James Stewart’s new Whitewater book, Blood Sport, is a scurrilous attempt to blacken the reputation of the Clinton administration. Or at least it would be if it contained any new and damning information. Which it doesn’t.
Such is the gist of a March 14 memo by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attack dog Ann Lewis — not to be confused with Mrs. Clinton’s attack dog emeritus, Susan Thomases, who originally Tapproached Stewart with the expectation that he could be persuaded to write the definitive Whitewater acquittal.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD’S crack investigative team (Fred Barnes’s fax machine) has obtained a copy of this confidential memo (thank you, whoever sent it). Lewis sent the memo to select Clinton boosters under the heading “To: All Concerned.” Not that they are concerned, Tmind you, it’s just that “while Mr. Stewart uncovered nothing new on the Whitewater front, he does recycle some old allegations.”
Some “erroneous allegations” are then ticked off under the he said she said subheadings “Blood Sport” and “Truth.” It seems that while Stewart challenges Mrs. Clinton’s description of her role in the Whitewater investment as passive (since she attended to its business affairs after 1988), the “truth” is that “Mrs. Clinton has always [our emphasis] acknowledged that in the later years of the investment . . she took over to make certain that the company complied with the law. Mrs. Clinton described her Whitewater work in detail to RTC investigators” (Lewis’s emphasis).
The “Bottom Line,” Lewis asserts, is that Stewart, “an award winning journalist… found absolutely no evidence that the Clintons did anything wrong.” Which is perhaps what prompted a Washington Post reviewer to call Blood Sport “an endless tale of small-time venality, hypocrisy, conflicts of interest and impropriety . . . all of it inflated to gargantuan dimensions by the refusal of both Clintons to try the simple expedient of telling the truth.”
Unlike the first lady, Stewart will not be flanked by a Secret Service detail to remove unwanted hecklers on his six-city book tour. Lewis helpfully included a schedule and locations of his upcoming stops. “We don’t want to help sell this book by creating controversy,” she wrote, “but we do want to be prepared to answer allegations with facts.” Perhaps the Clintons can find some new documents in the White House book room to help in this endeavor.
