The Problem of Privilege
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr The Problem of Privilege The odds on impeachment, never very great for President Bill Clinton given his high poll ratings, have sunk to near zero...
...Whew...
...His defense was that the reason for the late night activity at his home was that he was having an affair with Reynolds' wife...
...The Clinton White House as well has had higher level defectors than Willey and Tripp...
...Well, couldn't they have waited a few days before scaring us half to death...
...Like Donald Regan, President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, who left the White House on bad terms with Nancy Reagan and got a million-dollar advance for a book ridiculing her devotion to astrology...
...Meanwhile, Presidential aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal are still refusing to answer some of the Independent Counsel's questions...
...It may be time for a law limiting the right of government insiders to profit from what they leam or invent...
...Now, six Iraqi survivors of that failed effort, who were given refuge in this country, are fighting deportation...
...Richard Seed in Chicago says he will clone a human being...
...The tribunal has already decided, in the Paula Jones case, that a President is not immune from civil proceedings...
...Attorney General Janet Reno ordered an investigation into the disclosure of classified information, but it went nowhere...
...Now we face what, in effect, is becoming the criminalization of sin...
...By law, the Administration is supposed to notify Congress in advance of a covert operation through something called "a Presidential finding...
...Then there was Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent in the White House...
...Seed, who is only a physicist anyway, could not do it in a million years...
...Callendar and 13 others were convicted of sedition...
...You have to wonder about all the trouble Gutenberg has caused us...
...Out of this, and other such embarrassing stories, came the Sedition Act...
...Under House reprimand, Gingrich had to renounce a $4.5 million advance from Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins...
...What I find objectionable are "inside the White House" books by insiders who go outside and dish the dirt for fun and profit...
...As required by law, he will report to the House of Representatives on any allegations involving the President and the First Lady...
...Starr has been seeking the advice of legal scholars about whether, in the absence of House action on charges of criminal offenses, he has the authority, perhaps even the obligation, to include the President in any indictments he may pursue...
...The moon is 240,000 miles away, for Pete's sake...
...On a recent Sunday, Dan Quayle, who in 1992 fended off suggestions of an involvement in 1980 with lobbyist Paula Parkinson during a Florida golf weekend, became the first candidate of the year 2000 Presidential season to disclaim adultery...
...This has been a jittery time, worrying about the asteroid, anthrax, cloning, not to mention all the El Ninos...
...Hart refused to answer, but later told his press secretary, "This thing is never going to end, is it...
...In 1974, a unanimous Court held that Executive privilege is entitled to great respect, but not when it comes up against a prosecutor's need for evidence in a criminal proceeding...
...Look, let's just go home...
...It is hard to say when the public will determine that obsession with adultery is not necessarily adult...
...As far as we know, he has not come to a decision...
...The asteroid will miss the planet by 600,000 miles...
...Whether he is immune from criminal indictment remains an open question, despite Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's decision in 1974 that President Nixon could not be subjected to simultaneous impeachment and prosecution...
...About the time we are really scared, we are told that Dr...
...President Clinton is against the idea, because experience teaches that if you tell a secret to Congress it won't stay secret very long...
...Since the present case concerns conversations of White House aides and the First Lady with the President and among themselves, there is no way of knowing from outside if they meet the requirements the Supreme Court has carefully set down...
...You could feel the nervousness coursing through the country...
...So, can President Clinton get away with claiming Executive privilege for conversations about strategy in dealing with civil litigation and criminal investigation...
...But what if, as seems likely at the moment, the House gravely nods its head and does nothing...
...In February of last year...
...Ian Wilmut in Scotland announces that from the mammary cells of a six-year-old ewe he has cloned a sheep named Dolly...
...You mean the stuff Saddam Hussein is supposed to be hiding, ajar of which, according to Defense Secretary William Cohen, could wipe out a city...
...Now a new generation of reporters and their sources face the challenge of an angry Independent Counsel, looking for blood and able to drag people before a grand jury...
...The politics of sex has clearly become a witches' brew, likely to poison the political process for a long time to come...
...The White House insists they are covered by Executive privilege...
...After Kathleen Willey's effective appearance on 60 Minutes to charge Presidential molestation, it came out that her lawyer was trying to negotiate a $300,000 advance from a publisher for his client...
...A second was the sponsoring and subsequent dumping of a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein in 1972...
...As it was, he had to content himself with an enemies' list and an FBI investigation of me...
...The Return of Adultery and Sedition Two other words are currently in vogue in the Capital...
...Dishing Dirt for Profit A word about books...
...Hamilton strongly denied the charge...
...In 1948, the Supreme Court held that the President could invoke Executive privilege, but only in rare circumstances involving national security...
...One is "adultery...
...The Court has now agreed to decide, in a case involving a lawyer's notes of a conversation with White House lawyer Vincent Foster nine days before his suicide, whether lawyer-client confidentiality continues after the death of the client...
...Impeachment is not a judicial act, it is a political act, and politicians in Congress have no difficulty figuring out which side is up...
...It informed Congress much later in something called a "retroactive finding...
...Never have we had such a plethora of issues involving the Presidency up for adjudication...
...Or, take cloning...
...So he retired and spilled the story to ABC television and the Washington Post...
...Next, Dr...
...Probably not, if Starr can demonstrate the information is relevant to his inquiry and there is no other way to secure it...
...The idea of seeing lots of twos of us where there were ones before is enough to make us shudder...
...A third concerned support in 1975 for the rebellion of pro-Western Jonas Savimbi in Angola against the Soviet-backed government...
...That scheme included small arms for Kurdish guerrillas and leaflets ridiculing Saddam Hussein on his birthday, dropped over Baghdad by unmanned aircraft...
...Thanks to my friend William Safire, who has been researching the subject for a book, I was able to go back 200 years to the Sedition Act of 1798 and learn how the government treated irksome journalists in those days...
...Thanks to Jefferson's people, Callendar reported that an unsavory associate of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton named James Reynolds had late night meetings at Hamilton's home, getting inside information to speculate in government securities...
...and the doctor-patient, lawyer-client, priest-penitent privilege to protect the confidentiality of these relationships...
...Before him, there were the tomes by several of the Watergate gang—John Dean, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself—who taught us that the wages of sin include royalties...
...CIA Drafts Covert Plan to Topple Hussein...
...A major program of sabotage and subversion," the Times said, quoting unnamed "government officials...
...Another is Executive privilege, not mentioned in the Constitution yet asserted by Presidents back to Thomas Jefferson to protect the confidence of Chief Executive consultations...
...A good thing, too, if you will allow a self-serving comment...
...Could be called the "Son of Uncle Sam Law...
...Oh, for the day when all we had to worry about was the next alien spaceship...
...The "Big A," Bush called it, and said, no, he never had...
...The Michael Isikoff of his day (Isikoff is the Newsweek reporter who broke the Monica Lewinsky story) was James Calendar, who wrote for the newspaper Aurora...
...Nor am I talking about books that are controversial because of the financial arrangements covering them—for example, the deals that got two House speakers, Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich, into trouble...
...the Fifth Amendment privilege not to incriminate yourself...
...Not with Federal money, you won't, says President Clinton, calling human cloning "morally unacceptable...
...The Presidency has already been substantially diminished and is likely to be further diminished...
...Ideologically-minded foundations that once dealt mainly in policy have developed investigative arms probing for scandal...
...Then there are legal privileges shared by Americans: the First Amendment privilege to write and speak freely, and—although not always upheld by the courts—to guard confidential sources...
...Do we still have time for the last episode of Seinfeld...
...The Reagan Administration came up with a novel version of that when it did not want to tell Congress of CIA involvement in shipping missiles to Iran...
...Anthrax...
...It looks as though the Court will be spending a considerable amount of its time with matters of Presidential rights and immunities...
...Now, too, Congress wants to protect the right of CIA whistle-blowers to tell it about wrongheaded operations...
...What is it with these scare stories about those nasty El Ninos and asteroids lurking out there to do us wholesale harm...
...A covert plan you read about in the papers, however, is clearly a covert plan no longer...
...In New Hampshire in 1987, after a wellpublicized tryst with a Miami woman, candidate Gary Hart was asked by Paul Taylor of the Washington Post whether he had ever committed adultery...
...The Sedition Act lapsed and was not re-enacted...
...Their lawyer —former CIA Director James Woolsey...
...Thus, an adulterer, not a speculator...
...How many potential candidates will in the future be driven away from electoral politics as a dung heap can only be surmised...
...Certain privileges exist for people in authority, ostensibly so that they can serve us better...
...The last time a covert plan to topple Iraq's dictator was leaked, at least it was only after the whole thing had fizzled...
...There have been books about Aldrich Ames, the convicted CIA mole, but none by him...
...His Unlimited Access, with sundry unsavory tales of the President and the First Lady, sold half a million copies...
...Wouldn't you just know it...
...Gary Hart said in 1987, "What it gets down to is not crime, but sin...
...Will the asteroid close down the Kenneth Starr investigation...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr The Problem of Privilege The odds on impeachment, never very great for President Bill Clinton given his high poll ratings, have sunk to near zero since the dismissal of Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against him...
...One of Callendar's prize sources was Vice President Thomas Jefferson...
...Former political adviser Dick Morris, patron of prostitutes, got an advance of $2.5 million for claiming at length that he almost single-handedly engineered the 1996 election victory...
...The second word making a modest comeback is "sedition...
...I'm not talking about the spate of books simply trading on notoriety, like the shelfload of O. J. Simpson volumes...
...From Covert to Overt The headline in the New York Times was humorous, perhaps intentionally...
...This is the stuff of the Sedition Act," said First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, referring to Starr's use of grand jury subpoenas to ferret out leaks to journalists critical of him and his staff...
...What a quaint word...
...He volunteered his denial on NBC's Meet The Press, responding to the question of whether marital fidelity has become a qualification for high office...
...Just as they are getting ready to search the New York City subway system, though, the FBI comes out and says, no, not anthrax disease, but a common antianthrax vaccine...
...Then we are told that Dolly was not a true clone to begin with...
...American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein points out that sex as a political weapon is becoming institutionalized...
...Just think what Starr would do if he had that old Sedition Act...
...Dr Wilmut, it seems, used a fetal cell, not an adult cell, which makes what he did something other than cloning...
...In the case of the Nixon tapes, there was no doubt on either of those scores...
...Sedition...
...After a couple of days of suppressed panic, word came from NASA...
...Luckily, Jefferson was elected President and he pardoned them all...
...It prohibited "false, scandalous, and malicious writings," and "any writings against the government of the United States,' on pain of fines and prison up to two years...
...Soon we can expect the High Court to be asked to redefine the limits of Executive privilege...
...One day we learn that the FBI has arrested two men in Las Vegas suspected of carrying anthrax germs...
...Warren Marek, who ran that operation for the CIA, thought it was absurd...
...In 1992, George Bush was asked by Mary Tillotson of CNN whether he had ever committed adultery...
...Yes, anthrax...
...That was when President Richard M. Nixon had to surrender his lethal tapes...
...On television they made anxious little jokes...
...As early as four years ago, Linda Tripp was talking to New York book agent Lucianne Goldberg about a project never realized, titled "Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw at the Clinton White House...
...One is the privilege the Constitution grants members of Congress not to be sued or prosecuted for what they say on the House or Senate floor...
...That was before the Supreme Court started reviewing laws for constitutionality...
...The laws on sexual discrimination and harassment provide an avenue for a discovery process, enabling the accuser to search for damaging information from the past, backed by the threat of perjury...
...In its original meaning it has to do with the advantage of the upper classes, like "the privileged rich...
...Without being specific about my own past sources, there is a long history of CIA operations that leaked after being confided to Congressional committees...
...It should be remembered that his mandate stretches from the Arkansas land deal to the White House travel office to the misuse of FBI personnel files...
...Whatever hazards remain for the President lie mainly in Independent Counsel Kenneth W.Starr's investigation...
...It is my theory that natural threats are needed by the media to compete with the scandals and all the human follies that hold our attention...
...That is because of the "Son of Sam Law," which prevents a criminal from profiting from his crime...
...The story went on to say it could even hit the earth, with devastating effects like continent-size fires, vast clouds of dust, and millions upon millions of people killed...
...That goes for Hillary Rodham Clinton as well...
...One was the 1970 attempt to bring down President Salvador Allende of Chile...
...An interesting word...
...A Jittery Time A three-column front-page headline in the Times declared, "Asteroid is Expected to Make a Pass Close to Earth in 2028...
...No need to keep biting our nails...
...Imagine what President Nixon would have done with a Sedition Act...
Vol. 81 • April 1998 • No. 5
