Special Editorial: From Troopergate to Monicagate
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
SPECIAL EDITORIAL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. From Troopergate to Monicagate The Washington Post, Saturday, September 12, 1998, from its "Editorial Note" introducing the full, unedited...
...Then in our January 1994 issue came the blockbuster...
...RET is the author of Boy Clinton and (with Anonymous) ofThe Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton...
...in our September issue...
...During the first eight months of 1998 his plausibility washed out to sea with his presidency...
...This time the victims would be the employees of the White House Travel Office, who along with others were harassed by the FBI and the IRS...
...Was this the reversal of Churchill's World War II observation of "the New World redressing the balance of the Old...
...History's motion continues...
...Norquist predicted that Clinton's "cheerful use of the government to kneecap his critics and rivals" would get him through two presidential elections...
...In our June 1996 issue he explored Clinton's scheme to inveigle two huge insurance companies to pay his lawyers in the Paula Corbin Jones suit...
...Adams also introduced readers to the Clintons' and the McDougals' "designated fall guy," David Hale, who as a member of Arkansas's "political family" helped them prop up McDougal's tottering empire and conceal a bit of Hillary's bank fraud (a matter that I believe the Independent Counsel will soon act on...
...the House Banking Commit- C tee...
...Through the years, The American Spectator has kept tabs on Clintonites of all varieties...
...In time the historians assess their fading work...
...This piece will recount our revelations...
...The abuse of power, by the way, was purely gratuitous...
...Yet Adams's greatest scoop of the year was "What's Up in Jakarta...
...Other pieces published about the Clintons in 1994 show the White House stonewalling against the rising tide of congressional inquiries and practicing what was later to become a favored tactic in dealing with the Republican Congress...
...The White House would stand in the same resplendent dignity that it knew when John Adams first entered and George Bush left...
...In late December 1993, just before the Los Angeles Times published a similar piece, we lifted the lid off Clinton's reckless promiscuity and reflexive deceits with our first Troopergate piece...
...In numbers we have been reduced by famous and infamous defections...
...A national chorus of critics denounced its accuracy, but to my satisfaction no significant error has ever been unearthed...
...In our October 1995 issue, the indefatigable one, Evans-Pritchard, took inventory of all the "contradictions, inaccuracies, and unresolved mysteries" surrounding accounts of Foster's death up to that time...
...I t is too early to say what will become of the perpetual adolescent whom we at The American Spectator call Boy Clinton...
...Oh unholy thoughts...
...She missed the February issue's grimmer joke...
...The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has been stalwart, as has Wes Pruden's sturdy band at the Washington Times, and from London came the Telegraph papers led by the indefatigable one, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard...
...Consequently they are possessed of an assertiveness that ordinary people of other nations do not always have...
...Obviously, compared with subsequent legal judgments, we were actually quite tolerant towards Hubbell...
...Finally, in our August and October issues Adams disinterred still more political scandal from Clinton's Arkansas days: his use of David Hale's Capital Management Services as a "piggy bank," his acquisition of a political hush fund from three rural banks (money for Bimbo eruptions...
...By now the RTC investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan had the Clintons engaged in a cover up, and in our October issue James Ring Adams revealed Webb Hubbell as the coverup's possible mastermind with his "April and Webb and Jean and Jack...
...We have paid a significant price for our diligent pursuit of manifest wrongdoing...
...The record of Clinton's abuses has been established through years of sedulous reportage right here in these pages...
...In our August 1993 issue Lisa Schiffren expanded our case against Clinton to include ethical and perhaps legal violations along with a streak of cheapness...
...Through the centuries its currents proceed silently onward: ceaseless, impersonal, remorseless...
...Stan's course would be impeachment...
...Character is the central issue of every historic figure...
...From 1996 to the present our investigative team has endured growing pressure from the Clintons, their agents, and such authoritarian types as Sidney Blumenthal...
...The men and women of an era, heaving and sweating against the pull of history, give that era its drama, its issues, its dramatis personae...
...Since Troopergate, The American Spectator has published an abundance of other investigative pieces and stood out almost alone in warning the country of the Clinton administration's metastasizing scandals...
...Clinton committed perjury and obstruction of justice in resisting the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit, a lawsuit initiated because of an editorial accident in the first Troopergate piece...
...the corruption of Alexis Herman (March...
...None of these impeachable offenses nor any of the other indelicacies of l'affaire Lewinsky would be publicly known were it not for an accident of history that every American historian will lecture his students on some day...
...No one can ever be sure how things will turn out...
...Finally, in our December 1994 issue Danny Wattenberg quoted an Arkansas trooper on how he distributed "walking around money" to buy the minority vote for Clinton when he was governor...
...They strive to make their mark as the currents of history swirl around them...
...yet we have remained productive, so much so, that many in the media both here and abroad are claiming that we have been "vindicated" by events...
...By early 1994 so many details of overlapping scandals had been revealed by congressional inquiries and the small band of reporters hot on the Clintons' trail that for our February issue we summoned our fabled law firm, Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short, to estimate the number of criminal statutes implicated by reports in the national press about the misconduct of the Clintons, Webb Hubbell, and others in their inner circle...
...In March 1997 Adams shed light on the Clintons' use of private eyes to smear and intimidate others, and in July he exposed the troubling activity of an FBI agent harassing one of our Arkansas researchers...
...Earlier in the year York wrote an illuminating piece about the secretiveness of Mrs...
...Had our critics given a careful reading to the evidence in them, all the disgrace that Clinton has brought on the presidency and all the danger into which he has led the country might have been avoided...
...There this learned man came to two relevant conclusions: 1) Clinton should be impeached...
...We too warned our readers, but that was years ago and since then there has been so much more to read...
...He indulged his ravening sexual appetites practically in public (on the grounds of the Governor's Mansion and in parked cars...
...And it was the troopers who first revealed his bizarre sophistications about oral sex—for which they received condemnation, not him...
...Hubbell's exposure ran to a possible 40-year term and more than $1 million in fines...
...Since then, the impotence of the Clinton foreign policy has been exposed all around the world, in southwest Asia, in Korea, in the Middle East, and in Russia...
...I still hope he is wrong, but we are all dependent on Starr's timetable...
...Now it is time for the Clintons to be swept away...
...Subsequent CIA reports have substantiated Brown's revelation, and as with Trooper-gate, no significant errors have yet to be discovered...
...It has been a long chase...
...Back in our December 1996 issue York raised the question as to whether Judge Starr could indict the president or call for impeachment York concluded that indictment was impossible...
...Along with that satisfaction, however, is sadness...
...The only new elements of misbehavior in the Lewinsky scandal are perjury, and various forms of obstruction of justice, crimes that make him immediately impeachable...
...Brown's experience at Mena with corroborating facts and testimony...
...Our foreign policy would not be in disarray...
...all the grisly elements of l'affaire Lewinsky were in the first Troopergate piece and its follow-up four months later...
...and Marx's theorizing notwithstanding, there is nothing more to it than that...
...The May1995 issue was the first to mention Mena Airport, quoting witnesses who under oath made clear that when Clinton denied knowledge of the charges of drug trafficking out of that remote Arkansas airstrip, he was lying...
...That is where we stand today...
...In her "Bill and Hillary at the Trough," Schiffren, a former Bush speechwriter whose FBI file might even then have been en route to the White House, revealed the shifty accounting practices, public subsidies, and tax schemes (the Clintons took deductions on Bill's used underwear...
...Five months later, when Grover Norquist wrote his prophetic "The Coming Clinton Dynasty," we expanded our diagnosis to include Clinton's prodigious capacity for abuse of power...
...In March of 1997 Timmerman also gave us fresh information on John Huang...
...In the September issue he proved beyond doubt that Clinton cheated at golf, but then who would have doubted...
...Since 1996, Kenneth Timmerman has returned repeatedly to the increasingly familiar theme of corrupt technology transfers from the United States to the exotic Orient...
...Curiously the Boy President's diehard advocates often refer to this piece as "discredited" by C...
...Adams continued to turn up fresh evidence of the White House's suppression of the Whitewater investigation and its smearing of such incorruptible regulators as the RTC's Jean Lewis...
...the administration's gift to corrupt union president Arthur Coia, who escaped a looming RICO indictment with the help of Harold Ickes, Jr...
...Other 1995 revelations of administration corruption were written by York, who in our June issue detailed the remunerative relationship between Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and his high-rolling friend Nolanda Hill, now under indictment...
...that had allowed Arkansas's first family to livehandsomely on "Bill Clinton's much-touted lowest-in-the-nation' $35,000 salary...
...Evans-Pritchard notes that Paula's spunk is something unique to America...
...This feat was achieved by investigative journalist Becky Borders in our May 1996 issue...
...Men and women deposit their artifacts and expire...
...Actually, the Committee --- .has not discredited the Mena story and is still preparing its report...
...Not that we were completely alone...
...The currents of history are moving rapidly...
...Clinton's advocates would be well advised simply to drop the topic of Mena...
...Here we see that the Clintons had brought the corrupt politics of one-party Arkansas to the White House...
...Since the 1992 election The American Spectator has been gathering and publishing evidence of his eventual doom...
...Their 20 November 1998 The American Spectator access to the White House, the presence in the Commerce Department of their servitor John Huang, and the lucrative deals being cut between them and the Clintons' cronies are all laid out by Adams an entire year before the Los Angeles Times supposedly broke the story...
...and in October a summation of all we had thus far learned about Whitewater, ending with this overly sanguine line: "The real investigation of Whitewater has just begun, offering constant potential for a collapse in the stone wall...
...F rom 1996 to the present Byron York has also remained the intrepid investigative reporter...
...By the end of 1995 we had detected most of the patterns of corruption that would run through the next few years of the Clinton regime ending up with the present riot of gaucheries, felonies, abuses of power, and other grounds for impeachment...
...It was reviewed by Judge Robert Bork in our December issue...
...He employed private investigators to gather dirt and to smear those whom he wished to discredit...
...So now, five years after The American Spectator published the Arkansas state troopers' accounts of life with Governor Bill Clinton, other editors are finding out how the editors of The American Spectator felt when we laid eyes on the salacious text of our first Troopergate piece...
...As with Troopergate, most of these investigative pieces were met with studied neglect by America's political elites, a dereliction that allowed President Clinton to become more reckless and destructive than Governor Clinton...
...Apple exploded to an English journalist, "Do you want us to go round giving credibility to every piece of dirt thrown at the President by those a--- --- s at The American Spectator...
...April...
...He, of course, was Roger Clinton's employer...
...On the return trips drugs were being brought in by a rogue pilot, Barry Seal...
...After the Troopergate stories in 1994 the next story of moment was David Brock's Travelgate piece...
...Are the men and women of a given period possessed of sufficient wit and virtue, stupidity and baseness, to achieve their goals or avoid catastrophe...
...It shows Clinton for the unprincipled political operator that he is, and the felonies committed at Mena might reveal him as an habitué of underworld corruption as well as political corruption...
...When Brown informed Clinton, the governor said, "That's Lasater's deal," the reference being to Clinton's friend and supporter Dan Lasater...
...His America would be a land where the powerful could overawe everyone else...
...He was to be yet another of the Clintons' "designated fall guys," in this instance for Travelgate...
...I disputed him then...
...2) The fundamental charge is abuse of power...
...Our November issue carried the first published interviews of the fired Travel Office employees, whose stories—told by York—should have caused wider alarm than they did...
...We have attracted the outrage of many liberals, most of whom could not believe in the perfidy of a man they considered one of their own...
...History moves perpetually, like a great ocean...
...Ordinary Americans like Paula Jones live with a sense of freedom...
...Readers of The American Spectator have been weighing such terminal considerations for years...
...It turned out that the President's alledgedly shameless conduct had implicated 24 laws with total potential criminal liability of disqualification from federal office, 178 years incarceration, and more than $2.5 million in fines...
...Now the likelihood of impeachment is growing, to the astonishment of some Americans but not to our readers...
...Throughout 1997 York reported on foreign involvement in the administration and its campaigns...
...Clinton was behind the Travelgate firings, the purpose of which was essentially cronyism...
...C ampaign finance fraud was an emerging theme in our 1994 issues...
...6 When she saw her name in The Amero jean Spectator, the spark to file the suit ignited...
...In the April 1998 issue York wobbled enthusiastic advocates of impeachment—for instance, me—when he foretold that Starr's report would not mention earlier abuses of power, focusing instead on felonies arising from l'af- faire Lewinsky...
...One issue that is now dormant, the death of Vince Foster, will in my opinion come alive again when historians begin excavating this amazing six years...
...Fewer are calling us such names now, and I do not know anyone who can call us wrong...
...The economy would be humming along...
...Some of our friends have been swept away...
...Ever since Clinton exposed himself to her in a Little Rock hotel room, this very ordinary American woman had been nursing her angers...
...Clinton's health-care plan for our March issue, the same issue that included Kenneth Timmerman's piece on the cozy deals that the Red Chinese were getting under Clinton...
...In "Beyond Whitewater" and "The Obstructionists," Adams reported evidence of the Clintons looting Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan in part to arrange hasty funding for their gubernatorial campaigns...
...In our July 1998 issue he and Laurie Mylroie reported on how Clinton'sforeign policy was being effectively thwarted by Saddam Hussein...
...Last year I laid out the scenario of how Clinton's impeachment would look in my docudrama, The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton (Regnery...
...As the fainthearted fell away, Jim Adams repeatedly turned out pieces revealing the Clintons as a menace to the integrity of the nation's banking and pension system, much as they were to the state of Arkansas...
...All these revelations appeared here months before the rest of the press reported them...
...namely, in violation of House rules, dumping sought-after information on Congress just minutes before a White House aide was to testify, sometimes redacting that information for frivolous reasons, sometimes sending the wrongmaterial...
...Also in 1996 he exposed previous drug use by the White House staff (November), and exposed that improbable Clinton apologist, the listless and factless Gene Lyons (October...
...However, we have decided not to edit the text of the report...
...Well, again, I accept the vindication with satisfaction and sadness...
...In 1994 Adams also introduced one of the victims of the Clintons and their partners the McDougals, Freddie Whitener...
...The First Lady's reported misdeeds flouted five laws with a potential criminal liability of 47 years' incarceration and penalties of $1.2 million...
...That Clinton has repeatedly challenged equality before the law, putting himself above the law, signifies the seriousness of his threat to America...
...Both were eventually convicted of drugviolations and jailed...
...In it we did not intend to include the names of any of the women who had been approached by the troopers...
...We do know that we have been amassing evidence across an ever wider range of felonious behavior since 1992 when Bob Novak wrote "The Trouble With Clinton" in our June issue...
...They did not have to persecute them...
...This was the first in an ongoing series of fresh reporting on the high-technology giveaways by the Clinton Commerce Department to China, Clinton's eventual campaign donor...
...The Clintons have done their worst...
...Firing the employees was the Clintons' preThe American Spectator • November 1998 1 9 rogative...
...We shall see...
...Why did it have to take so long, and what further price will the American political system have to bear...
...18 November 1998 The American Spectator Again, all the misbehavior of raffaire Lewinsky was on display in the Troopergate stories, where Clinton was seen misusing state employees and state property such as rooms in the Governor's Mansion, police cars, and credit cards...
...It has been a long and not always amusing chase...
...the sand washes underfoot...
...Nor do we know how our six years of reporting on him will be entered in the record books...
...The American Spectator's investigative journalist, Byron York, in an imagined 1997 New York Times Book Review roundup of Clinton books, predicted the president's impeachment and the first couple's divorce...
...22 November 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Judge Stan's later report claims that all these questions have been resolved...
...There we see Governor Clinton encouraging Brown, his "fair-haired boy" among the troopers, to enter into a CIA operation that shipped arms out of Mena to the Nicaraguan contras...
...By sheer oversight we left the first name "Paula" in the piece...
...In our September issue we showed how Hillary Rodham Clinton could not possibly have made the cattle futures trades that she claimed to make...
...Instead he came forward and revealed Hillary's key role in the firings, her affair with Foster (first revealed in Troopergate), and other White House unsavories...
...and James Carville's campaign against Starr (August...
...Brock demonstrated that Mrs...
...On NBC's "Dateline" I was chided for this fatidical satire when interviewed by Lisa Myers...
...We were the first (and so far remain the only) publication to climb the Clinton family tree and demonstrate thatthe nubile Catherine Cornelius of Travelgate fame could not be the presidential cousin that the White House insisted she was...
...He offered government jobs for sex and silence...
...The laxness of our technology transfer policy was first reported in a piece by Michael Ledeen and Stephen Bryen in our June 1994 issue...
...From Troopergate to Monicagate The Washington Post, Saturday, September 12, 1998, from its "Editorial Note" introducing the full, unedited text of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report to Congress: "We recognize that the independent counsel's report contains extensive sexually explicit material that normally would be unacceptable for publication in the Post...
...In our August issue we published my full account of trooper L.D...
...In 1997's January issue Borders unveiled the first White House staffer to break with the Clintons, David Watkins...
...It came as no surprise when New York Times writer R.W...
...the White House's spurious claims of attorney-client privilege (July...
...There the Riady family of the Indonesian Lippo Group is introduced as having political and financial ties to the Clintons reaching back to the 1980's...
...But malicious law-breaking is a habit with the Clintons, as is lying...
...incoming White House Counsel Charles Ruff's formidable capacity to stonewall (June...
...I look back on that piece with a mixture of subdued satisfaction and sadness...
...In January 1998 Bill Clinton believed that he was standing on a sound political footing thanks to his masterful dissembling and his brilliant legerdemain with lies...
...Unnoticed by him, a silent rip tide came along...
...The rule of law extends to them as it does to governors and presidents...
...Now on the national level ordinary Americans could be bullied by the powerful...
...He should have quit while he was ahead...
...Then we thought the trouble was his truthfulness...
Vol. 31 • November 1998 • No. 11
