An independent prosecutor had been appointed to investigate a scandal engulfing the White House. But instead of doing that, this prosecutor was ” deliberately going into extraneous issues,” the president complained in a private memo to his chief of staff. “He cannot be allowed to get away with this,” the president ordered. Every available administration surrogate must ” hit him hard on the fact that as special prosecutor he is derelict in his duties in trying to conduct a partisan political vendetta.”
But the president did not get the response he wanted from his underlings. So five days later, on July 12, 1973, Richard Nixon chewed out Al Haig. ” Buzhardt or somebody gotta get off their ass and get up to chapter and verse” on Archibald Cox, Nixon fumed. “You know,” he said, how “‘We’re out to get the president’ and all that stuff.” And “Also how they leak — how many leaks they had.” Nixon could not understand why this obvious counteroffensive wasn’t already underway. “Goddamnit, if I had the time, I could do this,” he told Haig. “Do these fellows think of this sort of thing?”
Bill Clinton doesn’t have such problems. His people think of everything. And they do it, too, as a matter of course, and constantly and everywhere and out in the open. In fact, Clinton’s Ron Zieglers and Rabbi Korffs and E. Howard Hunts operate with such audacity and overdrive that American politics now smoothly responds to the rhythm of White House spin and smear. Washington is hypnotized by the spectacle, so much that it now evaluates each new outrage like an Olympic ice-dancing routine: this many points for technique, that many for presentation. Everyone forgets that what we’re actually watching is organized hooliganism.
A case in point: the subpoena served by independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s attorneys on the defrocked journalist and current White House hatchet man Sid Blumenthal. That subpoena sought documents and testimony relating to a whispering campaign, conducted by the usual “sources close to the president,” against employees in the independent counsel’s office. What might Sid Blumenthal know about such a campaign, and how might he have participated in it?
Not to worry, Mr. President; your loyalists have an answer for this question: Ken Starr is a fascist. First they came for Sid Blumenthal, Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry intones; “It’s us today and probably you tomorrow.” Blumenthal himself complains about an “assault on the First Amendment.” His lawyer likens Blumenthal’s grand-jury call to a move by the ” Gestapo.” Clinton flunkie Harold Ickes says it means we are living in a ” police state, pure and simple.”
This gets straight 6’s from the judges. Starr’s men cannot discuss grand- jury subpoenas and resulting testimony, so no formal explanation of their business with Blumenthal is available for public inspection. And in the absence of such an explanation, the world has concluded that Blumenthal is not a fair subject of independent-counsel inquiry. Sure, he may have criticized Ken Starr on the phone with reporters. But Ken Starr is open to criticism like anybody else, and Blumenthal’s job is to talk with reporters. The idea that criticizing someone to a reporter might constitute an obstruction of justice seems to nearly everyone in the front-row seats, in the words of National Public Radio legal analyst Nina Totenberg, “totally wacko.”
Maybe so. The Blumenthal subpoena is regrettable at least because it affords the president’s defenders such an easy opportunity to direct public attention away from their own behavior. But there remain a few notable distinctions to be drawn between the unfortunate PR effects of that subpoena, on the one hand, and its legal grounding and public purpose on the other.
For one thing, it is not in fact Sidney Blumenthal’s job to shop rumor and out-of-context info-porn about American law-enforcement officials in order to delegitimize an ongoing criminal investigation sanctioned by the courts and the U.S. Department of Justice. Sidney Blumenthal is a full-time federal employee. And the work of state we pay him six figures to do in no way includes protecting the president from the consequences of adultery, witness tampering, and subornation of perjury. Yes, he has a First Amendment right to say anything he wants about Kenneth Starr. But he has no right to say it on our dime.
Next, we should note that there is one neutral person privy to the rationale for the Blumenthal subpoena. She is chief judge Norma Holloway Johnson of the federal district court in Washington. Last Tuesday, she heard arguments from Sid Blumenthal’s lawyer about why the subpoena should be quashed. Judge Johnson rejected those arguments and ordered Blumenthal to testify before the grand jury, which he did last Thursday. He didn’t absolutely have to. If his attorneys thought the Johnson ruling was wrong, they could have appealed it to the federal circuit court. But they didn’t. For that matter, if the White House truly believed its own propaganda that the independent counsel’s office is a “Gestapo” entity, then the president could — and should — have ordered the attorney general to fire Ken Starr. But he didn’t.
Finally, there is what the current controversy reveals, more clearly than ever before, about the character of this president’s associates in their official capacity. It is automatic: Confronted by adversaries and asked for the truth, they have an instinct for subterfuge and stonewalling and slime. It is just like Nixon. Except that, in quantity and ferocity, it is worse. And it is not just Sid Blumenthal.
The Clintonian reaction to questions about Monica Lewinsky has smelled like a dirty trick for some weeks now. First came a tip to U.S. New & World Report that Linda Tripp’s friend Lucianne Goldberg, according to 40-year- old divorce records, had once given a child up for adoption. Then, on Sunday, February 22, Clinton critic and former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova went public with persistent rumors that private detectives linked to the president were snooping into his background — and his wife’s. “Blatant lies,” the White House immediately and categorically responded; no one associated with the president “has hired or authorized any private investigator” to look into anyone’s background.
But that same day, the Washington Post caught Clinton lawyer Mickey Kantor on the telephone with one such investigator, Terry Lenzner of the Investigative Group, Inc. And the very next day, Lenzner admitted that he had been retained by the president’s lawyers — and volunteered to the Post that, in his view, there would be “nothing inappropriate” about poking around the independent counsel’s office. Whereupon the White House’s denial became, as Ron Ziegler used to say, “inoperative.”
At a news briefing on February 24, Mike McCurry was asked whether White House staffers were leaking gossip “designed to undermine the authority of Ken Starr’s prosecutors.” He did not say no. McCurry was asked whether there was anything wrong with White House staffers’ speaking to reporters about the backgrounds of Starr’s employees. He did not say no. McCurry was asked whether the president was aware that there were detectives working in conjunction with his defense attorneys. He said yes. It’s just that the detectives aren’t looking for “personal derogatory information.”
We don’t believe that. Terry Lenzner fights rough. In 1991, his employees were discovered literally going through the garbage of an opposing party in an English corporate takeover. In 1997, he was revealed to have proposed a full-scale search for “embarrassing or incriminating details” in the family history of Republican senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma. Lenzner has performed projects of one sort or another in support of Bill Clinton since at least the 1992 presidential campaign. And he is hardly the only one. A private investigator named Anthony Pellicano, saying he was “working for Clinton,” recently approached a client of Lucianne Goldberg’s about Linda Tripp’s Lewinsky recordings.
The sub-rosa effort to discredit the president’s antagonists is hardly restricted to run-of-the-mill, public-record material. The newspapers have been too polite or too cautious to report the matter in any detail, but ” longtime Washington sources” and “Democratic sources” and “White House officials” have lately been promiscuous with tips about what Time magazine calls the “workplace and sexual histories of the prosecutors.” What does that mean, exactly? It means this: The tipsters have intimated, without evidence, that officials in Starr’s office, whom they name, have had extramarital affairs, have impregnated one another, or are closeted homosexuals.
Filth. It is bad enough that Bill Clinton’s unofficial, ostensibly uncoordinated spin campaign has declared unembarrassed “war” on the independent counsel’s office. James Carville, McCarthy-like, tells CNN that ” I have just been handed a document” that might demonstrate how “slimy,” ” scuzzy,” and “sleazy” Ken Starr is. On ABC, Carville shrieks that Starr is an “out-of-control, sex-crazed person.” At a reporters’ breakfast, Carville mocks Starr for being a Christian.
But it is quite another thing when White House aides and presidential hirelings behave in a similar manner. None of them may ever be proved legally culpable for obstruction of justice. That’s not the point. Emerging from the grand-jury room last Thursday, Sidney Blumenthal openly acknowledged having circulated stories about Kenneth Starr’s “vicious” and “lawless” methods. He bragged about it, even, and vowed to continue doing it. It is “part of my job,” he insisted.
America is not a police state — and the Constitution will not collapse — because Sidney Blumenthal had to answer a couple of hours of questions in a criminal probe. The graver threat — an unprecedented threat — is an executive branch of government stocked with people who make it “my job,” at best, to “tell the truth slowly,” as Mike McCurry puts it, and, more often, to do everything else they can to prevent our legal system from discerning that truth.
Bill Clinton’s White House, as a whole, is an obstruction of justice. Where corruption is concerned, Richard Nixon, more and more, looks like just another also-ran.
David Tell, for the Editors
