The White House's FBI Blunder Dole's Abortion Blunder
the weekly Standard The White House's FBI Blunder The good news is that Whitewater special counsel Kenneth Starr is now looking into the circumstances under which the Clinton White House...
...But maybe not...
...A 26-year veteran of the FBI who retired from his White House post in 1995 has now alleged, in the Wall Street Journal, that Clinton political appointees manipulated the Bureau's regular security procedures to protect favored colleagues-and punish career employees suspected of disloyalty...
...Okay, said the GOP's strongest voices on abortion, pro and con...
...No malign intent was involved, and no disclosure of personal information from these files occurred...
...Moreover, the A to G list is incomplete...
...The most controversial of its five short sentences proposes an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution...
...I mean, this is a moral issue," he says with exasperation...
...Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen reassures his readers that there is no need for Congress to look into this matter...
...And they stayed okay for the next four days, pleased over the possibility of a relatively peaceful convention at which each side might claim a symbolically meaningful victory...
...Instead, President Clinton's insistence that "it was just an innocent bureaucratic snafu" will essentially be confirmed...
...several prominent Reagan and Bush staffers aren't on it...
...During interviews with ABC and CNN, Dole restated his commitment to the pro-life cause...
...In the process, he has invited eight weeks of unremitting and unflattering press obsession with this battle, deflected attention from the Clinton administration's appallingly abortion-friendly record, and almost guaranteed a week-long display of internecine ugliness in San Diego...
...In short: no harm, no foul...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Dole had accomplished the impossible: mollifying the GOP's pro-life and pro-choice camps with subtle diplomacy concerning their ritualized, bitter dispute over the party platform's abortion plank...
...On the seventh day he rested, sitting square in the middle of the resulting rubble...
...Needless to say, this view had no delegates to the Democratic national convention...
...But the bad news is that, in the meantime, the whole story is being set up to disappear...
...Doles Abortion Blunder In the six days from June 6 to June 11, Bob Dole engineered not one but two astonishing developments in internal Republican abortion politics...
...The controversy began with the revelation that in December 1993, Clinton political appointees requisitioned more than 30 years of FBI security reports on Billy Dale, telling the Bureau that Dale was "being considered for access" to the White House complex of offices...
...Dole, by contrast, has picked a fight he may well lose with the GOP's most important and reliable base-serious people, pace the Times and the Post, with a serious and noble idea...
...After an initial flurry of typically angry (and inaccurate) denials about this misdeed, the White House damage-control operation has coughed up a novel excuse: It's all George Bush's fault...
...If leaked newspaper previews prove true, a separate FBI analysis of the "Filegate" caper, due out before this magazine is printed, will rebut suspicions that Clinton's aides were on a dirt-digging expedition through an "enemies list" of Republicans...
...The list, which inexplicably stops at the letter "G," includes two former White House chiefs of staff, two former presidential press secretaries, and innumerable former Republican aides-most of whose names would be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with daily White House operations...
...And the next day, Dole poured gasoline on this emerging fire, with a direct and irritable televised attack on his pro-life critics, who now threaten to mount a full-scale convention battle over the platform-and maybe sit the election out...
...The permanent White House employees alleged to have provided the president's men with this list surely did not think it comprised only low-level, non-political holdovers...
...the weekly Standard The White House's FBI Blunder The good news is that Whitewater special counsel Kenneth Starr is now looking into the circumstances under which the Clinton White House improperly secured and reviewed highly confidential background information from the FBI on 340-odd Reagan- and Bush-administration employees...
...It is insufficiently pro-life...
...A full accounting of this atrocious invasion of privacy may eventually become public...
...Just the same, Dole said he welcomed the support of pro-choice voters, and the next day's newspapers reported that he would endorse new, penumbral language in the platform acknowledging that the party was home to broadly divergent views...
...Dole began to undo his own skilled handiwork, telling CNN that the platform's forthcoming "big tent" phraseology was "not negotiable" and would probably be attached specifically to the abortion plank...
...Maybe so...
...the rest are "the sort of anonymous people who work day in and day out for the federal government...
...I already have," he says...
...Sister Souljah was a freak who had publicly endorsed black-on-white murders...
...That work will not get started this year, it seems...
...Pro-choice Republicans like Pete Wilson and Bill Weld were emboldened to demand further concessions...
...Clinton's disavowal of it was free of charge...
...Very fishy: This came seven months after that poor man had been falsely accused of embezzlement and summarily fired from his job as White House travel office chief...
...And, unfortunately, there's little reason to expect he will...
...Bob Dole has made the patient sicker...
...Bill Clinton, Cohen comforts us, is a "big, drooling Saint Bernard" of a man, much too nice to permit an "enemies list" vendetta...
...On Thursday, June 6, it looked as though Mr...
...But on Monday, June 10, Mr...
...No way...
...The abortion platform plank the GOP will now make civil war over is flawed, after all...
...It's a hard tale to swallow...
...It will cost him...
...Whatever the ultimate truth, based on what has already been revealed, there's reason to demand that President Clinton-who once promised the "most ethical" White House in history-fire those members of his staff who are responsible for this travesty...
...We are now asked to believe that, in pursuit of this unobjectionable mission, Clinton personnel-security officials inadvertently used an obsolete Secret Service computer listing of people with current and regular business in the White House...
...American abortion politics have never been particularly healthy...
...As if opinions grounded in morality were immutable, like curly hair, and all arguments about them were pointless and impolite...
...It's like Clinton and Sister Souljah in 1992, the Washington Post speculates-an effort by Dole to distance himself from his party's least popular constituency...
...later in the day, his campaign announced that Dole would not "seek or accept retreat" on the question at the upcoming San Diego convention...
...Faced with the prospect of a platform in which abortion, alone among subjects, would be singled out for nice-making ambiguity, pro-life leaders issued unhappy warnings...
...As was "access" for 300-plus Reagan- and Bush-era staffers, files on whose private lives had, it soon turned out, also been retrieved from the FBI...
...An unhappy confluence of computer glitches and procedural carelessness is to blame, the FBI has apparently determined...
...So in other words, only really famous people need worry that their financial, medical, and other secrets might have been rummaged through by a legendarily paranoid band of high-placed political hacks...
...It is not clear how he will get back up...
...And it will damage the pro-life cause...
...But the plank's four other sentences fail to commit the party to the awesome task of public persuasion necessary to achieve that goal...
...The mainstream media, always dense with disdain for those who see and proclaim the evil of abortion clearly, discern a risky but necessary calculation in Dole's maneuvers...
...Nonsense...
...It contains several glaring misspellings...
...Bob Dole appears to believe it is impossible...
...Here's Clinton/Gore deputy campaign manager Ann Lewis, in a how-to-confuse-the-issue advisory memo addressed to "friends": "Because the Bush administration had removed all existing personnel security files, including those for holdover employees, the Clinton administration needed to recreate those files for employees who continued to have access...
...According to one academic "authority on the politics of abortion," quoted approvingly by the New York Times, "These pro-life people will probably vote for Dole anyway, and to have them scream at him makes it look like he's not captive...
...And the files the list generated seem to have been reviewed not by FBI agents stationed at the White House, as normal rules would dictate, but by a former Democratic campaign staffer now on the Defense Department payroll, a man instructed by unnamed higher-ups to search for and report on "derogatory" data...
...Dale's "access" to the White House was already a dead letter...
...I can recognize only a few names" on the list...
...All those retired Republicans among them...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 40
