what? I disagree that Reno spared them a "disaster" I mean -- Wake up Broder, the President and his men already have a half dozen "spooks" peering through their windows looking for dirt on a 24 hour a day schedule at $250 an hour. How big a disaster could just one more prosecutor be -- especially looking into to those nasty, nasty phone calls?
As Broder points out himself, the President already finds himself the butt of at least 20 Republican led congressional "investigations" or lynch parties as Lott, and I, like to call them - but for far different reasons.
Broder, who you'd think was dating Ann McBride, even gave her a one-liner in today's Post story writing, "Within minutes of her announcement, Common Cause President Ann McBride upbraided Reno for "turning a deaf ear" to the head of the nation's premier law enforcement agency.
"Premier law enforcement agency." Whose words were those, Broder's or McBride's, and what do either of them fear form the FBI? It's pretty weird to think of Common Cause now rallying around the FBI when they have the "common" man in mind. Most people are afraid of secretive law enforcement agencies, and although their fear is misguided, if doesn't behoove McBride or Broder to sidle up to them. Or does it?
You be the judge.
Al Gore
Broder goes on, trying to convince us, "...Gore, more so than his boss, stood to suffer acute political damage regardless of the ultimate legal outcome. Previous independent counsel probes have dragged on for years, and this one surely would have lasted well until the presidential election season. Far beyond the immediate issue of the 40 telephone fund-raising solicitations Gore acknowledged making from his White House office, an outside probe would keep alive at least in the political arena the larger questions surrounding the tactics employed by the Clinton-Gore campaign to collect large sums of campaign cash."
So? Don't you read the Washington Post poll David? Americans don't care. They know the charges are trumped up by rabid Republicans hell-bent on capturing the White House so they can lease it to Dick Scaife.
Broder goes on to quote a bunch of nobody pollsters on Reno's decision and its impact on Gore's candidacy, but their comments are non-illuminating save for one - made by Bill McInturff whose star client was former Arizona governor J. Fife Symington III, who resigned after being convicted for filing fraudulent financial statements.
What a claim to fame.
McInturff said that, "the tarnishing of Gore's image has already happened; the visit to the Buddhist temple will remain in people's minds. The question has been planted and it won't go away."
Yet voters polled on that subject don't care about the Buddhist temple fiasco and most believe Gore did not "conspire" to grab money from nuns and foreign Chinese "devils" as Fred Thompson would have you believe -- despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
Linda DiVal, a GOP pollster I admire(d) , "saw negative fallout for Clinton, Gore and the Democrats in general," writes Broder, "The credibility of the attorney general is now in question," she said, "and that is as damaging to Clinton as John Mitchell's downfall was to Richard Nixon." Mitchell was the attorney general implicated in Watergate and imprisoned. "This has the potential to be a significant campaign issue next year," by "intensifying the anger of core Republicans against the whole Clinton administration," DiVal said, and raising the issue of political ethics "among women, moderates, suburbanites and other swing voters."
But even DiVal knows this is pap. Bill Clinton is made of Teflon and voters, especially women and suburbanites could care less about political infighting. They vote for him in droves and that vote for Gore in droves. Why do you think the Republicans are working so hard to crucify him? Soccer moms know Republican caca de toro when they see it. I'm surprised DiVal did not focus on the damage that a third party or independent candidate could do to both sides if properly financed.
Now that's an issue that only Ross Perot can take up - huh Linda?
Broder, who must have it out for Al Gore ends today's story with another quote from wanna-be-player McInturff -- "Al Gore may be happy that this won't drag on for another three years, but he ought to remember that when Nixon rid himself of a special prosecutor, it started his downfall. Especially with the FBI director dissenting, this is huge."
Sure.
Huge.
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