The Clinton Loophole
The Clinton Loophole Section 607 of the U.S. criminal code makes it a felony to "solicit or receive any contribution" for purposes of a federal election campaign "in any room or building occupied...
...It has immunized from criminal liability precisely those high-ranking public officials it was designed to bring to justice...
...In court papers filed December 2, our current attorney general reports that President Clinton placed "a series of fund-raising solicitation calls" from the White House on October 18, 1994...
...And Janet Reno claims there is "no evidence that the president placed calls from the White House soliciting contributions on any other occasion...
...No, it isn't surprising at all...
...The Weekly Standard holds no brief for the independent-counsel statute...
...This is an incomprehensible judgment—willfully obtuse...
...And in the hands of an attorney general confused to the point of dishonesty, like Janet Reno, it has lately done something even its worst critics never anticipated...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...During the first, in late October 1995, the president phoned organizers of a forthcoming fund-raising gala in New York City and urged them "to raise as much money as possible...
...First, there is Al Gore's fund-raising record as a former member of Congress...
...Not to the DNC's soft-money bank account, but to our reelection campaign—that is, with hard money...
...He described, in great detail, exactly what he'd done during his fund-raising calls, and toward what goal...
...Because, she contends, he was never "specifically aware of the prohibitions of Section 607," and he was never "warned that his conduct would be in potential violation of that or any other statute...
...This time, too, the call was "probably" placed in the Oval Office...
...They must be dealt with, instead, by an independent counsel, whose appointment must be requested from the U.S...
...No, Rep...
...In the hands of an unscrupulous, politically motivated prosecutor, like Lawrence Walsh, it has proved itself susceptible to frightening abuse...
...The attorney general has no discretion about this...
...In late January 1996, Reno also acknowledges, the president phoned an unnamed individual hoping to "clinch" a promised $100,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee...
...You cannot investigate" the president or vice president for something the attorney general has already determined does not require an independent counsel...
...he always used the phone in a nearby private apartment rented for that purpose...
...But alas, because the Clinton administration and a then-Democratic Congress insisted on its reautho-rization in 1994, the independent-counsel statute remains the law...
...The Justice Department is unable to find any evidence that Gore knew the DNC would deposit the cash in hard-money accounts...
...Of course the vice president was "specifically aware of the prohibitions of Section 607...
...There is specific and credible evidence that Vice President Gore has violated the plain letter of Section 607...
...Three pages later, however, she extensively describes two such occasions...
...By law and custom, Gore knew, you didn't dial for dollars from your Senate office...
...This provision applies to any "officer or employee of the United States or any department or agency thereof...
...While sitting at his official West Wing desk, Gore phoned a bunch of people, more than 40, over a period of seven months in 1995 and 1996...
...That law raises serious constitutional questions...
...All the calls originated from the president's third-floor study in the mansion's residential quarters...
...Among these officers and employees, according to a 1979 memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, are the president and vice president of the United States...
...Surely not...
...And while it remains the law, it must be obeyed...
...Clinton made this call from the Oval Office, where "discharge of official duties" is undeniably routine...
...Everybody in federal elective office is aware of them...
...Don't take our word for it...
...At the very same hearing, Janet Reno expressed a just as vehement, though diametrically opposite, view of law-enforcement reality...
...Apparent criminal violations by the president and vice president may not be conclusively investigated and prosecuted by the Justice Department...
...Read this way, to be sure, the law is insane: Fifty-dollar contributions are verboten...
...I don't think it is surprising to people," Gore smirked in March, "that when a president and vice president are running for reelection, that the vice president helps to raise funds for the campaign...
...And no one imagined—let alone officially asserted—that telephone practices like those Janet Reno says Bill Clinton employed are okay...
...First of all, to state the obvious," Gore began, "I was a candidate for reelection in the campaign...
...they were soft-money transactions, each of them...
...All anyone remembers about Gore's infamous March 3, 1997, press conference is the phrase "no controlling legal authority...
...This part of the White House is not intended for the "discharge of official duties...
...But this wasn't illegal, either, the attorney general argues...
...But he did not break the law, Reno concludes, because what he did does not meet the definition of "solicit...
...The independent-counsel statute should be repealed...
...No one the FBI spoke to remembers the vice president's asking for a hard-money donation...
...But when it's done on federal property, it's patently illegal...
...Nowhere in Reno's 29-page report to the court does she mention two (one would think) thoroughly dispositive pieces of very damning evidence...
...The problem is particularly acute since there seems little that anyone can do about it for the next three, long years—until November 2000, when voters will finally get a chance to choose a better president and, by extension, a better attorney general...
...Which is why, until recently, no one did read the law this way...
...Where exactly such information might come from—since no one is any longer allowed to look for it—she could not and did not explain...
...Using his office phone, the vice president acknowledged, he "asked people to contribute to our reelection campaign...
...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by the attorney general of the United States...
...A number of Gore's calls, the paper reported, generated a total of more than $120,000 for the DNC's hard-money bank account...
...the check came through...
...In the immediate aftermath of Janet Reno's refusal to invoke the independent-counsel statute, high Justice Department officials cannot even agree among themselves what aspect of 1996 campaign fund-raising they are still investigating...
...Reno now announces herself impressed with the "consistency of the investigative results" obtained from these interviews...
...So here, at least, there is no question of a Section 607 violation...
...criminal code makes it a felony to "solicit or receive any contribution" for purposes of a federal election campaign "in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties...
...Lantos, not on behalf of the American people...
...When it is not obeyed, as has now become unmistakably clear, the orderly administration of justice in the federal government is destroyed...
...When Janet Reno's testimony ended, Rep...
...And only after these coaching sessions did Janet Reno's crack investigators get around to interviewing any witnesses...
...But they weren't, the Washington Post then revealed in early September...
...Whereupon the vice president's private lawyers immediately rushed to contact everyone Gore had ever talked to about campaign contributions and helped the donors nail down a friendly, uniform story...
...He said a lot of other things, though, too, and he said them on the spot—before his legal advisers had perfected their spin...
...Any such large-dollar contribution goes to a national party's general, "soft-money" reserves...
...Next, there is the extensive, nationally televised testimony of the vice president himself...
...Of course, if "new information is developed," she added, things might change...
...This is a big problem...
...Section 607 can be read to forbid only solicitation on government property of "hard-money" contributions to election campaigns in amounts of $1,000 or less...
...During testimony before a House oversight committee just last week, FBI director Louis Freeh insisted that the Clinton and Gore phone solicitations remained "fully open" as "part of the inquiry...
...The legal authority she cites, honest to God, is the 1977 edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary...
...It is mandatory...
...But Janet Reno has declined to comply with the independent-counsel statute...
...In those days, Newsweek reported in mid-October, Al Gore never made donor calls from his Capitol office...
...Even if he had known, Reno concludes, Gore couldn't be prosecuted for it...
...There is specific and credible evidence that President Clinton has violated the spirit and traditional understanding of Section 607...
...This is lunacy, all of it...
...That matter has ended," she said...
...50,000 contributions are fine...
...Tom Lantos of California thanked her "on behalf of the Democrats on this committee" and "on behalf of the American people" for "another exemplary performance as an outstanding public figure...
...And it worked...
...In the process, she has eviscerated the impartiality of her office and rendered law-enforcement policy in her department a shambles...
...Not to worry, we were advised...
...For most of this year, this novel interpretation of Section 607—call it the "Clinton loophole"—has been Al Gore's sole defense of his own, much more extensive history of White House dollar-dialing...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 15
