Tuesday, July 22
Not a busy day. This morning the Thompson committee was to meet at 9:15, to vote on granting immunity to several potential witnesses. The TV camera crews were there, lighting the room like a movie set, and the still photographers stood poised to record the dramatic vote.
At 9:15 sharp, the senators walked in and sat down.
“The chair will now entertain motions to go into executive session,” Fred Thompson said.
“So moved,” said John Glenn.
“With unanimous consent,” said Thompson, “the committee will go into executive session.”
Then they all stood up and walked out.
Three hours later, they came back. Thompson whapped his gavel.
“The committee has unanimously decided that we will vote on these immunity issues tomorrow,” he said. “Anything else? Fine. Adjourned.”
Then they left again.
The sensations induced by a three-hour wait for a group of senators who you begin to suspect will never, ever return are not at all unpleasant. The boredom ripens into a kind of benign catalepsy — as though you had just driven across Kansas or read an issue of the New York Review of Books straight through. I was ready for a nap, to tell the truth, and could have taken one then and there, stretched across several chairs in the hearing room, but a committee source told me that the room was about to be used for other purposes. Besides, Chairman Thompson was going to appear again, to make a statement in the Capitol building’s Hall of Vice Presidents.
The Hall of Vice Presidents is not, as its name might imply, a dark and obscure passageway leading nowhere. It’s a grand room right outside the Senate chamber, with gilded, barrel-vaulted ceilings and floors tiled in the manner of a Roman bath. Spaced along the walls are marble busts of vice presidents: drearily lifeless renderings of Alben Barkley, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, Al Gore. Or maybe that was the real Al Gore. Who could tell?
In any case, the hall was as crowded and bustling as a county fair. These are busy days in the Capitol, though those of us permanently trapped in the Thompson hearings would never know it. Half a dozen senators were in the hall, each surrounded by a clump of reporters, picking up quotes on the tax bill, the spending bill, the investigation into Louisiana voter fraud, and many other momentous issues.
Sen. Thompson came out to blast the Justice Department for its refusal to cooperate more fully with his committee. I got as close as I could and strained to hear him, and was about to turn to shush a babbling voice at my back, when I saw it was Sen. Warner from Virginia. Apparently his clump of reporters had merged, amoeba-like, with Thompson’s clump. “We want to narrow our differences,” Warner was saying, with great earnestness, “and this points up . . .” But he was quickly drowned out by a man to my left. “The president wants it to work,” Sen. Gramm was saying to his clump, “we want it to work, but if it’s just a bill to spend money, well, then . . .” I didn’t want to be in Gramm’s clump, and as I fought my way back to Thompson’s dump, I got sucked into Sen. James Jeffords’s dump. “I don’t know whether we’re producing anything he can sign,” Jeffords told me. I nodded. From nowhere more senators appeared, and suddenly I was spun around into the face of Sen. Thad Cochran, who was clumpless and looked at me imploringly, as though he would very much like me to form the nucleus of his dump. I demurred but marveled enviously at the tumultuous rhythms of democracy at full throttle. So different from the Thompson hearings.
Wednesday, July 23
This is the Democrats’ big week. Thompson has allowed them three days of hearings, dedicated to illustrating their primary line of defense: Everybody Does It But Republicans Do It Worse. A committee source (as we are instructed to call him) has helpfully outlined their case. In 1994, Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour successfully sought a loan guarantee from a Taiwanese businessman, Ambrous Young, to the National Policy Forum, a “think tank” sponsored by the RNC. This loan guarantee, which technically came through Young’s Florida subsidiary, allowed the NPF to pay off another loan it had earlier received from the RNC. This in turn freed up money for the RNC to spend on the 1994 elections, if you follow me. To the Democrats this looks like money-laundering — an illegal infusion of foreign funds into our political process. “It will all become clear,” the committee source said before the hearings began. “This is extraordinarily well documented. There’s a piece of paper for every step of the story of this transaction.”
This morning it quickly became clear why the paper trail was so comprehensive: The transaction was lawyered to the last tittle. Lawyers drew up the loan, approved the loan, and filed the papers with the relevant legal authorities; outside counsel reviewed the deal and wrote an “opinion letter” pronouncing it legit. By contrast, the Asian contributions to the Democrats, which inspired the hearings in the first place, were slightly less (shall we say) formal. Moreover, everyone involved in the NPF loan volunteered to testify, again in contrast to the 50 Democratic witnesses who have either fled the country, taken the Fifth Amendment, or otherwise made themselves unavailable to the committee. Pointing out such contrasts makes me sound partisan, and I apologize, but they also make it difficult to see the National Policy Forum deal as deeply sinister.
Amazingly, the Democrats adopted the same inquisitorial techniques the Republicans used to bore the nation during the first disastrous week of heatings. The method is sure-fire. First, you find witnesses — in today’s instance, a lawyer named Benton Becker and a former NPF president named Michael Baroody — whose voices are so low and sleepy that they barely register on the ohm-meter. Then you let them read an interminable opening statement. Next, you let committee counsel examine them so they reiterate every point in their opening statement. Then you ask them about subjects you already know they have no knowledge of. Finally — as the shampoo bottles say — you rinse and repeat: Allow each senator 10 minutes to do the same thing. Before you know it, the press tables are half-empty or worse.
Reporters take seriously their duty to “write the first rough draft of history,” of course, but you can ask only so much of them. This afternoon, as the hearings ground on toward 6 o’clock, I looked up from my sports page to discover that the entire burden had momentarily fallen to me and Lance Gay of the Scripps Howard News Service. Even the AP guys were out of the room. Even Elizabeth Drew had left! As the author of exhaustively detailed tomes about campaign finance, she had heretofore been considered unboreable. Committee members be warned: If you’ve lost Elizabeth Drew, you’ve surely lost the country.
Thursday, July 24
Big news: CNN is at last broadcasting the hearings live. It took the testimony of Haley Barbour to awaken CNN from its slumbers; and with Andrew Cunanan now dead, they probably figured what the hell. Barbour began to testify after lunch, accompanied by his wife and (count ’em) six white guys in suits. They sat behind him, Mrs. Barbour in the middle, flanked on either side by three suits — a perfect statistical representation of the Republican party.
Barbour’s defense of the loan from Ambrous Young was vigorous. His trademark Mississippi accent has always been adjustable, and as he testified it thickened and thinned according to the subject matter. When he wanted to be folksy, he became almost unintelligible. “You know, Senators,” he said — Sinters — “I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.” Everyone chuckled at this, though no one had the slightest idea what it meant.
And it worked, too, for by the hearing’s end, the consensus seemed to be that Barbour had emerged essentially undamaged. At the media tables, the war of press releases raged on, and in real time. When a Democratic senator pointed out that the NPF had accepted money from something called “Panda Industries,” an intern appeared 15 minutes later with a Republican press release saying the DNC had accepted even more money from something called ” Panda Estates.” When a Republican senator said Young’s loan guarantee was not technically a “contribution,” another intern appeared 10 minutes later with a xeroxed federal-election regulation that said loan guarantees are too contributions. The efficiency and speed with which these press releases are produced constitute a modern marvel. Perhaps the interns should be running the hearings.
I myself was most interested in hearing Barbour defend a technical matter. When Ambrous Young made the loan guarantee to the NPF, Barbour had led him to believe that Barbour would make sure Young would be paid back should the NPF default. As it happens, the NPF was dissolved in late 1996, and Young had to eat more than $ 700,000 of the loan. This may not be sinister, but it’s cheesy. Young has said he liked to give money to the Republican party because it “put powder on my face” — which means, presumably, that it raised his status in the minds of powerful Americans. This calls to mind the tradition, if there’s a Chinese equivalent, of the heavily powdered geisha girl. Should he be surprised he got screwed?
Among the many documents put in exhibit for Barbour’s testimony, I noticed particularly one letter from 1994. In its way it is as revealing of political fund-raising as any piece of paper introduced so far. Barbour thanked Young effusively for the loan, and scribbled at the bottom of the page: “You’re a champ! Many, many thanks.” A champ? Change the “a” to “u,” and you’re closer to the truth.
Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
