Electronic Telegraph
telegraph.co.uk
It's not sexual McCarthyism
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Issue 1305
Monday 21 December 1998
AS always, the pendulum will swing back in President Clinton's favour. But will it
swing far enough to save him this time? The national apathy that has shielded him
from outrage for so long is now his foe. Americans are too busy with themselves
to rally, decisively, to his defence.
Polls showing 57 per cent opposed to impeachment include the faintly discernable
pulse of yuppies in the suburban malls. For the Senate Republicans, the wrath of
the other 43 per cent may count for more in the calculus of political risk. Besides,
there is a principle at stake. People are in prison across the United States for doing
exactly what their President has so obviously done.
The rule of law cannot abide a double standard. Which is why it is facile to accuse
the Republicans of staging a coup d'etat. They are not threatening to install one of
their own in the White House. Mr Clinton's successor, should it come to that, is
Vice-President Al Gore, a Democrat, and a far more committed advocate of liberal
causes than the chameleon Mr Clinton. Yes, the impeachment has been a nasty,
partisan, degrading spectacle, but which of the two sides is the more guilty of
venal self-interest? The Democrats do not dispute the guilt of the President. In
their own draft motion of censure they accepted that he had disgraced his office.
Their sole defence is that his crimes fall short of "high crimes". Many of the same
Democrats who voted in the past to impeach judges for a single offence of
perjury, voted this time to absolve the President, who appoints all federal
prosecutors and judges, of the systematic obstruction of a civil lawsuit, as well as
perjury.
Let me clarify this, in case anybody is still under the misapprehension that Mr
Clinton is being impeached for conducting an affair with Monica Lewinsky, or
lying about adultery. If that were the case, one could indeed argue that "sexual
McCarthyism" had run rampant. But it is not the case. Mr Clinton is in trouble for
conspiring to prevent a young woman, Paula Jones, from establishing in court that
she had been summoned from her place of work by the Arkansas state police and
escorted like a slave-girl to the hotel chambers of then Governor Clinton, where
she was expected to satisfy his droit de seigneur. The DNA on Monica's dress
was merely the building block in establishing this conspiracy. Mr Clinton was
impeached for abusing his power in an attempt to cover up a former abuse of
power.
I can understand the bitter feelings of those who argue that Mr Clinton's enemies
took advantage of the legal system to set a trap, although I would have more
sympathy if they, and their network of well-funded foundations, had not used the
law so masterfully themselves in advancing the Left-Liberal agenda. Still, toppling
a President is escalating this form of political warfare to a new level. Their
complaint deserves to be taken seriously. I would accept that it was the express
intent of Paula Jones, and even more so of her husband Steve, to use her 1994
sexual harassment lawsuit to inflict political damage on the Clinton presidency. But
I also think that she was perfectly justified in doing so. Mr Clinton's treatment of
her was not just boorish, it bordered on the mentally deranged. As she told me:
"People have got to know what he did to me." When the press refused to publish
her account, she resorted to a lawsuit as the only means of forcing it into public
consciousness.
I can also see why people in Britain think that the Independent Counsel, Kenneth
Starr, is a rogue inquisitor, especially if they rely on television for their news
coverage. It is said that after four years of poking around in every nook and
cranny of the Clintons' past life, Mr Starr was forced to concede that there was
no evidence of wrongdoing in the original Whitewater affair. Well, not exactly.
The Statute of Limitations on the worst allegations of bribery have already passed,
so the offences cannot be prosecuted. Witness one in the Whitewater/Madison
Guaranty bank fraud investigation, Vincent Foster, was found dead in a Virginia
park with an untraced revolver in his hand. Witness two, Jim McDougal, died in
prison earlier this year, in solitary confinement, without access to his medication.
Witness three, Susan McDougal, chose to go to prison on contempt charges
rather than answer factual questions about Mr Clinton's alleged role in a $300,000
scam. I would never suggest, of course, that silence is what kept her alive.
Witness four, Webster Hubbell, violated his criminal plea agreement, received
hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money, and has now been re-indicted.
Despite "omerta" and perishable witnesses, the Whitewater investigation is still
going on. I do not know how it will end, but Hillary Clinton is most assuredly in
the cross-hairs right now.
My gripe against Kenneth Starr is that he is not inquisitorial enough. He has failed
to pursue the Clintons for their worst sins, namely the misuse of the FBI and the
corruption of the US Justice Department. Perhaps this is because he is himself a
creature of the Justice Department, where he served as chief of staff.
Instinctively, he has avoided confronting the institutional power of the FBI. In the
death investigation of Vincent Foster, he refused to proceed when his own
prosecutor, Miguel Rodriguez, told him that he had uncovered evidence of an FBI
cover-up. Rodriguez resigned in protest, suspecting strongly that Foster was
murdered. The case was shut down. Mr Starr also botched the investigation into
the White House's illicit use of confidential FBI files on 900 Republican opponents.
He used FBI agents to probe misconduct involving the FBI itself. Needless to say,
they came up empty handed. A civil suit on behalf of the victims has since
uncovered evidence that the purloined files were part of a campaign of political
espionage ordered by Hillary Clinton herself.
The dirt in the files, including raw data on congressional leaders, was fed into
computers. Presumably it was later used for blackmail, or fed to media surrogates
for the systematic smearing of Republicans. But if Starr flinched, preferring to
eliminate Mr Clinton with the Lewinsky rifle shot, Congress made its judgment on
a broader basis. Saturday's impeachment vote was a rebuke of Mr Clinton's "Want
of Virtue" in all its facets: Filegate, the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service, the
Dixie Mafia ties from Arkansas, the sale of restricted technology to the Chinese in
exchange for campaign funds, and on and on. The passion and vitriol of this
impeachment are inexplicable, unless you understand the Republican belief that Mr
Clinton is corrupting the whole US government.
Open suspicion in Washington that he bombed Iraq in order to save his own skin
has brought home the point - perhaps more dramatically than impeachment itself -
that his credibility is beyond repair. He has poisoned the Middle East policy of the
West, and he will likely poison everything he touches from now on. The Senate
will have to take this into account at trial. The Democrats have the blocking
minority required to save Mr Clinton, but the upper chamber is a prickly place.
Elders on both sides of the aisle are almost preening in their sense of institutional
self-worth, and the tribal loyalties of party count for little. The Senate will look to
the interests of the country, as it usually has through history, and that bodes ill for
President Clinton.
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