FAULTY HEARING

Of course we presshounds deplore the corruption of news with the values of entertainment — it trivializes serious issues, as you know, and endangers the creation of an informed electorate, without which no democracy can long survive — but mostly we like a really good show. And we’ve been hoping, desperately, that the Thompson hearings into the fund-raising abuses of the 1996 presidential campaign will be a really good show. But we may be out of luck. Already several events have conspired to make sure the Thompson hearings that begin today will be, at best, merely a pretty good show and, at worst, a boring show. We hate boring shows.

For one thing, the committee’s own leakers have been busy in the last week lowering expectations. “I wouldn’t expect any big smoking guns if I were you,” one Republican senator told me. “No John Deans. No great earthshaking revelations.” Normally, in decoding pol-speak, which is highly encrypted, I would take him to mean precisely the opposite of what he says — as another example of “lowballing,” dampening expectations so that the revelations, when they do come, will seem all the more titillating. But the thought nags: My God, what if he really means it?

Another reason the hearings may not contain any great revelations is that the White House and the committee’s Democrats have been preemptively leaking revelations to the press — the way a bomb squad will detonate an explosive under controlled conditions so no one gets hurt. Yesterday, the day before the hearings began, was a day of dueling leaks. The New York Times had the best one: President Clinton himself, we learned, intervened to get John Huang hired as a fundraiser at the Democratic National Committee. Since the Republicans want us all to infer that Huang may have been a Chinese agent, this bit of news would have been quite dramatic if it were uncorked in open hearings. But now, suddenly, it’s old news. The current cliche, endlessly repeated by clever people, is that in Washington the scandal isn’t what’s illegal but what’s legal. During the Clinton administration we’ve seen the birth of a corollary: If it’s already been in the newspaper, it can’t be a scandal.

A good show needs a bracing curtain-raiser, and immediately after the gavel fell this morning, formally commencing the hearings, chairman Fred Thompson tried to give us one. With his rumbling Southern drawl and imposing physical dimensions — and, most important, with his many years of acting in Hollywood — Thompson can summon an impressive display of gravitas at will. He said that, owing to information acquired only in the last 24 hours, he had an opening statement to make before he made his official opening statement — a pre-opening opening statement, as it were.

“The Committee believes that high-level Chinese government officials [have] crafted a plan to increase China’s influence over the U.S. political process,” Thompson intoned. This involved pouring money into political campaigns, apparently, which is against the law. Moreover, the FBI briefed the White House about the Chinese caper. “This raises questions about who in the White House should have known — or actually knew — of the Chinese plan and how it had come to be implemented.”

Ka-boom? Not really. This too has been in the papers, after all. Finance- scandal scholars have long assumed that the centerpiece of the committee’s work would be to trace illegal campaign contributions, if possible, back to their Chinese source, maybe even (please God) through John Huang. “The great majority of information about this matter cannot be discussed further in open session,” Thompson said in closing. And that was it. In other words: “If you knew what we knew, you’d be amazed. But you’re never going to know what we know, because we’re not going to tell you. We’re just going to talk about it among ourselves.”

It’s a curious way to open a hearing — letting everybody know that they won’t be hearing the juiciest bits. But Thompson has said all along — and repeated again today — that “these hearings are not trials where people are prosecuted. They are not soap operas designed to titillate. Rather these hearings are about looking at a system, at how our government is working, designed at the end to make our system better.” A giant exercise in system improvement? My God, he really does mean it.

But of course the hearings are also about scoring political points. And there was plenty of that as the morning wore on. The entire session today was given over to opening statements, and the only interest lay in deciding whose statement was the most banal. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine took an early lead by quoting, inevitably, the catchphrase from Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money.” Then Pete Domenici elbowed her aside, with quotes from Justice Brandeis, Walter Lippman, and Woodrow Wilson — three quotes in five sentences! By the end of the day, quotes had also popped up from Aristotle, Tom Paine, Allen Dulles, Harry Truman, W. C. Fields, and that old segregationist fraud Sam Ervin. Other Republicans quoted Deep Throat (the leaker, not the movie): “Follow the money.” All agreed that these hearings into the unparalleled sleaziness of the Democratic party should proceed in a spirit of bipartisanship.

The Democrats, for their part, agreed that, in the interests of fairness, Republicans should be exposed as even sleazier than the Democrats. And of course they’ve got a case. Did President Clinton invite contributors to pajama parties in the Lincoln Bedroom? Sen. Carl Levin pointed out that President Bush used White House stationery to announce fund-raisers. Were the president’s famous coffee klatches unseemly? Levin mentioned a fund-raiser at Vice President Quayle’s official residence. Did the Democratic National Committee end up with foreign money? Don’t forget Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who brought in money from Hong Kong.

This is the Democrats’ first line of defense: Everybody does it, and the other guy does it worse. The second is to inject identity politics into the investigation — to accuse of racism, preemptively, anyone who dares dwell upon malefactors with names like Huang and Chung and Trie. The award for most shameless opening statement went, by acclamation, to Bob Torricelli, the elegantly dressed, formidably tanned senator from New Jersey. He used to date Bianca Jagger, and for the first time I got a hint of why they broke up. I ran into him in the men’s room this morning, during a break, as he delicately arranged his hair. He was staring in the mirror with such bedazzled infatuation that I felt embarrassed, as though I had interrupted a pair of mooning lovers. The look on his face was almost pornographic. I can imagine the hell he must have gone through every morning fighting Bianca for bathroom time.

But he’s a gutsy guy — so gutsy, in fact, that he’s not ashamed to admit it. “I want to assume one responsibility,” he announced to his colleagues. Though I can’t reproduce the swoops and dips of the senator’s faux-JFK delivery, his statement is worth quoting at length:

“Forty years ago, another chairman of a congressional committee, a senator also from the state of Tennessee, convened an inquiry into wrongdoing in our country. . . . It was only on a flickering television screen, but I will never forget it and even if I tried, my family would never allow me. It was Estes Kefauver, and he left the American people with the unmistakable impression that because of the misdeeds of a few individuals [i.e., ahem, the Mafia], there was a general problem of the role of Italian Americans in the commerce of this country. The pain, Mr. Chairman, that many Americans felt on that day must not and will not be allowed to be visited upon Asian Americans in the coming weeks.”

That’s Bob Torricelli’s challenge. That’s Bob Torricelli’s responsibility. And if you want to barf, so be it.
 
Wednesday, July 9

Day Two, and already I’m getting discouraged. I read in John Carmody’s TV Column in the Washington Post this morning that even MSNBC — even MSNBC — has declined to carry the hearings live. They’ll broadcast the Nevada boxing commission’s hearings on the future of Mike Tyson instead. Since when does a little nibble on an ear take precedence over Communist infiltration of our political process? Where are our priorities in this country? We, as a people, have lost our way.

Excuse me. I’ve been thinking so much about Torricelli that I’m starting to sound like him. But I think maybe the hearings have lost their way too. One problem is the hearing room itself. Normally such highprofile shows would be held in the Senate Caucus Room, a grand chamber that has served as the site for juicy Capitol Hill spectacles through the ages, from Teapot Dome to Army- McCarthy to Watergate and the Thomas-Hill hearings. When Estes Kefauver launched his pogrom against every olive-oil importer in America, he did it from the Caucus Room. TV reporters love the old Caucus Room because it gives them an obvious kicker — “Yes, Tom, these old walls have heard the question before: ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?'” Not this time, though. The hearings are being held in the sleek and bland Room 216 of the Hart Office Building It’s a “state of the art facility,” with lots of camera stands and monitors and sound boxes and arc lights — all the appurtenances of a big TV studio Which it is.

There was only one witness scheduled for today, the former finance director of the DNC. He’s Richard Sullivan, and he’s 33, though he looks about 12. I’ve made a mental note to check how often the word “boyish” is used in tomorrow’s papers.

Sullivan is a Washington type: the young political obsessive who graduates college to sign on with one political campaign after another, eats half his dinners from Dominos late at night with his pals in trashy campaign headquarters, gets dazzled and then bored driving Ted Kennedy or Alan Simpson to fundraisers, and careens toward total burnout a decade before middle age. Sullivan is about to take the bar exam, after which he will make more money in a month than the congressmen for whom he worked make in a year. Maybe he/s another John Dean.

John Dean without the felony convictions, that is. He even has a pretty blond wife sitting supportively behind him, like Mo. As a finance director, Sullivan may have been aces — and, except for that small matter of millions of dollars in illegal contributions, he probably was. But as a witness he’s stolidly undramatic. Only slowly, very slowly, did it become clear what the Republicans wanted from him. Apparently they wanted him to say that undue pressure was exerted on the DNC — from the president, the White House staff, and the Lippo Group — to hire John Huang. But Sullivan didn’t agree. They wanted him to admit that the White House coffees were illegal fund-raisers; Sullivan said they weren’t fund-raisers at all. They wanted him to admit that the DNC’s system for verifying contributions was dismantled for nefarious reasons. He says the system just “atrophied.” And on the big question about the Chinese plan to infiltrate our political process, he drew a complete blank.

The Democrats, on the other hand, wanted him to agree that the Republicans were sleazier than the Democrats He allowed as how that was true.

To pass the time, I busied myself reading handouts. Young functionaries from both parties — budding Richard Sullivans — circulate among the presshounds continually, bathing them in paper. The ones from the DNC are the best. “Key Points on What Happened in Today’s Hearings,” reads one handout I got this afternoon. It’s printed in bold-faced type. “1) Nothing New in Morning Testimony — Huang Hiring Detailed Seven Months Ago. . . . Instead of wasting taxpayer money on hearings today, investigators could have got the same information seven months ago from a 60-cent newspaper.” You see? No scandal. It’s already been in the paper.

When I get tired of reading this stuff at the press tables in the hearing room, I can get it firsthand in the hallway outside. This is Spin Central. At every break in the proceedings, committee staffers and White House officials rush to the hallway to tell reporters what everybody just saw happen in the hearing room. The big celebrity is Lanny Davis, the White House counsel in charge of scandals (not his official title). Surely you’ve seen him on Meet the Press? Crossfire?

Reporters were still abuzz about John Huang’s offer, made yesterday, to testify to the committee, if it grants him limited immunity from prosecution.

“I’m on background now,” a White House official said to a clutch of reporters in the hallway. “I’m a White House official, okay? Now: If the lawyers can work out an offer with Mr. Huang, we’re happy to have him speak. In no way will we interfere.”

How about the hearings so far?

“We’re taking a wait-and-see posture,” said the White House official. “It’s been very partisan so far. Very one-sided.”

One reporter ran off with this pearl safely recorded in his notebook, then quickly returned. “Lanny,” he asked the White House official, “the wait-and- see thing, is that on the record?”

“That’s on the record,” said White House counsel Lanny Davis.
 
Thursday, July 10

Sullivan was back today, as the committee’s only witness. I scoured the papers this morning and -more disappointment — found only one reference to Sullivan as “boyish.” But that was in the New York Times, which is, after all, the newspaper of record.

The line of spectators waiting to get into the hearing room gets shorter every day. About 150 chairs are set up in the back of the room, two dozen or so reserved for White House officials and party hacks, the rest for concerned citizens. But so far I’ve seen the gallery full only once, briefly, on the morning of the first hearing. Apparently people figure something isn’t worth seeing in person if you can’t watch it on TV.

The press tables have thinned out, too. The room has begun to look like a depopulated village after a great plague has passed through. But the photographers were out in force, and as always they rushed to capture Thompson as he lumbered into the hearing room and took his seat. They do this every morning, and you can’t help but wonder: How many pictures of him do they need? With a dozen cameras whirring and flashing six feet in front of his face, he settled in, withdrew papers from a folder, and adjusted his microphone, doing an uncanny impression of a man who does not have a dozen cameras whirring and flashing six feet in front of his face. Should we be surprised by how natural he seems? This is a man who has acted with Sissy Spacek. With Bruce Willis.

As the questioning of Sullivan meandered on, senators wandered in and out. I will be charitable, and assume this chronic truancy accounts for the unbearable, the excruciating repetitiveness of the questions they ask. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Senator Collins wanted to know whether there wasn’t extraordinary pressure applied to the DNC to get John Huang hired. Sullivan said no. Senator Nickles was just wondering: Wasn’t the DNC under extraordinary pressure to hire Huang? No, said Sullivan. Minutes pass, then hours. Senator Levin wanted to know: Are the Republicans worse about fund-raising than Democrats? Affirmative, said Sullivan. Senator Torricelli thought that, in the final analysis, Republicans are really much worse. Would Sullivan agree? He would.

They will never get on MSNBC if they keep this up.

And then, suddenly, miraculously, there was . . . news! The committee released copies of an overseas wire transfer to someone called Yogesh Gandhi, a shady operator who was apparently broke but who nevertheless donated $ 325, 000 to the DNC. The wire transfer came from another shady operator. Here at last was solid evidence of illicit foreign money being funneled into the presidential campaign. Unfortunately for the committee’s story line, the money came from Japan, not China.

Out in the hallway, during a break, some reporters cornered a pair of committee lawyers. Was there some suggestion that this Japanese money really came from China, in furtherance of the Chinese Plan that Thompson had warned us about in his bracing curtain-raiser?

“No,” said a lawyer.

Oh. But doesn’t that sort of undercut the idea that the Chinese were behind all this? The reporters’ chagrin was unmistakable. I feel like a guy who thought he was going to see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, only to discover his wife has brought him to The English Patient.

“Look,” the lawyer said, exasperated. “There’s no suggestion that some big guy choreographed all this. We’re just trying to pull the curtain back on the system. There’s no suggestion that all these transactions were part of some grand plan. This isn’t a prosecution. There’s no case trying to be made here. There’s no conspiracy theory being promoted.”

The other lawyer could sense our disappointment.

“Stay tuned,” he said, encouragingly.

I will. I have to, it’s my job. But what about everybody else?

Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.