The Nation's Pulse: Walsh vs. Starr
Ledeen, Michael
THE NATION'S PULSE by Michael Ledeen Walsh vs. Starr H ow convenient the political memory! Now afflicted with their own Special Prosecutors, the Democrats bemoan the incredible powers of the...
...By the way, when Walsh lost a case, he invariably appealed, burdening his targets with mounting legal expenses and continued stigma...
...There is not a single mention of the pattern of criminal activity Starr has uncovered–and for which several people are now in prison...
...He brought charges against CIA officer Joseph Fernandez in the wrong venue, apparently not realizing that CIA headquarters were in Virginia, not the District of Columbia...
...And vice was rewarded: a high percentage of voters placed Iran-contra among the top two issues influencing their selection...
...That, after all, is what Lawrence Walsh did on the eve of the 1992 presidential elections...
...There was very little challenge to the special prosecutor in Reagan's day, while attacks against Starr emerge by the hour...
...Walsh was astonishingly inept...
...In the last week of the Bush-Clinton campaign, with public attention largely focused on Clinton's immoral activities, and Bush rapidly closing the gap, Walsh suddenly indicted Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger...
...Unlike Walsh, Starr has never made a public statement about the alleged guilt of those he is investigating...
...Walsh has retained his habit of ignoring annoying facts...
...would still be an angel compared to Walsh...
...It's hard to imagine Starr doing anything of the sort...
...Within months of his appointment, Walsh presented various novel theories about his role...
...That's the way a politically motivated prosecutor behaves, and it's most decidedly not the way that Starr behaves...
...Nothing of the sort has been alleged about Starr, even by his most frantic critics...
...So far, at least, Starr has been a big improvement over Walsh...
...boxes of files–the contents of North's office–until North's lawyers filed a discovery request...
...Weinberger said he had every confidence in the colleague's accuracy, and accepted the veracity of the notes, but said he still had no recollection of being told about the Saudi involvement...
...He hounded and harassed his victims for seven years, ruining careers, slandering cabinet secretaries, and bankrupting the innocent...
...The primary accusation against Starr is that he is not investigating crimes, but conducting a political campaign against President Clinton...
...The colleague had jotted it down, and when Weinberger testified that he had no recollection of Saudi contributions, Walsh confronted him with the notes...
...Even if all the cries of righteous indignation against Starr were true–and they are not–he MICHAEL LEDEEN holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute...
...But if Starr were really interested in wreaking political damage on Clinton, he would have timed his court actions to coincide with national elections...
...In the case of Oliver North, Walsh somehow managed to misplace eighty (8o...
...In the Fernandez case, for example, Walsh was laughed out of the courtroom when the government refused to permit Fernandez to introduce evidence about his activities as CIA station chief in Costa Rica...
...They cheered when the Supreme Court, in one of its darkest moments, upheld the constitutionality of the law...
...Starr has had to fight for every scrap of evidence...
...In his only defeat so far, Starr elected to accept the jury's verdict, and moved on...
...He was required to ask the intelligence community if it would permit the use of such information in court...
...64 April 1998 • The American Spectator Justice Department required that the prosecutor believe he had evidence to convince an unbiased jury...
...Walsh took seven years because he refused to give up his crusade, even when judges and juries went against him...
...The Clintons have fought all requests, tooth and nail, tying down Starr (and congressional investigators) in a mire of paperwork and delay...
...B ut the two greatest contrasts between the two special prosecutors have to do with their professional competence, and the behavior of the administrations they investigated...
...There's abundant public evidence to indict Hillary Clinton for perjury in the Travelgate matter...
...Indeed, in Weinberger's case Walsh was so fond of the "false statements" charge that he used it even though the statute of limitations had run out...
...Walsh constantly failed to abide by the laws governing classified information...
...In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, and again in an on-line chat with "Time.com," his discussion of Starr is limited to the Paula Jones case and the Monica Lewinsky escapade, which enables him to misdescribe Starr's entire investigation as concerning "a private activity by the President that in no way affects his use of Presidential power...
...But neither one of them should have been given the awesome powers of their office, which more resembles the British Star Chamber we fought against in the Revolution than the system of justice the Founders envisaged...
...From the beginning, Walsh was looking for excuses to prosecute...
...65 The American Spectator • April 1998...
...They feign to have forgotten that the country owes this anti-American institution to them, and to them alone...
...The differences between Starr and Walsh go beyond questions of propriety...
...And when the ghastly thing had expired at the beginning of the Clinton presidency, it was again the Democrats, goaded on by the two Clintons, who insisted on re-creating it...
...They are not entitled to whine, and those in the public or the press who are now swayed by claims that Kenneth Starr has exceeded the bounds of propriety should pause for a moment to recall the last special prosecutor to delve into allegations of presidential crimes...
...Some eleven years ago Judge Lawrence Walsh was unleashed on the Reagan administration at the time of the Iran-contra affair...
...Now afflicted with their own Special Prosecutors, the Democrats bemoan the incredible powers of the office, the unlimited time, the unlimited staff, the constant intrusions into the privacy of his targets...
...Walsh indicted him for "making false statements to Congress," an invention of Walsh's...
...It was Walsh's personal favorite...
...Starr has brought several people to trial, and has obtained several convictions for real criminal behavior...
...It was the Democrats, after the purge of Richard Nixon, who drafted and passed into law the misnamed "Ethics in Government Act," which created the Special Prosecutor...
...Walsh would have gone to trial by now with such hard evidence, but Starr is undoubtedly looking for even more before taking such a grave step...
...Walsh further asserted that he could prosecute government officials even if they "technically complied with all relevant statutes and regulations," if they concealed their activities from Congress...
...He undoubtedlyknew that the case would be thrown out of court (as it was), but he went ahead anyway...
...One of the many charming ironies in the current situation is that the most outspoken critic of Lawrence Walsh was none other than Bob Bennett, Clinton's lawyer in the Paula Jones case, who was then defending Weinberger...
...He would prosecute, he said, if he found "probable cause" that a crime had been committed, even though the guidelines of the Now who's the one out of control...
...She swore she had no involvement in the purge of the White House Travel Office, but memos from Harry Thomason as well as Vince Foster's contemporaneous notes show she was the driving force...
...When Bush pardoned Weinberger and others awaiting trial at the end of his term, Walsh erupted with pronouncements about Weinberger's guilt, and declared Bush himself a target of the investigation...
...And he has the gall to say, "I don't know that there was a challenge to my credibility as such: the basic challenge to my work was that it took so long and cost so much," when one could fill a lengthy volume with basic criticism of his activities from across the political spectrum...
...This was patent nonsense (even the American government is entitled to a bit of secrecy from time to time), and even Walsh lacked the gall to indict anyone on such grounds...
...So let us not shed a tear for the Democrats, now cringing at the noose they tied themselves...
...Finally, in Iran-contra the Reagan administration pumped documents into investigators' hands (including very sensitive intelligence that should have been withheld), and rarely balked at requests for even more...
...Prior to Iran-contra no executive branch official was ever prosecuted for making unsworn false statements...
...Walsh committed numerous security violations, one–the loss of a briefcase of highly sensitive material that Walsh had ordered checked in at curbside for a flight from Los Angeles to Washington–so serious that it would have automatically led to a major investigation had it been done by a normal government employee...
...The charges were laughable: two years earlier, Weinberger had mentioned to a colleague that he'd heard a rumor that the Saudis were supporting the contras...
...Indeed, Starr is so timorous, and so leery of charges of partisanship, that he has bent over backwards to accumulate his evidence...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
