Stonewalling works
BARNES, FRED
Stonewalling Works by Fred Barnes David E. Kendall, the private attorney for President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, got carried away in his June 3 letter attacking independent counsel Kenneth...
...appeals court to yield the lawyers' notes, has appealed to the Supreme Court...
...The committee couldn't make much of this...
...Stonewalling—even of investigations undertaken by Clinton's own Justice Department—is now a defining characteristic of Clinton's presidency...
...It took him 10 days to get a routine subpoena of a client's record at the Bank of China (to find where funds for campaign donations had come from...
...Stonewalling Works by Fred Barnes David E. Kendall, the private attorney for President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, got carried away in his June 3 letter attacking independent counsel Kenneth Starr...
...Things got better...
...Asked in April whether he would urge former business partner Susan McDougal to appear before a Whitewater grand jury and tell the truth about his role, the president responded: "She has a lawyer...
...So what's the problem with her repeating this under oath before a grand jury...
...How exactly do the Clin-tonites stonewall...
...Executive editor Fred Barnes appears weekly on Fox on Politics on the Fox News Channel...
...Most have lawyers and have told the congressional committees they won't talk...
...When Thompson's committee sought logs of Clinton pal Charlie Trie's visits to the White House, one page had everything but Trie's name blacked out—no date, no time, no indication of whom Trie had seen...
...The latest claim is that Hillary Clinton's conversations with White House lawyers are privileged...
...One key issue involved Hillary Clinton's contacts after the 1993 death of Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel...
...Has Gore interceded to make sure they cooperate...
...He's done it by a ceaseless campaign of stonewalling...
...Charlie Trie, Clinton's favorite Little Rock restaurateur, and Pauline Kanchanalak, a frequent visitor to the White House, and John H. K. Lee have skipped the country...
...Did the president's men obstruct justice by drumming up lucrative legal work for Webb Hubbell, who is stiffing investigators...
...This happened in the Senate hearings on Whitewater...
...Republican senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, once the minority Watergate counsel and now chairman of the Senate probe of 1996 political fund-raising abuses, says Clinton and his aides have cited more legal grounds for impeding investigators than President Nixon did in Watergate...
...Zip, and Congress has no power to extradite them...
...Obtaining White House documents is laborious and lengthy...
...Too expensive and too few interviews have been lined up, said Glenn in a letter...
...To make matters worse, Democrats on the Hill often abet White House stonewalling...
...Indeed, Dean mentions in his book, Blind Ambition, that he and Nixon once agreed their conversations were privileged—strange bedfellows for Hillary, who worked at the House Judiciary Committee to impeach Nixon...
...Blaming Starr for failing to finish his investigation is like blaming a shooting victim for getting in the bullet's way...
...Though executive privilege normally applies only in national-security cases, Clinton invoked it in Travelgate to thwart the investigation of the firing of seven minor officials...
...Johnny Chung, another frequent White House visitor, hasn't responded to a subpoena...
...But if he testifies, it won't be thanks to Clinton...
...His first request, made April 9, involved documents in 28 categories...
...Clinton has...
...Not surprisingly, the White House is no help in getting witnesses to testify—quite the opposite...
...When that produced little, Thompson complained directly to Erskine Bowles, the president's chief of staff...
...Every way they can think of...
...McDougal remains in jail, convicted of contempt for refusing to testify...
...Given this, the White House has calculated that Clinton suffers more from promptly releasing damaging information than from coming clean tardily or not coming clean at all...
...Last year, four White House aides turned over subpoenaed papers to the Senate Banking Committee just as its Whitewater hearings were ending...
...Starr hasn't prolonged the probe...
...By this reasoning, John Dean could have refused to testify in Watergate about his boss, Richard Nixon, by invoking attorney-client privilege...
...Were he truly cooperating, Clinton might urge them to testify...
...This is what's unprecedented...
...In mid-May, he sent another request...
...The Thompson committee has also subpoenaed 23 nuns and monks at the Buddhist temple in California at which vice President Al Gore pitched for campaign funds in 1996...
...Now Democrats are making it difficult for Thompson to proceed...
...The Clinton State Department...
...In case the message wasn't clear enough, Clinton apologist James Carville declared noisily on CNN, "It's time to end this thing...
...The only contested things I recall in Watergate had to do with the tapes," Thompson says...
...This means not chasing every rainbow or every partisan rumor," Kendall said...
...What matters in congressional investigations is the hearings...
...Sure, some delay is "inherent" in a criminal probe, but now it's time for Starr to wind up the investigation...
...They know what they're doing...
...Their explanation for complying months late: They hadn't come across the documents until cleaning out their desks...
...But if critical documents are released tardily, it's usually too late for them to be highlighted in hearings, which take weeks of preparation...
...In 1993, the White House invoked executive privilege to block the transfer of Travelgate documents to the House oversight committee...
...They toy with document requests and subpoenas, sometimes deliberately defying them...
...Says Joseph diGen-ova, a former independent counsel and a Republican: "It is amazing the degree to which they've lawyered these [privilege] questions for delay purposes...
...Well after the Foster phase of the hearings was over, Maggie Williams, the first lady's chief of staff, handed over her phone records, which showed extensive contacts with Hillary following Foster's death...
...What is Clinton doing to get them back...
...Later, Dean testified voluntarily...
...So is former White House aide Mark Middleton...
...Not so you'd notice...
...Clinton could urge Hubbell to straighten out the matter by talking to Starr or congressional committees...
...Still, the White House has put many papers on a "document privilege log" and not released them...
...Meanwhile, the list is growing of Clinton-connected witnesses who won't be testifying at hearings this summer before Thompson's committee and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee (headed by GOP representative Dan Burton of Indiana...
...Besides, there probably isn't time for the committee to litigate any privilege issues...
...They're often nationally televised...
...Hubbell is also taking the Fifth...
...John Glenn of Ohio, the senior committee Democrat, is pressuring Thompson to abandon plans for investigators to travel to Asia...
...Only rarely do the media nick Clinton for stonewalling...
...To keep an incriminating memo by former Clinton aide David Watkins from becoming public, the White House claimed work-product and attorney-client privileges...
...We've received so few documents, we haven't had a chance to worry about the privilege claims," says committee spokesman Paul Clark...
...John Huang, a longtime chum of the president, is pleading the Fifth Amendment...
...Far-fetched claims of privilege began popping up early in Clinton's first term...
...Two months later, barely half the documents had been turned over...
...So helpful have the Clintons been to Starr's investigation, Kendall said, that "their cooperation has been unprecedented...
...Instead, he told Starr to "abandon your public relations offensive, get on with your investigation in the manner of previous independent counsels, and bring it to a speedy conclusion...
...There's a reason the Clinton stonewalling never stops: It works...
...Who has the responsibility for setting up interviews...
...A specialty of Clinton stonewalling is the frivolous claim of executive, attorney-client, or work-product privilege...
...During the Senate Banking Committee's hearings on Whitewater in 1995 and 1996, Democrats raised objections so tenuous even the White House wasn't raising them...
...Clinton didn't say...
...And Sen...
...He hasn't...
...And this is a special problem for Thompson because his investigation expires on December 31...
...So, in Clinton's Washington, stonewalling is here to stay...
...We never should have agreed to that," Thompson says...
...And the White House was hardly punished...
...It's none of my business...
...He hasn't...
...Hillary, ordered by a U.S...
...Clinton said McDougal has already stated publicly that the Clintons did nothing illegal...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
