>>He is doing this as a search and destroy operation to get Clinton at all costs.
That was one of the most bestest ever. Here's Kelly on the Corrupt ones:
Clinton's Whisperers
By Michael Kelly
Thursday, March 5, 1998; Page A21
Alas for lovers of black humor, the bell tolls no more for Sidney
Blumenthal. Kenneth Starr has realized that it was a mistake to subpoena
Blumenthal, formerly a journalist cum amateur Clintonite knife artist who
turned pro when he became a presidential assistant last year. The
independent counsel's inquisition into the White House's leaking and
smearing operation is for now ended. Before Sid returns to the night (full
disclosure: I worked with Blumenthal at the New Yorker and didn't like
him), one question: Why did Starr do it?
On Friday, Feb. 20, one of the prosecutors in the office of the Whitewater
independent counsel received a telephone call from a reporter who
questioned him about a past episode in his private life. The possibility of
imminent disclosure of the episode so upset the prosecutor that he called
his superior and declared that he wished to quit the investigation
immediately. The superior talked the prosecutor out of resigning, but the
reality remained: The White House's smear operation had not merely
attempted to intimidate a Whitewater prosecutor; at least for a moment, it
had succeeded. It is a violation of federal law to corruptly "influence,
intimidate or impede . . . any officer in or of the court of the United States."
The Blumenthal subpoena went out the next day.
Over the past month, Starr's Washington office has logged what Starr's
chief deputy, Jackie M. Bennett Jr., says are close to a hundred calls from
reporters inquiring about false and damaging accusations against the
independent counsel's prosecutors. The inquiries have ranged from
accusations of professional misconduct, some of which have been
reported, to a more malign campaign of personal smearing.
One particularly aggressive campaign involves a prosecutor who is a
bachelor, and who has been the subject of smears concerning both his
professional conduct and his past sex life. The sex smears, says Bennett,
are distortions and exaggerations of benign incidents, but Clinton's
whisperers have presented them in terms of sexual misconduct and gross
immorality.
Other recent calls to Starr's office from journalists reportedly have
concerned such pertinent matters as whether a member of the investigation
was a closeted homosexual and whether another person was involved in a
sexual relationship with a reporter. Bennett says he has been told by
reporters that the White House operation is conducting a search for dirt
through police reports, divorce filings and other public papers. Last week,
the White House was forced to admit that Washington private investigator
Terry Lenzner, infamous for an exceptionally vicious smear campaign
against Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, was working for the
president's personal lawyers in the Whitewater and Paula Jones cases. In a
written statement, Clinton attorneys David Kendall and Robert Bennett
denied that they were investigating the prosecutors' personal lives, but also
said, "there is public information available, which, of course, it is our duty
as counsel to research and gather."
The relatively recent campaign of sexually smearing Starr's assistants joins
a longer-running campaign to the same effect against Starr himself. For two
years, a false rumor has been circulating that Starr, who is married, was
sexually involved with a woman in Little Rock. The rumor apparently
originated with a case of mistaken identity. William Hardin, a retired FBI
agent working for the Whitewater investigation in Little Rock, did develop
a relationship with a prominent Little Rock woman, Jane Hunt, daughter of
Arkansas trucking magnate J. B. Hunt. (Hunt and Harding are now
married.) Who spread the false rumor that it was Starr, not Hardin, who
was seeing Hunt? Friends of Bill.
On Tuesday, the respected Little Rock political columnist John Brummett
wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he had been visited in the
late spring or early summer of 1996 by "a confirmed Clinton loyalist" who
offered an anonymous tip: "He wondered if I'd heard anything about Starr
having an affair with a Little Rock woman he named." Brummett also wrote
that the Arkansas lawyer Thomas Mars, who is representing Hardin and
Hunt, says that he has lately received calls from reporters asking about the
Starr-Hunt rumor, and that the reporters say they are hearing the rumor
from "Clinton loyalists."
Says Jackie Bennett: "What you have here is a situation where somebody
is peddling filth and lies about federal prosecutors, in what appears to be
an attempt to intimidate those prosecutors, and, based on what we have
been told, we believe that the somebody is the White House. If a bunch of
narcotics traffickers who were being investigated tried this tactic, I don't
think most Americans would have a problem with the prosecutor inquiring
into it."
What you have here is a situation where whisperers working in the
president's interests are trying to intimidate prosecutors conducting an
investigation with which the president claims to be fully cooperating. Why
doesn't Bill Clinton demand an end to the dirty work being done on his
behalf?
Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.
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