A Juicy Scandal

A JUICY SCANDAL July 4, after nine days of self-congratulation in China, Bill Clinton returned to the United States, where for six months he has declined to respond-in public or under oath—to...

...There are "repeated third-person references without antecedent...
...Except that the Robertson opinion is not persuasive...
...Legally unacceptable, according to the court...
...The Supreme Court has clearly ruled, he spends one sentence whispering, that evidence gleaned from voluntarily prepared private documents is "never protected" by the Constitution...
...He immediately addressed the nation by radio...
...But maybe they are...
...And nothing in the talking points necessarily implicates President Clinton or any of his friends in untoward behavior of any kind...
...Hubbell does seem to have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for no-show jobs—arranged by the president's friends—at precisely the time he was refusing to cooperate with the Starr grand jury...
...Robertson's opinion was a "carefully" worded, "powerful critique" of the independent counsel's methods and evidence, the New York Times reported...
...He may be losing on the facts, as well...
...His private records, in other words, are incriminating...
...Washington seems further impressed that the administration has so far blocked, behind imaginary "privileges," the grand-jury testimony of two Secret Service agents and White House fixer Bruce Lindsey...
...Robertson then skips merrily along, however, ignoring this central observation...
...It does matter, of course...
...They have assumed and explicated to a fare-thee-well, and they have published the resulting conspiracy theory on the Internet...
...Suffice it to say, for now, that it has not happened...
...Therefore, according to Robertson, Starr was precluded by the Fifth Amendment from obtaining those records...
...Hubbell delivered those records to the Whitewater grand jury in response to a subpoena...
...For weeks now, White House aides have been advising reporters to check out the work of John FX...
...Hubbell will be tried and convicted...
...The president promised to provide bacteriological "warning labels" on "all prepackaged juice" so that we can all make "better decisions about the juice...
...Messrs...
...They were produced on a computer keyboard...
...He did so under a Starr-sought, court-ordered grant of limited immunity...
...He asked that we "rededicate ourselves to the work of responsible citizenship...
...Fox teaches poetry at the University of Southwestern Louisiana...
...Circuit Court of Appeals ordered both Secret Service agents to obey their subpoenas and tell the truth...
...Better decisions about the juice...
...The Supreme Court decided last month not to grant Starr an emergency hearing on this question...
...Washington seems impressed by Starr's recent series of "legal setbacks...
...Circuit's quickly overlooked privilege ruling explains, that the administration is withholding the testimony of Secret Service agents purely to protect the intimate bond between a president and his lifesaving bodyguards...
...It cannot be, for instance, as the D.C...
...The University of Southwestern Louisiana English Department has not answered and cannot answer the Whitewater/Lewinsky scandals' cardinal questions...
...Kenneth Starr has blown it, Washington now mumbles into its phones and television cameras...
...A one-day story, that...
...Laziness...
...Let's assume this is a text," Gillis says, "and let us explicate it...
...The city is abuzz with fresh, speculative analyses of the famous "talking points," which appear to instruct Linda Tripp on how to change her memory about Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky...
...Gillis is a graduate student there...
...News & World Report and even Newsweek itself have published critical reexaminations of the talking points...
...Robertson will be overruled...
...His private records suggest as much...
...Because the talking points were not, pace Newsweek, "typed...
...Gillis and Fox, too, have now been granted an audience by CNN...
...Why...
...Salon and Slate and U.S...
...And highly suspicious, as is so much else of the Whitewater/Lewinsky evidence...
...He has not...
...And some of it appeared in the voice of objective reality...
...Maybe they're not what they seem...
...But has Starr yet "lost" a single substantive privilege ruling about Whitewater or Lewinsky...
...Mind, the judge did not determine that the charges were baseless...
...What, then, can account for the commentariat's easy judgment that the independent counsel has been sidetracked and embarrassed by this incident...
...No major issue of relevant law has yet been resolved in his favor, either...
...He did not pay taxes on this money...
...Starr is losing on the law...
...So how can anyone yet conclude that Kenneth Starr has "blown it...
...All of which proves, according to these two geniuses, that "neither Lewinsky nor 'the president's men' could have drafted the document...
...Washington seems impressed that Susan McDougal was released from incarceration for health reasons—though she will again face trial this fall for felony contempt of court...
...The talking points were instead likely prepared by Linda Tripp herself, with help from Lucianne Goldberg, an unknown lawyer, and . . . Michael Isikoff, who "might be considered a contributor...
...A JUICY SCANDAL July 4, after nine days of self-congratulation in China, Bill Clinton returned to the United States, where for six months he has declined to respond-in public or under oath—to swirling evidence that he has committed felony crimes while president...
...Two weeks ago, in fact, the D.C...
...Unless, that is, they have decided that the "it" in question—the cloud of felony accusations that still hangs over our president's head, and our president's obstinate refusal to help us penetrate that cloud—simply doesn't matter...
...Washington seems impressed that the Supreme Court denied Starr's request for access to notes taken by Vince Foster's attorney—though that case was about the Travel-gate scandal, which does not involve the president...
...Instead, he rebuked the independent counsel for investigating those charges in the first place...
...It cannot be, because no such absolute confidentiality now exists, and because the administration has never before taken action to create such a rule of silence...
...Talk like that was all over the next day's papers...
...Nor is there any logic to Robertson's additional ruling that Hubbell's tax crimes are "factually unrelated" to Starr's underlying Whitewater investigation...
...It is America's...
...The second and third Gillis/Fox exercises examine the talking points in further, mind-numbing detail...
...It is only for these two Secret Service agents, with knowledge of this particular president's activities in the White House, that the administration has invented "protective function privilege...
...Which meant the fact that Hubbell was the source of the documents—his implicit testimony that they existed, were authentic, and belonged to him— could not be revealed to the grand jury or any subsequent trial court...
...These are journalistic euphemisms for "persuasive...
...It will be ours...
...There is the "present-perfect tense" at one point...
...Jack" Gillis and Willard "Skip" Fox...
...What, for that matter, can account for Washington's new willingness to entertain the possibility that even basic suspicions about Bill Clinton— far short of the question of criminal culpability—may no longer be warranted...
...Ken Starr built his latest case against Hubbell on more than 13,000 pages of personal records...
...district judge James Robertson did on July 1. Robertson dismissed Starr's recent 10-count indictment of Webster Hubbell for conspiracy, tax evasion, and tax, mail, and wire fraud...
...Suffice it to say, too, that a preliminary explanation for this depressing non-development is already taking hold— even among the Whitewater/Lewinsky controversy's closest and least Clinton-sympathetic observers...
...It matters even more than "better decisions about the juice...
...Boredom...
...There is only Kenneth Starr, a man of "McCarthyite" zeal and "Gestapo tactics...
...It is a joke...
...There is literally no federal case law to sustain this argument...
...Gillis/Fox Essay #1, "Newsweek's Lies," concludes that Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff's scoop on the talking points was a "deliberate, knowing falsehood...
...As responsible citizenship presumably requires...
...There are minor inconsistencies among various published versions of the document...
...Some future generation of social historians may finally solve the mystery of why this generation of Americans did not long ago surround the White House, torches burning, to demand a proper, full accounting from our principal elected leader...
...Washington seems more impressed—Washington seems most impressed, Starr's critics and erstwhile friends alike—by what U.S...
...And for trampling Hubbell's Fifth Amendment rights—in a "quintessential fishing expe-dition"—while working to prove the charges...
...A three-judge, appellate-level panel has already decided otherwise...
...No such question has yet been answered, however eager the country has become to "put the matter behind us...
...The two men have performed what they call a "bit of textual bibliography" on the talking points...
...Hours after Robertson's ruling was released, CNN turned its airwaves over to former White House bagman Harold Ickes, who announced that the judge had confirmed beyond dispute what has always been Team Clinton's central theory about the president's scandals: There are no scandals...
...Former agents, for example, may say anything they like, whenever they wish...
...But the contents of Hubbell's records were and are another thing altogether, as Judge Robertson only briefly acknowledges...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...There is "aspectually anomalous" language...
...In the final analysis, it is not some single prosecutor's job to hold an American president accountable...
...And he volunteered to make the first move...
...If our current president escapes such accountability, if he somehow manages to skate free of his current controversies, it will not be Kenneth Starr's fault...
...No major question raised by that evidence has yet been resolved in Bill Clinton's favor...

Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 43


 
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