by Ann Coulter
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) followed up Dale’s disturbing account by accusing politicians of “playing politics instead of shaping policy”—but she was attacking the Republicans. She went on to praise herself—“at the risk of sounding constructive”—by proposing that the committee address an imaginary problem: how to “depoliticize” the Travel Office.
The difficulty with this was the office had never been “politicized.” Dale had begun working at the White House in the Kennedy administration—playing Santa Claus on the telephone for little Caroline—and moved into White House travel operations during the Johnson administration. He had served seven presidents—three Democrats and four Republicans. The office had not become “politicized” until the Clinton White House purged the entire office because it needed “the slots,” accused Dale of embezzling funds, ginned up an FBI investigation and prosecution against him, arranged for a compliant IRS to audit this public servant, and then turned to reliable flacks like Representative Maloney to defend the White House from legitimate inquiry.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S FAULT
In some respects, what was done to the White House Travel Office employees is the worst of the Clinton scandals. There is no more pernicious abuse of power than using the police powers of the federal government for personal or political gain. The most damning charges against Nixon had been that he had attempted to use the office of the president to influence the FBI and the IRS. He got an FBI investigation delayed for two weeks, and he was completely ignored by the IRS.
The very first indictment of Nixon in the second article of impeachment charged that he had attempted “to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns” and had attempted “to cause” IRS audits or other income tax investigations. And, incidentally, this was for “endeavor[ing]” to politicize the IRS “personally and through his subordinates.” Poor Tricky Dick could never actually get the IRS to audit one of his enemies. He couldn’t even get them to back off from auditing him while he was president.
Still: he asked. Technically, Nixon stormed around his office bellowing about it, and a low-level functionary took him at his word and asked, but even that was once an alarming fact in this country. In the wake of Watergate, rules were quickly adopted prohibiting the White House from having any contact with the IRS, precisely to avoid the merest potentiality of political abuse of this powerful government agency.38
Nixon was also charged with “impairing the due and proper administration of justice” for attempting to have the FBI “conduct or continue” investigations. The accusation was that he had tried to gin up FBI investigations and to use information obtained by the FBI “for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function.” In fact, Nixon wanted one man investigated, and he wanted FBI information on that one man: Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official who was leaking national security secrets to the New York Times. If that was “unrelated to national security,” what are the implications for an FBI investigation of a public servant whose job Clinton’s friends wanted?
In any event, like the IRS, J. Edgar Hoover also ignored him, which is why Nixon brought in the Plumbers to plug national security leaks, some of whom were later caught at the Watergate Hotel….
Indeed, the famous “smoking gun” tape was the direct result of the fact that the FBI would not accede to the Nixon administration’s demands—as is discussed on the tape. Consequently, Nixon listens to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman’s proposal that he and John Ehrlichman, the chief domestic policy adviser, ask the CIA to tell the FBI to keep stay away from the money trail leading from the Watergate burglars. Nixon accedes to the proposal but then, two weeks later, personally instructs the FBI director himself to “just continue your aggressive and thorough investigation.” A two-week delay of an investigation that would reveal the president hiring the equivalent of Terry Lenzner (Clinton’s private investigator), not to dig up dirt on his critics, but to plug national security leaks—that was once considered an impeachable offense in this country.
Twenty-five years later the Clinton administration uses the IRS and the FBI—and this time these agencies are responsive—to persecute an innocuous public servant whose job Clinton’s people wanted. Nixon acted from defensiveness; Clinton acts from cupidity. At least Nixon tried to bend these agencies to his will to stop leaks of national security information; at least he tried to manipulate the agencies to protect his people rather than to attack his enemies; at least he was rebuffed; and at least President Kennedy had his sexual trysts with grown women who were getting paid.
One realizes how low President Clinton has brought the country when you start thinking Bring back the Plumbers! Bring back the paid prostitutes!
On the other hand, there is no “smoking gun” tape of Clinton acceding to his aides’ proposals to obtain Billy Dale’s FBI file, or to have the FBI investigate Billy Dale, or to have the IRS Commissioner (and FOB) Peggy Richardson audit Billy Dale and UltrAir (as well as eight out of ten other Clinton critics, see Chapter 13). As Bob Woodward remarked, there are “a lot of suspicious circumstances,” but there is no Deep Throat.39
But the smoking gun tape was important only because the Nixon administration never got anyone audited and never got the FBI to investigate anyone. The indictment of the Nixon administration was Nixon and “his men” had contemplated doing things the Clinton administration has actually done. The smoking gun tape revealed that Nixon had permitted his subordinates to try to interfere with an FBI investigation and to try to instigate political IRS audits—in both cases unsuccessfully.
It is true that Clinton’s four misbehaving subordinates received letters of reprimand for their roles in the Travel Office firings—after those roles were revealed in the press. They were not docked pay or suspended from their duties; they merely got letters of reprimand in their files.40 Nixon’s misbehaving subordinates were fired, and he was still impeachable.
This we know from the Rodino Report, assembled with the able assistance of Hillary Rodham and Bernie Nussbaum: Nixon was impeachable for the acts of his subordinates in trying to do what we know Clinton’s subordinates actually did.
Chapter Twelve
Filegate: A “Bureaucratic Snafu”
In one of the five federal investigations into the Travel Office putsch, one small fact slipped through the White House stonewall: White House officials had pulled Billy Dale’s FBI file in an after-the-fact attempt to justify his firing. It is important to recall the scrolling series of excuses the Clinton administration issued for its inappropriate possession of Dale’s file, ordered from the FBI seven months after Dale’s abrupt termination.
First, the White House claimed Dale’s records had been retrieved from the White House archives, where Dale’s file had been left from an earlier effort to complete unfinished “background information folders.” Then, when it turned out the White House had not requested Dale’s file from the FBI until seven months after firing him, the White House said Dale’s folder had been pulled at the request of the General Accounting Office (GAO), which was conducting an investigation of the Travel Office firings. In short order, however, the GAO denied having requested Dale’s FBI file.
When those excuses turned out to be inoperative, the White House was forced to make a dramatic revelation: Dale’s file had been part of a slew of FBI files mistakenly requisitioned by the White House as part of an effort to update the background files of White House employees. The White House admitted that it had improperly pulled the files on as many as three hundred former White House employees, including prominent Republicans, but wrote the incident off as a “bureaucratic snafu.” As solid proof that there was no illegal, unconstitutional intent, the White House repeatedly pointed out that the names on the improperly pulled FBI files went up only to the letter G.
On the theory that enemies lists are not assembled in alphabetical
order, the White House supposedly proved that it had no nefarious purpose. As one syndicated columnist wrote of the White House’s possession of hundreds of extremely sensitive FBI files: “But a major scandal, no. [Anthony] Marceca [one of the government employees involved] says the search of the outdated lists halted at the letter ‘G.’ Real enemies lists don’t run out of steam.”1
Thrilled by the surprise news that the requisitioned files “stopped at G,” the White House went in high dudgeon at the thought that anyone could have imagined that the files snafu demonstrated anything other than the White House’s well-established incompetence. “This is proof positive that Billy Dale’s file was not singled out,” boasted White House Associate Special Counsel Mark Fabiani.
Ann Lewis, deputy manager for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, asserted that the fact that the file-gathering had stopped at the letter G conclusively established that there was no “sinister conspiracy” to create a White House enemies list, saying the files matter was “like Sesame Street”: “[A] conspiracy-minded president who really wanted to misuse power for his own political ends does not stop part way through the alphabet.”2 Even Republican lawyer Joseph diGenova conceded, “That makes me doubt a major plot.”3
George Stephanopoulos demanded an apology from Republicans for having suggested that the White House had obtained Billy Dale’s file as part of a vendetta: “These guys should be apologizing…. The charge they made earlier was wrong.”4 When asked to comment on the investigations being undertaken by the FBI, the independent counsel, and House investigative committees, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry dismissively sniffed, “Surprise, surprise. What else?”
And then it turned out that White House excuse #3 was not true. They had plenty of files on Republicans with names like “Brent Scowcroft” (President Bush’s national security adviser). Marceca even had the chance to review his own file, presumably filed under “M.” We know Marceca saw his file because of the astonishing fact that he later brought a lawsuit against two women, Lilly Stephenson and Joyce Montag, for their unflattering remarks about him recorded in his FBI file.
It also turned out that the White House held hundreds more files than it had initially owned up to. Week by week the number would grow—three hundred, four hundred, six hundred, seven hundred. The Clinton administration eventually admitted that it had pulled at least nine hundred raw files, most of which dealt with former White House employees from the Reagan and Bush administrations. And the files hadn’t stopped at the letter G. Was this now an enemies list?
The known perpetrators of this abuse of power were Democratic dirty-trickster Craig Livingstone, director of personnel security, and his enemies list assistant, Anthony Marceca, a small-time private eye and Democratic operative.
THE “SNAFU”
When the other excuses had run out, the White House reverted to its massive incompetence defense; Clinton called it “a completely honest bureaucratic snafu.” Livingstone’s office, White House officials said, had pulled files on Republicans because he had been given an outdated employee list by the Secret Service. That, supposedly, made the foul-up inevitable: How were Livingstone and Marceca to know that prominent Republicans were not employees of the Clinton administration?
The rosters had such names as President Reagan’s chief of staff Ken Duberstein, Reagan press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan and Bush cabinet member James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley. While no one has claimed Livingstone and Marceca are rocket scientists, they are political junkies, and in that capacity at least they ought to have noticed that the people whose raw files they were flipping through were probably not employees of the Clinton White House.
In any event, two Secret Service agents, John Libonati and Jeffrey Undercoffer, promptly contradicted the White House’s claim that it relied on outdated Secret Service lists when requesting the sensitive files from the FBI. Libonati and Undercoffer testified—perhaps self-servingly—that such an error on the part of their agency was impossible.
Self-serving or not, the agents soon came under criminal investigation by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Office for possible perjury in contradicting the official White House line. The criminal investigation was called off after one week, and eventually Inspector General Valerie Lau apologized before a Senate committee for this apparent attempt to interfere with the agents’ testimony. Lau implausibly claimed to the committee that she had been unaware of the criminal probe being conducted by her own office—a probe that at least six other employees in her office knew about.
Other aspects of the Republican file gathering did little to bolster the White House’s claimed innocence. The White House had, for example, called off the established practice of sending copies of all requests for background files or investigations to the FBI White House detail. “They basically told me to stay away from the file office,” Agent Dennis Sculimbrene said.5 This was not the sort of thing that tended to promote the appearance of innocent bungling.
In addition, a six-month gap in the log used to sign out the sensitive files from the White House Security Office was never explained. One page of the looseleaf log ends on March 29, 1994, and the next page picks up again with September 21, 1994.6 In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Livingstone had no explanation for the gap. The committee then sought out Mari Anderson, who had been Livingstone’s assistant at the time. Anderson evaded a Senate committee’s subpoena by, as the chairman said, “in effect, go[ing] into hiding.” Federal marshals were assigned to look for her. Anderson eventually told committee investigators that she had kept the file up to date, and that Livingstone sometimes removed files without making an entry in the log. Even Rose Mary Woods never went into hiding.
Indeed, if there was anything “innocent” about this snafu, the White House sure wasn’t acting like it. Why, for example, would an innocent White House hide its acquisition of the FBI file on Billy Dale from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee—yielding the file only after the committee threatened to hold the White House in contempt? Why would an innocent White House destroy FBI request forms and lists of files found in the White House vault? The White House discovered its files problem in the fall of 1994: Why weren’t the files shipped back to the FBI then? Why did the White House turn the files over to the Records Management Office, instead of returning them to the FBI?
On June 28, 1996, the Washington Post editorialized:[T]he question of why hundreds of unjustifiably collected FBI reports on Republicans ended up in the Clinton White House remains unanswered. But another mystery now looms even larger. How did Craig Livingstone end up on the White House payroll? No one professes to know….
At this stage, nobody at the White House will claim credit for Craig Livingstone. It gets you wondering… Are there no papers in the payroll part of the operation that indicate that Mr. Livingstone was actually hired or okayed by someone?
The FBI files affair raises serious questions. They deserve and require serious answers and real ones.7
Answers to these questions, however, never came.
Never in recent memory had any administration obtained background investigations of another president’s political staff. Yet the White House never investigated the files “snafu” and never provided Congress with answers to many enduring mysteries about the files.
With every other excuse having proved inoperative, Clinton senior adviser George Stephanopoulos gave the amazing defense that no one whose dossier White House employees had pawed over had actually been blackmailed. “There hasn’t been any evidence of political manipulation,” said Stephanopoulos. (That’s the thing about blackmail: the person being blackmailed usually doesn’t want to talk about it.)
THE FILES
The material in raw FBI background files is not the stuff of nominating speeches or awards banquets. Quite the opposite. These files contain the raw sewage of background investigations.8 White House appointees have to fill out questionnaire
SG-86, which former White House Counsel A.B. Culvahouse describes as designed to “affirmatively encourage the furnishing of adverse or derogatory information.” The FBI perfoᆙrms background checks on a whole host of potential government employees to screen out individuals who might be vulnerable to espionage, theft, blackmail threats, or simple political embarrassment.
The raw file is the comprehensive pool of evidence, including every unsubstantiated rumor that diligent field agents are able to rout. This can include helpful observations from bitter ex-beaus, people who are certifiably mad themselves, or who confused the candidate with someone else. Not infrequently, raw files contain demonstrably false information. Even the true information can be something less than bragging material. Divorce, family problems, visits to the psychiatrist, debts—it’s all in there. FBI analysts with expertise in sorting out reliable evidence from the unreliable, and who are dulled to reading about other people’s deepest secrets, will eventually go over what the field agents bring in. The final report on the candidate will discount the improbable, the atypical, the vindictive—and the irrelevant.