Gore Mum on INS Vote Scandal
CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2000
Democrat presidential nominee Al Gore maintained his silence Monday on the explosive charges leveled in a new book, accusing him of pressuring the Immigration and Naturalization Service to speed the citizenship paperwork for tens of thousands of new immigrants so they could vote in the 1996 election.
The accusations are made in "Sellout," written by David Schippers, who served as the top investigative counsel for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment trial and events surrounding the scandal.
Schippers alleges that many of the immigrants who were sped through the system by INS had violent criminal records even before they got to the United States and then committed violent crimes in America as well.
Schippers says his staff gathered the immigration evidence beginning in June 1998 as part of the Judiciary Committee's oversight investigation of the Justice Department. In particular, Schippers and his team of investigators were looking into the Clinton White House's use of the INS during the 1996 presidential campaign.
Schippers contends the Clinton-Gore administration pressured the INS into expediting its "Citizenship USA" program to grant citizenship to aliens the Clinton White House considered likely Democrat voters.
According to Schippers, he and his staff gathered much of that evidence even before they began investigating the Clinton impeachment case. However, Schippers believes if he and his staff had been given enough time to put together evidence and witnesses, "Citizenship USA" might have even figured in Clinton's impeachment trial.
"When we got into it, we realized that there were 60,000 people, 60,000 felony records that never made it into the (FBI immigrant) file, which means there were 60,000 people who were felons who had gotten citizenship," Schippers told CNSNews.com.
In his book, Schippers writes, "it was Gore who pressed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to grant citizenship to immigrants who might vote Democratic in the 1998 elections. In its rush, the INS didn't check the fingerprints of many immigrants to see if they had criminal backgrounds."
"What we did was get all the files, all the rap sheets. ... Then I had my staff sit down and go through those boxes. I said pick out 100 really bad crimes – rape, murder, home invasions, stuff like that, and just set them aside. In a box and a half, they had the hundred. We ignored DUI. We ignored anti-immigration charges," Schippers said.
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