KLAYMAN REPORT NO BEDTIME STORY
By Timothy W. Maier
Insight
October 17, 1998
Judicial Watch has been compiling a document of Clinton-
administration injustice that is proving to be nearly as juicy if
not as salacious as the Kenneth Starr report.
A few months ago two FBI agents paid a visit to the Washington
office of Larry Klayman, the former Justice Department prosecutor
who now heads Judicial Watch, a conservative legal-ethics watchdog
group. They weren't after Klayman, but rather were seeking evidence
he had gathered in his lawsuits against the Clinton administration
concerning illegal fund-raising. But Klayman is no patsy. He has
been down this road before, with congressional investigators
claiming to be interested in the volumes of documents collected by
Judicial Watch about the alleged sale of seats on Commerce
Department trade trips and its collection of potential blackmail
materials concerning Filegate and IRS abuses.
. . . "I was skeptical but polite to the agents," Klayman tells
Insight. "They told me they were going to subpoena some of the
corporate people who went on the trade trips."
. . . Klayman would like that. Hauling in such corporate giants
as Bernard Schwartz, the chief executive officer of Loral Space &
Communications who was the biggest Democratic donor, undoubtedly
would shed more light on whether Commerce trade trips were sold for
campaign donations, which Klayman suspects. Klayman already has the
deposition of the late commerce secretary Ron Brown's assistant
Nolanda Hill, saying this and more -- not only that first lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton devised the ticket-to-ride scheme for
campaign contributors, but that it was she who moved Democratic
National Committee fund-raiser John Huang into a key Commerce post
in charge of large Asian contracts.
. . . Recently Klayman phoned one of the FBI agents who had
called on him for help and asked if the Justice Department followed
through with the promised subpoenas. The former federal prosecutor
says the agent told him he could not discuss it.
. . . Klayman pressed. "Can you tell me at least this," he
pleaded. "Are you happy with what's happening?"
. . . The agent paused and then replied, "Let's put it this way:
I am thinking of resigning. You know how politics and the justice
system work."
. . . To Klayman, this hardly was news. As Insight reported
earlier this year, FBI Director Louis Freeh is among those who have
entertained thoughts of stepping down because of frustration about
politics within the Justice Department that has prevented him from
probing the campaign-finance mess. Freeh has held off while he
waits to learn whether Attorney General Janet Reno's 90-day inquiry
into the fund-raising roles of both Clinton and Vice President Al
Gore will trigger the independent-counsel statute.
. . . Nonetheless, Klayman remains optimistic, especially since
Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr has introduced Judicial Watch's
interim report, "Crimes and Other Offenses Committed by President
Bill Clinton Warranting His Impeachment and Removal From Elected
Office," into the official record of the House Judiciary
Committee's impeachment hearings.
. . . The 145-page Klayman document, plus some 4,000 pages of
supporting evidence and documentation, deals with Chinagate,
Taxgate, Filegate and Trustgate, a reference to suspected illegal
use of Clinton's legal-defense fund. The evidence is based on
Judicial Watch's 20 ongoing civil lawsuits involving the Clinton
administration, including Huang's exclusive deposition concerning
the raising of some $2 million for Democratic campaigns -- much of
it returned because of its dishonest origins.
. . . "No longer can Democrats and other apologists claim that
the Clinton scandals only concern sex," Klayman announced after his
report was accepted by the Judiciary Committee. "A review of the
Judicial Watch report, which is endorsed by the House Judiciary
Committee and complements the Starr report in setting the
parameters for the impeachment inquiry, establishes that Clinton
must answer for his conduct concerning the invasion of privacy
rights of American citizens; the sale of seats and likely breaches
of national security on trade missions; the misuse of the IRS to
retaliate against perceived adversaries; and the illegal
solicitation and receipt of monies into his legal-defense funds,
which in the case of Charlie Trie resulted in more than $600,000 in
Chinese cash being laundered at a time that the White House was
passing national- security information to Trie."
. . . More recently Klayman has sought criminal indictments
against former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and Deputy
Chief of Staff John Podesta in connection with the Chinagate
scandal. Klayman claims they tried to conceal documents suggesting
that seats on Commerce Department trade missions were for sale for
$50,000 contributions to the Democratic Party. Hill swore to that
fact in her deposition taken by Judicial Watch. A federal judge
since has granted Klayman permission to demonstrate a motion to
show cause that would require Panetta and Podesta to explain their
roles in the alleged trade-mission coverup scheme.
. . . While Klayman is expected to file that motion soon, friends
of the White House maintain he is on a fishing expedition,
contending his report is short on facts and full of innuendo and
unsubstantiated allegations. They naturally fulminate with special
fury at the linking of Clinton or Gore to illegal activities. . . .
During the course of Klayman's pending lawsuits on these issues
he has been threatened with slander lawsuits by Clinton strategist
James Carville. Klayman had deposed Carville, who derides the
Judicial Watch chief as a "little twerp." Another Clinton partisan,
CNBC entertainer Geraldo Rivera, characterizes Klayman as a legal
wild man but one who sounds "shockingly reasonable."
. . . Name-calling aside, the question is whether Klayman's
report, for all of its damning detail, will have much of an impact
on the impeachment hearings. The report details alleged widespread
abuse of power by the Clinton administration. Its strength, as the
former prosecutor sees it, is the evidence concerning those trade-
trip donations. Here the hard evidence speaks volumes -- from
Hill's deposition, which fingers Hillary Clinton as the mastermind
behind the plot -- to the role of Huang and the favoritism granted
Schwartz and Loral Space & Communications, now under a Justice
Department probe for allegedly enhancing Beijing's ballistic-
missile technology.
. . . Boston University Law School Dean Ronald A. Cass, who
served Presidents Reagan and Bush as vice chairman of the
International Trade Commission from 1987 to 1990, characterizes
parts of Klayman's report as a "collection of rumor and innuendo,"
with no direct proof that Clinton had knowledge of any wrongdoing.
As with Reagan during Iran-Contra, no credible evidence or witness
yet has been found to prove the president knew about illegal
activity going on under his nose. "Judicial Watch is pretty
aggressively anti- Clinton," Cass says. "It doesn't mean everything
they say is not true, but I can't say it's the gospel. They blow up
small evidence into conclusions such as the accusations in Filegate
that the president was hands-on. They are going on surmise. If
something was there, it would have come out already. I see in many
areas a pretty big leap on small pieces of evidence to form large
conclusions. Klayman says he has three binders with backup data,
but as a lawyer you put your best evidence out front -- not in the
binders as backup."
. . . The supporting documents contain references to a number of
articles --including some from Insight -- as well as to books
including Seymour M. Hersch's The Dark Side of Camelot. The Hersch
book is highlighted to support the allegation of George
Stephanopoulos, the White House aide turned political pundit, that
the Clinton team is employing an Ellen Rometsch strategy. Rometsch
was a girlfriend of John F. Kennedy who was an East German spy. The
strategy refers to a claim by Hersch, rumored for years, that FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy
prevented an investigation by using FBI files to blackmail GOP
members of Congress.
. . . But even Cass says Klayman's report should not be totally
dismissed. "The trade trips warrant further investigation," he
says. "There may be something to those allegations. It looks to be
pretty credible evidence. There is a tainted connection with the
trade trips and government decision-making. What you have there is
suggestive. It should require further investigation."
. . . That's exactly what Klayman hopes will happen when Congress
begins to call witnesses in the impeachment inquiry. But will the
Judiciary Committee have the courage to call Hill and Huang to
testify? If they don't, it can't be because investigators don't
know the sort of evidence they have to provide. Klayman has seen to
that. |
