As a man chokes when forced to speak of something he’d rather avoid, the New York Times is having a deuce of a time reporting on the Clinton administration’s misuse of the FBI. On June 13, it published a story headed ” Most F.B.I. Files Received by Clinton White House Summarized Background Inquiries.” This was a curious headline. First, its accuracy was questionable — the facts in the case are far from established. Second, it bore almost no relation to the article that followed.
The sixth paragraph mentioned that, while the FBI normally holds “raw files, ” “summaries sent to the White House could contain references to any issue discovered” during investigations. The nineteenth paragraph asserted that, ” in cases of major appointments,” “only summaries of the inquiries are provided to the White House.” But other than these two mentions, the piece had nothing to do with the question of whether the FBI files searched inside the Clinton White House contained summaries and summaries only. And a good thing too, because we don’t know what exactly was in the files.
There was also the following bald statement: “The files at issue were assembled for a different purpose [than criminal or national-security concerns], to help Presidential aides evaluate whether a person should be allowed regular access to the White House.” That is simply the White House spin, reported as though it were truth, without qualification. Reporter David Johnston knows better than that.
“The issue,” he noted, “has been a painful one for President Clinton who has struggled to move beyond the reach of issues like Whitewater and the firing of White House travel office employees.” Somehow, we find it harder than Johnston to feel the president’s pain in this instance.
