So the dividing line between chivalry and a legal cause of action is the use of force—until Clinton actually rapes a woman. If you stop at some point after grabbing your female subordinate’s breast and placing her hand on your crotch, it is not sexual harassment.
Most fabulous was Steinem’s admission that laws against sexual harassment were never intended to stop sexual harassers. Rather, sexual harassment law is a tool to be used against ideological enemies of the feminist movement. Steinem called complaints about feminists refusing to criticize the president for turning the White House into his personal brothel “another case of the double standard.” Again, paraphrasing doesn’t do her justice:[I]f the President had behaved with comparable insensitivity toward environmentalists, and at the same time remained their most crucial champion and bulwark against an anti-environmental Congress, would they be expected to desert him? I don’t think so.6
Perhaps not. But if the president’s “insensitivity toward environmentalists” consisted of breaking a law others were required to follow, say, dumping pollutants in a lake, people would expect the law to be enforced against the president, even if he was “good on environmental issues.” If instead, environmentalists reacted by saying, That’s not a pollutant, That’s not a lake, they might expect to see a drop in their credibility on environmental issues. Laws that are enforced only against people with certain points of view aren’t laws, they’re ideological weapons.
Law as thought control was already the official position of the Clinton administration in the case of sexual harassment. Clinton’s EEOC has been at the forefront of pushing “sexual harassment” cases that consist of nothing more than “offensive” speech in the workplace. Nazis can march in Skokie, but don’t call your secretary “honey.” No wonder the feminists are devoted to him. They don’t care about breast-grabbing; they want to know what you think.
At least now we know.
THE PRESIDENT LYING
One of the most terrible things Clinton has done to the country is to make it respectable to lie. He was already pushing the envelope on lying. He claimed during his first campaign that he didn’t inhale, and that he had no idea how he had ended up with a low draft number, and that he had “absolutely leveled with the American people” about Gennifer Flowers. Monica Lewinsky was just the reductio ad absurdum of all this. It had never been so obvious that Clinton was lying—baldly and repeatedly—to the American people.
When the story first broke, President Clinton assured the public he would provide as many of “the facts” as he could, “sooner rather than later,” in keeping with his “obligation to cooperate with the investigation.” Then it was a total stonewall. Words mean nothing. “[T] he very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”7
It may be illogical, but it is natural for people to think that if the president of the United States can lie, how can it be such a big deal if they lie, too? Fancy lawyers go on national TV to announce various exceptions to the quaint little anachronism of truth-telling. We have it on the authority of Susan Estrich, among others, that lying about sex is okay.7
This is absurd.
If we’re going to have sex crimes, it cannot be that people are allowed to lie about sex. Rape, child molestation, sodomy, indecent exposure, prostitution—these are all sex crimes. People may have disagreements with the substantive law—for example, by opposing the application of sexual harassment laws to politicians who are “good” on abortion—but whatever the substantive law is, it is not okay to lie in judicial proceedings. The laws cannot be abstracted from the judicial proceedings necessary to enforce the law. If lying about sex doesn’t count, then there cannot be sex crimes.
Is lying about sex okay if a woman levels a false allegation of rape or sexual harassment? Or only when a man falsely denies a charge of rape or sexual harassment? Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning, and the troopers have all given statements under oath “about sex.” Would it be okay for them to have lied? Lying under oath can never be okay.
It may sound trite, but truth is all that separates us from the cave. People cannot communicate if they cannot assume that most of what they hear is true. Truth is prerequisite for a society to survive, for capitalism to flourish, and for a system of law to dispense justice, rather than raw power.
This is evidenced by a casual review of the nations that prosper as well as those that muddle along. One of the countries least famous for its respect for the truth is France—the country whose morals we are being asked to emulate in the era of Clinton. Phony sophisticates suggest that only the lowbrow would fail to embrace the idea of Monica standing by the president’s coffin next to Hillary, just as former French President Francois Mitterrand’s wife stood next to her husband’s mistress. Consider Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman’s prognosis for countries such as France that share Clinton’s view of the truth:
Q: You’ve mentioned what you see as the institutional prerequisites for capitalism. Do you think there might be cultural prerequisites, too?
FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes. For example, truthfulness. The success of Lebanon as a commercial entrepot was to a significant degree because the merchants’ word could be trusted. It cut down transaction costs.
It’s a curious fact that capitalism developed and has really only come to fruition in the English-speaking world. It hasn’t really made the same progress even in Europe—certainly not in France, for instance. I don’t know why this is so, but the fact has to be admitted.8
PERJURY “ABOUT SEX”
The importance of truth-telling is of a much higher order in a judicial proceeding. There can be no system of justice if people feel no particular obligation to tell the truth under oath. Society recognizes that by imposing serious penalties for lying under oath. Perjury is completely unacceptable, even if you are in small claims court because your dog ate the neighbor’s flowers. It is certainly unacceptable when the president of the United States is answering questions under oath because he has been accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights.
If, as apparently everyone in America believes9—except Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Clift, and Vic Kamber—the president lied to the American people about his relationship with “that woman—Miss Lewinsky,” he has also perjured himself in a legal proceeding. During his deposition in the Jones case, with a federal judge presiding, President Clinton stated, under oath, “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I’ve never had an affair with her.” And “sexual relations” was expressly defined to encompass the “certain type of sex” Clinton is believed to have engaged in with Lewinsky.
Members of the bar ought to be apoplectic that the president of the United States appears to have committed perjury. At least one member of the judiciary is duly alarmed by how casually the press has treated perjury by members of the Clinton administration. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced Ronald Blackley, the chief of staff to former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, to twenty-seven months in prison for making false statements under oath. In sentencing Blackley, Judge Lamberth said, apparently referring to William Ginsburg:A lawyer, who must have been on another planet—actually he was just from Hollywood—recently claimed that no one is ever prosecuted for false statements under oath in a civil proceeding…. This Court has a duty to send a message to other high-level government officials, that there is a severe penalty to be paid for providing false information under oath.
Judge Lamberth said his sentence should demonstrate “the seriousness with which this issue should be viewed by all” because “democracy depends upon trust between the people and government officials.”
You can lie to Gloria Steinem, but don’t lie to Judge Lamberth.
OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE “ABOUT SEX”
President Nixon wouldn’t turn over documents, claiming one legal privilege, one time. He won, and consequently a new privilege was created. Clinton has invented wild legal doctrines to cover up his relationship with a White House i
ntern—among other Jane Does—and we have to “wait for the facts to come in.”
So far, Clinton has blocked the search for the truth with these “trumped-up argument[s],” as former Clinton adviser Dick Morris put it:• The president can’t be sued civilly for conduct that took place before he took office;
• The president’s aides do not have to give testimony to a grand jury about purely private conduct;
• White House lawyers cannot be called to testify about the president’s personal conduct;
• Secret Service officers cannot be asked to testify to anything about the president, or the president’s consorts.
He is president, so, his legal arguments go, he does not have to give evidence or respond to legal complaints. And to think Nixon had inaugurated the “Imperial Presidency.”
Admittedly Nixon did not invoke his one privilege in an investigation “about sex” he personally engaged in or pressed upon unwilling females. He raised it in an investigation about a third-rate burglary he didn’t commit.
The only presidential privilege Clinton had not claimed was the one floating around the Internet:Going to hell would interfere with the president’s ability to carry out the duties of his office, and God’s judgment would violate the separation of powers. Sins are therefore excused in the case of a sitting president, at least if the economy is good.
The president’s invocation of presidential immunity, executive privilege, attorney-client privilege, and “protective service privilege” to obstruct information from coming out about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky is about as plausible.
To state the obvious, White House discussions—at the highest possible level—about Monica Lewinsky cannot possibly be protected by a privilege for presidential communications about military and diplomatic secrets. They are, as his defenders say, “personal matters.” Personal matters are not beyond the reach of impeachable offenses; they are beyond the reach of any legal privilege immunizing communications from production to a grand jury.
Nixon may have been paranoid about national security leaks and the “opposition government” in the midst of the Vietnam War. And covering up the existence of the “Plumbers”—the private group Nixon authorized in order to plug national security leaks—may well have constituted obstruction of justice. But he wasn’t some horny hick in the White House asserting contrived privileges to cover his getting oral sex from the interns.
Warren Harding must be turning flips of delight in his grave to know that at least he isn’t Clinton. No one has ever been caught like Clinton, in this tawdry combination of sexual perversion, witness tampering, and perjury. The most frothing-at-the-mouth Nixon haters never thought Nixon had himself committed perjury—even over a small matter like national security leaks during wartime. There was a dignity about Nixon unimaginable with Clinton. This is the most complete ignominy in American history.
PART TWO
Abuse of Power
Chapter Eleven
Job Creation, Clinton Style: The Travel Office Massacre
Poor, inconvenient Billy Dale. He had the misfortune of holding a White House job—director of the Travel Office—coveted by of one of the Clintons’ Hollywood friends, Harry Thomason. To get rid of Dale, the idealistic first couple deployed the full force of the federal government against him. The FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS—even an independent contractor who happened to be working in the White House one weekend—were all called in to look for dirt on Dale.
The White House must have assumed that anyone could be found guilty of a crime if only investigated. Unfortunately for the Clintons, that assumption proved false. Investigations into the Clintons, after all, usually uncovered wrongdoing. On closer inspection, almost every wild accusation against the Clintons would turn out to be true—from the first lady’s work on Castle Grande—a fraudulent land deal in Arkansas—to the sale of a burial plot at Arlington Cemetery. But Dale was clean as a whistle. Civil Society: 1; the Clintons: 0.
Clinton did have the authority to fire Dale, who served at the president’s pleasure. It just happened that seven presidents before Clinton had not seen fit to fire Dale, and it also just happened that a generous campaign contributor wanted Dale’s job. Firing a veteran public servant to make room for a big Hollywood producer is the sort of rank cronyism and hypocrisy that one might have vainly hoped the Clintons had left behind when they came to the White House to usher in “the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic.”
The framers believed that one of the virtues of having just one president rather than a body of presidents was that a single man would be less inclined to engage in such cheap cronyism. As Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 76, the president “will have fewer personal attachments to gratify than a body of men who may each be supposed to have an equal number; and will be so much the less liable to be misled by the sentiments of friendship and of affection. There is nothing so apt to agitate the passions of mankind as personal considerations, whether they relate to ourselves or to others….”1
Still, Clinton could have just come clean and explained that, while he appreciated Dale’s vote (and Dale had voted for Clinton), what he really needed was money, so Dale had to be fired to accommodate a campaign contributor. While Clinton might not have been “putting people first,” as his campaign booklet had promised, that’s not an impeachable offense.
But that’s not what Clinton did. Rather, his administration ginned up every oppressive mechanism the federal government had to offer in order to wage a full-fledged assault on an inconvenient man, Billy Dale. The Clinton administration used government agencies to investigate, audit, and prosecute Dale, in a desperate, post hoc attempt to portray cronyism as some sort of good government maneuver. That is the very definition of abuse of power. It doesn’t get any clearer than this. If what the Clinton administration did to Dale is not impeachable, the Clintons have pulled ahead and, in the end, routed Civil Society.
THE FOBS
Harry Thomason, the Hollywood television executive famous for producing such shows as Evening Shade and Designing Women, was a major Clinton fund-raiser.2 He is an old friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, having first met the future president when Thomason was an Arkansas high school football coach in the 1970s. (One of the most priceless descriptions of the Thomasons’ kindness to the Clintons was this: “It was the Thomasons who served as their ambassadors to Hollywood in 1991 when the Clintons were thought of as hicks.”3)
Thomason had helped “produce” various campaign events, culminating in his orchestrating the January 20, 1993, presidential inauguration. Following the inauguration, Thomason was given a White House pass and a White House office. Ironically, Thomason’s job was to create events to burnish the president’s image. He was to report to the president.4
Thomason was part-owner of an air-charter consultant firm, TRM, Inc., that had teamed up with the Clinton campaign’s travel agency, World Wide Travel, to help arrange press travel during the campaign. Little Rock-based World Wide Travel was a hotbed of FOBs—including the very “generous” Riady family (about whom we will learn more later), longtime Clinton supporter Jackson T. Stephens, and the Rose Law Firm, where Mrs. Clinton was a partner. 5 World Wide Travel officials themselves had, of course, contributed to Clinton’s campaign.6
While roaming about the White House, Thomason spread rumors about the Travel Office. He was the first one to plant in the heads of Mrs. Clinton and President Clinton the idea of removing the long-serving White House employees.7 Thomason told Hillary Clinton that the Travel Office staffers were disloyal and should be replaced.
FUTURE EX-CODIRECTOR OF THE WHITE HOUSE TRAVEL OFFICE
Another FOB with an interest in World Wide Travel usurping the functions of the White House Travel Office was Clinton’s third cousin, twenty-five-year-old Catherine Cornelius. Her contributions to Clinton were murkier. During the campaign she had worked with World Wide Travel, coordinating travel arrangements for the press. Cornelius assumed
that travel arrangements, among other things, would continue in the White House as they had in Little Rock.
Before Clinton had even taken office, Cornelius had written up a plan for World Wide’s takeover of the White House Travel Office—with herself at the helm.
Clinton put Cousin Cornelius on the White House staff as a secretary to David Watkins, assistant to the president for management and administration. During her mere two months in Watkins’s office, Cornelius kept up her campaign to oust the Travel Office staff. Just three days after Clinton’s inauguration, Cornelius sent out a memo describing herself and another White House aide, Clarissa Cerda, as the future codirectors of the White House Travel Office. On February 15, 1993, Cornelius and Cerda coauthored an eight-page memo describing their planned reorganization of the Travel Office and, again, calling themselves “codirectors.” They denounced the Travel Office staff as “complacent” and “overly pro-press.”8
In April, Cornelius was reassigned to the coveted White House Travel Office. However, she was not yet codirector—only a spy on a reconnaissance mission for Watkins.9 More than a month later, the day the Travel Office staff was fired, Watkins noted in a memo to Mrs. Clinton that Cornelius “had been observing the Travel Office for 45 days” and that she believed the office was engaging in “criminal activity.” Coincidentally, right about the time Cornelius began “observing” the Travel Office, papers started disappearing.10 Among the vanishing papers was an expense log that would ultimately be crucial to Billy Dale’s defense. The log never turned up.11