BOOMerang!!! The Party of Clinton cannot scrape him off.
Congressional Republicans did finally stand up to oversight by impeaching the President, of course, and the conventional wisdom held that this was a political disaster. But Democratic pollster Celinda Lake now says, "Democrats paid a big price" for their defense. On the issue of values, Democrats now lag the GOP by 19 points, as against six points as recently as 1994. Her Republican partner in the joint Battleground Poll, Ed Goaes, says, "Short range, the Republicans were damaged by the impeachment process. Long range, it appears that we have gained a great deal by what Congressional members did on impeachment." Values, of course, promise to become the big issue of the impending Presidential campaign.
July 1, 1999
Watching the Watchdog
When the Independent Counsel statute washed over the falls yesterday, it took an awful lot of high dudgeon with it. The statute was born in the Nixon years on a wave of tut-tutting over the need to create some Olympian public figure, a prosecutor purified of base motive, who would operate "independently" of a Justice Department in thrall to a politically indiscriminate President.
Last of his kind
We said then it was a bad idea. We thought that the system of checks and balances put in place by the Founders was still the appropriate place to seek protection against abuse of power by the Executive. Oversight insulated from politics seemed difficult, if not impossible.
That has proven to be the case, though the reformers might not have predicted that a liberal President's supporters--Carville's army--would so unapologetically drag an Independent Counsel into Washington's media muck and hold his head under water. Now, 21 years later, perhaps it will be possible for all parties to keep their focus on what was the problem then and remains the problem now: the integrity of the Department of Justice.
Yes, nearly everyone is agreed now that the device known as "independent" counsel had insurmountable flaws. But the problem it tried to address remains: How do you watch the watchdog? Who takes responsibility for the Attorney General, who just announced that she will hold full power over special investigations of public officials? In theory, the power of prosecuting serious malfeasance rests with the Executive, and that is probably necessary for an orderly government. But can we really expect the Justice Department to police the White House to which it reports?
Again, we assume there is now a rough political consensus around this issue. Liberals hadn't the slightest doubt that Richard Nixon was leaning on John Mitchell. They constantly professed to worry about the same thing during the Reagan Administraton, targeting Ed Meese the moment he arrived in town. Conservatives vented at Judge Walsh's Iran-Contra odyssey, but liberals cheered his openly political election-eve indictment of Caspar Weinberger in 1992 and his baseless prosecution of Elliott Abrams. Today few doubt any longer that Ms. Reno is an adjunct to the Clinton-Gore political operation. Just yesterday we have the spectacle of Justice's former No. 3 and first Reno overseer, Webster Hubbell, pleading to another felony.
Needs watching
It would help, we think, if there were a better understanding of the problem posed here. The problem is not merely that the Executive is powerful. It is a powerful bureaucracy, and a bureaucracy's greatest power is to ensure that nothing happens. The Castle Grande case at the center of the Hubbell plea was a scam through Madison Guaranty back in Arkansas, but the obstruction of the Madison investigation--the decision to do nothing about it--was in Washington. This was what former Treasury official Roger Altman's heads up to the White House was about, and the investigation that RTC investigator Jean Lewis was yanked off of by the bureaucracy.
The lesson and the legacy of the Starr investigation into the Clinton Administration is that a legal stonewall conducted by a Presidency will succeed. We assume all sides will acknowledge this as well. Indeed it obviously continues today in Webb's latest plea, which merely involves conduct prior to the Clinton Presidency. Ken Starr was never able to tie the White House directly into any of these events because a President is surrounded by many aides and well-wishers, who don't always have to be told what to do.
The Clintons, of necessity, have the stonewall down to a science, starting with the incipient Senator's $100,000 commodities scam, successfully withheld until the statute expired. Then, before the Kendall and Bennett spincyclers arrived, we witnessed the Senate Whitewater hearings in which a parade of public officials from the White House, Treasury and federal agencies claimed in front of TV cameras that "to the best of their recollection" they remembered nothing. Has there been a more embarrassing spectacle in the postwar history of public service?
When the press and Congress tried to find out what the sudden Travel Office firings were about, they were stonewalled. Then Justice obediently prosecuted Billy Dale. When Vincent Foster killed himself, the White House counsel told Justice's investigating prosecutors to get lost. Filegate's 900 raw FBI files? Yawn, "an honest bureaucratic mistake." The campaign-finance players fled to China. The reason that a big breakthrough came about sexual behavior was that this was the one thing the President couldn't delegate.
Now, after all this, we have this week's news coverage dryly describing Attorney General Reno's new, self-designated investigative powers. She will appoint--and remove--special prosecutors. She will veto their indictments or appeals or major investigation decisions.
What is likely to happen now is exemplified by Justice's China investigation. It is petering out all over the map. The Justice task force's investigation into the ties between China and the 1996 Clinton campaign contributions has been a catalog of lapses.
Career prosecutor Charles La Bella was handpicked by Ms. Reno to take over the probe in mid-1997. He prepared a 96-page memo indicating that President Clinton and Vice President Gore were subjects of the investigation and that as a result an independent counsel must be named. FBI Director Louis Freeh endorsed his report. Attorney General Reno ignored it; indeed she never even called Mr. La Bella to discuss his memo. Mr. La Bella left after a year. In the year since, Justice has secured a few plea bargains of dubious value with some players in the campaign finance probe and bungled the tax-fraud trial of Maria Hsia, a fund-raiser with ties to Mr. Gore.
Amid such limpid prosecution, defense attorneys for the fund-raising players have seen little need to press their clients to cooperate more fully with the investigation. We now hear that John Huang will cop a plea; he of course attended the famous Sept. 13, 1995, Oval Office meeting where the campaign fund-raising conspiracy was hatched. Don't hold your breath waiting to find out if Ms. Reno's Justice ever asked about it.
And this is not the only instance of the black hole at Justice. What about the investigation of the Teamsters laundering of Clinton-Gore campaign funds? Congress called off its own investigation a year ago after receiving promises of a federal prosecution, but nothing much has happened.
Whatever became of Justice's investigation of the Intriago case, involving tens of thousands of illegal monies sent to the Clinton campaign by a Venezuelan banker and his Miami attorney, both visitors to the White House? A federal judge ruled Friday that Saudi businessman Abdul Raouf Khalil owed BCCI's defrauded depositors $1.2 billion. Reno Justice didn't pursue this result; it's the work of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, independently elected by the voters of Manhattan.
To deal with the watchdog question, the Founders gave us three branches of government. The Judiciary has done its part, but it is up to the Congress to hold Ms. Reno accountable. It has manifestly failed, and such are the vapors of Washington that Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch now considers himself a Presidential candidate. As of today, Congress can no longer shuck off its oversight tasks on an independent counsel.
Congressional Republicans did finally stand up to oversight by impeaching the President, of course, and the conventional wisdom held that this was a political disaster. But Democratic pollster Celinda Lake now says, "Democrats paid a big price" for their defense. On the issue of values, Democrats now lag the GOP by 19 points, as against six points as recently as 1994. Her Republican partner in the joint Battleground Poll, Ed Goaes, says, "Short range, the Republicans were damaged by the impeachment process. Long range, it appears that we have gained a great deal by what Congressional members did on impeachment." Values, of course, promise to become the big issue of the impending Presidential campaign.
The wisdom of the Founders, in short, may prevail even in this supposedly cynical cyber-age. When the Executive tries to traduce the rule of law, it's up to Congress to stand up to the duties the Constitution gives it.
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