Chapter Twelve:The Monica Year

"Brought to us and sponsored by the Great American Media"

Despite the fact that the Media had been alerted about the infiltration of Chinese government into our election process, they opted to ignore that issue for the sake of pursuing the President's sex scandal with an Intern.

Even though the federal government establishes that higher-level employees are not allowed to have sex with lessor-level employees and that in doing so with an Intern who would later be a paid federal employee, Bill Clinton had broken federal laws the Media allowed the Spin Miesters from the Administration to soften the meanings and implications of what the President had done.

Oral sex was no longer to be considered as sex. Lying was not lying, IF the President held a different definition of what he was saying in his mind or heart while he actually lied. Perjury was not perjury if one applied the new definition of lying- while under oath. Women could ALL be called liars and trailor park trash IF, and only IF, they came out with allegations against the President.

The Media blamed it all on the Spin Miesters and actually seemed proud of how successful they were at taking even the most heinous of matters and spinning it to the President's advantage.

But when we look at the SPIN MACHINE, we notice that the thing has a crank on it that causes it to SPIN and that it will not move unless the crank is operated. The Administration would not have been capable of putting out their outrageous suppositions of why the President was nothing more than a victim of hate crimes perpretrated on him to keep him from succeeding because he was from Arkansas- if the MEDIA did not have their hand on the crank.

And crank they did. All the while insisting that we look at the Spin and never mind the Spin Machine and who was doing the cranking.

It was a year-long cranking frenzy that spewed out story after story of sex that was not sex, cigars that were not smoked and so much more unseemly behavior that one would expect from the Bordello District of Hot Springs, but not from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President had promised in 1996 that he would be about the business of building a bridge to the next century. As his administrative failures and personal problems became so numerous, the construction of the bridge got put on a back burner and we, the people also got put on a back burner as the President and all his Administration, including his Cabinet, used so much of their their time and energy to try to coverup for and save the man who seemed hell-bent on self destruction.

We saw an Administration full of zealots who held no allegance to the Office of the Presidency (or to America, itself) but only to the man who occupied it, allied with a Media who's Liberal hopes and dreams were invested in the man who would use the Office to conform the country to their definition of Utopia and a Conservative sector of our country too inept and/or shellshocked to counter the maddness that filled 1998-99.

We were breezed by the China Gate, being told that that this was a potentially dangerous situation, but we would get back to that, if time allowed, after we discussed the more salacious scandal to death.

It should have been a time of introspect, as we collectively decided what would be best for our country. It should have been a time of intellectual and rational discussions of the long-term ramifications this and that Scandal would bring to bear on our society and on the office of the Presidency. Instead, it was a time to joke about the sophomoric and ignore the serious.

The following is a collection of articles that were offered by various writers throughout the Monica Year, in an attempt to focus on the more weighty matters- other than the sexual.

January 1998

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Matt Drudge would break the story of how Bill Clinton had been carrying on a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinski, an Intern, in the White House. We also heard, for the first time, about Linda Tripp, and of her taped converastions with Monica Lewinski related to the relationship between Lewinsky and the President.

The story has been given, by Linda Tripp and Lucienne Goldberg, a New York Publicist, to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. His editors hesitated in runningbthe story. Matt Drudge pieces the story together, confirmed it through Lucianne Goldberg and then printed it on his website: www.drudgereport.com

Wednesday, January 21, 1998: Michael Isikoff prints, "Dairy of a Scandal" in Newsweek. Newsweek tabled the story for a variety of reasons. He wrote a book on the matter, but he will go down historically as the man who hesitated. Matt Drudge, Internet Journalist, ran with it before Newsweek printed. It would be the story of either of their lifetimes. It would eventually bring the President to Impeachment. It also gave us our first look at the Monica Lewinsky. I initially expecting a Marilyn Monroe-type woman. She was barely a woman in age and definitely not glamorous. She looked like someone's daughter.

Thursday, January 22, 1998: Ruth Marcus prints,"Allegations Could Leads To Impeachment, Prosecution" in The Washington Post. "The allegations facing President Clinton--that he lied under oath about having a sexual relationship with a White House aide and told her to dent it--represent serious possible criminal violations that, if supported, could lead to his removal from office and prosecution, legal experts said yesterday."

"In an interview with PBS, Clinton strongly denied any such improper action, but did not respond to questions about whether he spoke to Lewinsky. (Defense attorney, Robert) Luskin said that is exactly why defense lawyers instruct their clients not to talk to potential witnesses. 'You never know what someone will say about such conversations,Luskin said. 'You want to eliminate the possibility of an occasion in which your client can be accused of saying these kinds of things.' "

And the administration followed this good Counselor's advise and let the scandal be orchestrated by a crafty Spin of the allegations that swirled and a silencing of the President who could so easily get himself into trouble. We saw and heard very little of the Presidebnt during this year. Each time we did see him, he dug a deeper hole for himself and he looked haggard and combative. The man who dodged the draft during Viet Nam would finally find a cause he was willing to fight in a war over: HIMSELF!

January 23, 1998: Wes Pruden prints, "A Time To Find Out Who We Really Are" in the Washington Times.

"We are about to see what America is really made of. The prospect is really scary."

"But maybe it doesn't matter. The man who insists he believes in a place called Hope has proved that not enough of us any longer care very much about the qualities we've always measured our presidents by--qualities like dignity, honor, integrity, self-discipline, scruples and a certain gravitas...."

"Nothing is scared to this president. He loves to fracture Scripture, misquoting it when he has to and making it up when he can't find a verse to bend to his uses...." "...He's even got Al Gore doing it. The veep stooped to Clintonism in a sermon in a Baptist church in Georgia, describing the Madonna as a homeless bag lady (she and Joseph were actually on a mandated trip to Bethlehem to pay their taxes) and a single mother (no doubt making God, the Father, in the veep's view, a deadbeat dad.)"

"This regard for the office assumes a compact with the man we elect to that office. They can disappoint us, but they're not supposed to embarrass us. that's why this sordid episode is so sad. Saddest of all is the fact that so many of us have not learned to expect anything better from him."

Tuesday, January 27, 1998: George F. Will prints, "The Big Sleaze" in the Washington Post. " 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?' -Joseph Wech, Army special counsel, speaking to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, June 9, 1954."

"Those words spoken in a televised meeting of a Senate committee, in response to a politician's legal but contemptible behavior, lanced a boil on the body politic. They catalyzed public revulsion about Joseph McCarthy's recklessness, his swift downfall began. Todays question is: Who will speak comparable words to another political sociopath, Bill Clinton?"

"The words might be required to expedite his resignation can be spoken in private by a delegation of Democrats. Until then, the nation's dignity and security are held hostage to this paradox: If Clinton had sufficient moral sense to see his duty, he would not be in a position where resignation is his duty."

"His presidency is beyond resuscitation. He can compound his disgrace by clinging to office, heedless of damage done to the national interest abroad or to the tone of civil life. But the condition of his presidency is even more parlous and dangerous to the nation than that of Woodrow Wilson's presidency after his crippling stroke of October 1919."

Tuesday, January 27, 1998: Wes Pruden printed "A Good Time to Avoid Prayer Meetings" in the Washington Times.

"The Conservatives who have been praying to get rid of Bill Clinton ought to shut it off."

"These are answered prayers nobody needs."

..."The president's dilemma is a real one: If he says, yes, he boffed Monica Lewinsky inside Hillary's house but never urged her to lie, he reveals himslef to be a little bit nuts and stupid besides, and Hillary is prepared the Dr. Mom who applied the shock therapy. (She may send home for the famous Tucker Telephone, a telephone once connecetd to the unmentionable parts of bad prisoners at Arkansas' Tucker Prison Farm. Prsioners were said to make themesleves ehard as far away as Shreveport without a long-distance line.)"

"If he denies the sex, explains away the navy-blue dress and the jewelry and satisfies a credulous and forgiving public, he nevertheless reveals himself to be a patsy for every young woman who wnats a job at the Penatgon and still a little nuts, anyway."

..."Writes Mr. (P.J.)O'Rourke (Weekly Standard): '... You can read the frustration on Hillary's face. She's no doubt long past feeling betrayed by a tomcat husband, and even dissapointed that her big chance to make a Sweden out of Americ has vanished at last. She has proven how tough she is. A fortnight ago she was subject to indictment for obstruction of justice herself, but her husband's peccadilloes, as Henry Hyde describes them, have saved her.' " Wednesday, January 28, 1998:David Broder printed, "Composed Inthe Center Of The Storm" in the Washington Post.

"On a night of extraordinary offstage drama, President Clinton delivered a robust, yet relaxed State of the Union address that gave no hint that he felt his leadership-- let alone his tenure in office--was in jeopardy."

..."The political stakes for this State of the Union could not have been higher."

..."Republican pollster Linda Divall said Clinton faced a triple challenge. 'He has to try to energize his party by giving Democrats a solid agenda they can embrace. But he also has to generate some bipartisanship. He needs help rom other people. this can't be a singular moment for him.'

After the speech, DiVall said she judged Clinton more successful in firing up the Democrats than in reaching out the Republicans, whose response she characterized as 'respectful, but not enthusiastic'."

Wednesday, January 28, 1998:John McCaslin printed, "Dodging Bullets" in the Washington Times.

"Hanging outside the closet in Michael McCurry's office at the White House is a bulletproof vest with several fading notes in the pocket, placed there over the years by his predecessors, each paid to defend the actions of the president of the United States, albeit nveer to this degree.

Has the time come for President Clinton's spokesman to don the jacket?

...'I've worked for a very long list of losers in my lifetime', he quipped at his initial White House briefing in January of 1995--beginning with Sen. Harrison A. Williams, New Jersey Democrat, Mr. McCurry's very first job out of Georgetwon Graduate school a little more than 20 years ago. The embattled boss he spoke for was eventually indicted, convicted of bribery and kicked out of the Senate after being caught by the FBI Abscam sting.

'This is much different', he said of today's unprecedented barrage of questions from White House correspondents concerning a proported trist between Mr. Clinton and a young White House Intern, Monica Lewinsky. 'And it reflects the difference in the press in the 20 years since the Abscam story broke. Think about the amazing transformation of the way news is reported since 1979,' he explains. 'The one thing that was different then was we ceratibly didn't have a situation where everything was live and instantaneous-- three all news cable channels, 24 hours a day-- that's the principle difference which is the excelleration of the news cycle."

He also printed "What's Up Doc?"

"Parents from Washington to Phenon Penh are rushing to explain the correct version of the 'birds and the bees' to their children, an impressionable generation rendered totally confused by President Clinton's description of his sexual...er, emotional relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

One parent who toils on Capitol Hill sat down and explained things by reading him a poem from a recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon, written in the fashion of Dr. Suess:

"Starr I are-- I'm here to ask, as you'll soon see...

"Did you grope Miss Lewinsky?

"Did you grope her in your house?

"Did you grope her beneath her blouse?

"Clinton I are-- I did not do that here or there...

"I did not do that anywhere!

"I did not do that near or far...

"I did not do that Starr you are!

"Did you smile? Did you flirt?

"And did you tell the girl to lie when called upon to testify?

"I do not like you Starr you are... "I think you have gone too far!

"I will not answer any more...

"perhaps I will go start a war!"

Thursday, January 29, 1998: George F. Will prints, "Conspiracy Theory To The Rescue" in the Washington Post.

"The increasingly gothic tale that Bill Clinton's current crisis was missing a savory ingredient until his wife, breathing fresh life into the paranoid style in American politics, blamed his problems on a "vast right-wing conspiracy," a phrase with an interesting pedegree. Joseph McCarthy,echoing J. Edgar Hoover's 1919 warning about a communist conspiracy "so vast, so daring", warned in 1951 about "a conspiracy on a sclae so immense" that it was everywhere.

Anticipating the Oliver Stone version of all this, Hillary Clinton supplied the "man on the grassy knoll" culprit. And, lo, the man is.... Jerry Falwell!

Well. Paranoics can have real enemies, as does Bill Clinton. But neither he nor his wife is a paranoic. Her insouciant insincerity in playing the conspiracy card is understandable, given that it is a Clinton habit, and given the alternative, which is to discuss the facts--those known and those still concealed by her husband."

Friday, January 30, 1998: Wesley Pruden printed, "On Their Knees For A President In Peril" in the Washington Times.

"The Feminist are reluctantly suiting up for the showdown of the final four: Hillary, Gennifer, Paula and Monica.

Gloria Steinem, who claimed for several days to have laryngitis, seems to be ready to put on the kneepads that Monica Lewinsky says are crucial to the uniform of the day at the White House.

"Do I wish that all this would turn out to be false?", she asks the New York Times. "yes, deeply I wish that. But I am not blameless. How can I require a leader to be blameless."

This is certainly how Bill Clinton expects women to think. If a long trail of docile and compliant women, beginning in Arkansas and now extending through the White House, are telling the truth, the boy president regards women as something like ashtrays. Just as ashtrays are the repository of cigar butts, Bill Clinton's women are the repository of his oral adultery. Open wide and you don't have to take off your clothes."

February 1998

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By February, the press would have bet on the shelf-life of this scandal expiring. They knew that thier attention span would not allow them to carry this story forth. They would not have to carry the story themselves, the Clinton Administration began to fumble.

Thursday, February 12, 1998: Greg Pierce(Inside Politics) printed, "Apocalypse Of A Scandal" in the Washington Times.

"New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd expressed shock over White House contingency plans to reveal the sexual peccadilloes of congressmen, reporters and (gasp) pundits.

The plan, revealed Sunday by former Clinton aide George Stephanopulos, is a "sexual Armageddon, a bedroom doomsday strategy" to bring down with President Clinton, Miss Dowd observed.

"This is even more brutally disgusting than the Clintonites' he's-not-perfect-but-we're-fighting-against-Starr's-facism-and -protecting-Our-Issues routine. If thiis president is damaged it will be season of wrath. An apocalypse of scandal.

"It will simply be enough to show Bill Clinton isn't the only guy in town who like to have young female staffers do 'clerical tasks' for him.

"Still, it makes me queasy to thinkof Bill and Hillary's Torquemadas-- a vast left-wing conspiracy--rooting around. Will they try to pin down the pecadilloes of Helen Thomas? It was bad enough hearing Roy Romers true confessions. Do we really want to delve into Bob Barr's sex life?

"This is just the latest step down on the Clinton moral escalator."

He also printed, "Hillary's Coup"

"Dick Morris, who is supposedly on the outs with the Clintons after implying that the first lady might be a lesbian, says that Hillary Rodham Clinton has conducted a bloodless coup at the White House.

"The minute President Clinton was thrown irredeemably on the defensive on Jan. 21-- the very day he began his sixth year in office- Hillary took over. Not just the scandla defense but the building itself." Mr. Morris, a former Clinton political advisor, writes in the Hill newspaper.

"The president, hanging by his wife's largesse, knows enough to step aside. From now on it will be her appointments, her policies, her positions that get green lights. The former staff of the White House will ahve to take a back seat reminiscent of the health care reform days. Move over Bowles, McCurry and Emanuel. Make room for the new kitchen cabinet: Susan Thomases, Ann Lewis, Melanie Verveer and Sidney Blumenthal. Le nouveau regime est arrive."

Wednesday, February 17, 1998: Wes Pruden printed, "The Insurance Policy In Those FBI Files" in the Washington Times.

Maybe the White House strategy for keeping Republican lips buttoned up is working. Maybe we ought not to judge nervous and timid Republicans so harshly for playing frightened pussycats.

George Stephanopulos, the conservative's favorite liberal, first put the strategy on the table.

"The White house is being a bit disingenuous", he said the other day on Sam and Cokie's Sunday morning talk show. "When a real damaging charge comes out, someone speaking om background tries to answer it, which is another form of leak.

"There's a different long-term strategy [at the White House], which I think could be far more explosive. White House allies are already starting to whisper about wthat I'll call the Ellen Romesch strategy."

Memories are short in Washington, where most correspondents and commentators think the world was created at 2:o'clock yesterday afternoon. But some of us remember Ellen Romesch. She was one of JFK's girlfriends, back in the days when everybody talked about the fun and games the pols play when the lights go dim at the end of the day but nobody wrote about it.

Miss Romesch was a yummy dish fit for a president....Miss Romesch was also an East German spy. Just when a few brave Republicans were screwing up the courage to make something of it, on the grounds that a president really shouldn't be taking off his clothes with a femme fatale from the Evil Empire, Bobby Kennedy, JFK's Attroney General sent J. Edgar Hoover to Capitol Hill with a not-so-friendly-word-to-the-wise. "Don't investigate this", he told the Republicans. "Because if you do, we're going to open up everybody's closets." J.Edgar Hoover, as every Republican knew, held the keys to alot of closets and was familiar with what was in all of them.

...The corollary of the Stephanopolus warning, if warning is what it was, is left unsaid. Nobody has to say it. Everyone on the Hill remembers those 600 raw FBI files...

Wednesday, February 24, 1998: Jennifer Harper printed, "NOW Chapter set to bolt over Clinton Scandal" in the Washington Times.

A local Chapter of the national Organization of Women is ready to desert the main group over the White House sex-and-lies scandal.

Convinced that NOW's leaders have gone too easy on President Clinton's relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, Dulles (Va.)Area NOW may close up shop asa public gesture of criticism.

"Our leaders can't be selective on the issues of sexual harrassment," said Marie-Jose Ragab, who has been president of the Northern Virginia Chapter for the past 10 years. "In the past, they have spoken out against sexaul harrassment, most of the time against Republican figures."

March 1998

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March truly belonged to William Safire. As the scandal waned in the public eyes, it remained on a full-boil within the walls of the White House and Mr. Saffire educated us as to what was going on behind the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Friday, March 5, 1998: William Safire printed, "Privelege Proliferation" in the New York Times.

"He was born to privelege," said President Clinton about Franklin Roosevelt, at the annivaersay gala for Time magazine, which had been defending him against Newsweek in the Monica Wars. But it took Bill Clinton to make "executive privelege" a pernicious habit.

Ever since the Supreme Court rejected President Clinton's attempt to throw a cloak of privelege over his tapes, Presidents have been reluctant to place thier doings beyond the reach of courts and Congress. "The allowance of the privelege is to withhold evidence that is demonstably relevant in a criminal trial," a unanimous Court decided in 1974, "would cut deeply into the gaurantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the courts."

And yet, as John Woo noted in the Wall Street Journal, in his five years in office, Bill Clinton has claimed privelege to withhold information from the courts and Congress six times-- as often as Ford, Carter, Reagn and Bush combined.

Moreover, Clinton's latest flirtation with a claim to being above the law involves an investigation into a cover-up about personal behavior. This has nothing to do with national security or with secret diplomatic exchanges, the reasons the other presidents cited in slamming the door to judicial or legislative inquiry.

This Clinton impulse to widen the perimeter of secrecy is causing the proliferation of privelege.

1.Spousal privelege. You can't force a husband to testify against a wife or vice versa....(when President Clinton's lawyers forced the testimony of Paula Jones's mother, no sympathy was remarked.)

2.Ghostly privelege. Ken Starr is now seeking the notes taekn by the lawyer for Vincent Foster in a meeting a week before his suicide. The conversation may have been about the Whitewater Coverup; his former attorney argues that the lawyer-client privelege should extend beyond the grave.

3.White House Counsel as personal lawyer privelege. Governmnet paid counsel at first used as an executive privelege claim to stall the Independent Counsel, refusing to hand over notes debriefing Hillary Clinton after her Grand Jury appearance. Sensing the claim's weakness, the Clintons then awitched to the attorney-client privelege, but that was denied by ther Eighth Circuit, and the Supremes tacitly agreed. This made plain that a White House lawyer's client is the people, not the president-- and the notes were handed over.

4.The lawyer-client privelege, noble in purpose, is not absolute. Starr seeks to overcome it in the case of the lawyer assigned to Monica by Vernon Jordan, probably arguing it does not apply when a client uses a lawyer to commit fraud or tells someone else about her discussions with attorneys.

5.The protection privelege. Clinton is seeking a new immunity from testifying for his Secret Service detail, which would dent grand juries the testimony of agents even if they see or hear evidence of a crime-- lest the President fear their close proximity and thereby make protection more difficult.

...We do not need a Clintonian "Bill of Priveleges" saving politicians from scrutiny, blocking the flow of truth and placing any class above the law."

March 12, 1998: William Safire printed, "Dear Mr. Master" in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON--The following appeal was issued today by Buddy, the First Dog:

I see on the papers that I am to be castrated. The word they use is "neutered", but even I, at seven months know what that means.

When I was till in the whelping box, my dam said to me, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a President." So that's why I say to my best friend--do not let them do this.

To me, Doris Day is the Wicked Witch of the West. She and her Animal Welfare League have written you to claim that if I were left "intact",I would risk testicular cancer and prostate problems leading to embarrasing urinary accidents. To Ms. Day I say: Que sera, sera.

That is not her real reason. Nor is she truly worried about agressive behavior, which is why some owners have to fix their dogs. thomas Jefferson had his sheepdog Buzzy hanged when she killed a sheep. But I'm a chocolate Labrador. Agressive? We lick people to death.

(One little run-in with the cat is nothing.)

The Humane Society establishment is coming after me because it wants you to send a message about too mnay strays wandering around the streets. They mean well. They don't want to put more uncared-for pets to sleep, so they want to set an example of preventing canine overpopulation.

But don't you see what's really at stake here? I'm not a symbol, I'm a real dog--not a cause but an individual. I'm not a polulation statistic; but a living, breathing, non-vertual photo-op anecdote.

Here are my Talking Points which I worked out with Uncle Bruce.

1. I am not a mutt. My pedigree goes back further than anybody else's in this White House.

One of the big unspoken reasons for castration and spaying is to avoid mongrelization, but I'm purebred for personality and companionship and gentleness 2.I am not about to wander the streets starving and snapping. On the contary, no other dog gets Secret Service protection. if I get lost 20 guys lose thier jobs.

3. You don't need the ridicule that castration would surely bring. Already there's a cartoon of Hillary at the vet saying, "we're here to have him neutered," and the nurse saying "Which one?" and you and me pointing at each other.

4. I can provide an alibiRemember in that deposition when you said you were getiing so paranoid that you wrote out a memo of your conversation with some woman, and that you keep it under your desk?

Let's say you may want to get rid of some papers or old billing records. I'm just a puppy, right? Unfixed, behaviorally challenged, right? "Sorry, Judge, the dog ate my defense"

5.And in that regard, another new legal theory: Master-Pet privelege. I'll never talk, provided I'm intact(Buddy's your buddy, but I'm no fool.)

6.What about my privacy? If this had to be done it could have been done discreetly, without a big announcement from the White House doctor. There's a fixation around here about fixation. Aftre the publicized operation everyone will look at me and snicker.

Finally, the most persuasive talking point of all:

7.The retention of my genetalia is money in the bank for the Democratic Party. Let's say I'll be capable of my first sexual relationship by next Spring. That means a litter of, say, 10 pups by the Fall of '99, just as the campaign of 2000 cries out for soft money.

You got any idea how much one Presidential puppy is worth? Born right here in the White House, upstairs where the bitch, Millie had hers? Give the pups to $100,000 contributors, a more memorable souvenir than a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and no criticism about Asian connections. (I'm no Pekingese.) That's $1 million a litter-- and as an eligibel male, I'm good for as many litters as the D.N.C. fundraisers can bear.

Those collectivist softies who say you shouldn't call a dog a "pet" but a "comapnion animal"--they're really Malthusian zealots with nutty ideas about population control.

What say we leave it up to the people? All you pet-lovers out there--write or E:mail my master, at the White House. Tell him: Support good breeding. Save Buddy from the knife!

April 1998

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April 9, 1998: William Safire printed, "End the Secrecy" in the New York Times.

Never in modern constituional history has the Federal judiciary so undermined the First Amendment.

Six weeks ago, the President made a sweeping assertion in court to create a new privelege of executive secrecy on matters having nothing to do with national security-- and the court let him do it in secret.

For the first time, a judge is considering extending this claim of being above the criminal law beyond the President himself, to his wife and everybody on his staff-- in secret. And the legal argument protesting the closure of hearings surrounding this change in the public access to the official operations of our government have been filed and answered-- in secret. Here we have a great constitutional issue involving the usurption of power. It deserves scholarly debate and a thorough airing. But Federal Judge Norma Holloway Johnson-- a Carter appointee insecure about public scrutiny of her peremptory rulings on the most profound matters affecting our system of government-- has sealed the cosntitutional pleadings and, in the President's delighted interpretation, sealed all lips.

Judicial secrecy is being used to cloak a reach for greater executive secrecy.

....This usurption is being kept out of sight because a judge is not prepared to weild a gavel in open court.

Forget Clinton; forget sex; forget lying; where are the civil libertarians and strict constructionists who care about equal justice, the separation of powers, the right of the people to have a voice in the great decisions that affect our future?

It's been 42 shameful days since the President's secret claim to be more than an ordinary citizen under the law. The last President to claim executive privelege did it in open court. All the briefings were on the record. Judge John Sirica polled the grand jury in open court without "disruption" and the media reported the decision instantly.

But that was in another country.



April 14, 1998: Wesley Pruden printed, "Winning the Victory Through Intimidation" in the Washington Times.

Intimidation is to politics what bullets are to guns, and everybody in Arkansas owns a gun.

That's why Bill Clinton an dhis White House always turn first to threats, bullyragging and intimidation. Nobody does it better.

The president and the Whitewater gang of horsethieves, robbers, artful if not necessarily gay deceivers, variuos shysters and skillful spin men are terrified of the big shoe that may be about to drop, Kenneth Starr's long-awaited report on what he has turned up in his four-year investigation of the looting of banks, intimidation of witnesses, callous abuse of women, manipulation od grand juries, bribery, suborning of perjury and assorted other lies.

.... Like blackmailers, those bent on intimidation do not necessarily intend to follow through; the threat is often enough When Robert Mulholland, a member of the Democratic National Committe from California and chief spokesman for his party, threatened to sift through the personal lives of Republicans and other critics of the president and spread it around if impeachment proceedings are filed in the House of representatives, he probably didn't mean it. when the White House, the next day, said the president hadn't had anything to do with it, the president didn't mean it either. Yesterday, the White House watered down its dissociation from Mr. Mulholland's project, and he said he would resume his swim through the septic tank.

Mr. Clinton has operated this way from the time he was a boy governor from Arkansas. Once a dog sucks eggs, as every good ol' boy knows, you'll never break him of sucking eggs....

May 1998

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In May of 1998, the Media sieged China Gate and expressed outrage at what they found in the Clinton Adminsitration's lack of vigilance and at times, outright collusion with the Chinese government's usurption of our military technology. It would last through June, but then the spin would load up with more Monica Mess-- even after they had insisted that the Matters behind the China Gate were grievously dangerous to our national security.



May 11, 1998: William Safire printed, "Hillary's Palestine" in The New York Times

Washington-- Stipulated: Hillary Rodham Clinton weighs her every public word to advance her husbands politics and interests.

Therefore, her decision last week to declare via global satelitte: "I think that it will b ein the long-term interest of the Middle East for Palestine to be a state" must be taken as a calculated move by both Clintons to rachet up pressure on Israel.

"We have been long waiting for sucha signal from any American Administration for a long time," responded the leading Arab spokesperson here. Hillary's signal was unambiguous, she used the word "state' nine times in promulgating the Clinton policy.

On cue, the Presidential press secretary the dismisses the First Lady's carefully crafted statement as the uncleared mouthings of some ditzy spouse who would again be "venturing into the Middle East peace process anytime soon." Suppopsedly not official Administration policy.

But the Clintons' message was received exactly as the Presidential couple intended: unless Israel obeyed the Clinton summons to a summit at which Washington would decide exactly how much territory Israel would hand over to the Palestinians, the U.S. would escalate its intervention.

Not only would the world's superpower "re-examine its approach," as Secretary of State Albright warned. The Clintons have signaled they are prepared to go further-- to dictate not just the scope of interim steps, but to impose terms of the final settlement....



May 15, 1998: Wesley Pruden printed, "Say What? Us Worry? Let the Good Times Roll" in the Washington Times.

Maybe acts do have consequences. Maybe competence, if not character, actually matters after all.

If the public opinion polls are correct, we've decided as a nation that it's OK for our president to be more concerned with affairs of his pants than affairs of state, as long as it doesn't interfere with what he does (or doesn't do) for the rest of us between 9 and 5.

Its even OK to sell the Oval Office to a foreign government-- we're all addicted to Chinese takeout, anyway-- as long as the economy keeps humming and the Dow keeps ticking toward the 10,000 mark. I'm all right, Jack(and too bad if you're not).

The old joke in Little Rock that Bill Clinton thought a foreign affair was a weekend at the Peabody in Memphis with his best friend's wife-- turns out not be such a joke. His idea of leadership abroad is trying to intimidate a close ally (Israel) into taking a suicide deal just to get the neighbors (the Arabs) to shut up, and encouraging the last communist power to scatter so much nuclear technology around Asia that the world's largest peacenik power (India) imagines it must build a nuclear arsenal of its own.

....Who could blame the Indians, who have no more taste for oblivion than the Israelis, for deciding that the prudent part of valor would be to assure their own survival, by nay means necessary?

The Indians, like the Israelis and other prudent nations around the world, concluded, even if many Americans have not, that the president of the United States imagines that he is still the governor of an American backwater, at liberty to buy and sell pieces of himslef and his administration to whoever has ready cash at hand. If it was good enough for Arkansas it's good enough for the other 49 states. Let the good times roll.



May 15, 1998: Bill Gertz printed, "Chinese Delivery" in the Washington Times.

U.S. Corporations and the Clinton Administration are finally working together on something --perfecting Chinese missiles.

ON May 2, a Chinese Long March 2C rocket blasted off into space without a hitch. The booster lofted two U.S. Iridium satellites into space and carefully sent each on its way using state-of-the-art satellite-dispensing technology. The satellites, made by the Motorola Corp., are part of a global constellation that in a couple of years will become a worldwide cellular-telephone network. The technology for Iridium was developed under Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

So, it seems that the Clinton Administration has finally found a practical application for the Reagan Administration's anti-missile program: improving Communist China's rockets. China's once-unreliable Long March booster was vastly improved with the help of U.S. satellite companies under the Clinton Administration's liberalized export controls. According to the Pentagon, the technology that improved the Long March has also made China's Dong Feng series of strategic nuclear missiles more lethal.

Nothing better illustrates the Clinton Administration's attitude that the business of American foreign policy is first and foremost business than these technology exchanges with China. The story of the American role in improving Chinese rocketry -- which has begun to emerge in reports in the New York Times and in my own dispatches in the Washington Times -- features high-flying corporate interests, dubious bureaucratic maneuvering, special treatment for campaign contributors, and, above all else, strategic myopia. No other Clinton scandal will produce fallout as long-lasting or as potentially dangerous as the fallout from this one.

Flash back to February 15, 1996. Another Chinese Long March rocket was not so successful. Less than 30 seconds after it was launched from a pad in southern China the booster exploded along with a $200-million American satellite. A team of scientists from Hughes Electronics Corp. and Loral Space & Communications Ltd. -- the owners of the satellite -- launched an accident investigation. Their analysis of the problems with the Chinese booster included numerous recommendations on how to avoid such costly mishaps in the future.

The team produced a highly technical report identifying an electrical glitch in the flight-guidance system as the cause of the crash. The report also identified other weaknesses in the rocket. The American experts apparently never bothered to check with the State Department to see if the technology they were sharing with the Chinese was embargoed, or whether exporting such dual-use knowhow required an export license. Several months later, they "turned themselves in" to the State Department, according to a U.S. Government official familiar with the incident.

The Pentagon launched an investigation of the matter, and its final report, labeled "secret," came to this stark conclusion: "United States national security has been harmed." How? According to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif), Chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, U.S. expertise has "perfected" China's Long March rockets, which are identical in design to Chinese strategic nuclear missiles.

"Engineers from Loral, assisted by engineers from Hughes Electronics, and at the direction of their superiors, charged forward to correct the problems in the Long March," Rohrabacher said in a floor speech on April 30. "It seems what happened was a sterile, coldly calculated decision to fix these problems with no consideration of the national-security implications to the United States." Rohrabacher saw the technology transfer as a betrayal. "Chinese missiles blowing up on launch is a good thing," he says. "We should not be making their missiles better."

How is it that U.S. corporations and a Communist government find themselves sharing a vital interest? Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars per launch on U.S. boosters, satellite manufacturers such as Hughes, Loral, Motorola, and Martin - Marietta (the latter two now combined in Lockheed Martin) sought to use Chinese boosters costing just $25 million to $85 million a launch. However, as the tradeoff for being comparatively cheap, the Long March boosters were completely unreliable; three or four of them would fail for every successful launch, resulting in huge insurance costs for American satellite makers.

So the interest of American companies was to get as much technology to their Chinese partners as possible, and they have made a sustained push to do so. Great Wall Industries, which handles all deals for China's space launch services, was sanctioned twice by the U.S. Government in 1991 and 1993 for selling M-11 missiles to Pakistan. The penalties were imposed under U.S. law requiring the imposition of sanctions for violations of the 29-nation Missile Technology Control Regime, which restricts sales of missiles with ranges greater than ! 86 miles and warheads heavier than 1,100 pounds.

Sensitive technology transfers were banned under some 40 different economic sanctions imposed on China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Beginning in the early 1990s, satellite makers began receiving waivers of the sanctions. Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., explains that in 1994 the Pakistan-related sanctions were litted "in no small part because ofU. S. satellite manufacturers' desire to have unfettered access to China launch services."

"Starting in 1993," says Sokolski, "Hughes and other satellite makers who wanted China to launch their payloads made every effort to limit the possibilities of error." This meant sharing "some of America's most sensitive missile technology." Included in the U.S. efforts were discussions with the Chinese Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology on the sufficiency of the altitude-control system on the Long March launcher, examinations of rocket-fuel capabilities, and test firings of a kick motor for the booster's last stage. U.S. companies were also involved in giving China the same technology used to launch MIRVs (multiple, independently targeted re-entry vehicles), hydra-warheads that vastly increase the firepower of nuclear missiles.

There have been many instances of this business-driven foreign-policy obtuseness:

-- Rep. Rohrabacher says an aerospace executive from Motorola told him that the company was involved in "upgrading" Chinese space boosters/missiles under a" national-security waiver signed by the President." According to Rohrabacher, Motorola supplied rocket-stage separation technology. And Motorola helped the Chinese learn how to "dispense" satellites into orbit -- the MIRV technology.

-- According to Sokolski, Martin - Marrietta also asked the U.S. Government for permission to exchange information with China on upper-stage control systems, used to separate and ignite the sections. "These same control functions are also critical to China's perfection of an accurate multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle for its new solid-fuel rocket system," he says. It is not clear whether the technology was approved for export.

-- In 1993, according to Sokolski, sevveral U.S. satellite makers asked the Commerce Department if they could share coupling and load-analysis technology. That technology is crucial for assuring that a missile ignites, that its stages separate, and that its engines cut off in ways that will not shatter sensitive satellite payloads. Again, Sokolski says, "This would not only help assure the safe, efficient launching of the most sensitive civilian payloads, but also of complex MIRVed military systems."

And so the Long March has been perfected, or at least its failure rate has plummeted. At what price? According to a report of the Senate subcommittee on proliferation, the kind of space technology China has acquired from the United States is just what is needed to make an intercontinental ballistic missile: stage coupling for extended range, accurate guidance, and system integration. And, as I first reported in the Washington Times, the CIA has concluded that 13 of China's 18 long-range strategic missiles have nuclear warheads aimed at American cities. Loral's gain could one day be L.A.'s pain.

Rather than putting the brakes on this transfer of technology, the Clinton Administration has been speeding it along. High-tech executives in Silicon Valley are a key Clinton constituency -- and source of funds -- and so he has been careful to foster their overseas business. Silicon Valley's defense-related firms don't have the same attitude as old-line defense contractors, who were part of the defense establishment and did business in an atmosphere of Cold War patriotism. The culture of Silicon Valley firms is post - Cold War, and its firms are ready to deal.

They found their match in the Clinton Administration. In 1993, the Administration undertook a major reform of U. S. export controls; by 1995, it had nearly dismantled our national-security safeguards. The first to go was COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, a group of Western nations that had successfully limited flows of weapons technology to the West's enemies, especially the Soviet bloc and China. The Clintonites worried that this process gave too much control to the Pentagon, which is always wary of arming our adversaries.

Although the Administration promised to replace COCOM with a new arms-control regime, nothing comparable has been established. The 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies allows each member nation to determine whether an export may proceed. COCOM required a consensus among the member nations before an export could take place; Wassenaar requires only a report after the fact -- essentially a perpetual green light for any and all technology exports.

Meanwhile, in a telling move, the Clinton Administration in March 1996 shit~ed authority over licensing satellites from the State Department to the Commerce Department. Without State involvement, "we're not even informed," complains one staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The go-go Commerce Department has been blindly moving ahead with the decontrol of all manner of technologies, from supercomputers to satellites. William Reinsch, the undersecretary of commerce for export administration, bragged in a recent speech that satellite-technology transfers were an example of helping U.S. business while protecting national security.

The missile revelations are only part of the indictment of the Clinton Administration's handling of China. The Administration's announced policy of" engagement" seems to have become a perpetual excuse factory, as every negative action taken by the Chinese -- selling missiles to Pakistan, missile technology to Iran, and nuclear equipment to both states -- is explained away as "inconclusive" or considered solved with the latest hollow Chinese promise not to repeat the offense. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently spoke of a new'' strategic partnership" with China. But she won few concessions on either weapons transfers or human-rights abuses during her recent visit to China.

Now the White House is scrambling to come up with something for President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin to do at their June summit meeting in Peking. According to a memorandum written by White House National Security Council staffer Gary Samore, Washington has proposed a "missile deal" to be concluded at the summit. If Peking will agree to join the 29-nation Missile Technology Control Regime, which bars exports of missiles and related technology to non-members, the Administration will issue a "blanket waiver" of Tiananmen-inspired restrictions on space-launch cooperation with China. The Administration also will "speed up consideration of MTCR-controlled exports" to China. ,p. After this memorandum was published in the Washington Times, State Department officials denied they have any plan to share missile technology, claiming that only knowhow related to peaceful uses of space will be exchanged. And the Administration always maintains that there are strict safeguards against technology's" leaking" into Chinese military applications. But the Pentagon's assessment of the Hughes/Loral cooperation on the Long March makes clear that valuable missile knowhow has already been shared.

In any case, according to U.S. officials, Peking's response to the U.S. proposal that China join the Missile Technology Control Regime and stop selling dangerous knowhow to Iran and Pakistan was curt: No thanks. So will the summit offer agreements on any rem ~ssues? r~ot mcely, unless, as some critics expect, Washington offers yet more concessions in exchange for yet more hollow promises -- a continuation of the pattern of achieving arms-control ~' progress" by ignoring Chinese misconduct.

Meanwhile, Rep. Rohrabacher met late last month with top House leaders, including Speaker Newt Gingrich and National Security Committee Chairman Floyd Spence, and an investigation has been launched. Hearings could be held in several weeks.

"Nations [that] threaten the security interests of the United States should not be armed by America, nor should America help them arm themselves," according to a recent report by the Senate subcommittee on proliferation. "America's government should be reducing the likelihood that the world's foremost proliferators are engaging in this activity with the assistance of the United States. The fight against proliferation must include self-discipline at our own borders." That would have seemed merely a matter of common sense -- until the age of Clinton.



May 16, 1998: Jeff Gerth printed "Democratic Find Raiser Said to Name China Tie" with David Johnston and Don Van Atta(linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central) in The New York Times

A Democratic fund-raiser has told Federal investigators he funneled tens of thousands of dollars from a Chinese military officer to the Democrats during President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, according to lawyers and officials with knowledge of the Justice Department's campaign finance inquiry.

The fund-raiser, Johnny Chung, told investigators that a large part of the nearly $ ! 00,000 he gave to Democratic causes in the summer of 1996 --including $80,000 to the Democratic National Committee -- came from China's People's Liberation Army through a Chinese lieutenant colonel and aerospace executive whose father was General Liu Huaqing, the officials and lawyers said.

General Liu was then not only China's top military commander but also a member of the top leadership of the Communist Party.

Chung said the aerospace executive, Liu Chao-ying, told him the source of the money. At one fund-raiser to which Chung gained admission for her, she was photographed with President Clinton.

A special adviser to the White House counsel, Jim Kennedy, said today, "We had no knowledge about the source of Chung's money or the background of his guest. In hindsight it was clearly not appropriate for Chung to bring her to see the President."

Chung's account, coupled with supporting documents such as bank records, is the first direct evidence obtained by the Justice Department that elements of the Chinese Government made illegal contributions to the Democratic Party. Under American law, foreign governments are prohibited from contributing to political campaigns.

While the amount described is a tiny part of the $194 million that Democrats raised in 1996, investigators regard the identification of Liu as a breakthrough in their long search for confirmation of a "China Plan." The hunt was prompted by secret telephone intercepts suggesting that Beijing considered covertly influencing the American elections.

Chung, a Southern California businessman, began cooperating with investigators after he pleaded guilty in March to campaign-related bank and tax fraud. He is the first defendant in the Justice Department inquiry to agree to cooperate.

It is not clear whether other Chinese officials or executives were involved in the purported payments by Liu, or what her motivation or the Chinese military's might have been. At the time, President Clinton was making it easier for American civilian communication satellites to be launched by Chinese rockets, a key issue for the P.L.A. and for Liu's company, which sells missiles for the military and also has a troubled space subsidiary.

The President's decision was valuable to Liu for enabling her company to do more business with American companies, but it had also been sought by American aerospace corporations, including Loral Space and Communications and the Hughes Electronics Corporation, a subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation, seeking to do more business in China.

It is not known, however, whether anyone in the Democratic Party or the Clinton Administration had reason to suspect the source of the contributions from Chung.

A lawyer for Chung, Brian A. Sun, declined to comment on his client's conversations with investigators, citing his client's sealed plea agreement with the Justice Department. "I'm shocked that sources at the Justice Department would attribute anything like that to my client."

Chung has denied being an agent of the Chinese Government. "Nor did Chung ever try to lobby the American Government on any type of issue involving technology or anything else," Sun said.

A National Security Council spokesman, Eric Rubin, said, "It is ludicrous to suggest there was any influence on the determination of U.S. policy on this matter." He said he did not know whether any executives from Liu's company expressed an interest in the issue.

Liu did not return a message left with her office in Hong Kong today.

Chung's revelations have opened an avenue of inquiry leading in a diplomatically sensitive direction: next month, Clinton goes to Beijing, where he hopes to announce increased space cooperation between China and the United States.

A representative of the Chinese Government denied that Beijing was behind the purported contributions. "China has always abided by the laws and regulations in this country," said Yu Shu-ning, a press counselor for the Chinese embassy. "We have nothing to do whatsoever with political contributions in this country."

Chung, an American citizen who was born in Taiwan, owned a floundering facsimile company in Torrance, Calif. He became involved with the Democratic Party in early 1995 through Asian-American contacts at the White House and was known for constantly trying to use his connections in Washington with Chinese Government officials and executives.

Despite being labeled a "hustler" by one Presidential aide in 1995, Chung managed to visit the White House at least 49 times. He and his company contributed $366,000 to the Democratic National Committee -- most of it before he met Liu. The full amount was later returned after questions were raised about Democratic fund-raising. A Democratic National Committee spokesman, Richard W. Hess, said, "We did not know and had no way of knowing the source of his funds."

Chung met Liu in June 1996 in Hong Kong. She was not only a lieutenant colonel in the military, but a senior manager and vice president in charge of international trading for China Aerospace International Holdings Ltd., according to the company% 1996 annual report.

The company is the Hong Kong arm of China Aerospace Corporation, a state-owned jewel in China's military industrial complex with interests in satellite technology, missile sales and rocket launches.

Liu's father, General Liu, was China's senior military officer, and as vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission was in charge of China's drive to modernize the People's Liberation Army by selling weapons to other countries and using the hard currency to acquire Western technology. In that role, he oversaw his country's missile deals.

In addition to his military role, General Liu was a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party, the very top circle of political leadership in China. He retired from his official positions last fall at the time of the Party's 15th Congress.

China Aerospace sells satellites, launches them and owns a large chunk of a Hong Kong satellite operator, but the financial viability of many of these ventures depends on American satellites. In 1996 President Clinton made it easier for American satellites to be launched by Chinese rockets. The decision was announced in March but due to delays did not take effect until election day.

As Liu began her relationship with Chung, her company and her father were trying to fix China's troubled rocket program. That spring, China Aerospace had brought in outside experts, including officials from Hughes and Loral to help analyze why a launch the previous February had failed. The Pentagon later concluded that the outside review harmed American national security by advancing China's rocket and missile capabilities. Both companies denied wrongdoing.

In 1991 and 1993 the United States barred all American companies from doing business with two China Aerospace units who had made illegal missile sales to Pakistan. In each instance, Liu was assistant to the president of the sanctioned company.

Writing about who in China may have benefited from the 1991 missile deal, former Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d, in his memoirs, said, "In all probability, several senior government and party officials or their families stood to gain from the performance of those contracts."

The sons and daughters of China's elite -- sometimes referred to as "princelings" -- have developed lucrative businesses based on their family connections.

The missile deals were part of General Liu's strategy of selling Chinese weapons to other countries to raise money to acquire Western technology.

"Liu was a proponent of PL.A. modernization who was very much interested in obtaining Western technology," said retired Rear Adm. Eric A. McVadon, the American defense attache in Beijing in the early 1990's. He said Liu constantly rebuffed American concerns about China's weaponry sales.

Those concerns were front and center in 1996, when General Liu was still in charge of the P.L.A. They included China's sale of missiles to Iran and of nuclear equipment to Pakistan, as well as its own bellicose military maneuvers near Taiwan.

Liu, McVadon recalled, was a "gladhander" who "brokered deals." In 1990 she was granted a visa to visit the United States as a representative of a China Aerospace subsidiary.

At the first meeting between Chung and Liu in June 1996, Chung is said to have told investigators, Liu told him she was interested in again visiting the United States. Soon learning that Chung could arrange meetings with the President, she expressed an interest in meeting Clinton.

Chung helped Liu obtain a visa on July 11, 1996, according to a law enforcement official. Five days later, he wrote the Democratic National Committee that he wanted to bring Liu and a Chinese medical executive to a July 22 fund-raising dinner to be held at the Brentwood, Calif., home of the financier Eli Broad.

Both of his guests' names were placed on the guest list after Chung wrote a check for $45,000 to the Democratic National Committee on July 19.

A week later, Chung set up a California corporation for Liu and himself, records show.

Liu arrived in Los Angeles on July 21, and the next day Chung accompanied her to two fund-raising events attended by Clinton, according to a law enforcement official. The first was an early evening $1,000-per-plate gala at the Beverly Hilton.

Later that night, Chung and Liu attended a $25,000-per-couple dinner at Broad's home that raised more than $1.5 million for the Democrats. The President was photographed with Liu, a routine courtesy at such events.

Sun, Chung's lawyer, said, "I don't think she was any differem from any of his business contacts -- they thought Johnny was influential and someone they would like to know as they furthered their business dealings in the United States."

The previous year, photos from another Chung visit with Clinton had caused a problem. The President had expressed concerns about some of Chung's Chinese business diems -- unrelated to Liu -- whom the fund-raiser brought to a March 1995 radio address by Clinton.

Clinton's director of Oval Office operations, Nancy Hernreich, in testimony taken by Senate investigators, said Clinton told her later the visit shouldn't have happened. She took that to mean that Clinton thought Chung's clients were "inappropriate foreign people."



May 16, 1998: FRANCIS X. CLINES printed "Fundrasing Probe Focuses on Nepostism in China" with David Johnston and Don Van Atta(linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central) in The New York Times

In the long life of Gen. Liu Huaqing, a pioneer in Communist China's history since the first battles of the revolution, fortune has rewarded him with a "gaogan zidi" -- a "high-cadre child" of privilege, his daughter.

Now, while the 82-year-old general enjoys his early months of retirement from the nation's highest military and political councils, his daughter, Liu Chaoying, a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese army, works assiduously as a Hong Kong aerospace executive dedicated to finding ways to make China competitive with U.S. rocket and satellite expertise.

In her dedication, Col. Liu managed to obtain a visa two years ago to attend a private, $25,000-per-couple fund-raising dinner in Los Angeles for President Clinton. At her side was Johnny Chung, the California fund-raiser. In recently admitting to campaign-related abuses, Chung told federal investigators that Ms. Liu gave more than $300,000 in military intelligence money from China and that he illegally funneled close to $100,000 into the Democrats' 1996 election campaign, according to officials who were briefed by the Justice Department about Chung's allegation.

The Chung accusation has sent federal investigators delving into the nepotic ways of the Communist Chinese power establishment and the role of Ms, Liu, who managed to shake hands with Clinton at the fund-raiser as Chung beamed at shepherding her trans-Pacific leap into big-money U.S. politics.

Ms. Liu, a stylish woman diligent about improving her limited English vocabulary, is a 3 9-year-old executive in the same high-tech aerospace and weaponry field that her father, Gen. Liu, made the nation's top priority in his years of directing the modernization of China's military forces.

By all available accounts, the daughter is no disappointment to the father.

Col. Liu, reportedly schooled in military intelligence, exercises influence rooted in the power of Gen. Liu, who retired last year as the nation's top military commander and one of seven members of the ruling Politburo standing committee.

Just as Liu Huaqing prevailed across the years as the military protege of Deng Xiaoping, the civil war ideologue and future national leader, Ms. Liu has ventured forth in the modern militancy of China's global competitiveness.

"She's very businesslike, looking for opportunities, obviously enjoying the privileged access she has," said Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center and a specialist on China in the Reagan administration.

Paal has met Ms. Liu in Hong Kong, where she stays alert to influential American visitors in her role as vice president in charge of international trading for China Aerospace International Holdings Ltd. This is a "Red Chip" conglomerate, a westward-looking offshoot of Beijing's military-industrial complex. It deals widely in satellites, real estate and consumer goods, and is considered especially intent on "dual-technology" purchases, such as super-computers that can advance the techniques of science and business, but also the military.

"She bought drinks for me on a couple of occasions," Paal recounted. "She cuts deals by virtue of her access as a fairly typical elite cadre child," he explained, drawing a scholarly distinction between the "princeling" class of privileged offspring of Beijing's purely political class, and the "gaogan zidi" nepotism of the military class.

Ms. Liu, who has not yet commented on the accusations, is of a generation of Chinese children of privilege who have been venturing for over a decade into Western business capitals on their parents' cachet. Until his retirement last year, Gen. Liu specialized in selling Chinese weapons to other countries for hard currency which he used in acquiring Westem technology to modernize Beijing's forces. This entrepreneurial art involves state-subsidized businesses like his daughter's.

"Her daddy continues to be highly regarded," said June Teufel Dreyer, a business professor and China scholar at the University of Miami. "He's a very impressive guy: iron-gray crewcut, square jaw, no-nonsense. I sat next to him at a dinner in 1986. We conversed and I found him kind of wary, but he didn't spout propaganda."

Students of the general rate him as quite adaptable, particularly in threading his way through the period of bad relations between Beijing and Washington.

"The interesting part I saw was this: at the same time there was animosity, he had his daughter in the U.S.," said retired Rear Adm. Eric. McVadon, the U.S. defense attache in Beijing in the early 1990s whose concerns included Gen. Liu's aggressive weaponry sales. "That revealed an ambivalence on the part of Liu about how he felt about the U.S."

Soon after the fund-raising dinner featuring Clinton, Ms. Liu had Chung open a California branch of Marswell Investing, one of her Hong Kong enterprises. "Marswell seems to have been created to park money in the U.S., but we don't have evidence of Marswell doing any business," said JeffFiedler, a China research specialist with the AFL-CIO.

There are reports, however, that Marswell is being used as a real estate front for the purchase of California houses for such princeling offspring as the son-in-law ofDeng Xiaoping, according to James Mulvenon, a China scholar with the Rand Corp. "The children of these people don't get a lot of dirt under their fingernails."

By some investigators' accounts, Ms. Liu also invested as much as $300,000 in the troubled facsimile business of Chung while he was proving to be one of the most hyperkinetic of fund raisers for Clinton. Despite Administration cautions that deemed him a "hustler," Chung managed 49 visits to the White House, endlessly courting influence.

Investigators tracking Ms. Liu's U.S. contacts face an array of Chung dealings. "It could be just a case of China capitalism run amok," said one China-born specialist who studies the foreign activities of Beijing's children of privilege. "I mean, there are far more sophisticated people she could have hired here than Johnny Chung. He's right out of some Marx Brother movie."

But the relentless Chung, an American born in Taiwan, managed an impressive big-money donation effort for the Democrats despite his own apparent business failings. A total of $336,000 subsequently was returned to him after fund-raising investigations began last year.

Federal agents are attempting to see how big a part Ms. Liu or other foreign interests might have played in Chung's political dealings. Ultimately, there is the accusation of a "China Plan," denied by Beijing, to make illegal political donations in order to entice the administration to ease restrictions on cooperating with Beijing on rocket and satellite technology.

Ms. Liu's husband, Pan Yue, is more of a political intellectual than an entrepreneur, according to Paal. He said Pan has been an information officer for the China Youth League, a patriotic government movement, and director of the state-owned properties bureau.

"I've heard many people whispering against her, now that her father's retired, but whispering is part of the culture," Paal said of Ms. Liu, whom he described as above average in height, lean, curly-haired and fashionable by Hong Kong standards.

Across the decades, Gen. Liu survived such political threats as the cultural revolution, securing his reputation by reviving China's military relationship with Russia and acquiring new weaponry.

His career began in the fight against Japanese invaders six decades ago. Then, he plunged into the civil war. After the Communists won, he helped develop the Chinese navy, graduating in 1958 from the Voroshilov Naval Academy in Leningrad.

Following the Tiananmen Square debacle, Gen. Liu was appointed to the top military-political post, vice chairman of the Central Military Command, on his strength as a professional soldier rich in tradition but fervid for modernization.

The ongoing role of his daughter, Liu Chao-ying, is far from unusual in China's nepotic ruling class, experts like Jonathan Pollack of the Rand Corp., emphasize as they track her American adventures. "These are folks who do take care of their families," Pollack said. "A lot of their kids work in the PLA," he said of the military, "And a lot of them autonomously thumb their noses at the system and go off deeper into the private sector. It's called 'jumping into the sea.'"



May 17, 1998:The NewYork Times printed "From Sanctions to Satellite Licenses" (linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central)

Between 1993 and 1996, the Clinton Administration dropped its sanctions on China Aerospace, a sate-owned Chinese company, for selling missles to Pakistan and gave the company permission to launch private United States communication satellites, despite some lingering concerns in the administration about security."

August 1993 - State Department imposes economic sanctions against subsidiaries of Beijing-based China Aerospace for selling missiles to Pakistan. The sanctions bar American companies from doing business with the concerns.

Sept.-Oct. 1993 -Michael Armstrong, the chief executive of Hughes Electronics Corp., tells the President the sanctions hurt his company because China Aerospace is a low-cost launcher of satellites.

Nov. 1993 - The Administration signals it might ease satellite licensing procedures and Mr. Armstrong relays to the White House an encouraging reaction from his contacts in China.

April 1995 - Secretary of State Warren Christopher begins an interagency review of restrictions on the export of communications satellites at Mr. Armstrong's urging. The companies want to see responsibility for the issue shit~ed to the Commerce Department.

Oct. 9, 1995 - Following the recommendation of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and his advisers, Mr. Christopher keeps satellites under the purview of the State Department. The Commerce Department appeals this decision to President Clinton.

Feb. 6, 1996 - With the relations between the United States and China tense over Beijing's military operations and sales, President Clinton approves the launch of four American satellites by Chinese rockets.

Mid-Februaty 1996 - The White House revives the effort to ease restrictions on satellite exports, reviewing anew Mr. Christopher's decision.

March 8-15, 1996 - China conducts missile tests near Taiwan, signalling its displeasure over talk of Taiwanese independence during Taiwan's elections.

March 14, 1996 - In a low-key announcement, the Administration says that Mr. Clinton has shifted responsibility for communications satellites to the Commerce Department. Regulations, it says, are to be issued in 30 days.

May 3, 1996 - Three top satellite executives write to Mr. Clinton complaining about the delay in issuing the regulations.

Nov. 5, 1996 - The State Department publishes the new regulations in the Federal Register. President Clinton is reelected.



May 17, 1998:Ibm Raum printed "Clinton Welcomes China Cash Probe" in the Associated Press(Sunday, May 17, 1998; 4:15 p.m. EDT--linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central)

"President Clinton welcomed an investigation into whether he improperly signed a waiver in 1996 to approve exporting satellite technology to China. He said Sunday the decision was not swayed by six-figure donations from an executive who benefited.

"But the Justice Department has opened a preliminary inquiry into possible influence on the president's decision of more than $600,000 in donations to the Democratic Party by Bernard L. Schwartz, chairman of Loral Space and Communications Ltd., a government official said. The export waiver covered Loral and another company.

"Speaking in Birmingham, England, where he was attending the economic summit of world leaders, Clinton said he had heard about the new allegations but insisted the money did not change the United States' China policy.

.... All foreign policy decisions, we made in the interest of the American people," the president said.

.... If someone tried to influence them (decisions), that is a different issue. There ought to be an investigation," he said "



May 17, 1998:David Briscoe printed "GOP Senators Push China Bills" in the Associated Press(linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central)

"Several Republican senators are urging Majority Leader Trent Lott to schedule a vote on eight House-passed bills aimed at stepping up pressure on China before President Clinton's China trip next month.

"'Passage would send a strong message to the Chinese government, as well as to President Clinton, that the American people are very serious about human rights abuses that continue in China,' said Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark., who said his party's leaders have let the bills 'languish in the Senate.'

"Hutchinson said in an interview that if the bills are not sent to the Senate floor by the Foreign Relations Committee, which has scheduled consideration of six of them next week, he will move to attach them as amendments to other bills .... "



May 18, 1998:William Safire printed "U. S. Security for Sale" in the New York Times(linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central)

"A President hungry for money to finance his re - election overruled the Pentagon; he sold to a Chinese Military Intelligence front the technology that defense experts argued would give Beijing the capacity to blind our spy satellites and launch a sneak attack. How soon we have forgotten Pearl Harbor.

October 1996 must have been some tense month for Democratic fund - raisers. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times had begun to expose" the Asian connection" of John Huang and Indonesia' s Riady family to the Clinton campaign.

The fix was already in to sell the satellite technology to China. Clinton had switched the licensing over to Ron Brown' s" anything - goes" Commerce Department. Johnny Chung had paid up. Commerce' s Huang had delivered money big time ( though one of his illegal foreign sources had already been spotted ). The boss of the satellite's builder had come through as Clinton' s largest contributor.

But public outrage was absent. The F.B.I. didn't read the papers and Reno Justice did not want to embarrass the President. And television news found no pictorial values in the Asian connection

Stealthily, the Clinton Administration held back the implementation of the corrupt policy until Nov. 5 -- the day the campaign ended.

Now the reporting of Jeff Gerth and The Times' s investigative team is putting the spotlight of pitiless publicity on the sellout of American security.

We begin to see how the daughter of China' s top military commander steered at least $ 300,000 through the Chung channel to the D. N. C. ( Apparently, Mr. Chung skimmed off a chunk and may be spilling his guts lest he have to face his Beijing friends. )

We begin to leam more of the February 8th, 1996 visit of the arms dealer Wang Jun to the Commerce office of Ron Brown, and Wang' s" coffee" meeting that day with the President, the very day that Clinton approved four Chinese launches -- even as China was terrorizing Taiwan with missile tests.

Clinton ' s explanation, which used to slyly suggest that China policy was not changed" solely" by contributors, has now switched to total ignorance: shucks, we did not know the source of the money. But this President' s D. N. C. did not know because it wanted not to know; procedures long in place to prevent the unlawful inflow of foreign funds were uprooted by the money - hungry Clintonites.

Today, two years after this sale of our security, comes the unforeseen chain reaction: as China strengthens its satellite and missile technology, a new Indian Government reacts to the growing threat from its longtime Asian rival and joins the nuclear club. In turn, China feels pressed to supply its threatened ally, Pakistan, with weaponry Beijing promised us not to transfer.

This makes Clinton the Proliferation President.

Who has helped keep this sellout of security under wraps ? In the Senate, John Glenn was rewarded with a space flight by Clinton for derogating the leads to China of the Thompson committee. Fred Thompson' s warnings about China's plan to penetrate this White House were then scorned by Democratic partisans; his Government Operations Committee should now swarm all over this.

The House' s aggressive agent of the Clinton cover - up, Henry Waxman of California, is finally" troubled "by the prospect of damning evidence he prevented the Burton committee from finding. At least three Democratic partisans who foolishly followed Waxman in blocking the testimony of Asian witnesses may have difficulty explaining their cover-up vote to even more troubled voters in their districts.

The Gerth revelations lead to more questions: Where were the chiefs of the C. I. A. and the National Security Agency, their intelligence so dependent on satellites, on the satellite technology sale to China ?

Is anybody at Reno Justice re - examining testimony taken by independent counsel investigating corruption at Commerce before Ron Brown' s death ? Does Brown ' s former lawyer claim" dead man' s privilege" on notes ? Did the N. S. A. tape overseas calls of suspect Commerce officials ? Who induced Commerce to lobby Clinton for control of satellite technology ?

And the most immediate: Will homesick prosecutor Charles LaBella, beholden to Janet Reno for his political appointment in San Diego, dare to offend his patron by calling for an independent counsel?"



May 22, 1998:The Republican National Committee Press Office printed "U. S. Security for Sale" in the U.S. Newswire(linked to the Washington Post's Talk Central)

"The following was released today by the Republican National Committee.

The Clinton administration is trying to defend its irresponsible transfers of missile technology to China by claiming that Presidents Reagan and Bush permitted U.S. satellites to be launched from China. Here are the facts:

-- Neither Reagan nor Bush approved thhe transfer of advanced technology to China that would endanger U.S. national security. President Reagan did allow China to launch two communications satellites in 1988. He -- and, later, President Bush -- were compelled to grant licenses because of the enormous backlog of launches forced by the Challenger disaster (no shuttles were launched for almost three years after Challenger), a series of Titan launch failures at Vandenberg, and French problems with launches from French Guyana. Clinton, however, turned a closely supervised short-term remedy into reckless permanent nationalpolicy.

-- Unlike Clinton, Bush imposed a striict, national security regime. Reagan and Bush permitted launches only after a rigorous, multi-agency review process involving the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, and a strict, nine-point procedure to ensure that only non-military, non-sensitive technology wasinvolved.

-- Clinton -- not Reagan and Bush -- ooverruled the Pentagon and the Secretary of State to dismantle the national security regimens and allow satellite licenses to be granted by the Commerce Department. Clinton reversed the Reagan-Bush strict national security regimen, moving satellite licensing to the Commerce Department, overriding an Advisory Council composed of State, Defense and the CIA. A memo from Secretary of State Warren Christopher expressed the concern that embedded in the satellites were technological secrets that could jeopardize "significant military and intelligence interests."

-- Clinton -- not Reagan or Bush -- exxtended an additional satellite license to Loral despite Pentagon and Justice Department opposition. Clinton quietly signed an additional license to Loral over the objections of the Justice Department, which was conducting an investigation into allegations that Loral had provided China with a review of its rocket and missile capabilities that the Pentagon concluded had harmed American national security and advanced Chinese guidance capabilities.

There are no parallels between what Clinton did and what Bush, Reagan or any other President has ever done.

Under Reagan and Bush, China did not have accurate and reliable nuclear missiles targeted on America's cities.

Now they do, and it's Bill Clinton's fault."

June 1998

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June 11, 1998:U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee9 http://www.house.gov/reform/

"Witnesses Who Have Fled Or Plead The 5th"

Chaiman Dan Burton

Congressionsal Record, June 11, 1998 http://www.house.gov/reform/finance/statemnt/floortxt6_11_98.htm

December 9, 1997

Full Committee Hearing

Mr. Burton: Have you ever experienced so many unavialable witnesses in any matter in which you have prosecuted or on which you have been involved?

FBI Director Freeh: I spent about 16 years doing organized crime cases in New York City, and many people were frequently unavailable.

108

72 House & Senate Witnesses Asserting Fifth Amendment

John Huang/ Johnny Chung/ Man Ya Shih*/ Gene Lum/ David Wang*/ Keshi Zhan*/ Gin F. J. Chen/ Siuw Moi Lian*/Yi Chu*/ Mark Middleton/ Seow Fong Ooi/ Joseph Landon*/Nolanda Hill/ Bin Yueh Jeng/ Nora Lum/ Jane Huang/Hsui Chu Lin/ Larry Wong/ Duangnet Kronenberg/ Jen Chin Hsueh/ Na-chi "Nancy" Lee/ Maria L. Hsia/ Chi Rung Wang/ Hueutsan Huang*/Webster Hubbell/ Jou Sheng/ Yue Chu*/ Yogesh Ghandi/ Judy Hsu/ Man Ho*/ Steven Hwang/ Jane Dewi Tahir/ manlin Foung*/ Gilbert Colon/ Maria Mapili/ Yumei Yang/ Irene Wu/ Jie Su Hsiao/ Arapaho/ Cheyenne Indians/ Mike Lin/ Hsiu Luan Tseng/ Hsin Chen Shih/ Zie Pan Huang*/ Mark Jimenez? Shu Jen Wu*/ Michael Brown/ Woody Hwang/ Charles Intriago/ Simon Chen/ Sioeng Fei Man/ Jessica Elnitiarta/ Kent La/ Terri Bradley/ Lay Kweek Wie/ Lai Bun Tsun/ Ridwan Dinata/ Yoahan Elnitiarta/ Richard Esparragoza/ Manuel G. Garcia/ Reynalod B. Crespo/ Raymond Dos Remedios/ David Fried/ Louis C. Leonardo/ Juan L. Ruiz/ Marcelino V. Brotonel/ Enrique Sanchez/ Ruth Ramirez/ Charlie Trie/ Carmen Lunetta/ Len Keller/ Jacob Delvalle/ William Gearhart

*Granted Immunity after plead 5th Amendment

17 Witnesses Have Left the Country

Sandra Elnitiarta/ Pauline Kanchanalak/ Ming Chen/ Antonio Pan/ John H.K. Lee/ Agus Setiawan/ Arief Wariandinata/ Ted Sioeng/ Dewi Tirto/ Subandi Tanuwidjaja/ Soraya Wiriadinata/ Felix Ma/ Susanto Tanuwidjaja/ Sundari Elnitiarta/ Yopie Elnitiarta/ Laureen Elnitiarta/

* Has returned to the United States

19 Foreign Witnesses have Refused to be Interviewed by Investigativ Bodies

Ng Lap Seng/ Stepehn Riady/ Roy Tirtadji/ Ken Hsui/ John Muncy/ James Lin/ Eugene Wu/ Mochtar Riady/ Stanley Ho/ Suma Ching Hai/ James Riady/ Daniel Wu/ Ambrose Hsuing/ Hogen Fukunaga/ Li Kwai Fai/ Bruce Cheung/ Wang Jun/ Yanti Ardi/ Nanny Nitiarta/



June 22, 1998:William Safire printed "Compromised Visitor" in the New York Times

Never has a U.S. President traveled to Beijing at such a disadvantage. Bill Clinton has reason to suspect that the Chinese leaders possess information about "the China connection" to his campaigns, but he does not know what it is.

He knows that they know much more than anyone about the penetration of the White House by Asian fronts for Chinese intelligence. They have all the details about Indonesia's Riady family's long-term investment in his career, and probably of instructions to influence his post-election change of trade policy.

....In obstructing any investigation, the interests of China run parallel to those of this compromised U.S. President. Both Clinton and the Chinese want nothing further to come out.

Accept, if you wish, the protestations of Clinton defenders that his campaign was duped by John Huang, Charlie Trie and Maria Hsia, and was ignorant of the source of the Asian funds solicited from Johnny Chung. Buy, if you like, the notion that the payments had nothing to do with flip-flops on trade and the technology-transfer triumph over the Penatgon by anything-goes Commerce.

But even if China's quid was not "soley" responsible for Clinton's quo , the fact remains that secret Chinese money passed and U.S. policy was changed. The unspoken truth haunting this summit is that China's leaders have soemthing on this President.

...In this charade, Clinton will formally ask the Chinese to cooperate with the Congress and the Department of Justice, and Jiang will formally promise to help. Perhaps an expendable non-official middleman will be designated to take a gentle fall, helping Janet Reno to avoid having to seek independent counsel. And the relived Clinton will owe Jiang a big one.

July 1998

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July 9, 1998:Barry Schweld, AP Diplomat Writer printed "Defector Warns Of Russian Plans" in the Washington Post

A former Soviet Agent says Russia's military intelligence is gathering information on President Clinton, key congressional and military leaders and members of the Cabinet for assasination squads.

Elite troops already are training in the United States and in the vent of war "would try to assasinate as many American leaders as possible, as well as their families", Stanislav Lunev, a former colonel in the Russian ,ilitary intelligence service, asserts in abook published Wednesday.

..."The use of nuclear weapons would be likely", he said.

...In the book, "through The Eyes Of The Enemy", and in an associated Press interview, Lunev said special agents were entering the United States as foreign tourists on fake passports and that elite troops were locating sites to deposit small nuclear devices, known as "suitcase bombs" in the shenandoah Vally outside Washington and the Hudson Valley of New York.

...Asked what his intentions were, Lunev said: "I wish America to take much more care about this country's national security becasue the Cold War is not finished."...



July 14, 1998:Dick Morris printed "Clinton's State-Level Attack Dogs" in the New York Post

HAS the White House employed close allies to persuade politically-connected local prosecutors to startegically intimidate, harass and, most important, discredit Kenneth Starr's most formidable witness?

Last week, as Linda Tripp testified day after day before the Starr grand jury, Maryland prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli announced that his local grand jury would investigate whether Tripp had committed a crime in taping the infamous phone calls with Monica Lewinsky.

...The pattern is all too obvious. Clinton's allies are using the identical M.O. whenever they need to discredit a threatening accuser. Firefighters facing a burning forst will light a balze of their own to consume the fuel before it fees the main fire; in the same way, Clinton'sa llies in these Democratic states are going after Starr star witnesses. In effect, they are enlisting the power of state-level criminal-justice systems to obstruct federal investigations. The apparent goal? To boldly and publically compromise the credibility of ant threatening witness at the very time that the substance of the witness' accusations are at issue. No waiting for trial, no waiting for cross-examination- just in-your-face guerrilla warfare, dressed up as a quest for justice....



July 17, 1998:Larry Margasak, AP Writer printed "Justice Says Agents Must Testify" in the Washington Post

Declaring there would be no "irreparable harm," Chief Jsutice William Rehnquist today refused to spare President Clinton's Secret Service protectors from testifying in the Monica Lewinsky case. with the dramatic legal fight ended, prosecutors summoned the officers to the grand jury. A district federal judge, athree-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel and, Thursday, the full 11-member appelate court here, all ruled the agents must testify. They agreed with Starr's position that there is no legal privelege to avoid cooperating with a criminal investigation.

So crushing a defeat was Thursday's rulling-- on an Administration request for the full court to reconsider the case-- that not a single judge requested a vote to hear arguments.

"This court has ruled that the privelege does not exist," the appealate court said....



July 20, 1998:Wes Pruden printed "Seems like Old Times Down In Arkansas" in the Washington Times

The More things change, the more they saty the same. You can take the boy out of Hot Springs, but you probably can't take the Hot Springs out of the boy president.

Nobody paid much attention to Bill Clinton's private life when he was governor of Arkansas. Those who knew him well thought is was too sordid to examine, and he was only the governor, after all. By one reckoning, he was sleeping with half of the reporters assigned to cover the governor's office, or trying to, so a lot of people in Arkansas never learned who he was.

Mr. Clinton seems to think he is governor of the United States, with all the perks pertaining thereunto-- this is the source of his continuing headache-- but to most of the rest of us he's the president of the United States, and some of us even expect him to show a little regard for the dignity if not the majesty of his office.

...President Clinton Continues to govern exactly as he governed Arkansas. Dick Morris, who knows the president better than most, observes how the Clinton men threatened Linda Tripp in the way they threatened David Hale, the original Whitewater bag man whose testimony convicted Jim Guy Tucker and the McDougals. Just before that trial began, the county district attroney, a longtime Clintonsycophant named Mark Stodola (and a one-time debtor of the McDougal Bank) filed an obscure criminal charge against David Hale, accusing him of filling out an insurance form incorrectly. "That indictment achieved its goal," says Dick Morris. "The jury pool in the Tucker-McDougal [trial] heard loud and clear the intended message: hale is a liar who cannot be believed."

...The past, the man said is prologue,a nd Bill Clinton is teaching a credulous nation what every southerner understands from birth, that the past is not dead, it is not even past.



July 23, 1998:BWilliam Safire printed "Unclosed Filegate" in the New York Times

Remember "Filegate"? Three yaers ago when we learned that the White House had been regularly pulling the files from the F.B.I. on hundreds of Republicans-- ostensibly for security clearance, but including hundreds of former Reagan and Bush appointees never being considered for jobs.<-> Even Clinton partisans "shuddered" at the shades of an "enemies list." White House spokesman dismissed it as a "bureaucratic snafu," caused by a Secret Service that couldn't keep its lists straight.

...The list, still growing, is up to 900 nmaes; some, like Linda Tripp, were handovers, but at least 400 were not-- from James Brady to James Baker, John Whitehead to James Carville.

Was Livingstone hired at Hillary Clinton's suggestion? Who gave this former bar bouncer the names of the targets of White House curiosity-- names that he then ordered up fromthe roundheeled F.B.I.?

...As Clinton stonewallers talk about the President's privacy, and as white House spinmeisters sieze the issue of privacy on the Internet, think baout Livingstone's eye to the keyholeof more than 400 Republican bedrooms. If Starr cannot indict, he should report forthwith; then, if necessary, Congress should act.



July 24, 1998:Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report posted "REPORT: CLINTON UNWILLING TO TESTIFY BEFORE LEWINSKY JURY,AIDE SAYS; PRESIDENT CLINTON SUBPOENAED!"



July 24, 1998:Patrick J. Buchannan printed "A Presidency in Ruins" ( a reposted by Carrol Quigly 04:18pm Jul24, 1994 EST(#5167 of 5167)in Washington Post's Talk Central)

The president's wife is forced to make a fool of herself by acting as though the Monica mess is the work of " a vast right-wing conspiracy". friend Vernon Jordan was forced to go to the edge of the law, perhaps over, to bail him out. Secret Service agents have been forced into garnd juries to snitch on a president it is their sworn duyt to defend...

"Of all the myths out of which the Republic was born... none was more hopeful than the crowning myth of the Presidency-- that the people, in their shared wisdom, would be able to choose the best amn to lead them. From this came a derivative myth-- that the Presidency would make noble any man who held its responsibility. The Office would trun a dross from his character, his duties would, by their very weight, make him a superior man..."

So wrote Theodore H. White, famed chronicler of presidential campaigns. To White, Richard Nixon's "Breach Of faith" was that he destroyed the myth tat held us together.

Yet Nixon was less an architect of Watergate than a passive accomplice. He did not know about the break-in, he did not order it, he was appalled at its stupidity-- but he did approve of the plans of panicked aides, trying to cover up for dolts at the campaign.

In brief, Richard Nixon's involvement came of misplaced loyalty. He was trying to protect the people. In Clinton's case the reverse is true. His aides, to a man, were innocnet of any culpability in this sqalid MonicaGate matter when it broke. It is Clinton who is dragging everyone in and everyone down. Nixon's aides brought him down; Clinton is bringing his own people down.

....The President knows the answer. But rather than call Starr over to the White House, rather than walk over to the garnd jury, Clinton is dragging down his family, friends, lawyers, staff, Secret Service and anyone else who can serve as a temporary roadblock between himself and the truth.

....But Clinton defenders assure us that even if he committed perjury, even if he lied flagrantly to the American people, it is of no consequences because it was, after all, "only about sex." But perjury is a felony punishable by prison, and loss of voting rights and the right to hold public office. Are presidents above the law?

....Understandably, Clinton's partisans do not want to lose, do want their right-wing enemies gloating over their defeat. But they ought to ask themselves: Is it worth sacrificing their own integrity to prevent the truth from coming out about Bill Clinton's?



July 27, 1998:Wes Pruden printed "Miss Reno regrets, and the GOP yawns" in the Washington Times

Janet Reno is fortunate that all chivalry is not dea. If she were a man she might get a kick in the pants from Congress. Or she might not.

Chivalry is dead in the Clinton household, as we all know, and the president appears to be keeping the pressure of the attorney general to be good girl and behalf herself. He's desperate to keep an independent grand jury from taking a hard look at how he and al Gore skinned campaign contributors in '96, and what the contributors got in return. If he has to make his attorney general look like a spineless lackey to do it, well, that's just a risk a gentleman has to take.

The suspicion grows--mushrooms, you might say--that what the Chinese contributors got was a blind eye to srm violations. Anyone who gets the shakes at the thought of Chinese nuclear missles aimed at a dozen American cities can take a certain solace, as the president and vice-president no doubt do,that it was Chinese money that helped the president win 370 electoral votes en route to election.

Miss Reno insists that it's her stubborn hard head that prevents her from naming a special prosecutor, as nearly everyone not in the employ of Democratic officeholders thinks she should. But nobody's head could be that hard in the face of insistent advise from her ranking associates who think a special prosecutor is inevitable.

He latest nightmare is a 100-page recommendation from Charles LaBella, who has completed an in-house priliminary report, that the investigation be turned over to an outside prosecuter because Justice Department lawyers are unlikely to resist pressure to cook the results of their investigation. Mr. LaBella told the attorney general that she had mis-interpreted the independent-counsel law by creating an artificially high standard for invoking it

Or maybe it is not a misinterpretation at all. Maybe the author of this artificially high standard is the same lawyer who wrote Monica Lewinsky's talking points. this kind of stubborness could only come from the White House to an attorney general who is terrified that if she doesn't obey, she might have to look for work elsewhere.



July 27, 1998:William Safire printed "Grand Obstruction" in the New York Times

A Prosecutor must have a "theory of the case"-- a theme that ties together the diaparate evidence of a conspiracy to obstruct justice-- to give coherent meaning to all to all the strands of evidence.

Up to now, our attention has been narrowly focused on the Tripp appearances before a grand jury, the deal-making for Lewinsky testimony, the Presidential subpeona to testify again under oath.

And as of now, the Clinton defenders are saying, everybody lies about sexual liasons and if one took place here, the cover up is trivial, certainly no "high crime" providing the basis for impeachment.

Conventional wisdon has it that the scandals of the first term-- Whitewater and the concealment of files, power abuse in the travel-office firings, Filgate-- all turned up to be dry holes, with the Little Rock grand jury shut down, leaving the Independent Councsel with little to show but the improper inducement to lie about some tawdry hanky-panky.

But what if we're all mistaken? What if the seemingly obsessive pursuit of false denial in the Lewinsky-Tripp-Willey matter turns out to illuminate a much broader landscape of witness tampering and suppression of evidence? Then we would be talking about a serious abuse of executive power.

....If my pure speculation about Ken Starr's "theory of the case" is correct, and his intent is to show a pervasive patternof the sue of executive power to obstruct the administration of justice, that would explain (a) the prosecutor's vain attempt to see the notes of Vincent Foster's lawyer regarding Travelgate, (b)his ongoing effort to deny privelege to taxpayer-paid White House lawyers and (c)the prosecutor's appeal of a recent court decision taking the pressure off the well-compensated Hubbell to talk.

this approach also suggests that the demand by the Clinton Justice for total Secret Service privelege in the Lewinsky matter was a classic and perhaps fatal blunder. Resulting sweeping court decisions emboldened Starr to bring a parade of agents before grand juries. Why assume, as most do, that the line of questioning is limited to sexual encounters? Agents may have witnessed obstruction in other matters.

Every bit of corroboration counts.

....When will we see this report? My guess is, in Clinton's phrase, sooner rather than later: Starr need not wait for all appeals to end or trials to be held before reporting on the Presidential obstruction he encountered over three years. Public reaction to its startling contents should be "if only we had known."

More profound question:what conclusion about the abuse of power will the report reach, or lead a reluctant Congress to act upon?

The answer, if I am right, may come more quickly and be more far-reaching than most imagine.



July 28, 1998:Larry Margasak, Associated Press Writer's story "Lewinsky Reaches Tenative Immunity" appeared in the Washington Post

WASHINGTON(AP) Monica Lewinsky has a tenative immunity deal to cooperate with Kenneth Starr's investigation of an alleged cover-up, legal sources said today.

....The agreement for Ms. Lewinsky's testimony that she had sexual relations with President Clinton was reached after the foremr White House intern was interviewed for five hours Monday by Starr's prosecutors in New York City.



July 29, 1998:AP WIRE REPORT,"Clinton To Testify On Videotape" appeared in the Washington Post

WASHINGTON (AP)Under subpeona in the Monica Lewinsky investigation, President Clinton will provide videotaped testimony to prosecutor Kenneth Starr on August 17, Clinton's attorney said today.

Clinton's personal attorneys will be present for the testimony, which will be given at the White House, attorney David Kendall said.

....As a part of the agreement, Starr withdrew the historic subpeona, a senior White House official said. Kendall came to the White Hosue to brief Clinton just after reaching the agreement with Starr this afternoon, the official said.

....Ms. Lewinsky is prepared to testify that she and Clinton discussed ways of concealing a sexual relationship, legal sources say.

....For example, said the sources, Ms. Lewinsky, 25, says she and the president agreed that one way to expalin the former intern's frequent visits to the Oval Office area would be to say that she was going to see presidential secrestary and friend, Betty Currie. Clinton did offer that explanation in sworn testimony for a lawsuit.

....One of Ms. Lewinsky's attorneys, Plato Cacheris, stood on a street corner outside his office Yuesday to announce that his client had agreed to provide "full and truthful testimony" to a grand jury.

Legal sources say she would say that had sexual relations with Clinton, contrary to his denials.



July 29, 1998:Wes Pruden Printed "Four Escape Routed For Bill Clinton" in the Washington Times

Bill Clinton and Harry Houdini, wherever he may be have alot in common. Both are matsres of the imporbable escape.

The difference is that everybody rooted for Houdini to succeed, whether he was entombed in a coffin or weighed with chains in a trunk submerged in a tank. The president is entangled in a young woman's lingerie, a grand jury subpeona and a hundred lies, and a lot of people are rooting for the lies and the lingerie.

...The news that the president has been subpeonaed, Monica Lewinsky has been interviewed and an appeals court has told Bruce Lindsay, the president's alter ego and one of the last surviving cronies of the Arkansas mafia, that he too must testify to the Monica Lewinsky grand jury, dots the last i and crossed the final t in this seamy if not exactly steamy saga. who wouldn't feel cornered?

The president doesn't have many options left. The subpeona issued two weeks ago and acknowledged by the White House only when it could share the front pages with the Capitol shootings, puts Mr. Clinton in a true dilemma, with every escape route blocked and every alternative looking worse than the others.

He has four choices. He could comply with the subpeona willingly, go before th grand jury in whatever venue his his lawyers can work out with Mr. Starr, and answer the mna's questions with as much liar's skill as he can muster. This fraught with risk. Assuming that he and Monica were more than friends, which an assumption that nearly everyone makes, does he continue to lie about it, and compound perjury with more perjury? He doesn't know what other evidence Mr. Starr has. If he tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he testifies against himself, giving the lie to his earlier sworn denials.

He could flout the subpeona, and tell Mr. Starr to go to hell. This would require a certain measuer of courage and chutzpah. Chutzpah he has in splenty, but Bill Clinton has never shown himself to be endowed with courage. Harry Truman could have pulled it off, but Harry Truman, whose personal integrity was never questioned, would never had gotten himself in ajam like this in the first place.

He could fight the subpeona, and this is no doubt the most attractive choice. His lawyers would cloak the challenge in the colors of the flag, and he could make endless speeches about how he was doing it for the presidents Reublican and Democrat who would follow after. This would set up an historic constitutional crisis. His lawyers would have work for months, and in the end, lose. This might buy Mr. Clinton the rest of his term, but it would be bought at the cost of paralyzing his presidency and crippling his party in Congress for a generation. All this for a few minutes of cheap sex, without even taking off his clothes. Other presidents would flinch at this. Richard Nixon, to give his ghost its due, had the grace and gumption to resign rather than to put the nation through such an ordeal. Bill Clinton doesn't care. There's always someone to take the hit for him. The landscape, stretching from Texarkana eastward to the Potomac, is littered with th corpses of foolish but loyal friends.

The fourth option might actually work, but the man who didn't inhale, who dodged his genration's war and fled to another country to mock braver men than he, could never bring himself to take it. He could admit it all, ascribe to it to a moment of human weakness, and say that yes, he did lie in his deposition, and he did it not because everyone lies about sex but because he wanted to protect his wife ( his nose would grow 12 feet 4 inches in 13 seconds, in full view of the camera). And for his daughter, and even for Monica.

"Where I come from," he might say, " a man is taught to lie if necessary to protect women, and I'm truly sorry that I gave in to a momentary temptation of the flesh. I believe in amazing grace, and that God has forgiven me, nd I hope you will, too."....



July 31, 1998:Associated Press printed "Lewinsky Investigation Chronology" appeared in the Washington Post Talk Central: 09:47pm Jul 30, 1998 EST (#5781 of 5816)

A chronology of events in the Monica Lewinsky inquiry:

--Jan 12, 1998: Linda Tripp provides IIndependent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office with taped conversations between her and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

--Jan. 13: Mrs. Tripp wears a hidden mmicrophone for the FBI and records a conversation with Ms. Lewinsky.

--Jan. 14: Ms. Lewinsky hands Mrs. Triipp a three-page document of talking points in the last contact between the two women.

--Jan. 16: Prosecutors confront Ms. Leewinsky and unsuccessfully seek her cooperation.

--Jan. 17: President Clinton testifiess in the Paula Jones sexual harrassment lawsuit ans denies a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewisnky.

--Jan. 21: First news stories appear tthat Starr has expanded his investigation to look at whether Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky had an affair and tried to cover it up.

--Jan. 26: During a White House news cconference, Clinton states, 'I did not have relations with that woman,... i never told anybody to lie."

--Jan. 27: Starr opens a grand jury innquiry.

--March 15: Former Clinton aide, Kathlleen Willey appears on CBS' "60 Minutes", saying that Clinton made unwelcome sexual advances in a room adjacent to the Oval Office in 1993.

--March 21: Clinton invokes executive privelege in an effort to limit grand jury quetioning of aides Bruce Lindsay and Sidney Blumenthal.

--April 1: In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright dismisses the Jones lawsuit against Clinton.

--May 4: In Washington, U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson denies the White House executive privelege claim.

--May 22: Judge Norma Hollowayrules thhat Secret Service agent can be compelled to testify before a grand jury.

--June 2: Lewinsky replaces her attornney, William Ginsberg with two Washington lawyers, Jacob Stein and Plato Cacheris.

--July 7: A federal appeals court rulees that Secret Service employees must tell the grand jury what they observed while gaurding the president.

--July 17: After Supreme Court Chief JJustice William Rehnquist refuses to block the order on Secret Service testimony, the agents report to the grand jury. Prosecuters issue a historic subpeona ordering Clinton's testimony.

--July 27: A federal appeals court rulles that Lindsay's testimony is noy shielded by attorney-client privelege. Ms. Lewinsky talks with prosecutors.

--July 28: Ms. Lewinsky is given immunnity from prosecution in exchange for her agreement to testify.

--July 29: Clinton agrees to testify bby videotape from the White House and prosecutors withdraw heir subpeona. Legal sources say Ms. Lewisnky has given prosecutors a dress that she says may contain eveidence of a sexual encounter with the president.

August 1998

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August 3, 1998:Wes Pruden printed "A Sorry Result Only Al Gore Could Love" in the Washington Times

Al Gore's the only man in America with a logical reason to root for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Everybody else loses.

The Republicans, first of all. They've got a very good shot at regaining the White House in 2000, particularly if they resist the impulse to nominate a dreary loser with a familiar face.

The occassional Democrat trying to scrounge the courage-- and th big bucks-- to challenge Al and his goofy enviro-nuttiness has to grit his teeth and pretend he believes the president lest an impeachment bestow the presidency on a man who won't get better shot than this.

And the rest of us lose, and not just by the humiliation of having to watch a president thrown out of office becasue he couldn't imagine that the laws the rest of us observe apply to him, too. He may not be a better man than that, but we've got to believe that we're still a better country than that.

....Forensics tests will no doubt be run on the dress, and when these reveal that someone in that dress went bump in the night with somebody, a fight will inevitably follow over whether the president of the united States must submit to a DNA test. The humilation-- not to the president, but to the rest of us--never ends. Observing that the endless investigation has cost upward of $40 million, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, cried out: "Wrap this sucker up!" An inadvertantly, injudicious choice of words, but a sentiment both Bill and Al understand



August 3, 1998:John Solomon, Associated Press printed "White House Appeal on Privelege" as it appears in the Washington Post

With pressure mounting for President Clinton to expalin his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the White House today decided to continue the legal fight seeking to block testimony by presidential confidant, Bruce Lindsey, an officail said.

The administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the white Hosue would appeal a decision last month by athree-judge appeals court panel that ordered Bruce Lindsey to testify before a grand jury. The judges rejected arguments that Lindsey's tetsimony was proteceted by attorney-client privelege.

....Lindsey, a deputy White House counsel and Clinton's closest adviser, has declined to answer several of prosecutors' questions in the Lewinsky case. He argued that disclosing his conversations with the president would violate Clinton's right to confidential legal advice.

But both the judge overseeing the grand jury and the three-judge appeals court panel ruled that a government lawyer could not use the attorney-client privilege to keep from testifying in a federal criminal investigation of alleged government misconduct.

August 4, 1998:Michael Kirkland printed "Chief justice won't block testimony" in Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 (UPI) - Chief Justice William Rehnquist has refused to block the forced testimony of a White House lawyer before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury.

The chief justice did not issue an opinion with the denial.

The White House had asked the chief justice to block the testimony before Starr's grand jury, contending that government lawyers have the same attorney-client privilege as private lawyers.



August 5, 1998:"The Privilege Battles" in the Washington Post

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigation of the Monica S. Lewinsky matter has spun offtwo legal cases that are pending before the Supreme Court. The administration's claims ora Secret Service privilege and attorney-client privilege for White House lawyers have potentially far-reaching consequences for the institution of the presidency, if not for President Clinton in particular.

Jan. 27: Starr's deputies first meet with Secret Service officials seeking to question officers about what they saw or heard of Clinton's dealings with Lewinsky.

Feb. 18: Deputy counsel Bruce R. Lindsey, Clinton's closest aide, is called to the grand jury; he declines to answer certain questions, citing both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege. A week later, White House aide Sidney Blumenthal declines to answer some question about Lewinsky damage-control meetings, citing executive privilege.

March 6: Starr files motion to compel Lindsey and Blumenthal to testify.

March 20: White House asks court to block testimony based on executive and attorney-client privileges.

April 10: Negotiations over Secret Service testimony break down; Starr files motion to compel testimony from two uniformed officers and the agency's chief lawyer.

May 4: Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson rules against the administration's executive privilege and attorney-client privilege claims, saying in effect the White House cannot be used as a shield for the president when his personal conduct is at issue in a criminal case.

May 22: Johnson also rejects Secret Service claim of a new and legally untested "protective function privilege," dismissing the argument that forcing such testimony will cause the president to push away his protectors.

June 1: White House drops executive privilege fights but vows to appeal attorney-client privilege.

June 4: Starr, in a bid to speed up the cases, asks the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis in both cases, bypassing the appeals court. The court refuses.

July 7: A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously rejects the Secret Service's privilege argument, finding that there is no basis for creating a new legal privilege and suggesting that Congress is the proper forum for considering whether to do so.

July 14: On the same day that the Justice Department announces it will ask the full appeals court to reconsider the Secret Service ruling, Start seeks to force resolution by calling seven additional Secret Service personnel to the grand jury, including the head of Clinton's detail.

July 15: Johnson refuses to grant a stay.

July 16: The full appeals court declines to hear the Secret Service case and says officers must testify if the Supreme Court does not grant a stay by noon the next day.

July 17: Four minutes before the deadline, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist refuses to block Secret Service testimony, citing the unlikely chances that the agency will succeed on the merits of its privilege case. Officers begin testifying.

July 27: A three-judge appeals panel rules 2 to 1 against the White House on the attorney-client privilege claim, finding that Lindsey has been acting more as a personal counsel for the president and that there is no privilege for a government lawyer in such a case.

Aug. 3: The White House, seeking to head off testimony the next morning by special counsel Lanny A. Breuer, asks the appeals court to issue a stay while it appeals the Lindsey case to the Supreme Court. The appeals court refuses and the White House asks Rehnquist to intervene.

Yesterday: Rehnquist also refuses to block Breuer's testimony.



August 5, 1998:Dick Morris printed "The Political Life: The White House has only itself to blame" in The Hill

Why is the Clinton White House victimized by women who save their dirty dresses and friends who tape the true confessions of their office-mates? Is it just bad luck or is it venal partisanship? The fact is that Clinton's handlers have only themselves to blame for the eccentricity of the witnesses against them.

Linda Tripp would never have taped -- or even thought of taping -- Monica Lewinsky had she not been savaged by Clinton attorney Bob Bennett when she backed up Kathleen Willey's story of molestation in the Oval Office. When an attorney of Bennett's stature and skill goes after you, it's no laughing matter.

By the time Bennett had finished with her, Tripp knew that she would face more of the same if she told Paula Jones' lawyers about what Monica Lewinsky had told her over the phone. Subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case, silence was no option. Tripp knew that she would have to choose between committing perjury and getting pilloried. If she told what Lewinsky had told her, she would be squarely in the White House sights -- vulnerable to a smear campaign fueled by confidential information from her FBI file and her Pentagon personnel file and by dirt dug up by a legion of private detectives aka the secret police.

....I doubt that Lewinsky would have kept the stained dress in the first place were she not terrified by the treatment that she saw Tripp, Willey, Jones, Dolly Kyle Browning and a legion of others go through. Even if she did keep the dress initially as a souvenir, she would certainly not have kept it after the affair became public unless she needed the evidence to defend herself should she go public. The information that Terry Lenzner, secret policeman extraordinaire, had been delegated to check out Lewinsky's past for two months must have reinforced her determination to hang onto that dress.

For months it had been clear that the White House tactic of smearing decent women who are trying to tell the truth was going to lead to just such a backfire. The efforts of Nixon's handlers to discredit Daniel Ellsberg by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist and to get dirt on Larry O'Brien by bugging his phones at the Democratic National Committee backfired big-time. Now the parallel attempts to dig up dirt on Tripp, Lewinsky and others are backfiring with possibly equal severity. Bill Clinton's management style is to surround himself with strong-willed people and let them do what they will without having to order it himself. Much of the time it works. This strategy for manipulating his staff produces a Harold Ickes fundraising machine, a George Stephanopoulos spin factory, and a Dick Morris issue operation. But here letting the likes of Carville, Begala, Lenzner, Palladino, Bennett and Wright run wild without restraint or control has led to disaster.

Without the tapes and the dress what would Starr have on Clinton? Not much. Why does he have tapes and the dress? Becasue overreaction begat overreaction until people saw they had to go to extreme lengths to defend their reputations if they went public and told the truth. Before this counterproductive cycle of smears, vituperation, snooping and invasion of privacy goes any further, Bill Clinton must close it down. Before this kind of Nixonion conduct closes down his administration.



August 5, 1998:[The following is a transcript of a recorded phone message put out by a group in Chicago called "Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts [CCCC]." (312) 731-1100 and (312) 731-1505.]

"HI! Sherman Skolnick, Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts, 9800 South Oglesby.

He knows a lot about U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who used to be a state prosecutor in southern Florida. He is attorney Jack Thompson of the Miami area.

JACK THOMPSON: ..But the fact is that Janet Reno is being blackmailed by people within the administration and by organized crime interests who are involved in money laundering -- that from Michael Morrison, editor of the *Wall Street Journal*.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: For what purpose, do you suppose?

JACK THOMPSON: I believe, to blow the Clinton administration out of the water.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: You think the *Wall Street Journal* knows about this, but hasn't published much, huh?

JACK THOMPSON: That's correct, the editor told me that.

I think the sitting on the information that's known by people in the news media about Janet Reno is despicable.

I was Reno's opponent, Republican opponent, in the general election in 1988 for the office of Dade County state attorney.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: So you know a little bit about her? [laughs]

JACK THOMPSON: I know more about her than the editors of the *Miami Herald* know about her. And indeed, I wanted to testify, as did Miami police chief Ken Hars(?). Of all the people that should have been allowed to testify at her confirmation hearings, *he* should have, and *I* should have. Because what we know about her alcoholism, her use of call girls for sex...

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: What, she's a lesbian you mean?

JACK THOMPSON: Yes. I would sign an affidavit as to what --and *have* -- as to what I know. And indeed, [I] wanted to, under oath, give the names of call girls and other women with whom she's had sex! Here in Dade County, and around the country!

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: She was very weak on drug cases for the 15 years that she was a state prosecutor down there.

JACK THOMPSON: She was weak on *every* case, except when it came to bringing charges against police officers for purported abuses of their power.

But clearly, when you have an editor of the *Wall Street Journal* tell you -- that is, *me* -- that they know that Janet Reno is being blackmailed by certain individuals within the Clinton administration and by organized crime, that's a rather heady charger And they have information that they feel can prove that -- and as do certain Members of Congress.

She's a lesbian who wants to remain "in the closet", she's a lesbian who criminally uses call girls to satisfy her desires, and she's a person who has a *severe* alcohol abuse problem -- even so severe that people within her office stated (when she was working here as state attorney in Dade County) that she would attempt to discharge her duties during daylight hours while drunk in the office.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: They make a blackmail issue out of her drunkeness and her sexuality, in other words?

JACK THOMPSON: They have videotapes of her, engaged in sex acts with call girls.

She's had numerous DUI [Driving Under the Influence (of alcohol, presumably)] incidents that she has used her position here in south Florida to cover up by pulling rank on police officers and police departments to cover up those incidents --*that* was squashed by both Republicans *and* Democrats during the confirmation process.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: (We're talking with Jack Thompson, an attorney in the Miami area, regarding U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.)

Do you think that those that are in the dope trade and organized crime know this and are using it even now against her?

JACK THOMPSON: Oh there's no question. Because it would, of course, end her tenure as Attorney General were this to be known: that she's a drunk and a prostitute-using lesbian. I think the Clintons wanted a dirty cop on the beat whose chain they could yank in order to keep her in line on Whitewater or any other matter that might come down the pike!

Well the House, according to Speaker Gingrich, is going to have full-blown, far-ranging hearing on Waco. That's a fair opportunity for me and others to point out, for example, that Janet Reno was probably drunk when she made the decision to make the incursion into the Mount Carmel compound.

I called a press conference to announce the information, including sources independent of me that could corroborate her lesbianism, her use of call girls, and her alcoholism.

SHERMAN SKOLNICK: And what happened?

JACK THOMPSON: The press conference was attended by every media entity in south Florida -- seventeen-, eighteen-some entities. Guess what? The story was *completely* *spiked*."



August 5, 1998:Bob Herbert printed "The Damage Is Done" in The New York Times

"But the damage is done. The nation handed its highest office to a man who embodies th narrcisisticlc extremes of the baby-boomer generation. It's all about Bill. And like everyone else who has had a relationship with this irresponsible and self-absorbed individual -- his wife, his friends, his loyal aides, his party -- the nation is paying the price.

There are important issues waiting to be dealt with -- an economic crisis in Asia, the extraordinary gap between America's haves and have-nots, the future of Social Security, campaign finance reform, education, health care, race relations and a Congressional election in November. But there is no leadership coming from Mr. Clinton. He's worried about his grand jury testimony and a devilish stain on a blue dress.

The Clinton Presidency is like a car disabled on the side of the road.

"Bill Clinton was never about dignity or integrity or respect for others, qualities that should be prerequisites for the Presidency. He raised hopes with his style and his rhetoric, but it turned out there was very little that was authentic about the man. His contempt for the truth is legendary. His idea of ethical behavior is to operate as close as possible to the borders of corruption. His treatment of women, as the world knows, seemed at times both compulsive and atrocious, and became a source of profound embarrassment to the feminists who supported him so strongly."



August 6, 1998:Kevin Galvin printed "House Panel Cites Reno For Contempt" in The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- "A House committee voted today to cite Attorney General Janet Keno for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over reports recommending that she seek an independent counsel to probe campaign fund-raising abuses.

The panel moved to the extraordinary confrontation on a 24-19 vote. All Republicans supported the motion. Eighteen Democrats joined by Independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont opposed it.

"The committee has a need to see these documents," said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

August 10, 1998:Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy printed "Over To You, Bill" in Time Magazine VOL. 152 NO.7

The White House puts on a brave front as Lewinsky finally appears on Starr's center stage and another Tripp prop is revealed

The night before her day in court, Monica Lewinsky promised her lawyers she would go to sleep early, hut instead she lay awake for hours. She worried about what it would mean to put her private life irrevocably into the public record: she had no illusion that anything would stay secret for long. And she wondered how she would keep her composure through something so painful. She had watched President Clinton under pressure--he always made it look easy--putting everything in neat compartments in a way she never could. But she has learned a lot these past six months, and the only way she could imagine bringing herself to testify against Clinton without falling apart was by trying to be like him. "She had to put her emotions in a box," an associate said later, "because this was a really difficult thing for her."

Monica had about 12 hours to go: at that very moment, Clinton still had 12 days before his appointment with Kenneth Starr, but his thoughts that night at the White House were of rebellion--against Starr, against the advice of his own lawyer, David Kendall, against the expectations building on all sides. He had agreed to testify because he felt he had no choice in the face of a subpoena and the warnings from Democrats that he had better not fight it. But no decisions are forever these days, and so on the eve of Monica's testimony, one of Clinton's closest advisers slipped into the White House late that night, so as not to upset Kendall, and spent an hour alone with the President. The adviser made the case for a reversal: the independent counsel had overstepped his bounds; no President has ever been forced to appear before a grand jury; it could be a perjury trap. The move would be hard to weather politically, the adviser admitted; the Democrats on Capitol Hill might quaver and bolt, and the public reaction could be very ugly. But the alternative could be even worse.

In the end Clinton chose to stick with his plan to testify next Monday. Apart from the political costs of refusing, the courts have long ruled that you can sue a sitting President, you can subpoena his tapes, and you can get his papers. If Clinton challenged the call to testify, Kendall had warned, he would lose, and perhaps quickly. "It doesn't make sense for the presidency, for Bill Clinton, for the next 2 1/2 years, for him to be silent," says an adviser.

Ken Starr has spent seven months stalking his quarry; last week he gently laid in the bait. Lewinsky's testimony for six hours on Thursday did not leave much room for escape, for quibbles over what constitutes a sexual relationship or charges that she had an overly rich fantasy life. She told the 23 grand jurors that during a period of more than 18 months, she was alone with the President many times, that they did indeed have a sexual relationship and talked about how to conceal it. She told them about the dark-blue dress from the Gap. And while repons of her testimony did not surprise many in the White House, even they don't know how tightly Start has triangulated the days and nights of Monica Lewinsky.

Start has her testimony, the tapes and something else, the kind of gift only a faithful government secretary like Linda Tripp could give: a stenographer's notebook filled with 80 to 100 pages of tight shorthand that chronicles the times, dates, places and circumstances of Lewinsky's alleged liaison with the President, a sort of Guide Bleu to the whole story. According to sources outside Starr's office, at this time a year ago, when Lewinsky was distraught over Clinton's decision to break things off, she talked to her friend Tripp for hours about what had happened and why, from the very start of the relationship, and Tripp patiently wrote it all down in her notebook.

Tripp gave that book to Start during one of their first encounters back in January, these sources tell TIME, and thus handed him a skeleton key that could help in tracking down the White House visitation records and phone logs, as well as grilling the Secret Service agents, in an effort to reconstruct the relationship from beginning to end. The notebook includes a chronicle of events that took place during months not covered by Tripp's audiotapes. When Starr finally got his chance to question Lewinsky, the book may have helped him test her credibility and jog her memory once she began cooperating. Last week, as people waited to learn the results of the dress tests, Clinton's antagonists were reminding anyone who would listen that Start was building his case in triplicate. "Even if the dress turns out to be nothing," says a private lawyer involved in the case, "there is so much other stuff--the messages, the gifts, the logs, the Secret Service stuff They were alone an awful lot."

If anything, Clinton's position was solidifying as the date with Starr drew nearer. The spectacle of Lewinsky running the gantlet of cameras into the federal courthouse, the rumors that the DNA tests on the dress would prove his undoing, the growing consensus that he was walking into a perjury trap, led outsiders to assert that he would soon have no choice but to confess all--and insiders to suspect essentially the opposite: that he would admit not a single thing, deny any romance, dismiss Lewinsky as a fantasizing stalker and even consider refusing to turn over a blood sample that could match his DNA to the stain on the dress. Fight it out, all the way, without looking back.

That strategy was totally plausible to those who know Bill Clinton best and fear Hillary Clinton most. By last week, the First Lady had canceled her plans to head up to Martha's Vineyard two weeks before the President, and though she was officially "on vacation," nobody was fooled about why she was still in town. If Clinton's first instinct is to find a compromise, hers is to fight. She has the advantage that her conversations with her husband are still legally protected, unlike just about everyone else's. One reason why all the people who usually guide Clinton out of tough spots are mute this time is fear that Starr can haul them before a grand jury to repeat their advice; the other reason is more tender. No one wants to suggest in front of his wife that the President may have been less than faithful and plot a strategy accordingly.

And so the President stays glued to his denials. That leaves the White House staff divided into three camps, united only by their lack of certainty about what Clinton did and what he intends to say about what he did. There are the rough-and-ready, "he's innocent" loyalists, who stick to their guns because they are too honorable to desert the boss, or they believe nothing happened because "he told me so." Among them are some of Clinton's newest aides, whose need to believe him borders on the spiritual. There is the middle group of longer-standing advisers who fear it is all true but push on, hoping otherwise, praying that this scandal will, like so many others before, prove to be nonfatal. And then there are the kiln-fired realists, who are, by habit if not by faith, the most optimistic. As one of them put it, "He deserves everything he is getting right now. But that doesn't mean we aren't trying to help."

In public, that means the meticulous maintenance of the Potemkin presidency, in which every appearance suggests that nothing is wrong. It was a week of crusades for gun control and Native American economic development, unity meetings with Democrats on the Hill, relentless Rose Garden ceremonies that at some point were painful to watch, as when Clinton cued the Marine Band to drown out reporters' questions. Deputy spokesman Barry Toiv, last week's sacrificial lamb, could even joke about it with the rumbling White House press corps. "Hey, I am sorry," he said on arriving almost an hour late for the Wednesday briefing. "It is not easy getting up here and saying nothing. It takes a lot of preparation."

Behind the scenes, aides worked hard to limit the President's exposure. Because of reports that hackers have broken into closed-circuit TV feeds, some members of Clinton's inner circle are pressing Kendall to ask Starr to have the grand jury come to the White House. They are trying to prevent the testimony from being videotaped because they are certain that the tape would leak. For now, the White House boasts that grand jurors will not be able to ask questions of Clinton. There is nothing, however, to prevent prosecutors at the courthouse from sending over questions to their colleagues sitting with the President.

Clinton's inner circle takes some comfort in the fact that in contrast to typical grand-jury testimony, the President's lawyer will remain at his side rather than having to wait outside. "Kendall's job will be to sit there with a briefcase full of socks ready to stuffthem into his mouth," jokes a Washington defense lawyer. Kendall might also remind the questioners that they are talking to the President of the U.S.--a protocol Clinton cannot enforce himself. But Kendall can do only so much. If he pulls on the President's sleeve one time too many, the interruption may run afoul of whatever deal he and Starr worked out and the independent counsel may appeal to the judge to silence Kendall or remove him from the room.

There have been loud hints all along that Kendall's strategy may come down to an argument over the definition of sex, which once again opens the gap between what is legally possible and what is politically conceivable. If Start is trying to prove Clinton lied in his deposition to Paula Jones' lawyers when he said he had never had sexual relations with Lewinsky, then whether or not he committed perjury could depend on how the term "sexual relations" is defined. Perjury requires intent: innocent mistakes are not enough. And because of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, ambiguities are resolved in favor of the defendant.

So the lawyers for Paula Jones tried to avoid any possible ambiguity by drafting a galactically broad definition of sex that would include touching of any erotic kind, fondling, oral sex or actual intercourse. In fact, the definition was so broad that when presented with it in January, Clinton's side challenged the definition by noting that a friendly hug on a rope line would just about meet the standard for sexual relations. At the time, Judge Susan Webber Wright agreed and narrowed the definition in such a way that some legal advisers saw a perjury escape hatch here, since the narrow definition would include intercourse but not necessarily oral sex.

Any loopholes in terminology may provide some momentary refuge, but not for long. Even the President's legal team understands that politically, Clinton could never claim innocence based on a legal technicality. As far as the public and Congress are concerned, Clinton in his deposition testified that he had never had any kind of sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky. And perhaps more important, the same holds true for the President's public declaration that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

In private, the efforts to help the President's cause took an uglier turn. White House operatives have never so much as hinted publicly at any hostility toward Lewinsky; they left it to poison-pen columnists and late-night comics to draw Lewinsky as a cartoon, flighty, flaky--and their polls showed how well that worked. The fact that most Americans think she is telling the truth about an affair has not spared her their scorn; the polls show an almost complete lack of respect or sympathy for her, to the point that a U.S. Congressman could dismiss her completely. "The President is going to say I didn't do it," says one Democratic lawmaker. "And it's going to go down to, Whom do you trust, the President or some floozy who wants to get herself out of trouble?"

Once Lewinsky agreed two weeks ago to cooperate with Starr, she unleashed a more ruthless set of enemies. It may only be a matter of time before Clinton loyalists relaunch their winter counterattack on Lewinsky's credibility. But more insidious were leaks to supermarket tabloids that called into question not just Lewinsky's honesty but her sanity as well. The National Enquirer cited White House insiders who portray Lewinsky as "a virtual psychopath" who stalked the President and spun his innocent attentions to her into a full-blown sexual fantasy.

Clinton's team savored a rare legal victory over Starr when it was revealed last week that Starr and his aides may have violated federal rules by leaking grand jury testimony and could possibly be fined or held in contempt. It has always been a possible route for Clinton to seize on the leak investigation as another reason not to cooperate. But that is a move Clinton can save for later. For now, he is still playing Starr's game, which means an unprecedented rendezvous with the grand jury next week.



August 11, 1998:Matt Drudge printed "Children Are Watching" in the Drudge Report

....Back to the beginning.

Back to another cold day in Washington: Inauguration Eve 1993. And another Harry Thomason production.

Some 18,000 guests had gathered at Washington's Capital Centre for the 52nd Inaugural Gala: "An American Reunion." It was aired on CBS-TV. It was Michael Jackson and Fleetwood Mac wishing the new president well. It was Barbra Streisand.

Dressed in a white Donna Karan that was cut down to here and slashed up to there, with a face that celebrated the end of Reagan and Bush slavery, Streisand was in top form that night.

She belted out a jazzy version of "God Bless America" -- caressing the word "sweet.', She sang "Evergreen,, and dedicated it to Bill and Hillary Clinton --sitting just a few rows up.

CBS cameras, with Harry Thomason,s direction, captured Hillary looking out at the seats, out at the future with love and wonder. Everything was right on that magical D.C. night...

But it was Streisand's third musical selection that would end up turning into a presidential prophecy.

Just hours before Bill Clinton was sworn in, there was Barbra Streisand on stage, before a national audience, singing and lecturing Bill Clinton to be careful: Children are listening.

It is not clear if Harry Thomason personally approved Streisand's odd play list that evening -- a set that featured Stephen Sondheim's haunting song "children Will Listen" from the play "Into the Woods."

Streisand, sitting on a stool looking directly at Bill Clinton, sipped her tea, opened her heart and sang:

"Careful the things you say, children will listen.

"Careful the things you do, children will see and learn... Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn what to be.

"Careful before you say 'Listen to me.'"

The camera caught Bill Clinton misting up during Streisand's serenade.

Hillary nodded with approval as Streisand warned about the perils of lying.

She sang:

"Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last, past what you can see, and then turn against you.

"Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell. Children will listen!"

Streisand hit the high notes flawlessly, the crowd applauded.

"Careful what you say, Children will listen. Careful you do it too, children will see and learn...

"Tamper with what is true and children will turn, if just to be free.

"Careful before you say "Listen to me.' Children will listen, children will listen. Children, children will listen."

The crowd applauded and cheered, Streisand blew a kiss...

The irony of that far away moment is enough to break your heart beyond repair.

Because of course no one in the arena that night could have any idea that Bill Clinton would later appear before a federal grand jury to face questions about what he did as he watched a White House intern do strange things with his cigars in the Oval Office.

The 1990's have turned into one sick nightmare.

Children, run for cover!



August 12, 1998:Dick Morris printed "Clinton Loses His Moral Authority" in the New York Post

THE tobacco bill is dead. Clinton's education reform proposals are destroyed. The president's call to expand Medicare and child care is forgotten. Abroad, India tests its nuclear weapons with impunity and Netanyahu feels no pressure to talk peace, in Kosovo, Serbian armies advance unrestrained and once again the West is helpless. These political development reflect the reality that President Clinton's moral authority - finally vested in him by a shaken country in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City tragedy - has been revoked, sharply and suddenly, by the American people.

Lost is all of the credibility that Clinton gained as he called for national unity, healing, gentleness, and a lowering of voices amid the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building and the twisted wreckage of Olympic Park in Atlanta.

Clinton will likely serve out his term as president. But his tenure as America's moral leader is over - ended by the graphic evidence Monica Lewinsky's testimony seems to offer of his human frailty and failings.

While Americans are likely to forgive his alleged adultery and even his possible perjury, we will never again look up to him in the same way we had begun to do. He may regain his personal popularity. Perhaps his political power will return. But his moral authority is gone forever.

The personal tragedy is that President Clinton so coveted that forfeited moral authority. He insistently framed his speeches, legislative program, political agenda and public style to acquire it. Despite scandal, special prosecutors and partisan attacks, he managed to grow in stature. But the extraordinary discipline which he applied to manipulating and maintaining his public image was apparently in sharp contrast to the chaos and indiscretion in his private life. That disjuncture has stripped him of the core of his power as president.

First elected with only 43 percent of the vote, Clinton groped for a presidential style that would set a higher tone. He began to reach for the heights at a Memphis Baptist church when he told a black congregation that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not live and did not die so that African-American children could kill one another.

But it was not until the Oklahoma City bombing that the president became a moral leader. Addressing a traumatized nation, his calm, forceful resolve to keep America safe but with our civil liberties in tact set the tone for a balanced, moderate response to a trauma that might have been the American equivalent of the Reichstag fire - a provocation for suspension of basic freedoms.

Abroad, President Clinton worked to transform his biggest defect - his desire to please both sides - into an asset through his empathy for the different viewpoints of opposing camps. His growing moral authority helped catalyze the peace process in the Middle East, Ireland, Bosnia, Haiti and even Korea.

Before our eyes, Clinton has seemed to grow, sometimes awkwardly, into presidential standing and national leadership. In Arkansas, as the boy-governor, he was everybody's son - young, filled with promise, packed with potential. As a candidate in 1992, he was everyman -enjoying Big Macs, jogging in ill-fittting shorts, riding the bus, and playing the saxophone. Then, in office, he had gradually appeared to rise higher.

Now his moral traction is gone....

.... America is ready for idealism. We are anxious to hear a public figure summon us to a new standard of morality and caring. We want to share our prosperity with the poor of the world and to take the lead in protecting our planet from pollution. Americans want to seize this moment when our economic problems seem in check for a new idealism. We want to hear of the inner city, global warming, climate change, school standards, and welfare-to-work programs. We want a new moral leader.

An assassin stole John F. Kennedy from us. Vietnam robbed us of Lyndon Johnson. Now Clinton's potential is being taken from us in the tawdry reminder that our leaders are first of all human beings, subject to the same failings that plague us all. After surviving a thousand shots and spears from prosecutors and partisans, Clinton's most serious wound - the loss of his moral authority - has been self-inflicted.

August 13, 1998:George Will printed "Will Clinton's punishment fit the crime?" in Sacabee.com

WASHINGTON--Neither good taste nor public-spiritedness mars the nearly perfect seaminess to which President Clinton's self-indulgence and self-absorption have reduced the national conversation. However, this is almost sublime: His grand jury testimony is scheduled for Aug. 17, fifty years to the day after a riveting moment in another perjury drama.

In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist, accused Alger Hiss of espionage while both were serving the Soviet Union. On Aug. 17 Hiss was invited by Congressman Richard Nixon to Room 1400 in New York's Commodore Hotel, where Chambers awaited. After a pantomime of uncertainty, Hiss said he had known Chambers slightly, under another name. Thus Hiss continued to weave the tangled web that destroyed him.

The Hiss case involved large themes--dangerous international conflict, clashing understandings of man and justice. Clinton's crisis partakes of his defining attribute: smallness. Which might save him.

When Kenneth Starr's report puts Monica Lewinsky in the context of the seamless corruption of Clinton's career--a chronological report 500 pages long might not deal with her until Page 400--the very multiplicity of episodes may make all seem as small as the Clintons. So the country may say: Let him limp across the finish line. The great constitutional remedy--impeachment--should be reserved for weightier objects.

Has Clinton committed perjury? Only his word--that is, nothing serious--suggests otherwise. Would a perjurer suborn perjury? Please. Can obstruction of justice be proved? Perhaps not. Clinton may not have told Lewinsky to lie--just as Henry II perhaps did not "tell" servile underlings to murder Beckett. Henry just wondered aloud, in the presence of people eager to ingratiate themselves, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Watergate occasioned important reappraisals (often misguided) of campaign regulations, presidential powers and the supervision of national security institutions. But no large lessons will flow from the Clintons' misadventures, only a truism: It is tremendous folly to put trashy people in positions of trust and conspicuousness.

The artful dodger looks increasingly cornered, but Aug. 17 could have much drama drained from it by a pre-emptive presidential address of contrition. But be warned: Political apologies often turn out to be self-testimonials by the apologizer, who confesses that he erred because he loved the people too much or expediency too little. Clinton's might be a hackneyed reprise, replete with serial lip-bites, of his synthetic sincerity that is by now banal: "Compassion made me less than completely candid because I could not bear to hurt ..."

That would be (in Mark Twain's words) not merely food for laughter but an entire banquet. (Clinton's supposed brilliance as a rhetorician is refuted by an axiom: A sculptor wants to be seen to be a sculptor, and a painter seen to be a painter, but an orator does not want to be seen as an orator.) However, what is Clinton's choice?

If he commits perjury before the grand jury, a catalyzing few Democrats of distinction probably will grease the skids beneath him. Starr's indifference to polls is a facet of the probity that makes him unintelligible to Clinton, and surely there are Democrats of probity who are unwilling to ratify by passivity any more of his defining political deviancy down.

Still, if that blue cocktail dress yields no physical evidence, Clinton might roll the dice and stick with his story. Doing so, he would risk everything on the gamble--he should assume that Starr has heard from witnesses Clinton knows nothing of--that Starr has not accumulated convincing corroborative evidence of Lewinsky's story.

Clinton's presidency, an inconsequential skiff even before waves of scandal began pouring over the gunnels, has now been whittled nearly to nothingness by the public's intuitive wielding of"Ockham's razor," also called the principle of parsimony. The principle is: When seeking to explain phenomena, start with the simplest theory.

The public understands that Clinton's behavior for six months-- silence, when not minting implausible privilege claims and directing calumny against Start--has been rational if, but only iff he is guilty. Polls--snapshots of a flowing river--will change radically if he commits perjury before the grand jury.

There is no look as baleful as that which contorts the faces of some Clinton despisers when they think he might "get away with it." Have they not noticed? Condign punishment is under way--public mortification, domestic torture (life on the White House's second floor must now be gothic) and political emasculation. Yet to come, the ridicule of history.

The object so sublime, to make the punishment fit the crime, is already being achieved.



August 14, 1998:Ben Jones printed "Mr. President, Do the Right Thing And Step Down" in Roll Call

Dear Mr. President,

You know me and I know you, so let's cut to the chase. I am not one of those sanctimonious virtuecrats out hustling a book or a television ministry. I'm just a citizen who cares deeply about our country.

Many of us in the Democratic party feel that the advice you have been getting at the White House has managed to put you between a rock and a hard place.

Since I am a progressive Southern Democrat like you, I thought you might be interested in my two-cents worth. It certainly won't serve you any worse than what you've been getting from that expensive know-it-all K Street crowd. They seem to fit Mark Twain's definition ora Mugwump: one who is educated beyond his or her intelligence.

I also know quite a bit about personal moral excesses. There was a long period in my life when I burned the candle at both ends and in the middle. My philosophy was, "When on thin ice, dance!"

Well, it all caught up with me. And it will catch up with you, too. There is finally no avoiding it, no matter how "slick" you are. What goes around comes around.

Your relationship with Monica Lewinsky was a private matter until it came into a courtroom. Then it became our business. And I believe you have failed US.

It appears to me that your choices are very simple: First of all, if you are innocent of these accusations, there is simply not a thing to worry about. As soon as you are cleared, people like me, who believe that you have committed adultery, perjury and obstruction of justice, will owe you a serious, honest and very public apology. I will be the first in line. Your exoneration will be cause for celebration. That won't explain why you have stonewalled this revelation of innocence for six months, but I'm sure there must be some good reason.

If, on the other hand, our suspicions are correct and you are guilty of this illegal behavior, then you must take a bold, decisive and honorable action. You must resign.

A lip-biting mea culpa, the current conventional wisdom of the Beltway elders, may have sufficed in January, but not now. A public apology on the heels of your excellent State of the Union address may have stopped the bleeding and healed the wound. The euphemisms of yuppie psychobabble would have probably excused the indiscretions. But not now.

For if you are lying, you have been lying every day for six months, and the institution of the presidency has been diminished in vain.

And you have chumped your defenders, who have used the energies, resources and political capital of the party in an embarrassing defense of the indefensible. Perjury is perjury is perjury. And perjury by any elected official, in any circumstance, is cause for swirl and sure removal from office. It is the worst violation of the public trust.

Unable to argue the facts, your defenders have indulged in moral relativism, denying the obvious danger of winking at any perjury. That is to basically misunderstand the rule of law. There is no number two here. You have encouraged this attack on the rule of law, in fact orchestrated an attack on the law enforcers themselves. This has not been in defense of principle, or for national security, but to cover your own rear end from the consequences of your illicit behavior.

It is time for you to face up to the consequences of those actions. Your behavior and the strategy of obfuscation you have engaged in for the last six months have done a lasting disservice to this country. The damage to our nation's moral compass has been inflicted by you and your cynical defenders. The erosion of respect for the office you hold is a direct result of your hubris.

The only way that you can now achieve any respectable legacy is to realize and accept that you have clipped your own wings, and that you can no longer effectively carry out the duties and responsibilities for which you were elected. Your ability to function unfettered has long since dissipated to the point of diminishing returns. Until this matter came to light, you have had an accomplished tenure. In most ways, you will be leaving the country in better shape than you found it, and you will be leaving it in very capable hands.

To continue to "compartmentalize," a fancy word for denial, is to continue to subject our country to more hearings, leaks, rumors, smears, court decisions and ultimately the likelihood of impeachment proceedings. You are a talented man, Mr. Clinton, but as they say, we "didn't elect you that much."

Well, that's my advice. Do the honorable thing. Step down. The nation will be grateful. And you will be well regarded in the future.

Mr. President, I have bad news for you. The last dog has died.

Yours truly, Ben Jones

Former Rep. Ben Jones (D-Ga) served in the House of Representatives from 1989 to 1993.



August 14, 1998:Lars Erik Nelson printed "If He Lied, He's Unfit" in the New York Daily Times

"Today will tell you once and for all whether the man in the White House is President Clinton or, in Monica Lewinsky's words, the Big Creep.

If he can deny he had sex with Lewinsky, his wounded, diminished presidency will continue ; and a world of leering gossips and babblers will owe him an apology.

But if he now admits he had sex with her, as some of his aides have begun to hint, he is unfit to lead the nation and ought to have the decency to resign. If he lied to us about Lewinsky ; staring so earnestly into the camera as he denied any improper relationship ; who can ever believe him again? If he allowed so many of his most-trusted officials to defend him falsely for seven months, who can ever believe any of them again?

And if he had sex ; no matter how you define it ; with an intern, a low-level subordinate, he has betrayed not only his wife, but his daughter, the American people who look to him for leadership, the integrity of the government he professes to love, all of the loyal staff who followed him into government to carry out a progressive agenda, every parent who proudly and nervously watches a daughter go off to work and every aspiring intern who thinks the route to success is hard work.

The central issue is not, as independent counsel Kenneth Starr pretends, whether Clinton committed perjury in his deposition for the Paula Jones lawsuit. Nor is it even possible obstruction of justice. The Jones suit was thrown out; there was no justice to obstruct.

The risk is not impeachment. Even if Starr could prove his worst suspicions about Clinton, the House has little stomach for impeaching a popular President and Republicans would have to win overwhelming control of the Senate � and then get a party-line vote � to convict him on any of the charges that have surfaced so far.

The real threat to the President is in what did or did not happen with Lewinsky. If polls are correct, a bizarre morality now reigns in America. The public is willing to forgive the sex, but not the perjury. To me, the supposed perjury is trivial; the sex, if true, unforgivable, and the lie to the American public, if it has been a lie, reason enough to howl him from office.

Don't think an apology and confession will make all this go away. Clinton would be a dirty joke forever. An apology and confession would make heroines of Starr, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg. It would vindicate all those haters who have dubbed him Slick Willie, the Arkansas state troopers who told their dirty stories, the right-wing preachers peddling their salacious videos, the gleeful TV commentators who have wallowed in this filthy speculation for seven months. In the next confrontation between Clinton and his most rabid political foes, the foes, not Clinton, would have greater credibility. If he had sex with Lewinsky, all of them will have been proven right, and all those who trusted the President would be proven wrong.

Yes, Clinton could continue as President despite public disgrace. He could even be a useful President, vetoing House Speaker Newt Gingrich's nuttier bills and making trips to those foreign nations that think illicit sex is only to be expected from powerful leaders.

We'd be better off with the cardboard cutout of Clinton that stands outside the White House. For $5, you can have your picture taken with it. No, it doesn't do much, but at least it keeps its hands off your daughter."

August 18, 1998:Wes Pruden printed "Waiting for a verdict on who we really are" in the Washington Times

Now we'll find out what kind of country we are, whether we still live in the America that most of us grew up in.

The president, looking surly and resentful, gave us the spin Monday night, that he never told a lie when he lied to us over the past seven months about Monica Lewinsky, and that we owe him a responsibility to forget, forgive and maybe give him a hug.

TV's talking heads -- there's an IQ of at least the sum of its age behind every one of those pretty faces -- started the day with assurances that the president's testimony, and his explanation (with no apology) last night writes finis to the scandal.

The president's preacher struggled earlier to find Biblical justification for presidential lies and lowlife. "King David did something that was much worse than anything that President Clinton is alleged to have done," said the Rev. Dr. Phillip Wogaman of Washington's Foundry Methodist Church, noting that the king arranged the death of the husband of Bathsheba, his backstairs squeeze. "And King David, ifI read my Bible correctly, was not impeached." (And ifI read my Constitution correctly, Bill Clinton is a president, not a king with the power to lop offthe heads of his critics, and ifI read my history correctly, kings have never been subject to impeachment, which is a formula for removing elected officials from office.)  The Rev. Jesse Jackson, passing by the White House when he saw all the cameras and racing in to get a little of the action, imagined a parable about the president, Samson and Delilah. Samson, the Rev recalled, was tempted by Delilah, and God gave him another chance. Quoth the Rev: "Yet, the special prosecutor, I suppose, would have locked him up." So hectic was the day that the Rev didn't have time to rhyme, but he did take time to shamelessly invoke the president's daughter's forgiveness as a reason why we, too, should give her daddy a pass. There was no word yesterday from Billy Graham, who was at least conspicuously absent, and the cardinals of the Roman church, the distinguished rabbis, imams, and other representatives of the kingdom of God kept a discreet silence, too. In a previous generation, the pulpits would have trembled with the thunder of outrage and rung with denunciations of sin and betrayal, but we should not expect that in an era when churchmen argue over how best to celebrate sexual perversions as legitimate sacraments of the marriage bed. The politicians were mostly silent, too, and it was perhaps a measure of the depth of the Clinton dilemma that the only Democrats the TV networks could find to defend the president last night were mostly Rep. Barney Frank, who struggled to say something positive and concluded that only the 22nd Amendment could save the president from defeat at the polls. There was not a lot from the Republican side, either. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah preached love and forgiveness until the president, having faked as much contrition as he could bear, concluded his speech with an attack on Kenneth Starr. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania was not impressed, and neither was Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida. Both sit on crucial judiciary committees. Most Republicans, like all the Democrats, are determined to wait until the pollsters and focus groups tell them which ethical standards and constitutional principles are safe to hold. They're eager to define deviancy down, in Pat Moynihan's memorable phrase; they just want to be told how far down. The exception to the general gutlessness pervasive in the nation's capital was John Ashcrofi, the Ozarks preacher's son and senator from Missouri. "The president should tell the truth," he said as the president sat down with his lawyers to parse his lies. "Americans want our president to represent the values we teach our children -- honesty, responsibility, accountability. Seven months ago, I asked President Clinton to take responsibility for his actions, to be accountable to the American people .... Instead, all the  president's defenders have denied the president is accountable as a role model, denied the president is responsible for his actions, and denied the president must be honest under his sworn oath. "While President Clinton swore an oath to tell the truth, the Congress swore an oath to defend the Constitution. Congress should follow the principles in the Constitution, not the politics of the moment .... If President Clinton committed the high crime of perjury, Congress should uphold its duty without delay." Not so long ago this was the American creed, honored by rich and poor, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, male and female, even lawyers. Maybe it still is. Or maybe Bill Clinton is a reflection of who we've become. The jury has gone out -- not on the president, who has convicted himself, but on the rest of us, who can neither run nor hide. September 1998

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@Jenni Vinson June 18, 1999