The Washington Post was angry.
Its reporters and editors believed they had been stonewalled by the 1992 Bill Clinton Presidential campaign.
And now that he had been elected President, they wanted access to a treasury of documents relating to potential irregularities in Whitewater and a gubernatorial campaign.
David Gergen, a conservative adviser to Republican Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, had been hired by Clinton in 1993 to provide a counterbalancing perspective to his liberal team members.
Gergen had served in the Nixon White House during Watergate. He knew firsthand the political dangers of stonewalling–or merely appearing to stonewall.
So he advised Clinton: Give the Post the documents. Yes, it will be temporarily embarrassing. But in a little while the bad stories will blow over and you can get on with the job.
If you don’t hand over the documents, you’ll look like you’re hiding something. The press will raise a stink. The Republicans will demand a Special Prosecutor. And there will be no end to it.
Clinton agreed with Gergen. But there was a catch: He didn’t feel he could make the decision alone. Hillary had been a partner in the Whitewater land transactions.
“You’ll have to speak to Hillary and get her agreement,” he told Gergen. “If she agrees, we’ll do it.”
Gergen promised to see her.
Two days later, Gergen called Hillary Clinton’s office and asked for an appointment.
“We’ll get back to you,” her secretary promised.
Hillary Clinton
Hillary never did. Finally, two weeks after the canceled December 10 meeting with the Clintons, Gergen got the news he had been dreading: Bruce Lindsay, Clinton’s trusted adviser, would deliver a one-paragraph letter to the Post, essentially saying; “Screw you.”
Events quickly unfolded exactly as Gergen had predicted:
- The Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie, called the White House: “Nothing personal, but we’re going to pursue this story relentlessly.”
- The New York Times and Newsweek–among other news outlets–joined the journalistic investigation.
- Coverage of Whitewater intensified.
- Republicans began demanding that Attorney General Janet Reno appoint an independent counsel.
- On January 20, 1994–exactly a year after Clinton took the oath as President–Edward Fiske, a former federal prosecutor, was named independent counsel.
- In August, Fiske was dismissed by a Federal judge who considered him too liberal and replaced with Kenneth Starr, a former solicitor general and federal appeals court judge.
- Starr unearthed Clinton’s salacious affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which culminated in an unsuccessful Republican impeachment attempt in 1998.
- Starr resigned in 1999, and was replaced by Robert W. Ray.
- The investigation continued until 2002, but no criminal charges were ever filed against either Clinton.
In his 2001 book, Eyewitness to Power, Gergen summarizes the meaning of this episode:
If the Clintons had turned over the Whitewater documents to the Washington Post in December 1993, their history–and that of the United States–would have been entirely different.
Disclosure would have brought embarrassing revelations–such as Hillary’s investment in commodity futures.
“But we know today that nothing in those documents constituted a case for criminal prosecution of either one of the Clintons in their Whitewater land dealings…
“Edward Fiske and Kenneth Starr would never have arrived on the scene, we might never have heard of Monica Lewinsky (who had nothing to do with the original Whitewater matter) and there would have been no impeachment.
“The country would have been spared that travail, and the President himself could have had a highly productive second term.”
Gergen blames President Clinton rather than Hillary for refusing to disclose the documents. Voters elected him–not her–to run the government. He–not she–ultimately bears the responsibility.
Still, his comments about Hillary are telling, considering:
- That she is likely to win election to the White House this November; and
- That she continues to reflexively stonewall instead of opt for transparency when facing questions.
As Gergen puts it: “She should have said yes [to disclosure] from the beginning, accepting short-term embarrassment in exchange for long-term protection of both herself and her husband.
“She listened too easily to the lawyers and to her own instincts as a litigator, instincts that told her never to give an inch to the other side. Whitewater was always more a political than a legal problem.”
The same might be said of her lingering credibility problem with the use of a private email server as Secretary of State.
Both of her predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, used private servers, and neither has been subjected to Republican inquisition.
She could have easily avoided the turmoil that has dogged her for years by simply admitting at the outset: “Yes, I used a private server–just like my two Republican predecessors did. Everyone knows government servers are compromised.”
Instead, she fell back on Nixonian stonewalling tactics–which proved fatal to Richard Nixon and almost fatal to her husband.
This is, in short, a woman who has learned nothing from the past–her own nor that of her husband.
It’s a safe bet that as President Hillary Clinton will continue to stonewall over matters whose disclosure is embarrassing only in the short-term–thus jeopardizing her tenure as Chief Executive.
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ILLEGAL ALIENS = UNRELIABLE ALLIES
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on February 26, 2015 at 3:07 pmSome Republicans–like Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah–want their new majorities in the House and Senate to make “producing legislation” a top priority.
But others will soon make the impeachment of President Barack Obama their top priority.
Here’s how it will happen.
“We now have the votes and we have the ability to call the agenda, so stop name-calling and let’s actually produce some legislation that helps jobs and the economy and moves our country forward,” Chaffetz said in an interview after Republicans captured the U.S. Senate on November 4, 2014.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz
“I think the country has figured that out, and they’ve given us the mandate to do it, and we better produce, or they’ll kick us out too.”
Obama has vowed to act unilaterally before year’s end to reduce the number of deportations and grant work permits to millions of illegal aliens living in the United States.
After promising to take executive action on immigration by the end of the summer of 2014, Obama delayed his plans until after the elections. Democrats–especially Senators from conservative states–had warned him that such administrative moves could threaten their reelection.
Illegal aliens crossing American borders by the millions
But on November 4, most of those Democrats lost anyway, leaving immigration advocates–and their millions of illegal alien constituents–feeling that the delay was needless.
“What I’m not going to do is just wait,” the president said as immigration legislation that the Senate passed in June 2013 remained stalled in the House.
Kentucky’s U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell–who became Senate Majority Leader in January–warned that this would be an in-your-face affront to the new majority GOP:
Mitch McConnell
“I think the president choosing to do a lot of things unilaterally on immigration would be a big mistake,” McConnell said. “It’s an issue that most of my members want to address legislatively and it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull to say, ‘If you guys don’t do what I want, I’m going to do it on my own.’ …
“I hope he won’t do that because I do think it poisons the well for the opportunity to address a very important domestic issue.”
To which Obama responded: “I have no doubt that there will be some Republicans who are angered or frustrated by any executive action that I may take.
“Those are folks, I just have to say, who are also deeply opposed to immigration reform in any form and blocked the House from being able to pass a bipartisan bill.”
Barack Obama
Republicans could use spending bills to restrict or stop such executive action, by cutting appropriations to those agencies that would be tasked with carrying out Obama’s directives on immigration.
Several Republicans hold the deep-seated view that Obama already has been abusing his constitutional authority.
“Abuse of power” is an impeachable offense under the United States Constitution. So making this assertion would provide Republicans with the weapon they’ve long sought to drive Obama from the White House.
Republicans, in fact, have a tainted history of using impeachment to remove a President who dared to thwart their agenda.
After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, Republican President Andrew Johnson tried to carry out Lincoln’s humane policies to reunify the nation after the Civil War.
He issued a series of proclamations directing the former Confederate states to hold conventions and elections to re-form their civil governments. In response, Southern states returned many of their old leaders, and passed Black Codes to deprive freed slaves of many civil liberties.
Andrew Johnson
Congress refused to seat legislators from those states and advanced legislation to overrule the Southern actions. Johnson vetoed their bills, and Congress overrode him, setting a pattern until he left the White House in 1869.
As the conflict grew between the executive and legislative branches of government, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, restricting Johnson in firing Cabinet officials. Johnson then tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton–with whom he had an antagonistic relationship.
An enraged Congress impeached Johnson in the House of Representatives. He avoided conviction and removal from office in the Senate–by one vote.
If President Obama tries to end-run Congress on immigration policy, history will likely repeat itself with another round of impeachment hearings.
It was Mitch McConnell who infamously vowed–immediately after Obama’s election in 2008–to make him “a one-term President.”
Moreover, there is actually no reason for Obama to risk his Presidency by granting the privileges of American citizenship to millions of illegal aliens.
Democrats–and especially Obama–had counted on millions of illegal aliens to retain Democratic control of the Senate. But those masses of Hispanic voters never showed up at the polls, thus giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress.
If Obama practiced ruthless “Chicago politics” as charged by his enemies, his response would be: “You [illegal aliens] didn’t live up to your end. Therefore, I have no further responsibility to you.”
Unfortunately for the President, he seems unable to break with his past of backing unpopular causes for little in return.
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