Presswatch /Licked by Leaks

...Evidently, the White House did not learn of the Wood nanny's erstwhileillegal status until February 4—the same day it sent up its trial balloon...

...Reported by David Johnston, the story about the Connecticut lawyer came to him via anonymous sources he described as "government and Clinton transition officials...

...Clinton was disingenuous in the way he described some of his recent troubles...

...it is equally instructive that the traditional press was tough on Clinton's Detroit performance...

...I'm betting it's part of his communications strategy, which will feature more such efforts as the one in Detroit...

...Aspin's concern was preventing "Congress from overturning a new policy" put in place early on by an executive order...

...Joseph Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, through which any attorney general nominee must initially pass...

...In his broken promises (not to mention in his selection of an attorney general and in his effort to lift the ban on gays in the military), Clinton was a walking negative story...

...I'd have to say a foe—but which kind...

...The government officials had to have been from the FBI...

...As one account put it, Wood had been narrowly "legalistic" in what she had told the White House...

...These officials were probably acting on Biden's suggestion that Baird's nanny problem be made public prior to the confirmation hearings...

...During the campaign no one paid much attention to those five qualifying words, which Kelly called a "legalistic construct" or "loophole" through which Clinton was trying to wriggle in order to claim he was not breaking a promise...

...Following a review of the issue that Aspin would conduct, and following politically necessary meetings with members of Congress, especially Sen...

...Suffice it to say that it is not a happy thing for a president to have institutions like the FBI and the Pentagon trafficking in leaks so early in his tenure...

...Was the leaker a friend or a foeof Aspin's...

...hat happened to the liberal media that supposedly gave Bill Clinton every break during the campaign...

...Don't bet on Clinton to succeed, if only because today's much more diverse media (including Limbaugh) makes it harder for a president to dominate public opinion...

...And by Friday the president had indeed pulled back, in a compromise with Senator Nunn that postponed any executive order for at least six months...

...Besides, if Biden or his staff or someone else on the Hill had been among Johnston's sources, the reporter would have mentioned "congressional" sources...

...Aspin told Clinton that he should view his meeting with the Joint Chiefs not as a negotiation but "the first step in the consultation that you have promised...

...Such a leaker could have been inside or outside the administration, and if in the administration probably working in the White House or Pentagon...

...An hour before Defense Secretary Les Aspin was to be interviewed on CBS's "Face the Nation," the network was handed a copy of a draft memo, dated January 18 and apparently intended to prepare Clinton for his meeting the next day with the Joint Chiefs in which he would discuss his goal of lifting the ban on open homosexuality in the military...

...The FBI, which reports to the attorney general, would have had two reasons to leak...

...Gays in the military dominated page-ones and news broadcasts and talk shows...

...Compounding the negative spin was the sense that the new folks in the White House are incompetent...

...N ow to the third leak—the odd "trial balloon" of Kimba Wood's pending nomination as attorney general, floated by White House aides on February 4. As the New York Times described the effort in its February 5 story, "The White House seemed to be putting out Judge Wood's name to test public reaction and insure that no damaging disclosures surfaced before officially nominating her...

...Wood's candidacy was finished late Thursday evening, not because of adverse public reaction (it was too early for that) or the surfacing of any damaging disclosures (there were none), but because of Clinton's own decision that she was not to be his nominee after all...

...As NBC's Lisa Myers put it on the third day of the new presidency: "From up close, the Clinton White House has looked like the Not-Ready-for-PrimeTime Players...

...If Clinton stays true to character, and if other reporters are as alert to the fine print as Kelly, there will be more such stories...

...Those who participated in the town hall—and who did not ask the kind of follow-up questions the press would have—had a less skeptical view of Clinton...

...This was the leak to the New York Times of Zoe Baird's hiring of two illegal aliens and her failure to pay their Social Security taxes as required by law until just before her nomination...

...No one knew what it was, and the bureau wasn't talking—except to Johnston...

...These will upset Clinton, who will therefore continue to try to bypass the traditional press and get his message out "unfiltered" through such gimmicky devices as the Detroit town hall meeting he held February 10...

...It reported how Clinton didn't say during the campaign that he would not raise taxes on the middle class—he said he would not raise...

...Political difficulty, of course, was exactly what befell Clinton over the next few days...

...Look for a gap to open up between the press and the town-hall public, and look for Clinton to try to widen the gap by criticizing the press...

...CI R 6 6 ead the Fine Print to Know if a Promise Really Counts," was the headline atop Michael Kelly's excellent New York Times story of January 26...

...He made it appear that it was his preference to delay the decision about allowing gays to serve in the military...

...Clinton had chosen Ms...

...But it does show that Clinton's people like to do damage when practicing damage control, even if to a woman whose sex they otherwise have nothing but the highest respect for...

...One is that he made more than the usual number of specific campaign promises, and by January 20 he had broken many of them...

...Virtually unlimited access and quick response are two things prized especially by daily reporters...

...He also said that he hadn't selected Judge Kimba Wood to be his attorney general before it surfaced that she had hired an illegal alien as a nanny...

...This is how the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz framed a January 31 story on Clinton and a press that was now turning him into a punching bag...

...There remains the question of why "Clinton transition officials" were also among Johnston's sources...

...Iraq and Bosnia took a back seat...

...T he second major leak occurred on Sunday, January 24, just four days after Clinton became president...

...Mark it down: The press loves to report what is maybe the easiest story in the world to write—the flip-flop, the reversal, the contradiction...

...Wood and was checking her background before making an announcement...

...Baird had told Biden of her nanny illegalities, but Biden could not have known the level of detail reflected in Johnston's story: it had to have come from someone who had seen the relevant documents—which only the FBI had...

...In any event, observe here that White House officials, having put up a trial balloon, were now busy shooting it down...

...Getting a story like Baird's into print makes it a kind of public property, and therefore everyone' s—not just the bureau's—responsibility...

...Also coloring some of the early negative coverage were the White House decision to bar reporters from the inner sanctum of the press office and the administration's slowness to return phone calls...

...There are more immediate explanations for the spate of negative stories Clinton received in January and February...

...Predictably, the administration's strategy for changing the policy on gays dominated the questioning of Aspin on "Face the Nation...

...Sam Nunn, Clinton could eventually issue an executive order...

...First, bureau officials didn't want as their ultimate supervisor someone who had cut corners with the law...

...White House advisers decided almost immediately that nominating Wood would create, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "a serious perception problem...

...The more likely foe, however, was someone (undoubtedly at the Pentagon) who is absolutely opposed to any change in the gay ban, someone who figured that the more publicity the issue received, the more political difficulty Clinton would encounter...

...It is instructive that Clinton did not hold a formal White House news conference (Bush held 140 in four years) before his first town hall...

...Indeed, the Wall Street Journal's news account sounded like an editorial: Mr...

...With Clinton the only show in town, the press has been free to resume at least some of its adversarial practices...

...Not only was Wood not sufficiently forthcoming, according to the anonymous sources, she had also (it was leaked) "trained" to work at a Playboy Club while a student in London twenty-eight years ago...

...Second, the bureau didn't want later to be accused of not investigating the nominee fully...

...The rank-and-file had had its fill of that: the week of the leak also saw FBI Director William Sessions publicly reprimanded for ethics violations by outgoing Attorney General William Barr...

...A gay rights advocate who disagreed with Aspin's incrementalist approach could have done the deed, hoping to embarrass Clinton into acting as he had originally intended by issuing an executive order early in his presidency...

...With this president, Kelly advised, "it is always wise to read the fine print...

...On January 14, the agents were still working on the routine background investigation and thus had yet to send their report to Sen...

...As Maureen Dowd suggested in the New York Times, it was rather ironic that Wood was shown the door for practicing what Clinton specializes in...

...in fact he was forced into the delay by opposition from Capitol Hill and the joint chiefs of staff...

...In fact, Mr...

...But the real LL problem was less that the press was pro-Clinton than that it was so relentlessly anti-Bush...

...Clinton denied that fear of the Mighty Rush affected his decision, and Limbaugh himself disputed that he and his listeners were so benighted they could not distinguish between Baird and Wood...

...taxes on the middle class "to pay for my programs...

...The White House then put out the story that what made Clinton change his mind was that Wood had not disclosed the key details earlier...

...As described by the Washington Post on January 25, Aspin in the memo quoted Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to the effect that the White House could count on only thirty Senate votes for lifting the ban...

...this was not only an incredible cheap shot but an irrelevance that would have been seen as such by the Judiciary Committee and the public...

...Little did they know that the FBI had its own agenda...

...This, no doubt, is what the leaker hoped to achieve on the eve of the president's meeting with the Joint Chiefs...

...As it happened, such speculation was premature...

...Especially on the economy—where is the big series exposing the lousy campaign coverage of economic issues...

...According to news reports, when Clinton was informed that the nomination could be the subject of discussion on "The Rush Limbaugh Show," he decided right then and there to ditch Kimba Wood...

...among the newsmagazine set, there were conspicuous Clinton cheerleaders (led by Newsweek's Joe Klein), while poor Bush had none to speak of...

...What's happened since Clinton's election is that the press no longer has George Bush to kick around...

...He advised Clinton not to issue the executive order immediately but instead to "take the necessary administrative steps" to stop homosexuals from being discharged and to prohibit recruits from being asked about their sexual orientation...

...Coincidentally, while writing a piece on Baird for the Wall Street Journal, I had heard that the bureau had come across disturbing information...

...Leaks can be from people friendly as well as hostile to the leak subject, and the Times story itself, as well as my own reporting, persuades me that the Clinton transition officials who talked to Johnston were trying to help Zoe Baird in an ultimately ill-fated effort at damage control...

...During the campaign, the press gave Clinton numerous breaks...

...Thus, for example, on February 4, NBC's Andrea Mitchell paired some campaign footage in which Clinton declared that "everyone ought to be able to go to college" and that "money should not be an object" with tape that day of George Stephanopoulos in effect saying that money might be an object after all...

...If my reading is correct—if the Aspin memo was leaked by Pentagon opponents of Clinton's effort to lift the ban on gays—it is only one more indication that the new president is regarded by the military as weak and manipulable...

...It had been embarrassed on this score in 1987, when it had been the press that caught wind of Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg's long-ago pot smoking...