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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (7636)	10/7/1998 9:10:00 AM
From: Bill	Respond to of 67261

<<and George Bush lied under oath. >> When did he do this, Mr. Facts?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (7636)	10/7/1998 9:30:00 AM
From: j_b	Respond to of 67261

<<That is, I guess, Iran/Contra was OK, even if the Boland amendment was a duly enacted law, and George Bush lied under oath>> Two points here - first, this issue is also irrelevant if we are discussing Clinton, but relevant if we are discussing impeachment in general. Second, the reason no charges were brought on the basis of the Boland amendment is that it was deemed to be too vague a law, and impossible to interpret. Therefore, it would not be possible to prove that it was actually violated. Do I agree with that? No, I feel it was violated in spirit, if not in letter, and that the Iran/Contra activities should not have happened. However, if the Democrats could have pursued Bush or Reagan over this, they would have. Democrats are no more benign or non-partisan than the Republicans. <<Do you consider the current perjury / obstruction of justice / conspiracy charges to be "Monica" issues or not? >> Yes. If there is sufficient evidence to prosecute for perjury, that should be pursued (after he leaves office) in criminal court, or wherever cases like that go. <<On another post of yours, j_b, you brought up the White House travel office affair as some kind of political dirty trick>> The parts of Travelgate that you have forgotten involve the use of Billy Dale's FBI file to try to smear him, and the use of the IRS to try to do the same. These were actually done well after the travel office personnel had been fired, and were most likely illegal (it was investigated by the Democrat Congress and dropped). These issues have been discussed elsewhere, but if you'd like I can repost or send the information to you privately.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (7636)	10/7/1998 12:54:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Capital Shrink Rap nytimes.com Then, we have another comparison between current grand inquisitor Ken Starr and other Presidential investigations of the past. I know, it's all irrelevant, but interesting never the less. The patient in this case is Monica Lewinsky, who, not without reason, sought the help of two different therapists during her adventures with the two big creeps, Clinton and Tripp. As part of the bargain Kenneth Starr drove in his immunity negotiations with Ms. Lewinsky, she agreed to grant a limited waiver freeing both her therapists to corroborate her accounts of Presidential sex in interviews with his investigators. One of the therapists, Irene Kassorla, specifically asked, however, that "the details of her interview not be made public" -- a doomed, almost poignant, request in our Salem of 1998. Both her interview and that of the other therapist, Kathleen Estep, became part of the latest Judiciary Committee document dump last Friday, with minimal redactions. Since there was no information in either interview remotely germane to the investigation that hadn't already been summarized in the previously released Starr report and documents, there was no need to release the complete interviews; there was no previously unmined news in them at all, as witness their scant press coverage over the weekend. What was added to the record, though, were her therapists' diagnostic speculations about Ms. Lewinsky's possible clinical ailments and their connection to her "relationship with her father." Ho-hum stuff, perhaps, but surely the patient's private business and utterly irrelevant to an impeachment investigation. In his posthumously published memoir, Arthur Liman, the chief counsel in the Iran-contra hearings, recalls that "suggestions in the press that [Oliver] North had undergone psychiatric treatment at a military facility" prompted him to "subpoena those records." But after soul-searching, he concluded that Colonel North "was entitled to the same privacy as an ordinary citizen." Such concern for the niceties of privacy sound absolutely quaint now. I wonder if today's Washington would even muster the same outrage once provoked by one of the most unsavory incidents of Watergate -- the White House "plumbers" break-in to the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsberg's therapist in a failed effort to burglarize his psychiatric files. When the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was sentenced to prison for his role in this incident, the judge, Gerhard A. Gesell, called it "a shameful episode in the history of this country." When last Friday Congress blithely released psychiatric musings on a private citizen, posting them on a government Web site for all the world to see, it was simply business as usual. Well, there's this thing floating around about people having no shame, but that's a different context. Cheers, Dan.