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

To: Big D who wrote (9777)	12/29/1998 9:13:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13994

December 29, 1998 'Disregard for the Law' Here's a question philosophers have pondered through the ages: If someone were to fire a cannonball up Pennsylvania Avenue, would anyone hear it? Or to put it differently, Is it true that trees only talk to one another? We raise these mysteries after observing that not much of anyone in Washington beyond a few reporters seems to have noticed that on December 22 a federal district judge denounced the behavior of a group of Clintonesque former Commerce Department officials as akin to "hooligans" and "scofflaws." What's more, he said the department's handling of a lawsuit over the late Ron Brown's trade junkets has been so untrustworthy that he is appointing a special magistrate to keep an eye on them. Judge Royce Lamberth found that the facts "strongly substantiate the claim that the agency was deliberately destroying and jettisoning documents," ending "in a flurry of document shredding" in Secretary Brown's office after his death in Bosnia in April 1996. He describes the department's four years of legal stonewalling as an "egregious . . . disregard for the law." Again, one must ponder the Beltway's apparently eternal mysteries: Does anyone connect the dots down there anymore, or do all the capital's solons and scribes really believe the whole issue is just Bill Clinton's pattycake habits? It's been four years since Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act requesting documents on Ron Brown's foreign trade missions and the possible linkage of seats on them to political contributions. This was the scandal that flushed Democratic fund-raiser John Huang out of hiding and into a federal deposition a week before the 1996 election. Commerce had good reason to destroy documents. Back in 1996, even the preliminary memos that Judicial Watch had uncovered were judged by Charles Lewis of the liberal Center for Public Integrity "to support the notion that favorable treatment was given to friends of Ron Brown, Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party." "Seemingly everywhere Judicial Watch looked, there lurked some piece of Commerce dirty laundry," Judge Lamberth notes. Oh, and as to the all-purpose dismissal of Judicial Watch's lawyer Larry Klayman as a pest, the judge laconically observes, "The DOC appears to have demonstrated a disregard for the law that cannot be explained even by the idiosyncrasies of Judicial Watch's counsel." The stench from Commerce's soiled laundry eventually became so great that the Clinton Administration capitulated in August 1997 and asked for judgment against itself, offering to pay $2 million in legal fees to Judicial Watch and to initiate a new document search. Judicial Watch took the unprecedented step of opposing the motion, claiming Commerce had proven it couldn't be trusted. And Judge Lamberth agreed: "Almost ironically, the DOC's motion must be denied, not because the evidence fails to establish that the government's conduct was unreasonable, but because the record of misconduct in this case is so egregious and so extensive that merely granting the DOC's motion and ordering a new search would fail to hold the agency fully accountable for the serious violations that it appears to have deliberately committed. . . ." Judge Lamberth has now ordered a new search of government records under the close supervision of a federal magistrate. He also allowed a motion to compel new testimony by Mr. Huang, the former Commerce official, because "little of his deposition testimony is particularly credible." The Justice Department was also criticized for having "repeatedly denied" requests for a legible copy of the desk diary Mr. Huang had kept at Commerce. Judge Lamberth specifically ordered Attorney General Janet Reno to provide Judicial Watch with a legible copy of Mr. Huang's diary. In short, the Clinton Administration's common practice of misusing the good-faith patience inherent in the legal system's procedures has run up against one public official with the courage and the authority to order it stopped. Judge Lamberth's blunt and clear criticism stands in contrast with a post-modern Beltway culture more prone to merely smirking at the Clintonites' brazenness or fluttering anxiously over it. The documents that Judicial Watch is really after probably no longer exist. Nolanda Hill, a former business partner and confidante of Secretary Brown, testified this past April that shortly before his death Mr. Brown showed her a packet of documents that he said had been retrieved from Commerce files during the search for Judicial Watch's FOIA requests. Ms. Hill reviewed the top five or six documents and saw they were copies of letters to trade mission participants specifically referencing their donations to the DNC. The documents have never been seen since, and Judge Lamberth notes that Ms. Hill, who is now under federal indictment for tax evasion, "has never been questioned by anyone" from the government about what she saw. "On many occasions," Judge Lamberth concluded, "the DOC appears to have engaged in the illegal withholding of responsive documents, in the removal of such documents from the DOC, and in the destruction of potentially responsive documents in the office of the late Secretary Brown and elsewhere, as well as a great deal of misconduct during the litigation, which the Court leaves for another day's decision." We'd say that a week or so from now is an ideal time to take up these matters, which are perfectly relevant to the core issue of conduct that is now before us. interactive.wsj.com