High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (40 page)
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Authors: Ann Coulter
BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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Moreover, once a White House scandal is exposed, the Clinton administration has never quickly and thoroughly investigated the wrongdoing, produced the purported miscreant, and taken adequate remedial measures. The Clinton administration moves with lightning speed only when producing things like the affectionate letters to the president from the groped Kathleen Willey.
Instead, when caught red-handed, the White House has consistently reacted by lying, withholding documents, and denouncing the whistleblowers. For the obstruction of justice charges surrounding the Lewinsky matter, the White House has truly gone to the mattresses. One wonders if the Clintons may have actually been innocent in some of the scandals, but just assumed the worst of themselves and acted guilty.
Consider the files scandal. If those files were
not
being gathered with the consent of the president, he hasn’t done much to erase that impression. Two employees of the Clinton White House were engaging in egregious violations of the privacy rights of American citizens by husbanding and reviewing extremely sensitive FBI background files. It cannot be disputed that these two—Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca—were “unfit and unworthy” of the job. Placing these goons in those positions shows a fundamental lack of seriousness about the background process, which is supposed to be a key component in determining qualifications of employees.
not
being gathered with the consent of the president, he hasn’t done much to erase that impression. Two employees of the Clinton White House were engaging in egregious violations of the privacy rights of American citizens by husbanding and reviewing extremely sensitive FBI background files. It cannot be disputed that these two—Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca—were “unfit and unworthy” of the job. Placing these goons in those positions shows a fundamental lack of seriousness about the background process, which is supposed to be a key component in determining qualifications of employees.
Yet no one has taken responsibility for even giving these two their jobs—apart from the question-begging admission that Livingstone hired Marceca. The White House acts as if no one higher than the former bar bouncer can be held accountable. This cannot help but suggest that Livingstone’s benefactor was the president (or the first lady). At the very least, whoever did hire Livingstone is being “protected by the high station and interest of” the president.
Moreover, consider what the White House did not do. There was no horrified reaction to the news that nine hundred FBI files had been improperly obtained. The Clinton administration never really ginned up any interest in figuring out how this outrageous abuse could have occurred. This brings the irresponsibility directly back to the president. (Recall that when President Bush discovered that someone had been looking through Clinton’s passport file, the guilty party was immediately fired without further ado.)
The Clinton administration’s handling of the FBI files scandal is surely a paradigm of when a president could be impeached for a single instance of misconduct by his subordinates. Madison remarked during the First Session of the First Congress that since the president would have absolute authority to fire any employee of the executive branch, his subordinates’ misconduct would “subject him to impeachment himself, if he suffers them to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses.”
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President Clinton’s culpability for the unfit and unworthy Livingstone and Marceca results from the unavoidable facts that (1) the president did not put in place adequate systems to detect or correct their wrongdoing, and (2) he is still, now—as you read this—protecting the person who was responsible for hiring and supervising Livingstone and Marceca.
If nothing else, the threat of impeachment ought to be able, at least, to prod the president into telling the public who was responsible for hiring Livingstone and for supervising his activities. The threat of impeachment ought to be able to force the president—the executive in charge of the executive branch—to produce the culprits responsible for all corrupt practices and abuses of power. Whose idea was it to fire the Travel Office employees and then use the FBI to charge Billy Dale, the head of that office, with criminal wrongdoing? How did Dale come to be audited by the IRS after his notorious termination? How about Paula Jones? How did so many well-known Clinton critics come to be audited by the IRS?
Someone at the White House was responsible for these acts. But President Clinton just announces that all he knows about it is what he reads in the paper and he has to get back to the important business of naming his dog.
Washington Post
reporter Sue Schmidt ought to be president. She has more authority to decide when the country goes to war, since, as Clinton constantly acknowledges, she knows more about what goes on in the White House under his watch than he does.
The Music Never StopsWashington Post
reporter Sue Schmidt ought to be president. She has more authority to decide when the country goes to war, since, as Clinton constantly acknowledges, she knows more about what goes on in the White House under his watch than he does.
If one eliminates a handful of
players from the Watergate scandal, it is easy to imagine President Nixon serving out his second term uneventfully. In fact, remove just G. Gordon Liddy from the picture, and there might well have been no Watergate break-in, and consequently no cover-up and no presidential lie. How many characters would have to be removed from Clinton’s administration to create an ethical administration? Not “the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic,” just moderately ethical. You’d be left with Donna Shalala running the government. The president has filled his administration with crooks and rogues—and if they weren’t that way before, they have become so under his tutelage.
players from the Watergate scandal, it is easy to imagine President Nixon serving out his second term uneventfully. In fact, remove just G. Gordon Liddy from the picture, and there might well have been no Watergate break-in, and consequently no cover-up and no presidential lie. How many characters would have to be removed from Clinton’s administration to create an ethical administration? Not “the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic,” just moderately ethical. You’d be left with Donna Shalala running the government. The president has filled his administration with crooks and rogues—and if they weren’t that way before, they have become so under his tutelage.
This much corruption can’t be a staffing problem. It has been true since long before Clinton came to Washington. (Try to imagine, for example, Bernie Nussbaum finding himself in a partnership with the likes of James McDougal.)
Clinton might have been able to duck responsibility for his Health Care Task Force’s “reprehensible lies” to a court; his associate attorney general’s thievery from the Rose Law Firm; his Housing and Urban Development secretary’s lies to the FBI about payoffs to a mistress; and his secretary of Agriculture’s acceptance of gifts from those he was supposed to be regulating. A lie about a mistress or individual bribe-taking or thievery has no apparent value to the president. But it didn’t end with that.
There was White House Associate Counsel William Kennedy, who ordered the FBI to investigate Billy Dale in “fifteen minutes” or he would call in the IRS (which he did anyway). There were Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca rifling though private FBI files—including Dale’s file, requested by some unknown Clinton employee about the time Kennedy was demanding an investigation. There was Clinton friend, supporter, and IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson, who according to White House memos was “on top of” the Dale matter. (As luck would have it, Dale was later audited by the IRS). There were the various top Clinton administration officials calling around to scare up massive “consulting fees” for Webb Hubbell, including Clinton’s then and future White House Chiefs of Staff Mack McLarty and Erskine Bowles; Clinton’s trade representative, Mickey Kantor; and informal Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan. And, of course, there was Webb Hubbell himself.
It didn’t end when Kennedy got the boot. It didn’t end once the administration finally made sacrificial lambs out of Livingstone and Marceca. It didn’t end when Nussbaum headed back to New York. It never ends. And it won’t end until Clinton is gone. There is no more room for giving the president the benefit of the doubt. Even if it were possible to believe Clinton were an innocent dupe of this endless stream of nefarious staffers, his incompetence in hiring them is enough to impeach him. This isn’t a simple matter of saying the fish rots from the head. It is saying the whole administration, the whole country, is gagging on Clinton’s rotting fish. That was true even before January 21, 1998.
IMPEACHMENT OF A PRESIDENT FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICEPresident Clinton has almost
certainly perjured himself about Monica Lewinsky, as well as her many “Jane Doe” competitors. He has just as surely obstructed justice in an attempt to cover his own perjury as well as his own underlying misconduct.
certainly perjured himself about Monica Lewinsky, as well as her many “Jane Doe” competitors. He has just as surely obstructed justice in an attempt to cover his own perjury as well as his own underlying misconduct.
Nixon’s obstruction of justice consisted of: invoking executive privilege to avoid turning over the tapes of his Oval Office conversations to the Congress; allowing his aides to ask the CIA to stall an FBI investigation into one aspect of the Watergate investigation, though the delay lasted only two weeks; and telling a single lie to the American people. Nixon didn’t believe it was a lie, and under the nation’s newly minted Clinton standards, it wasn’t.
Just that much interference with an investigation—invoking executive privilege just one time, delaying an FBI investigation for a couple of weeks, and not owning up to the Watergate burglars’ day job as “Plumbers”—was Nixon’s version of “shredding the Constitution.” Apparently, investigations into possible misconduct within the executive branch are treated very seriously. Minor interference with legal processes concerning even low-level crimes, like spying on the DNC by individuals with only tenuous connections to the president, were deemed grave threats to the constitutional order.
Admittedly much of this was overblown, irrational anti-Nixon hysteria. The “shredding the Constitution” rhetoric was really imbecilic. But that’s the precedent: minor stonewalling of an investigation by the president was deemed a threat to constitutional government, even if it was not as colossal a threat as the
Washington Post
let on.
Washington Post
let on.
There actually are some real reasons the president shouldn’t be breaking the law. The president has vast powers as chief executive, including control over the use of force. It is his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. And indeed, the Constitution spells out the president’s oath—and only his—in similar words. If the president himself engages in obstruction of justice, that undermines confidence in the legal system.
It is one thing for the president to have an understanding of the law that is different from that of the federal courts or of Congress. But people must have confidence that he is acting on some plausible view of the law and not simply twisting it to his own convenience—or worse, flouting or obstructing the law to his own advantage. If the president does this in one area, the public cannot have confidence that he is not doing it in all sorts of other areas—to benefit loyal supporters, core constituencies, campaign contributors, China, and so on.
There is no need to hyperventilate about anyone “shredding the Constitution”; it is enough to say that it is very bad for the president to break the law, even those unimportant felonies members of the Clinton administration admit to breaking.
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Clinton’s Perjury108
President Nixon never gave
a single statement under oath throughout the Watergate investigation. So however he obstructed justice, it could not have been by perjuring himself. He was said to have “subverted constitutional government,” because his
aides
gave false statements under oath about their own “personal conduct.” It wasn’t even personal to Nixon. No one thinks Nixon had the bright idea of wiretapping the DNC. That “dumb” foray, as Nixon called it,
109
was committed by people who were neither president nor even drawing government salaries.
a single statement under oath throughout the Watergate investigation. So however he obstructed justice, it could not have been by perjuring himself. He was said to have “subverted constitutional government,” because his
aides
gave false statements under oath about their own “personal conduct.” It wasn’t even personal to Nixon. No one thinks Nixon had the bright idea of wiretapping the DNC. That “dumb” foray, as Nixon called it,
109
was committed by people who were neither president nor even drawing government salaries.
Twenty-five years later, there is more reason to believe in visitors from another planet than to believe the president has not perjured himself. Even if Clinton ever does, as his former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, has urged, “[a]t some point… tell the American people the truth of what was behind this relationship,” he has already given his statements under oath. And not just about Monica Lewinsky. He has also given sworn statements, with a federal judge presiding, about Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers (“once”), Kathleen Willey—even statements about loyal Betty Currie’s role in all this.
As journalist Stuart Taylor has pointed out, believing Clinton strains mathematical probabilities. Noting that at least ten major players (so far) have given statements under oath directly contradicting Clinton’s own statements under oath, Taylor calculated, “If we posit at 50-50 the probability that any one of the top ten witnesses against Clinton is lying, then the mathematical probability that all ten are lying—and thus that Clinton has told the whole truth in his own sworn testimony—comes to one chance in 1,024.”
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Whether or not it is unconstitutional to indict a sitting president (it isn’t), alleged Clinton mouthpiece Monica Lewinsky certainly can be indicted. If Lewinsky were to plead guilty to, or be convicted of, perjury or an obstruction crime, even the yellowbellied Republican Congress would come close to having their criminal standard of proof that the president committed a felony. Lewinsky and Clinton’s alleged perjuries are the same—that they did not have “a certain kind of sex,” as Paula Jones termed it. If Lewinsky perjured herself, so did Clinton. And if Lewinsky committed an obstruction crime to prevent the court or grand jury from discovering evidence of her relationship with Clinton, there is one person with whom she would have had to conspire: the other party to that relationship. Unless she was sure Clinton was going to perjure himself, too, she would have been walking right into open and obvious obstruction offenses. And she would have been begging for a perjury conviction with her affidavit denying the affair.
Lying is an impeachable offense. Perjury, suborning perjury, concealing evidence, and obstruction of justice are not only impeachable offenses, they are also crimes. These are real crimes, far surpassing the quantum of misconduct necessary for an impeachment. About this there is absolutely no question. Even Clinton aide Paul Begala would not have the cheek to claim otherwise. That the president has committed them may be properly deemed an attempt “to subvert the Constitution.”
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