High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

  It must be said that, though the Travel Office staff was neither disloyal nor corrupt, some of the accounting methods Dale employed were sloppy and unorthodox, which created an opening for unsubstantiated charges of criminality. But the breadth of the accusations Thomason and Cornelius leveled at the office suggests that even they did not really believe the criminality charges.

  One of Cornelius’s indictments of the Travel Office was that the employees used “sexist” language,12 which created a hostile environment—something that could not be tolerated in Bill Clinton’s White House. Thomason claimed they were disloyal—a view, he told Watkins, that was shared by the first lady.13

  THE PRESIDENT AND FIRST LADY’S FORGOTTEN ROLES

  While Cornelius was snooping around the Travel Office, Hollywood producer Thomason was taking his case directly to the president and first lady. Not long after the inauguration, Thomason met directly with President Clinton to outline his plan for the White House to award a half-million-dollar consulting contract to TRM.14 The president forwarded Thomason’s memo, promoting the venture to top White House aides. This was not an idle gesture: Clinton also attached a label marked “action” on the memo and added a personal handwritten notation—“These guys are sharp. Should discuss with [Leon] Panetta [head of the Office of Management and Budget] and [Philip] Lader [deputy White House chief of staff].”15

  According to Watkins’s notes from April 16, 1993, Thomason told him that Travel Office employees were probably receiving 5 percent kickbacks from airline bookings.

  On May 12, 1993, Thomason again met with the president in the morning and Hillary later in the day. Thomason then went to Watkins and told him that he had spoken with the first lady about the Travel Office situation and that she was “ready to fire them all that day.”16

  On May 13, 1993, Thomason had a meeting with the first lady at the White House. The next day, she directed Watkins to fire the Travel Office staff. According to Watkins’s notes, Mrs. Clinton explained, “We need those people out—we need our people in—we need the slots.” She told Watkins that “Harry” had a plan for the Travel Office.

  A few days later, Mrs. Clinton was pressing the planned takeover on Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, then-White House chief of staff. According to McLarty’s notes of the May 16 dinner meeting, after briefing the first lady on the Travel Office employees, he felt “pressure” from her to take quick action: “May 16: HRC Pressure.”

  The next day—May 17, 1993—McLarty talked to Watkins about Mrs. Clinton’s concerns. Watkins later wrote that he felt he had to fire the Travel Office employees or there “would be hell to pay.” A May 17 memo on the firing was faxed to President Clinton in California and “cc’d” to “Hillary Rodham Clinton.” That day, aboard Air Force One, presidential aide Bruce Lindsey briefed Clinton on the impending firings.17

  Indeed, this is just some of the mountains of evidence—in the form of sworn statements, White House admissions, and contemporaneous notes—that put President and Mrs. Clinton’s fingerprints all over the decision to replace the Travel Office staff with “our people,” as Hillary delicately put it.

  Mrs. Clinton has consistently denied playing any role in the Travel Office firings, despite reams of documents and testimony turned up by congressional investigators that contradict this assertion. In a deposition given to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on March 21, 1996, Hillary Clinton said, “I had no decision-making role with regard to the removal of Travel Office employees.”

  The president, too, claimed to be out of the loop on the Travel Office firings. On May 25, 1993, President Clinton said, “I had nothing to do with any decision, except to save the taxpayers and the press money. That’s all I know.”18

  “PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST”—THE PUTSCH

  Watkins fired the seven Travel Office employees on May 19, 1993. Cornelius and World Wide Travel moved in immediately. Watkins gave Dale and his staff ninety minutes to pack up and move out. He informed them their White House passes would be no good after 5 PM that day. As Dale tearily packed his belongings from more than three decades of White House service, Catherine Cornelius moved in, asking Dale questions about the operation she had just acquired. The Travel Office employees were driven just off White House grounds in the back of a van and deposited on the Ellipse.19

  In a “soul-cleansing” memo written some months later, but that would not be produced for another three years, Watkins explained that the Travel Office firings were Mrs. Clinton’s doing: Vince Foster and Harry Thomason, Watkins wrote, “regularly informed me of [the first lady’s] attention to the Travel Office situation—as well as her insistence that the situation be resolved immediately by replacing the Travel Office staff…. We both knew that there would be hell to pay if… we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes.”20

  The White House cover-up has remained the same. In all, five separate federal agencies would attempt to get to the bottom of the Travel Office firings. Representatives from all five agencies later testified that they had encountered steady roadblocks in their investigation, with the White House withholding documents, facts, or witnesses. Michael Shaheen of the Department of Justice labeled the White House’s lack of “cooperation and candor” as “unprecedented.”21 And as William Clinger’s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee noted in its report on the Travel Office firings, “Never before has a President and his staff done so much to cover up improper actions and hinder the public’s right to learn the truth.”22

  THE SCRIPT REQUIRED CRIMINALS

  Amazingly, Hillary and White House image-polisher Thomason had originally envisioned the Travel Office firings as a great public relations coup: the populist first couple putting an end to government corruption, removing deadwood at the White House, and saving the taxpayers money.

  But this public-relations ploy backfired. The press quickly figured out what was really going on, and was not thrilled with the bald-faced political patronage that cost seven career employees their jobs. The dismissive remark of Thomason’s wife, Hollywood producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, that taking over the White House Travel Office was “the equivalent of taking over a lemonade stand,” didn’t help matters.23

  Still, so far, nothing much new here. The jobs of long-serving White House employees were for sale in the Clinton White House, just like, as we will see, the Lincoln bedroom and foreign policy.

  It was the White House’s relentless attempt to return to the original script, to portray the dumped Travel Office employees as crooks, that constituted an abuse of power unparalleled—undreamed of—by any previous administration.

  The problem was, to pull off the image-enhancing version of the firings, the White House needed the Travel Office employees actually to be corrupt and thieving. So no matter how weak the evidence was, White House aides continued to accuse the employees of corruption and kickbacks in the press, finally bringing in the FBI and the IRS to locate some criminality. That was what the image was supposed to be, not White House cronyism. Dale’s failure to be a crook wasn’t going to get in their way.

  SMEAR

  The day of the purge—May 19, 1993—the president set the tone. Explaining his role in the firings (none) Clinton elaborated: “All I know about it was I was told the people in charge of administering the White House found serious problems there and thought there was no alternative.”24

  The same day, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers held a press briefing to inform reporters that an independent audit of the Travel Office had uncovered evidence of “gross mismanagement” and “very shoddy accounting practices.” Harry Thomason and Director of Media Affairs (and Cornelius boyfriend) Jeff Eller followed up in “off-the-record” briefings, telling reporters that the FBI was looking into “kickbacks” at the Travel Office.

  (Eller had already tried to help his girlfriend’s career plans by asking FBI agents for damaging information on the Travel Office employees.25 When it came out
in the press that the leaker’s inamorata was none other than Cornelius, Eller expressed his empathy for the fired employees by bitterly complaining: “It’s unfortunate that my personal life is getting dragged into this.”26)

  Even months after Dale’s November 1995 acquittal on embezzlement charges, the first lady was still trying to portray him as a crook. She explained to ABC’s 20/20 that her interest in the Travel Office firings was limited to “the financial mismanagement” in the office.27

  All seven Travel Office employees were fired and then defamed by the announcement of an FBI investigation, even though only two Travel Office employees, Dale and his assistant, had anything to do with the office finances.28

  ABUSE OF FBI FILES

  Around the time of the firings, someone in the White House asked Director of Personnel Security Craig Livingstone for Billy Dale’s file—despite the fact that later testimony indicated that no one at the White House even knew who Craig Livingstone was or what he was doing there. “I do remember that the files were discussed,” said Livingstone’s former executive assistant, Mari Anderson, under oath.29 Anderson elaborated in her sworn statement, “I know Craig [Livingstone] discussed them [on the telephone], but with who, I don’t remember…. Craig was talking on the phone, and he asked [me or office assistant Lisa Wetzel] to go and pull these files, and I gave them to Craig.”

  Apparently, Livingstone was unable to accommodate the request fully: He did not have Dale’s “raw” FBI file, with all the unsubstantiated rumors FBI agents had been able to unearth. This is odd since the White House cover story on why Livingstone was mistakenly in possession of about nine hundred FBI files—including many on former cabinet members and other high-level staffers in the Reagan and Bush administrations—was that Livingstone had been conducting a review of all current White House staff. Dale’s file would fit into that description the way James Baker’s file, for example, wouldn’t. In any event, now that Dale was on the White House enemies list, Livingstone moved to correct the oversight.

  In December 1993—seven months after Dale had been fired and Livingstone himself had revoked Dale’s security clearance—Livingstone’s office requested Dale’s raw background file from the FBI. (Craig Livingstone had been the person in charge of “securing” the Travel Office after Dale and his coworkers were fired.) The request form said, “The person named above is being considered for: ACCESS (S)” to the White House. Dale had been banned from the White House in May 1993. Still, his FBI file arrived at Livingstone’s office on January 6, 1994, and stayed there until December 1, 1994.

  Livingstone and his office were not a few loose cannons; the assumption that sensitive FBI files could be plumbed for opposition research was apparently widespread at the Clinton White House. FBI Agent Dennis Sculimbrene said under oath that three White House political appointees had already asked him for derogatory material on all seven White House Travel Office employees even before the May 19 massacre. The three were Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy, Watkins’s deputy Patsy Thomasson, and Cornelius’s boyfriend Jeff Eller.30

  FBI INVESTIGATION

  William Kennedy did not stop at attempts to ferret out damaging information from the Travel Office employees’ FBI files. On May 12, right about the time when Thomason was again pleading his case directly to President and Mrs. Clinton, Kennedy contacted FBI headquarters directly to demand an investigation of the seven employees on the basis of Cornelius’s unsubstantiated allegations.

  James Bourke, the FBI supervisor who took Kennedy’s call, politely suggested to Kennedy that, to initiate an FBI investigation, he would need to come up with more specific claims of wrongdoing than, for example, the fact that a female employee had been shunned by the staff,31 or that the same female employee believed that staffers were living beyond their means. And Bourke did not even know that the same female employee had designs on running the office herself or that two days earlier Hollywood producer Thomason had sent a memo to the White House complaining, again, that UltrAir—the charter airline Billy Dale used—had shut out his own company from providing White House travel.32

  Moreover, Kennedy could not even tell the FBI agent whether the alleged “kickbacks” involved the federal government’s money at all. Kennedy said he’d get back to Bourke.

  The next day, May 13, Kennedy was more specific. This was the day Hillary was demanding that Watkins fire “those people” to open up slots for “our people.” He said the demand for an FBI investigation of the Travel Office came from “the highest levels” of the White House, and if the FBI refused to begin investigating the Travel Office within the next fifteen minutes he would turn to a more responsive federal agency: the IRS.33

  Only after Kennedy had demanded an FBI investigation into the Travel Office within “fifteen minutes,” and after he had made a non-idle threat to call in the IRS, did anyone at the White House attempt to ascertain whether there was any basis for an investigation. The White House still had no evidence of corruption in the Travel Office, apart from the claims of financially interested parties Cornelius and Thomason.

  The White House turned to an accounting firm that happened to be in the White House anyway, helping Al Gore with his “reinventing government” ploy. White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr., asked KPMG Peat Marwick to glance through the Travel Office books the following weekend to see if anything was amiss. Even this eleventh-hour review was not an official audit; a single auditor simply performed an informal review of the Travel Office’s books. He discovered what anyone who had worked with Dale would have known: Dale’s records on about $7 million worth of yearly travel by the press were not in tip-top shape. About $18,000 of the press’s money was unaccounted for, and various other payments were undocumented.

  Dale was not given a chance to respond to the charges.

  On the basis of this slipshod, post hoc rationalization for an FBI investigation that had already been authorized at the “highest levels” of the White House, the White House forced the FBI to investigate. This allowed the White House to justify the firings later as the result of a criminal probe, which resulted from the Peat Marwick review. In fact, however, the events went in precisely the opposite direction: the decision to fire the Travel Office staff was followed by the White House’s demand for a criminal probe by the FBI, which was followed by an informal review of the Travel Office books by Peat Marwick.

  Three days after the firings, the White House released a statement from the FBI stating that Peat Marwick had produced “sufficient information for the FBI to determine that additional criminal investigation is warranted.” Publicizing an FBI investigation this way contravened FBI standing policy of never confirming or denying pending investigations. This much the White House later admitted, saying it was a mistake.34

  But it was too late for the Travel Office staff: they were already tarred with the publicity of a criminal investigation. As Mrs. Clinton would say of charges against her beleaguered husband, a lie makes it halfway’ round the world before the truth can get its boots on.

  Dale was ultimately brought up on embezzlement charges for depositing $68,000 of the media’s money in his personal account. He denied, and the government was unable to prove, that he had ever used the floating account for his personal use. The prosecution probed the Dale family’s finances in minute detail, but on November 16, 1995—two and a half years after his firing—Billy Dale was acquitted of all criminal charges.

  THE TAX MAN COMETH

  When Kennedy threatened to call in the IRS if the FBI didn’t gin up an investigation, he wasn’t kidding.

  Precisely eight days after Kennedy issued this threat, IRS officers showed up unannounced at the offices of UltrAir and began an unorthodox audit. If there had been any “kickbacks,” as Thomason had alleged, UltrAir would have been the airline paying them. The auditors asked to see UltrAir’s books concerning flights arranged through the White House Travel Office.

  The UltrAir audit turned out to be highly unusual in man
y respects. Typically, an IRS audit is performed with respect to a company’s tax returns. UltrAir was formed in 1992; it had not yet had occasion to file a single tax return.35

  Two years later the IRS concluded that there were no problems with UltrAir.

  The IRS did not stop at auditing UltrAir. Both the former head of UltrAir, Charles Caudle, and Billy Dale himself were personally audited. The IRS must have been sorry Caudle turned up on the White House enemies list: it turned out the IRS owed Caudle nearly $5,000.36

  In June Kennedy told two other members of the White House Counsel’s Office that he had spoken to the commissioner of the IRS, Margaret Milner Richardson, about Billy Dale and reported that she was “on top of it” and that IRS agents were “aware.”37 Commissioner Richardson had been a friend of Mrs. Clinton’s since their days at Yale Law School; she had also been a Clinton campaign contributor and an aide on the Clinton transition team.

  Eventually, Billy Dale was personally audited by the IRS. In case this needs to be stated: White House lawyers are not supposed to have advance warning of even random IRS audits.

  Coincidentally, Dale was first warned that he was going to be audited personally when being questioned by the IRS about the Travel Office accounts. He described this in testimony before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee:Well, I can tell you that, I don’t remember the date but somewhere along October-November of 1993, I got a summons from the IRS to appear in my attorney’s office and bring all documents pertaining to the Travel Office. I went and it was our understanding that they were going to question me about the excise tax and how the White House Travel Office had handled it. And as the meeting was drawing to a close, they had asked me a lot of personal questions, what kind of an automobile did I drive and things like that, and they looked at me and they said, “Don’t be surprised if you hear from Baltimore and they want to audit you.”