>>No big bucks.
Speilberg, Geffen and Katzenberg will pay him off. He'll be a movin to Beverly, Hills that is. Swimming pools, movie starlets.
BILL'S SEXGATE RX MIGHT KILL HIM
BY DICK MORRIS
THERE comes a time in the life of a presidential scandal when the cure becomes more potentially lethal to the president than the disease ever was.
In legal terms, the cover-up becomes more of an issue than the misdeed it is covering up. As in Watergate, the Clinton scandals are entering this critical phase.
First, there was the sex itself. People have always been willing to forgive that.
Then there was the perjury, encouraging others to lie, the deceiving of a nation. Two-thirds of the American people clearly do not want to see the president removed even for these crimes.
But now the scandal enters a new phase as evidence emerges of a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public.
Increasingly, it will be only these actions and these activities which pose a genuine threat to the ability of President Clinton to remain in office. He has survived the disease. Can he now survive the cure?
Beginning as early as 1990, Clinton surrounded himself with detectives and negative-research specialists who collectively have become a kind of secret police force to protect his interests.
Consider the public evidence of their possible activities:
Kathleen Willey reports her cat was stolen and her tires were slashed on her car. Shortly thereafter, while jogging in the park, a man ran up alongside her, asked about her cat - calling it by name.
He said that if she wasn't careful, her children would be next.
Former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen says she was offered acting jobs through the Hollywood-connected Clinton operative Mickey Kantor in return for denying a sexual encounter with Clinton when she was Miss Arkansas.
She also reports that her hotel room was ransacked - and $2,000 left untouched - in what she suspects was an effort to find incriminating tapes.
Linda Tripp's confidential personnel file winds up in The New Yorker magazine in an attempt to discredit her.
Dolly Kyle Browning, who claims a former longtime relationship with Clinton, relates the details of a long attempt to intimidate her and shut her up.
The Washington Post reports in 1992 that the Clinton presidential campaign maintained a staff of detectives to dig up dirt on women to cow them into silence.
In a telephone conversation that same year, Betsy Wright, head of the Bimbo Patrol told me much the same thing.
Data from my confidential personnel file ends up in the National Enquirer - for which Clinton lawyer David Kendall is the attorney - and in Newsweek magazine in the first two weeks of September 1996.
Republican consultant Ed Rollins confides to me that White House staffer Sidney Blumenthal wrote a negative story about him when Blumenthal worked for The New Yorker, using material that, Rollins said, could only have come from my FBI file. I kept Rollins' secret until I was asked a direct question in my grand-jury appearance.
Data smearing House Government Operations Committee Chairman Dan Burton and Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde is released just as possible impeachment proceedings open.
Paula Jones' husband is dismissed from his decades-long job with Northwest Airlines just as the CEO of the airline seeks the Democratic nomination for governor of California.
The Washington Post reports detectives in Clinton's employ have spent months digging up dirt on Monica Lewinsky to discredit her.
For months, I have been warning the Clinton administration the activities of their secret police force will get out of hand and might bring this presidency down.
Now the process appears to be under way. What the sex scandal will never accomplish, the backlash against Clinton's efforts to contain the scandal may well accomplish: his removal from office.
The chief of the secret police is Terry Lenzner, whose past employment included working for big tobacco companies to discredit whistle-blowers who sought to reveal secret company documents showing how the cigarette companies deliberately targeted young children in their advertising.
His other clients include the National Enquirer, where so much of this dirt has landed.
It is essential the congressional impeachment hearings probe how Lenzner is paid, what tasks he performed, and who ordered him to perform them.
Since Lenzner was awarded a no-bid contract to train Haitian police at U.S. government expense, how can we be sure public money is not being used to subsidize his dirty little war against America's innocents?
Congress should also probe The Washington Post's allegation that Detective Jack Palladino was paid with federal funds during the 1992 campaign to investigate the background of women who were sexual and political threats to Clinton.
The hearings should also focus on who is paying for the secret police.
To say that Clinton's lawyers are paying is to dodge the question. Clinton's lawyers have basically never been paid.
The president and the First Lady have yet to pay them a dime, and the legal-defense fund has largely been consumed by administrative and legal expenses.
If the Clinton lawyers are running on empty, you can bet that Lenzner is not. So who is footing the bill?
As the answers to these questions pile up, the chances that Clinton survives this scandal will begin to drop quickly. nypost.com |