The Wages of Sid
The Wages of Sid An independent prosecutor had been appointed to investigate a scandal engulfing the White House. But instead of doing that, this prosecutor was "deliberately going into extraneous...
...And he is hardly the only one...
...It is "part of my job," he insisted...
...Department of Justice...
...And the very next day, Lenzner admitted that he had been retained by the president's lawyers— and volunteered to the Post that, in his view, there would be "nothing inappropriate" about poking around the independent counsel's office...
...The idea that criticizing someone to a reporter might constitute an obstruction of justice seems to nearly everyone in the front-row seats, in the words of National Public Radio legal analyst Nina Totenberg, "totally wacko...
...On ABC, Carville shrieks that Starr is an "out-of-control, sex-crazed person...
...Goddamnit, if I had the time, I could do this," he told Haig...
...None of them may ever be proved legally culpable for obstruction of justice...
...He didn't absolutely have to...
...The Clintonian reaction to questions about Monica Lewinsky has smelled like a dirty trick for some weeks now...
...He bragged about it, even, and vowed to continue doing it...
...What might Sid Blumenthal know about such a campaign, and how might he have participated in it...
...The graver threat—an unprecedented threat— is an executive branch of government stocked with people who make it "my job," at best, to "tell the truth slowly," as Mike McCurry puts it, and, more often, to do everything else they can to prevent our legal system from discerning that truth...
...Do these fellows think of this sort of thing...
...It is bad enough that Bill Clinton's unofficial, ostensibly uncoordinated spin campaign has declared unembarrassed "war" on the independent counsel's office...
...But Ken Starr is open to criticism like anybody else, and Blu-menthal's job is to talk with reporters...
...At a reporters' breakfast, Carville mocks Starr for being a Christian...
...Where corruption is concerned, Richard Nixon, more and more, looks like just another also-ran...
...Nixon could not understand why this obvious counteroffensive wasn't already underway...
...But there remain a few notable distinctions to be drawn between the unfortunate PR effects of that subpoena, on the one hand, and its legal grounding and public purpose on the other...
...For that matter, if the White House truly believed its own propaganda that the independent counsel's office is a "Gestapo" entity, then the president could—and should—have ordered the attorney general to fire Ken Starr...
...She is chief judge Norma Holloway Johnson of the federal district court in Washington...
...And "Also how they leak—how many leaks they had...
...But they didn't...
...He did not say no...
...First came a tip to U.S...
...Buzhardt or somebody gotta get off their ass and get up to chapter and verse" on Archibald Cox, Nixon fumed...
...At a news briefing on February 24, Mike McCurry was asked whether White House staffers were leaking gossip "designed to undermine the authority of Ken Starr's prosecutors...
...Judge Johnson rejected those arguments and ordered Blumenthal to testify before the grand jury, which he did last Thursday...
...And they do it, too, as a matter of course, and constantly and everywhere and out in the open...
...But it is quite another thing when White House aides and presidential hirelings behave in a similar manner...
...In 1997, he was revealed to have proposed a full-scale search for "embarrassing or incriminating details" in the family history of Republican senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma...
...Bill Clinton's White House, as a whole, is an obstruction of justice...
...But that same day, the Washington Post caught Clinton lawyer Mickey Kantor on the telephone with one such investigator, Terry Lenzner of the Investigative Group, Inc...
...A private investigator named Anthony Pellicano, saying he was "working for Clinton," recently approached a client of Lucianne Goldberg's about Linda Tripp's Lewinsky recordings...
...Filth...
...your loyalists have an answer for this question...
...The sub-rosa effort to discredit the president's antagonists is hardly restricted to run-of-the-mill, public-record material...
...Clinton flunkie Harold Ickes says it means we are living in a "police state, pure and simple...
...America is not a police state—and the Constitution will not collapse—because Sidney Blumenthal had to answer a couple of hours of questions in a criminal probe...
...Everyone forgets that what we're actually watching is organized hooliganism...
...Emerging from the grand-jury room last Thursday, Sidney Blumenthal openly acknowledged having circulated stories about Kenneth Starr's "vicious" and "lawless" methods...
...In fact, Clinton's Ron Zieglers and Rabbi Korffs and E. Howard Hunts operate with such audacity and overdrive that American politics now smoothly responds to the rhythm of White House spin and smear...
...What does that mean, exactly...
...no one associated with the president "has hired or authorized any private investigator" to look into anyone's background...
...His lawyer likens Blumenthal's grand-jury call to a move by the "Gestapo...
...Last Tuesday, she heard arguments from Sid Blumenthal's lawyer about why the subpoena should be quashed...
...It's us today and probably you tomorrow...
...But he didn't...
...Lenzner has performed projects of one sort or another in support of Bill Clinton since at least the 1992 presidential campaign...
...It means this: The tipsters have intimated, without evidence, that officials in Starr's office, whom they name, have had extramarital affairs, have impregnated one another, or are closeted homosexuals...
...But instead of doing that, this prosecutor was "deliberately going into extraneous issues," the president complained in a private memo to his chief of staff...
...It's just that the detectives aren't looking for "personal derogatory information...
...President...
...It is automatic: Confronted by adversaries and asked for the truth, they have an instinct for subterfuge and stonewalling and slime...
...Whereupon the White House's denial became, as Ron Ziegler used to say, "inoperative...
...The newspapers have been too polite or too cautious to report the matter in any detail, but "longtime Washington sources" and "Democratic sources" and "White House officials" have lately been promiscuous with tips about what Time magazine calls the "workplace and sexual histories of the prosecutors...
...Not to worry, Mr...
...Blatant lies," the White House immediately and categorically responded...
...But he has no right to say it on our dime...
...Every available administration surrogate must "hit him hard on the fact that as special prosecutor he is derelict in his duties in trying to conduct a partisan political vendetta...
...Then, on Sunday, February 22, Clinton critic and former U.S...
...And it is not just Sid Blumenthal...
...Terry Lenzner fights rough...
...Except that, in quantity and ferocity, it is worse...
...His people think of everything...
...This gets straight 6's from the judges...
...Blumenthal himself complains about an "assault on the First Amendment...
...Starr's men cannot discuss grand-jury subpoenas and resulting testimony, so no formal explanation of their business with Blumenthal is available for public inspection...
...First they came for Sid Blumenthal, Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry intones...
...Sidney Blumenthal is a full-time federal employee...
...New & World Report that Linda Tripp's friend Lucianne Goldberg, according to 40-year-old divorce records, had once given a child up for adoption...
...James Carville, McCarthy-like, tells CNN that "I have just been handed a document" that might demonstrate how "slimy," "scuzzy," and "sleazy" Ken Starr is...
...Next, we should note that there is one neutral person privy to the rationale for the Blumenthal subpoena...
...That's not the point...
...So five days later, on July 12, 1973, Richard Nixon chewed out Al Haig...
...He did not say no...
...Maybe so...
...We don't believe that...
...But the president did not get the response he wanted from his underlings...
...Finally, there is what the current controversy reveals, more clearly than ever before, about the character of this president's associates in their official capacity...
...A case in point: the subpoena served by independent counsel Kenneth Starr's attorneys on the defrocked journalist and current White House hatchet man Sid Blumenthal...
...And in the absence of such an explanation, the world has concluded that Blumenthal is not a fair subject of independent-counsel inquiry...
...He said yes...
...That subpoena sought documents and testimony relating to a whispering campaign, conducted by the usual "sources close to the president," against employees in the independent counsel's office...
...In 1991, his employees were discovered literally going through the garbage of an opposing party in an English corporate takeover...
...attorney Joseph diGenova went public with persistent rumors that private detectives linked to the president were snooping into his background—and his wife's...
...And the work of state we pay him six figures to do in no way includes protecting the president from the consequences of adultery, witness tampering, and subornation of perjury...
...Sure, he may have criticized Ken Starr on the phone with reporters...
...McCurry was asked whether the president was aware that there were detectives working in conjunction with his defense attorneys...
...If his attorneys thought the Johnson ruling was wrong, they could have appealed it to the federal circuit court...
...Washington is hypnotized by the spectacle, so much that it now evaluates each new outrage like an Olympic ice-dancing routine: this many points for technique, that many for presentation...
...Bill Clinton doesn't have such problems...
...The Blumenthal subpoena is regrettable at least because it affords the president's defenders such an easy opportunity to direct public attention away from their own behavior...
...Yes, he has a First Amendment right to say anything he wants about Kenneth Starr...
...For one thing, it is not in fact Sidney Blumenthal's job to shop rumor and out-of-context info-porn about American law-enforcement officials in order to dele-gitimize an ongoing criminal investigation sanctioned by the courts and the U.S...
...He cannot be allowed to get away with this," the president ordered...
...Ken Starr is a fascist...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...McCurry was asked whether there was anything wrong with White House staffers' speaking to reporters about the backgrounds of Starr's employees...
...You know," he said, how "'We're out to get the president' and all that stuff...
...It is just like Nixon...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 25
