Last Call: Forget it, Jake
York, Byron
LAST CALL by Byron York Forget it, Jake IN THE LAST SCENE OF CHINATOWN, THE troubled Los Angeles socialite played by Faye Dunaway is frantically trying to gather up her daughter and get away...
...IN AUGUST HE'LL try former Clinton crony Webb Hubbell on fraud charges stemming from the original Whitewater investigation...
...But the trial will still be worth the trouble...
...in fact, neither admitted guilt for anything having to do with the 1996 campaign...
...A few days later, the House released the Cox Report, which details how the Justice Department, the Energy Department, the National Security Council, and everyone else in Bill Clinton's administration failed to act in the Chinese espionage case—and then lied about it...
...Now he tells us...
...Of course it is...
...EVEN NOW, THAT REALIZATION IS CREEPING into the brains of some of Bill Clinton's most loyal partisans...
...These days, with the public apparently sick of it all, the real goal of all those who've been investigating Clinton is the verdict of history...
...In the fall of 1997, Brett Kavanaugh, one of the independent counsel's top attorneys, wrote a little-noticed piece in the Georgetown Law Journal that said "sustained presidential (and presidentially directed) criticism of an independent counsel eventually will have an impact on a large percentage of citizens...
...RECENTLY IN WASHINGTON IT HAS BECOME clearer than ever that the corruption emanating from the White House has spread, Chinatown-style, throughout the government...
...The evidence as laid out in the indictment is solid and persuasive—so much so that I'll put my money on a hung jury...
...Given the extensive evidence of money laundering and conduit contributions involving Huang and Trie, the news was simply breathtaking...
...As long as Clinton was under siege," Shields wrote, "too many of us suppressed our real doubts about him and what he had done by choosing instead to concentrate our attention on the obvious malice and vengefulness of his accusers...
...And the next time you and your conscience get together, perhaps you should rent a movie—like Chinatown...
...It's absurd," one congressional investigator told me...
...At the end of the picture, as Dunaway tries to escape, Huston catches up with her on a Chinatown street...
...They're establishing a record in the hope that sometime in the future, when popular passions have stilled and reason is more abundant, people will look at the everybody-does-it laundered money and the look-what-I-found billing records and the I-was-ministeringto-a-troubled-young-person alibis and the nobody-told-meabout-espionage-at-the-labs lies and concede the obvious: This was a fundamentally corrupt White House...
...she's also revealed his rather shockingly depraved personal life...
...A stunned Nicholson finally comprehends that Huston has corrupted everything—with a malignancy that swallows up the good intentions of those who try to stop him...
...With those words, years of concerted character assassination by the White House paid off yet again, and Starr knew it...
...Then the McDougal trial proved it will work especially in the most clear-cut cases of guilt...
...He owns the police...
...In late May Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr announced he would not re-try Susan McDougal and Julie Hiatt Steele, whose recent trials both ended in hung juries...
...Moments later, she's shot dead by one of her father's officers...
...All these things are just overwhelming," the congressional lawyer sighed...
...A truly energetic political campaign to destroy the credibility of an independent counsel is an effort to obtain a hung jury, and there is a real danger that it will work in all but the most clear-cut cases of guilt...
...8-i 82 July 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Dunaway answers as she gets in her car...
...Dunaway pulls out a pistol and points it at Huston...
...It's such a struggle to press for real answers...
...In court papers filed in the McDougal case, Starr wrote that "it will be very difficult—if not impossible—to find unbiased jurors in this district to serve in a retrial...
...Put that gun away," Nicholson yells...
...He owns the police...
...TV pundit Mark Shields wrote recently in the Washington Post that many Democrats are feeling "a mix of remorse and regret" for their spirited defense of the president...
...THE PRESIDENT EVEN MANAGED TO DESTROY the one cop he didn't own...
...Dunaway has helped private eye Jack Nicholson uncover her father's scheme to reshape much of Southern California for his own profit...
...Nicholson and several police officers are there...
...They could have been indicting these guys for things we had six months into the investigation...
...Let the police handle this...
...LAST CALL by Byron York Forget it, Jake IN THE LAST SCENE OF CHINATOWN, THE troubled Los Angeles socialite played by Faye Dunaway is frantically trying to gather up her daughter and get away from her rich and dangerous father, played by John Huston...
...Then, after Clinton was saved from impeachment, Shields and his compatriots "were left alone with our own consciences....We had no choice but to confront the truly bad things this president had done...
...In late May the Justice Department announced that John Huang and Charlie Trie have agreed to plead guilty to minor charges stemming from their fundraising for Democratic candidates...
...Thanks, Mark...
...Immediately after the deals were announced, Justice officials broadly leaked that neither man knew anything to implicate higher-ups in the White House or the Democratic National Committee...
...BUT STARR SOLDIERS ON...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
