STONEWALLING WORKS

Blaming Starr for failing to finish his investigation is like blaming a shooting victim for getting in the bullet’s way. Starr hasn’t prolonged the probe. Clinton has. He’s done it by a ceaseless campaign of stonewalling. This is what’s unprecedented. Stonewalling — even of investigations undertaken by Clinton’s own Justice Department — is now a defining characteristic of Clinton’s presidency. Republican senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, once the minority Watergate counsel and now chairman of the Senate probe of 1996 political fund-raising abuses, says Clinton and his aides have cited more legal grounds for impeding investigators than President Nixon did in Watergate. “The only contested things I recall in Watergate had to do with the tapes,” Thompson says.

How exactly do the Clintonites stonewall? Every way they can think of. They toy with document requests and subpoenas, sometimes deliberately defying them. Last year, four White House aides turned over subpoenaed papers to the Senate Banking Committee just as its Whitewater hearings were ending. Their explanation for complying months late: They hadn’t come across the documents until cleaning out their desks. When Thompson’s committee sought logs of Clinton pal Charlie Trie’s visits to the White House, one page had everything but Trie’s name blacked out — no date, no time, no indication of whom Trie had seen. A specialty of Clinton stonewalling is the frivolous claim of executive, attorney-client, or work-product privilege. Though executive privilege normally applies only in national-security cases, Clinton invoked it in Travelgate to thwart the investigation of the firing of seven minor officials.

Not surprisingly, the White House is no help in getting witnesses to testify — quite the opposite. Did the president’s men obstruct justice by drumming up lucrative legal work for Webb Hubbell, who is stiffing investigators? Clinton could urge Hubbell to straighten out the matter by talking to Starr or congressional committees. He hasn’t. Asked in April whether he would urge former business partner Susan McDougal to appear before a Whitewater grand jury and tell the truth about his role, the president responded: “She has a lawyer. They know what they’re doing. . . . It’s none of my business.” Clinton said McDougal has already stated publicly that the Clintons did nothing illegal. So what’s the problem with her repeating this under oath before a grand jury? Clinton didn’t say. McDougal remains in jail, convicted of contempt for refusing to testify.

Meanwhile, the list is growing of Clinton-connected witnesses who won’t be testifying at hearings this summer before Thompson’s committee and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee (headed by GOP representative Dan Burton of Indiana). John Huang, a longtime chum of the president, is pleading the Fifth Amendment. So is former White House aide Mark Middleton. (Hubbell is also taking the Fifth.) Were he truly cooperating, Clinton might urge them to testify. He hasn’t. Charlie Trie, Clinton’s favorite Little Rock restaurateur, and Pauline Kanchanalak, a frequent visitor to the White House, and John H. K. Lee have skipped the country. What is Clinton doing to get them back? Zip, and Congress has no power to extradite them. Johnny Chung, another frequent White House visitor, hasn’t responded to a subpoena. But if he testifies, it won’t be thanks to Clinton. The Thompson committee has also subpoenaed 23 nuns and monks at the Buddhist temple in California at which Vice President Al Gore pitched for campaign funds in 1996. Most have lawyers and have told the congressional committees they won’t talk. Has Gore interceded to make sure they cooperate? Not so you’d notice.

To make matters worse, Democrats on the Hill often abet White House stonewalling. During the Senate Banking Committee’s hearings on Whitewater in 1995 and 1996, Democrats raised objections so tenuous even the White House wasn’t raising them. Now Democrats are making it difficult for Thompson to proceed. It took him 10 days to get a routine subpoena of a client’s record at the Bank of China (to find where funds for campaign donations had come from). And Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, the senior committee Democrat, is pressuring Thompson to abandon plans for investigators to travel to Asia. Why? Too expensive and too few interviews have been lined up, said Glenn in a letter. Who has the responsibility for setting up interviews? The Clinton State Department.

Obtaining White House documents is laborious and lengthy. And this is a special problem for Thompson because his investigation expires on December 31. “We never should have agreed to that,” Thompson says. His first request, made April 9, involved documents in 28 categories. Two months later, barely half the documents had been turned over. In mid-May, he sent another request. When that produced little, Thompson complained directly to Erskine Bowles, the president’s chief of staff. Things got better. Still, the White House has put many papers on a “document privilege log” and not released them. “We’ve received so few documents, we haven’t had a chance to worry about the privilege claims,” says committee spokesman Paul Clark. Besides, there probably isn’t time for the committee to litigate any privilege issues.

Far-fetched claims of privilege began popping up early in Clinton’s first term. In 1993, the White House invoked executive privilege to block the transfer of Travelgate documents to the House oversight committee. To keep an incriminating memo by former Clinton aide David Watkins from becoming public, the White House claimed work-product and attorney-client privileges. The latest claim is that Hillary Clinton’s conversations with White House lawyers are privileged. By this reasoning, John Dean could have refused to testify in Watergate about his boss, Richard Nixon, by invoking attorney-client privilege. Indeed, Dean mentions in his book, Blind Ambition, that he and Nixon once agreed their conversations were privileged — strange bedfellows for Hillary, who worked at the House Judiciary Committee to impeach Nixon. (Later, Dean testified voluntarily.) Says Joseph diGenova, a former independent counsel and a Republican: “It is amazing the degree to which they’ve lawyered these [privilege] questions for delay purposes.” Hillary, ordered by a U.S. appeals court to yield the lawyers’ notes, has appealed to the Supreme Court.

There’s a reason the Clinton stonewalling never stops: It works. What matters in congressional investigations is the hearings. They’re often nationally televised. But if critical documents are released tardily, it’s usually too late for them to be highlighted in hearings, which take weeks of preparation. This happened in the Senate hearings on Whitewater. One key issue involved Hillary Clinton’s contacts after the 1993 death of Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel. Well after the Foster phase of the hearings was over, Maggie Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff, handed over her phone records, which showed extensive contacts with Hillary following Foster’s death. The committee couldn’t make much of this. And the White House was hardly punished.

Only rarely do the media nick Clinton for stonewalling. Given this, the White House has calculated that Clinton suffers more from promptly releasing damaging information than from coming clean tardily or not coming clean at all. So, in Clinton’s Washington, stonewalling is here to stay.

Executive editor Fred Barnes appears weekly on Fox on Politics on the Fox News Channel.