The Nation's Pulse: Ray of Hope
Eastland, Terry
ren plains of their hearts, in their inability even to comprehend the spiritual impulse, they're exactly the same. G.K. Chesterton said that people who no longer believe in God will believe in...
...Ray's statement advances Starr's testimony by closing the book on the FBI files matter...
...The court's jurisdictional grant was narrow: Marceca was the only person it named and the charge was to look into whether he had lied to investigators...
...Why...
...Clinton, it was said, "clandestinely placed" Craig Livingstone in charge of White House security, or, as another version had it, he was "hand picked" by her, and then she "dissimulated" about what she had done...
...Because after all of this work, the evidence on Filegate is not there--not to support the prosecution of Hillary Clinton or anyone else...
...Mrs...
...But everyone knew that the question bounced to Starr was whether there had been a politically motivated conspiracy involving senior White House officials and/or the Clintons to violate the Privacy Act...
...Clin54 May 2o o o " The American Spectator ton about hiring Livingstone or about his knowledge concerning the circumstances of Livingstone's appointment...
...The report doubtless will specify the nature of this question as well as what other "very live, active elements" there were...
...No news is good news, and God news is no news at all...
...it was an abuse of power, part of his "extensive criminality...
...Others have now thought the same about Ray...
...But today, four years after the files story first emerged, four years during which we have had extensive investigations by not only the Office of Independent Counsel, but also two congressional committees, the manifestly sounder judgment is that it is time to move on...
...Ray noted that any Privacy Act violations, being misdemeanors, would be outside his jurisdiction as independent counsel...
...As Paul wrote in his Second Epistle to Timothy, "In the last days perilous times shall come...
...If the judges then release the total package--as they generally have in previous independent counsel investigations- the time for full evaluation will finally have arrived...
...On the accelerating anti-Christian hatred in Western society (which is really a form of societal self-hatred), we have been silent and accepting for too long...
...Menstrual fetishists are a fine symbol of our present-tense culture...
...Ray concludes: "There was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved" in seeking the files...
...In response, a White House spokesman said that Ray's statement "confirms what Mr...
...n March Robert W. Ray, the independent counsel who succeeded Kenneth Starr last October, filed with the pertinent court a report on his office's probe of the FBI files matter, also known as "Filegate...
...by Terry Eastland Ray of Hope Filegate and the indictments that never came...
...O ne response to the conclusions of these two independent counsels is to blame them for not doing enough...
...In fact, what Starr said, with respect to the FBI files matter, was merely that there was "no evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone ...who would be relevant to the committee's assessment of our referralY The only person so relevant, of course, was the president himself...
...Sometimes the guilty are not found out...
...Nor, if you want to go back that far, to include as a ground for President Clinton's impeachment...
...But with these sentences Ray definitely set himself up to speak to (a) "substantial cooperation and assistance," or (b) the lack thereof, with respect to Travelgate and Whitewater...
...Each report will remain under seal for three months, during which time those named will be able to make comments in an appendix...
...The White House said the files (which can contain disparaging material) were never used and had not been retrieved for partisan political reasons...
...Thus, some assessment is possible now...
...Given what the record already shows in these matters, I expect Ray's future statements will include a lot of (b...
...But even he would never have expected to see a cathedral trashed by people who believe in...condoms...
...In filing his first report, Ray usefully has provided its conTERRY EASTLAND is publisher of TAS and TAS Online, where a version of this article first appeared...
...Lawyers who then worked for Starr's office have told me that there was a question involving Marceca that needed further investigation...
...According to the New York Times, Ray will also file a report on '~ elgate" in early summer and then one on Whitewater in late summer...
...The ability to make distinctions, especially on the part of Clinton watchers, is in need of recovery...
...The New York Times interpreted them as an attempt on Ray's part to strike "a different tone" from Starr, "who had deeply strained relations with the White House...
...Ray, refusing to say more, declined my interview request...
...The best response to the work of the two counsels is to say: Well, okay, but let us make distinctions...
...Ray did not have to include these two sentences...
...Ray added that there was '!no substantial and credible evidence" that Mrs...
...Filegate, it was said, provided grounds for actually impeaching Clinton...
...Nothing is so politically effective;' wrote Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in the 1988 Morrison case, which sustained the independent counsel law, "as the ability to charge that one's opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, 'crooks.'" An irony of the Clinton era is that more than a few conservatives, perhaps because they were so often flummoxed by the dextrous Clinton, accepted this invitation and vcound up like the liberals they rightly criticized during the Reagan and Bush presidencies for"criminalizing politics...
...Bob Ray, obviously, is now the one to listen to...
...In "Where Starr Stands," a carefully reported cover story for the April 1998 Spectator, Byron York concluded it was "unlikely" that Starr would bring any cases in the files matter, nor one against Nussbaum...
...On the matter of AIDS and homophobia, the gay crowd have a good slogan: "Silence = acceptance...
...Perhaps...
...Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof...
...We celebrate the time of the month because we're barely capable of remembering anything before that...
...Our findings, based upon an extensive investigation, indicated that there was no dissemination [of the files] for partisan political purposes...
...Starr's testimony and Ray's statement, taken together, vindicate none of these statements and contradict all of them...
...Their assumption is that the evidence of criminality is there, it must be there--somewhere...
...For years critics argued that one of the problems with the independent counsel law was the reductionism it invited--a reductionism that makes the criminal law the measure of all things...
...And there is a passage in his first statement worth noting for future reference...
...More than once it was said, the indictments are coming, and then no indictments were handed up...
...As the Pope recognized, the Church has done bad things...
...And it must be pursued, whatever the cost...
...Of course, there is always that possibility, here as in any other investigated but non-prosecuted case...
...Readers of The American Spectator will not be surprised by Ray's bottom line...
...Say this enough, by the way, and people will cease to listen...
...For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers...
...Heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God...
...All in all, not a pretty picture, one of many from this tawdry presidency...
...Without the report in hand, it's difficult to judge the roles of Livingstone or Marceca, or, for that matter, of the FBI, and it's impossible to know how Ray dealt with what Nussbaum was quoted in an FBI interview summary as saying, and which Nussbaum said was a misquote-that Livingstone had been "highly recommended" by the first lady...
...Indeed, her lying was "under oath...
...Attorney General Janet Reno asked Starr to investigate...
...For while there was nothing prosecutable, there were, as FBI Director Louis Freeh has said, "egregious" violations of privacy, not to mention inept administrative work on the part of people charged with, of all things, White House security...
...The White House," said Ray, "provided substantial cooperation and assistance, as did the FBI and the United States Secret Service...
...clusions in a public statement, a practice he apparently intends to continue...
...Starr said [in his House testimony on his impeachment referral] two years ago...
...When it turned out that Starr had not recommended Filegate as a ground of impeachment, TAS Editorin-Chief Bob Tyrrell expressed the sentiments of many when he wrote that the prosecutor should have east his net more widely...
...On ABC's "This Week," Ray went beyond his statement to say "the files went into the vault at the White House and that's where they remained...
...But neither Livingstone, whom no one at the White House would admit to actually having hired, nor Marceca, who had a history of fringe political activity, were the sort usually entrusted with White House security matters...
...Chesterton said that people who no longer believe in God will believe in anything...
...The President did not assert any privileges and the White House, principally through the White House Counsel's Office, allowed OIC personnel substantial access to facilities, documents, and witnesses in order to obtain all relevant evidence relating to these two investigations...
...Still, Ray's conclusions are crystal clear...
...Might the Clintons, who had proven themselves untrustworthy in other contexts and whose White House had compiled an enemies list, have been up to something, well, Nixonian...
...So is his bottom line: No prosecutions were warrante d - not of the Clintons or anyone else...
...Starr added that the FBI files investigation had "very live, active elements" to it...
...Ray also said--concluding another matter Reno gave Starr later in 1996--that there was "no substantial and credible evidence" that former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum lied to Congress regarding his discussions with Mrs...
...But even nonbelievers have to acknowledge that Western liberal society is built on Judeo-Christian foundations: Try throwing sanitary napkins in Jeddah or Tehran and see where it gets you...
...This first report concems a matter that came to light in 1996: that during the first year of the administration the White House director of security, Craig Livingstone, and his aide, Anthony Marceca, improperly obtained hundreds of FBI background files, including those of officials of previous Republican administrations...
...On the other hand, Ray's conclusion may disturb those writers who had decided these matters long ago...
...Clinton was involved in hiring Livingstone...
...The American Spectator _9 May 2 o o o 55...
...The privacy violations, moreover, are the object of a civil lawsuit seeking damages...
...It had all been "an honest bureaucratic snafu...
...The early Apostles wouldn't have been surprised...
...A form of godliness" is a good way of putting it: You elevate your "pleasures" and their attendant paraphernalia--condoms, abortion clinics--into a new creed of "tolerance" and "diversity" that eventually supplants traditional morality...
Vol. 33 • May 2000 • No. 4
