High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (39 page)

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Authors: Ann Coulter

BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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But they were eager to “fix the blame,” and the odds were, tying Nixon to the actions of his subordinates would be the only way to tie him to an impeachable offense. After all, even the most paranoid Nixon haters never seriously contemplated discovering evidence that Nixon had been involved in the Watergate break-in. As the abundant use of “expletive deleted” demonstrated, Nixon was not guarded in his Oval Office taped statements. He can be heard on the tapes saying that the main thing that embarrassed him about the break-in was that “it was so dumb—tying it to us is an insult to our intelligence.” But even before the tapes came out, it didn’t make any sense.
99
The evident hope was that some of the president’s “men”
had
been so dumb, and that Nixon would try to protect them. Consequently, the Rodino Report provides a bounty of historical support for the proposition that the president can be impeached for the misconduct of his subordinates.
100
Stop the Madness—A Rational Standard for the President’s Accountability
 
Still, it seems rather severe
to suggest, as the Rodino Report does, that a bad act by a single one of these subordinates, if not remedied on account of mere “negligence” or “inattention,” should merit impeachment of the president. With thousands of executive branch employees, the president cannot reasonably be held responsible for giving positions to a few persons who may later turn out to be “unfit and unworthy” of the job (as the Duke of Suffolk was in 1450).
On the other hand, the president should not be able to hire an endless stream of crooks and hoodlums to do his bidding, and then insist that all he knows about their misbehavior—after they get caught by some congressional or media watchdog—is what he reads in the papers. Surely the president is responsible for any bad acts that he has himself encouraged implicitly or explicitly.
As James Madison noted:
If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.
101
 
Nobody’s Fault But the President’s
 
There are several “grounds”
on which to believe a president will “shelter” his misbehaving subordinates. Clinton illustrates at least four of them. First, the misconduct in Bill Clinton’s administration almost always benefits Bill Clinton. Second, the president has never routed out or punished malfeasance in his administration on his own. Indeed, the president invariably acts like he is responsible—but not in the sense of being accountable, only in the sense of being guilty. Third, the president’s accomplices generally end up with promotions, attractive job offers, or lucrative Lippo consulting fees. Moreover, the president’s criminal accomplices are somehow left with the impression that President Clinton is dangling a presidential pardon before them.
Finally, though, the sheer number of mishaps the Clinton administration has stumbled into starts to make it look like it’s not an accident. This is not a subjective point. A president’s impeachability is not a function of the number of indignant Anthony Lewis columns prattling about an Imperial Presidency. But no one—maybe Anthony Lewis, not Clinton anyway—disputes the wrongdoing in the Clinton administration. The president, for example, does not dispute that Craig Livingstone’s collection of private FBI files on Republicans was wrong. Nor does the president dispute that William Kennedy’s demand for an FBI investigation of the Travel Office was an abuse of power. POTUS admits that he should not have met with “hustler” Johnny Chung and the DNC should not have been eagerly accepting illegal foreign contributions.
Whatever the scandal, Clinton’s defense is the same: POTUS is not responsible. It was a bureaucratic snafu, and he knows only what he reads in the papers.
102
But he is responsible—it’s
his
administration. And the fact that it is his administration is the one recurring factor in the never-ending series of bureaucratic snafus.
If any one of the slew of Clinton administration lies, abuses of power, corruption, and obstructions of justice were dropped into an otherwise totally clean and honest administration, the president might plausibly be given a pass. Once. It would at least be a nonfrivolous debate. Giving Clinton a pass on every scandal in his administration—from the government persecution of Billy Dale to the sale of technology to Red China—is frivolous. And this is to say nothing of the president’s own perjuries and obstructions of justice exposed since 1997.
You Win Again
 
Noticeably, much of the misconduct
in the Clinton administration keeps benefiting one person: Bill Clinton. And that is Bill Clinton, personally—or “the current occupant of that office,” as the Supreme Court referred to him in
Clinton
v.
Jones
.
Clinton’s first White House counsel, for example, resigned, if not in disgrace then at least under a cloud, for having obstructed the FBI’s attempted investigation of Vince Foster’s office. Why would the counsel, heretofore respected lawyer Bernard Nussbaum, have had any interest in obstructing an investigation of Foster’s office? Foster, it seems, had been doing personal legal work for the Clintons. It was their tax records and their Whitewater documents that Nussbaum would not allow the FBI to see. Neither before nor after Nussbaum’s tenure at the White House has he found himself accused of improper conduct. Clinton has.
Another victim of Clinton’s reverse Pygmalion effect was Mr. Clean, Bruce Babbitt, whom Clinton made secretary of the Interior. Was President Clinton, once again, the innocent victim of a corrupt subordinate? The secretary of the Interior apparently sold government policy for large donations to the DNC. It is difficult to believe Secretary Babbitt was freelancing in his abuse of power and, completely unbeknownst to the president, selling government policy for his own ends. Especially since
his
ends weren’t served. Babbitt wasn’t running for any office. A more credible scenario is that the sale of casino rights was part of Clinton’s acknowledged frenzy for campaign dollars. Padding DNC coffers advantaged Clinton, not Babbitt.
Whose enemies were being audited by the IRS? Against whom might an impoverished Webb Hubbell have testified? Whose campaign coffers swelled with the sale of the Lincoln Bedroom, plots at Arlington cemetery, and White House coffees? To whose campaign had Loral and Hughes contributed?
Earning Presidential Kneepads: Promotions and Pardons
 
A president is responsible for
the behavior of his subordinates if he allows them to believe he will protect them if they are caught engaging in improper conduct. The Earl of Oxford was held responsible for William Kidd’s piracies, on the theory that Kidd had been emboldened “through hopes of being protected by the high station and interest of” Oxford, since Oxford had appointed him. The point was not that Oxford had actually solicited Kidd’s piracies or had been videotaped offering Kidd a pardon if he were to go out and engage in piracies. Oxford had simply done nothing to dash Kidd’s hopes that he would be protected by Oxford’s good station.
This is similar to the accusation often leveled at President Nixon—that he had set a tone that encouraged others in his administration to engage in misconduct. And that was when misconduct consisted of White House staff keeping “enemies lists” that the president never ordered or saw, not White House staff using secret FBI files to compile dossiers on the president’s perceived enemies.
If the worst that could be said of Clinton was that he had managed to set a
tone
that permitted others in his administration to engage in misconduct, he could start popping champagne corks. Clinton is constantly getting caught hinting at pardons and granting promotions to potential witnesses against him.
Kathleen Willey was provided a series of positions with the government for which she was not obviously qualified as long as she stayed quiet about the president’s grope. Monica Lewinsky was given jobs both in and out of the government for her silence. Webb Hubbell made more money than he ever had earned or stolen in a comparable period in his life for keeping his mouth shut about the president. The United States attorney for the District of Columbia, who did not indict the vice president after Gore admitted on national television to committing all elements of a federal felony, was soon promoted. The government flunky at the Defense Department who illegally released information from Linda Tripp’s personnel file was given a promotion weeks later. (This despite Clinton’s promise during the 1992 campaign that “[i]f I catch anybody [going through State Department personnel files] I will fire them the next day. You won’t have to have an inquiry or rigmarole or anything else.”)
103
Six months after U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson’s role as faithful mule to the president was exposed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton chose Richardson to serve as secretary of Energy (a field of endeavor about which he probably knows even less than he did about diplomacy). To go from the cesspool of the U.N. to the Energy Department was considered a step up, if only because Richardson was then in a position to shake down some really big fat cats. In all of the press reports of Richardson’s promotion there was barely a mention of Richardson’s involvement in the Lewinsky affair. No one paused to consider:
Hmmm, six months ago Richardson was offering Monica a taxpayer-funded job in the Clinton administration, now he’s being promoted to a much more important cabinet job. I wonder if…. But no.
What kind of tone might this set?
Webb Hubbell’s attorney was taped on the prison phone telling Hubbell, “[T]here is some chance that the day after Election Day they will make a move that moots everything. And I don’t want to discourage it.” The attorney, John W. Nields, later insisted the “move” to which he had referred had “absolutely nothing to do with a pardon.” Instead, he sportingly averred he was raising the possibility of “immunity granted by the independent counsel, which I was hopeful we would get right after the election, and we did.”
104
This is a laughable claim since (1) whether Hubbell would be given immunity was entirely in his own hands, and (2) the grant of immunity Hubbell did get could hardly be described as “moot[ing] everything”—it sent Hubbell to prison for eighteen months.
James McDougal said it was the expectation of a presidential pardon that persuaded his wife, Susan McDougal, to refuse to answer the grand jury’s question, “Did Bill Clinton lie at your trial?” Mr. McDougal explained: “The turning point is that I feel that he led Susan to believe she would be pardoned.” Because she believed that, he pointed out, “She is now in jail. She is in jail because she wouldn’t answer a question before the grand jury, not for anything we were convicted of.”
105
Perhaps some will say James McDougal isn’t credible on this point. And Hubbell’s lawyer may have been dreaming. But the standard the framers gave was precisely whether crooks had reason to believe that the president would protect them, not whether the president actually intended to protect them. Madison said a president could be impeached if there were “grounds to believe he will shelter” any person. Somehow Clinton’s criminal associates have fallen under the impression that he will pardon them, and President Clinton has done nothing to dispel that impression.
During the first presidential debate in the 1996 campaign, Senator Bob Dole asked President Clinton to rule out granting pardons to his felonious friends in a second term. Clinton refused to do so, saying only that he would “adhere to the law.” The “law” is, of course, that, except in the case of an impeachment, the president has absolute authority to pardon anyone but himself.
106
Protecting the Guilty
 
It has to be said, though,
that the
Saturday Night Live
skit of the Clinton character introducing his secretary of state as “former Arkansas State Trooper Warren Christopher” was somewhat unfair to Clinton. Some scandals would become just too public and notorious to leave the president much room to give the miscreant a promotion. But there is little reason to suppose Craig Livingstone would not now be Clinton’s White House chief of staff if not for the publicity accorded his romp through the FBI files.
Whether or not the president’s disreputable subordinates can be confident of receiving a promotion under Clinton, they definitely can be confident that neither President Clinton nor any member of his administration will ever uncover the wrongdoing or mete out any punishment. Clinton emboldens the knaves in his administration by consistently allowing misconduct to go undetected, unaccounted for, and unpunished. Indeed, there is no evidence that the Clinton administration has taken appropriate steps to prevent or to discover malfeasance in its ranks. Rather, the bad acts of Clinton’s employees have almost invariably been brought to light by congressional investigators, the independent prosecutor, or the media.
This includes—and this is just a brief sampling—the president’s White House counsel obstructing the FBI’s attempted search of Vince Foster’s office; his top staffers arranging for the payment of more than half a million dollars in “consulting fees” to Webb Hubbell, a potential witness against the president; his employees illegally collecting and perusing nine hundred sensitive FBI files; his vice president making felonious fund-raising calls from the White House; his IRS director auditing the president’s two leading private citizen “enemies”; and the talking points intended to tamper with a witness in a case against the president personally, passed to the witness by a former employee of the president (a.k.a. “that woman”).

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