CLINTON'S PENTAGON PAPERS . . . CONT.
Scrapbook CLINTON’S PENTAGON PAPERS . . . CONT. THE SCRAPBOOK has “obtained” (thank you, Judicial Watch) a March 16 memo from Cliff Bernath of the Pentagon publicaffairs office, explaining how...
...What THE SCRAPBOOK wonders is, How did Jane Mayer know to ask Bernath on March 13 in considerable detail about Tripp’s responses on various confidential forms...
...On the final Saturday of the campaign, Davis told a convention of Hispanic activists in Long Beach that outgoing Republican governor Pete Wilson had been a “disaster” for California...
...The stakes are high, says the White House press office, for the Census “is the basis for virtually all demographic information used by educators, policy makers, journalists and community leaders...
...The infractions of Bacon and Bernath, on the other hand, look to be more serious, but so far have gone unpunished...
...You won’t have to have an inquiry or rigmarole or anything else...
...You certainly wouldn’t want to slander anybody or anything...
...Her standard personnel Form 171 may well have been available to someone there...
...Gosh, Mr...
...then maybe it would be too risky for the president to fire him...
...Wanna run for office this year...
...It is by no means an obvious line of inquiry, unless she was chiefly seeking to damage Tripp’s credibility, as the White House is doing these days, for obvious reasons...
...The following afternoon, at a backyard picnic in the San Fernando Valley, Davis told his audience that Wilson “likes to fan the flames of discontent, anti-Semitism, and bigotry”— and was therefore “one of the worst governors of the 20th century...
...Coelho, Republicans say, is sabotaging the board’s work in order to leave the field open for a Clintongenerated plan to put sampling into place...
...Cool,” experience, competence are in...
...It was already clear on March 16 that Bacon and Bernath at the very least had met Clinton’s supposed standard for an immediate firing...
...Voters don’t like that stuff anymore...
...In the memo, Bernath describes a Thursday evening (March 12) conversation with Bacon, who “asked me to help Ms...
...THE SCRAPBOOK discerns two important unsettled questions here...
...The White House immediately counterattacked, warning in a press release that “children, the poor, people of color, city dwellers, and people who live in rural rental homes” are particularly susceptible to undercount...
...The second question is, When is President Clinton going to live up to his campaign promise to fire the likes of Bacon and Bernath...
...Tripp, after all, had worked at the White House...
...The only reaction of the administration was to order the Pentagon inspector general to investigate, and it must be one hell of an investigation, since it’s still continuing...
...The body of the speech was completely sound...
...Republicans are urging the traditional head count...
...If anyone in any department can name any instance at any time since the 1990 census in which a road, hospital, or child-care center was built in the wrong place because of faulty Census data, please let us know...
...Mayer’s scoop was that Tripp had been arrested...
...Bacon testified under oath that Bernath “volunteered” to help Mayer...
...Too bad good ol’ Gray didn’t get this message himself...
...If Bacon didn’t talk to the White House about Jane Mayer’s Linda Tripp inquiry...
...This would have relieved Bacon of the responsibility to coordinate his dirty tricks with top presidential aides...
...Which Bernath promptly did the following day, as he told Judicial Watch in a deposition and as Jay Nordlinger reported in this magazine’s May 18 and June 1 issues (see page 10 for his latest installment...
...Could this be one of the things Ken Starr is asking Sid Blumenthal about before the grand jury...
...GOP Hill staffers even hinted they might subpoena Coelho to get him to reveal his government clients if he didn’t get the committee moving...
...Hot,” insurgent candidacies are out...
...Davis, the Washington chat shows all seem to agree, personifies the overarching “meaning” of this year’s primary campaigns...
...if he didn’t need to because he knew (from Mayer) what the White House wanted him to do...
...Coelho, now a lobbyist, is President Clinton’s appointee as cochair of the bipartisan Census Monitoring Board...
...Adopt a pose of gentlemanly professionalism, instead...
...DOWN FOR THE COUNT The battle over the 2000 Census continues...
...But Tripp’s arrest turned out to be a Keystone Kops mix-up that had been quickly reduced by the judge to a minor infraction...
...The information in question was contained in a highly confidential Defense Department personnel document, Form 398, on which Linda Tripp had failed to report being arrested when she was 19...
...Last week, Republicans began to complain about California Democrat Tony Coelho, the onetime House majority whip who resigned in disgrace during the savings-and-loan scandal...
...He’s lucky we didn’t impeach him...
...THE SCRAPBOOK has “obtained” (thank you, Judicial Watch) a March 16 memo from Cliff Bernath of the Pentagon publicaffairs office, explaining how he and his boss Ken Bacon decided to leak information from Linda Tripp’s confidential security file to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, thereby violating the Privacy Act—a post-Watergate federal law passed to criminalize the Nixonian practice of rifling the confidential files of political enemies...
...Says Bergen now: “I agreed with all of it except his reference to the show...
...Did a White House official suggest to Mayer that she pursue the lead at the Defense Department so there would be no White House fingerprints...
...JUST A FRIENDLY LITTLE SMEAR California lieutenant governor Gray Davis won the Democratic nomination for governor last week...
...Like good ol’ Gray...
...What made her doggedly interested in, and knowledgeable about, the forms Tripp would have filled out as a government employee...
...Well,” Davis smiled, “sometimes you take a little political license in these campaigns...
...So they urge scrapping traditional Census procedures and extrapolating through a process known as sampling...
...Democrats warn that such enumeration misses vast tranches of the American people—particularly that subset of the American people that votes Democratic...
...First, Bacon and Bernath and White House spokesman Mike McCurry and Sid Blumenthal and Ann Lewis and no doubt the neutered White House Labrador Buddy, too, have all denied that Bacon was in contact with the White House about the issue of Linda Tripp’s arrest and what she reported on her security form...
...Bernath says of the illegal file-leaking, “Ken has made clear it’s a priority...
...And when has he ever been guilty of anti-Semitism...
...Bernath’s memo contradicts Bacon’s sworn account...
...THE SCRAPBOOK hereby issues a challenge to the entire executive branch...
...Okay, then...
...Back in 1992, when candidate Bill Clinton found out that his passport files had been rooted through by Bush appointees in the State Department, he was ticked off enough to do his finger-shaking, stare-in-the-camera trick: “If I catch anybody doing it,” he said, “I will fire them the next day...
...Was Mayer tipped off to ask Bacon about this by someone else who had seen a file of Tripp’s and knew she had said she was never arrested...
...Mayer get the information she needed as soon as possible in the morning...
...America relies on Census data every day—to determine where to build more roads, hospitals, and child care centers...
...The appropriate congressional oversight committee might want to see how this investigation is coming along...
...This was a lie, as we now know...
...But now, more than two months later, they still have their jobs, and Bernath has even received a handsome promotion...
...It’s always possible, of course, that the president in this case is more of a coward than a liar...
...Don’t throw angry mud bombs at the incumbent...
...DAN QUAYLE WAS REALLY RIGHT Candice Bergen, the actress formerly known as Murphy Brown, has come clean in a Los Angeles Times profile about the famous 1992 contretemps in which Vice President Quayle zinged her TV character in a speech about family values for setting a bad example by blithely choosing to be a single mother...
...But only a little...
...Davis, the Los Angeles Times then asked him, could you remind us which impeachable offenses Pete Wilson has committed...
...When the baby was practically written out of the sitcom the next season, says Bergen, “it was very distressing to me, and I couldn’t get them to change it...
...Mayer and Bernath and Bacon all thought that the result of Mayer’s article would be to land Tripp in deep legal trouble...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 39
