Bill's Cousin Cornelius?
Borders, Rebecca
"Bill's Cousin Cornelius?" NEW QUESTIONS EMERGE ABOUT A CURIOUS RELATIONSHIP AND ITS ROLE IN TRAVELGATE Was it a coincidence that the Travel Office fi took place s after a Time rep F er csa ask...
...Whatever its origins, it is described melodramatically by Time writer Jeffrey Birnbaum in Madhouse, his new book on five Clinton aides: The long days and longer nights at the White House compelled him to wish even more than usual for affection and release, and a woman on staff named Catherine Cornelius, blonde and twenty-five years old, provided both...
...According to Eller's former live-in girlfriend—who threw him out after reading about Eller-Cornelius in the Washington Post while eating breakfast with Eller...
...It couldn't be Paul Begala or Bruce Lindsey—that "will come out...
...Regarding Cornelius's stories about the extravagant lifestyles of the travel office workers, Foster wrote, "C.C...
...It's not clear what these absences indicate...
...As the attorney for the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, Tisdale recently had to respond to a subpoena from independent counsel Kenneth Starr for documents relating to ADFA's funding of four companies, including Hubbell father-in-law Seth Ward's POM Inc...
...To keep her from changing her story regarding the absence of political pressure from the Clintons on a regulatory decision she made in favor of Madison Guaranty, Gearan's group discussed who should be sent as an emissary...
...Eller, a close ally of Hillary Clinton, jumped into the travel office fray arguing for the employees' immediate dismissals...
...It was Rutherford, for instance, who tried to threaten Arkansas State Trooper L.D...
...The Watkins memo, it should be recalled, is particularly revealing in describing the first lady's near paranoia about gossip—or even the perception of gossip—concerning the first family...
...In his memo he writes "she had become a liability to daily operations" at his office...
...Gearan then records the following: "Tisdale...
...Ward is also a client of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings...
...One of the main documents here is David Watkins's soul-cleansing memo addressed (if never delivered) to McLarty on the chain of events leading up to the firings...
...Watkins continued to have serious reservations about Cornelius: "24-year-old blonde with one year experience," he wrote in a note dated May 14, 1993...
...According to a telephone log obtained by TAS, she called then-Governor Clinton at his office on March 22, 1989, and left a Washington, D.C...
...In an Oval Office meeting, they told Watkins, McLarty, and Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster that the Secret Service agents should be fired immediately and replaced with agents from the campaign's Secret Service detail who "were loyal...
...According to a former career White House worker, she was often seen making unexplained mid-day visits to the Oval Office...
...Clinton with their arms wrapped around each other...
...I never asked her to collect documents or other information...
...Only Catherine Cornelius continues to work at the White House, as the deputy director for presidential advance...
...not know she a cousin," is how Foster put it in his travel office notebook...
...Though the revelation came as a shock to people who had worked with her in both the White House and the campaign, it was evidently intended to quash a rumor that Cornelius was having an affair with the president...
...Unfortunately, the rumors concerning Cornelius and the president were arising just when pressures to fire the travel office workers were coming to a head—especially from Harry Thomason, with whom Cornelius had been cooperating...
...RILL'S COUSIN INJCORNELIUS...
...Watkins wrote about the firings—a question that still lingers...
...She "is so f---ing important," Gearan has Ickes saying...
...in Lindsey firm...
...Clean" of the Clinton White House, farms out political dirty work to an Arkansas operative paid for by the DNC...
...The First Family was anxious to have that situation immediately resolved, and the First Lady in particular was extremely upset with the delayed action in that case...
...CC...
...The story began just eight days earlier, on May 11, 1993, when a Washington general assignment reporter from Time magazine called the White House Travel Office...
...Meanwhile, his notes from this period complain about her "periodic, unexplained absences from White House Travel Office—too many smoke breaks, etc...
...She was one of the first volunteers to show up in the Clinton campaign headquarters in September 1991...
...Watkins was working on a White House reorganization that would have transferred the travel office employees to other positions in the government by the fall...
...Clinton, since any charge that he lied to the GAO would confirm everything Watkins says about her leading role in the firings...
...Shortly after Time was told that Cornelius was Clinton's cousin, she asked Cerda to look into the legal ramifications of nepotism laws as they affect White House employment...
...28 May 1996 The American Spectator...
...Had Mrs...
...we need those people out—We need our people in...
...The arrangements were unusual...
...The first reference is to John Tisdale, a partner in the Little Rock firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings...
...Unlike other travel office employees, she flew on Air Force One and rode in the presidential motorcade instead of the press bus...
...In return, Eller was more than willing to help her if he could, despite what to a clearer-thinking person would have seemed an obvious risk to himself...
...His memo, along with notes taken by Watkins and other contemporaneous records, suggest that the scandal may have been triggered by more than simply a desire to pay off political cronies...
...According to former co-workers, Cornelius had done much to feed the rumors...
...Watkins, referring to himself in the third person, noted on May 31,1993, "Catherine Cornelius— DW did not know she was cousin...
...Clinton continues to deny any involvement in them...
...Newsweek had reported rumors of lamp throwing during an argument in the family quarters and other signs of tension in the Clinton marriage...
...Watkins's notes from May 14 say that Mrs...
...After investigating the logistics of removing the Secret Service agents, Watkins and Foster advised both Clintons that the agents would soon be transferred routinely, and the agents in question were allowed to finish their tours of duty...
...The reporter wanted to ask about Catherine Cornelius, a blond 25-year-old White House travel office aide who had begun to travel with the president...
...Presidential relative or not, she had maintained a longer relationship with Bill Clinton than anyone suspected...
...Whatever the merits of the Secret Service incident, it indicated that the Clintons —"the First Lady in particular" — detested rumors...
...He also emphatically denied the much publicized story that Cornelius was acting on his direction when she removed travel office documents from the White House in an effort to prove financial mismanagement...
...Her first reaction was to accuse the career travel office employees of gossiping about her relationship with the president...
...And both wrote in notes at the time of the travel office firings that they did not know she was Bill's cousin...
...McLarty for a number of years and was assisting Mr...
...He is currently one of the Clintons' private defense attorneys, and also represents Helen Dickey, one of the White House aides with access to the "book room" who has been questioned about Mrs...
...NEW QUESTIONS EMERGE ABOUT A CURIOUS RELATIONSHIP AND ITS ROLE IN TRAVELGATE Was it a coincidence that the Travel Office fi took place s after a Time rep F er csa ask about Catheri 0 ne underappreciated benefit of the material that the White House has been belatedly turning over to congressional investigators of Whitewater and Travelgate is the light they shine on some of the murkier figures connected to the scandals...
...McLarty at that time on an ad hoc basis...
...POTUS, of course, is the President of the United States...
...credible...
...On the evening of May 11, both Hillary Clinton and Susan Thomases left messages with Thomason, shortly after he had met with McLarty, Watkins, and Foster to set the firings in motion...
...What is known is that she was having an affair of sorts with Jeff Eller, the media affairs chief who'd helped her out with the Time magazinereporter...
...We both knew that there would be hell to pay if, after our failure in the Secret Service situations earlier, we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady's wishes...
...Yet by May 17, he wrote in his memo, he knew that the travel office staff had to be dismissed and why...
...the affair began during the 1992 campaign...
...On June 2, 1993, Watkins noted what Cornelius said to his assistant Brian Foucart, who'd passed on Watkins's suggestion that she transfer or take a leave of absence in the wake of the botched travel office firings...
...But she had never confided her familial relationship with the president with either her co-workers or superiors in the White House...
...He came up and spent some time in the White House but was paid by the Democratic National Committee and got the DNC to give some work to his ad firm...
...Was "our people" a reference to people she could trust...
...Tisdale last year was also served a subpoena by the Senate Whitewater Committee for Whitewater documents...
...Clinton's reputation, added fuel to the fire...
...The American Spectator • May 1996 Jeff Eller, the director of media affairs at the White House, stepped in with the appropriate spin...
...A spokesman for World Wide Travel, the Little Rock-based travel agency that had worked with Cornelius for nearly a year and was poised to take over the White House business after the travel office employees were fired, also denied knowing that Cornelius and Clinton were related...
...number...
...Later, when Harry Thomason spread rumors fed to him by Cornelius about alleged financial mismanagement by travel office director Billy Dale and the other employees, Watkins continued to dismiss her opinions "in light of her self-interest and her tendency to exaggerate...
...After Clinton formally announced his presidential candidacy in October, she was hired as a coordinator of volunteer workers, and went on from there to help coordinate campaign travel...
...Neither Watkins nor Vince Foster, both natives of Hope, Arkansas, and boyhood friends of Bill's, were aware that she was a Clinton 27 relative...
...So the smooth Mack McLarty, generally perceived as the "Mr...
...She had bragged about her relationship with the president, and proudly displayed a photo showing them with their arms around each other...
...et whatever insights these newly released documents give us into the likes of Ickes and McLarty, Tisdale and Rutherford, and their involvement in Whitewater damage control, they are decidedly less intriguing than new information that has emerged about a central figure in Travelgate — Catherine A. Cornelius, Bill Clinton's so-called cousin and one of the key figures in the firing of the travel office workers...
...A co-schemer of Cornelius's was her friend Clarissa Cerda, a White House lawyer...
...He said he wanted to "get ahead of the story...
...Watkins was later forced to leave the White House in May 1994, after he was caught using a presidential helicopter for a golf outing...
...By May 13 the FBI had been brought in, and according to Vince Foster's travel office notebook—another subpoenaed document the White House hid from investigators for two years—Cornelius was "scared...
...If we f--- this up, we're done...
...Skip Rutherford is Mack McLarty's punk, McLarty's flak," the former intimate said...
...Harry Thomason remains under criminal investigation for his involvement with the travel office...
...Tisdale has been part of Whitewater damage control from the start, which included a meeting in November 1992 with Lindsey, Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, and Jim Lyons...
...That's not necessarily good news for Mrs...
...As the House oversight committee learned most recently, Mrs...
...Cornelius's background, not to mention Mr...
...Clinton been spurred to action by worries about Cornelius...
...Vince Foster killed himself two months after the firings...
...A former Clinton intimate who knows Rutherford well has a different take...
...According to Harold Ickes, speaking before the Senate Whitewater Committee last February, "Skip Rutherford is someone who resides in Arkansas, has known the president and first lady and Mr...
...Told Brian no one could ask her to leave or be transferred but POTUS and Mack...
...Brown against cooperating with this magazine for the story that became "Love and Hate in Arkansas" (TAS, April/May 1994...
...Clinton told him...
...Skip —White House pass...
...Could that paranoia have been great enough to precipitate the disastrous firing of the travel office seven...
...Watkins thought little of Cornelius's work...
...Once at the White House she worked as a staff assistant in Watkins's office, then moved to the travel office with the aim of becoming its director, a naive but ambitious plan that went hand in hand with Harry Thomason's more serious designs on the White House travel business...
...As the head of management and administration at the White House, Watkins was the official ultimately pressured by the first lady and her friends and subordinates to fire these government workers, which he officially did on May19...
...In the memo Watkins referred to the following incident: "As you recall," Watkins wrote to McLarty, "an issue developed between the Secret Service and the First Family in February and March requiring resolution and action on yours and my parts...
...He told Time Cornelius was a distant cousin of the president, a relationship that — remarkably— has never been questioned since...
...Clinton's "missing" billing records that resurfaced last January 4. A former law partner of senior White House aide Bruce Lindsey, Tisdale was a natural choice to talk with Bassett Schaffer since she is a partner in his REBECCA BORDERS is a Washington reporter.:i' 26 May 1996 • The American Spectator firm's Fayetteville office...
...He faces enormous legal bills resulting from his involvement in the travel office firings, and may be indicted for misleading the GAO in its inquiry into the findings...
...She had bragged about her close friendship with the president, claimed that she talked with him at least twice a day on the phone, and proudly displayed a photograph of herself and Mr...
...she undertook this of her own volition...
...Jeff Eller never recovered from the reprimand he received in the White House's internal report on the firings and left Washington in August 1994, to become a political consultant in Texas...
...Rutherford is currently involved in bringing casino gambling to the president's hometown of Hot Springs...
...Notes taken by former White House aide Mark Gearan's, for example, quote Whitewater damage-controller Harold Ickes on the need to keep former Arkansas Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer in line...
...Why the rush...
...Cornelius was in Chicago with Clinton when the Time reporter's inquiry was passed on to her...
...Skip," in turn, is Skip Rutherford...
...The Clintons evidently blamed the Secret Service for either spreading or at least not quelling the rumors...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
