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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (777)	8/7/1998 1:33:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 13994

The inside scum from the scum at Salon: Clinton's sexual scorched-earth plan - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If GOP pushes impeachment, White House loyalists warn, their own dirty secrets will be exposed. BY JONATHAN BRODER AND HARRY JAFFE \| Just before the 1988 elections, Republican operative Lee Atwater began spreading a rumor that Democratic House Speaker Thomas Foley was gay. When the rumor reached Rep. Barney Frank, at the time the only openly homosexual member of Congress, Frank acted quickly and decisively. He informed Atwater that unless the rumors about Foley ceased immediately, he would personally out six gay Republicans on the floor of the House. The GOP whisper campaign halted dead in its tracks. A decade later, as Kenneth Starr moves to wrap up his investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and submit his final report to Congress on his four-year-long criminal probe of the president, the lessons of that confrontation have not been lost on some Clinton allies. While Republican and Democratic lawmakers, pundits and supporters urge the president to apologize for a sexual relation with Lewinsky to avoid impeachment, these die-hard Clinton loyalists are spreading the word that a long-ignored but fearsome tactic has now resurfaced as an element in the president's survival strategy: The threat of exposing the sexual improprieties of Republican critics, both in Congress and beyond, should they demand impeachment hearings in the House. "We're talking about the Doomsday Machine here," one close ally of the president told Salon, alluding to the unstoppable chain of retaliatory nuclear strikes in the movie, "Dr. Strangelove." "Once the Doomsday Machine is set in motion, there will be no stopping it. The Republicans with skeletons in their closets must assume everything is known and will come out. So the question is: Do they really want to go there?" The threat to out the president's critics is not new. It first surfaced on Feb. 8, when former White House advisor George Stephanopoulos, analyzing the then-2-week-old Lewinsky scandal for ABC's "This Week," said White House allies were "starting to whisper about what I'll call the 'Ellen Romach' strategy." Stephanopoulos then went on to explain that Romach was an East German spy who had slept with President John Kennedy as well as many other congressmen and senators. "Robert Kennedy was charged with getting her out of the country and also getting [FBI Director] John Edgar Hoover to go to the Congress and say, 'Don't you investigate this, because if you do, we're going to open up everybody's closets," Stephanopoulos said. Returning to the Lewinsky scandal, he added: "I think that in the long run, they have a deterrent strategy" (of gathering embarrassing details about the private lives of Clinton's congressional critics and threatening to leak them to the media). As part of his defense in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct lawsuit, Clinton's lawyers retained private investigator Terry Lenzner, whose company, Investigative Group International, conducted interviews and public record searches to gather information on Jones' sexual history. Clinton's critics now believe IGI, which employs lawyers, former FBI, CIA and DEA agents, ex-cops and former reporters, was also hired to dig up dirt on the president's accusers in the Lewinsky scandal as well. Lenzner could not be reached for comment. salonmagazine.com Actually, they are wrong. Frank blackmailed the Reps when they wanted to censure him for allowing his "husband" to run a prostitution ring out of his home and for using his influence to fix his husband's parking tickets. Frank, the leading intellectual of the Dem Party and one who often claimed that RR was clueless, claimed ignorance of activities that happened under his own nose, so to speak. So who was clueless by admission? The writers at Salon wouldn't want to actually tell the truth about Frank, would they? The article seems to confirm that the WH will add blackmail to the list of their official crimes. Thanks for the confirmation, Salon.