High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (21 page)

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Authors: Ann Coulter

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ANTHONY MARCECA: DIGGING IN LOW-GRADE DIRT
 
At least we know
who hired Livingstone’s file-gathering colleague, Anthony Marceca: Craig Livingstone. Marceca was an army investigator when Livingstone arranged for him to be detailed to the White House. Army Criminal Investigation Command spokesman Paul Boyce said the request from the White House was for Marceca by name, not simply for any staffer.
19
Livingstone had gotten to know Marceca on the 1984 Hart campaign. Marceca had also worked on the presidential campaigns of Edmund Muskie and George McGovern (1972), Ted Kennedy (1980), John Glenn (1984), and Al Gore (1988), and had volunteered on Clinton’s inaugural staff (perhaps figuring his only way to work for a winning candidate was to wait until after the election).
Robert Smith, a primary challenger to Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in 1986, recalls that Marceca approached him during the campaign, offering derogatory material on Specter. He had basically just low-grade dirt, Smith told the Associated Press: “A lot of it dealt with Arlen’s personal life and his family. I found it deplorable.”
20
One can only hope Marceca had the foresight to preserve his personal letter from President Clinton, praising him for contributing to “the dedicated efforts of our great security team,” and concluding, “Without your help, Craig might have been buried under the paperwork required to ensure White House personnel security…. Hillary joins me in wishing you every future success.”
21
SHAKY WHITE HOUSE EXCUSES
 
When all is said and done,
we know this: two Democratic operatives with shady backgrounds—according to the various Democratic campaign officials who have employed the duo—were working for the president, on the White House payroll, in a chain of command that had them reporting to the president through the White House Counsel’s Office. They collected files teeming with derogatory information on hundreds of former—and possibly future—Republican appointees. Given the record of these custodians, and the White House’s laughably lax security around the files (Marceca even took some home with him), the nine hundred Americans whose raw files were obtained by the Clinton White House have little reason to suppose that their private file folders are not now swelling the cabinets of Democraticaligned activist groups, awaiting confirmation hearings in future Republican administrations.
The
New York Times
editorialized in June 1996:
While it remains unclear whether White House aides were pursuing a political agenda in rummaging through the files, it is now apparent that there was a great potential for mischief. Both the White House and the FBI showed remarkably little regard for the privacy rights of Americans in their cavalier treatment of background files on more than 400 men and women who worked in recent Republican administrations…. [The White House’s] explanation has not been discredited, but it is looking shakier.
22
 
“Shakier” indeed.
Recall that throughout Travelgate and Filegate, the FBI was remarkably compliant with the White House: it investigated the Travel Office, sent over the files, cut its own White House detail out of the file-retrieval process, leaked to the White House an advance copy of Agent Gary Aldrich’s book
Unlimited Access
, shook down Agent Sculimbrene, and so on. As noted, the general counsel of the FBI at the time, Howard Shapiro, ultimately left the FBI due to the heavy flak he received for his compliant attitude toward the Clinton White House.
Neither the press nor the Republican Congress has shown as much indignation about the files as have the citizens whose files were illegally obtained. No impeachment hearings were initiated—even to demand simple answers to the continuing Filegate mysteries. And the press has moved on.
FIGHTING BACK
 
Still haunted by the Ghost of Leaks Yet to Come
are the citizens whose files were pulled. Many of these may be future Republican leaders. Or perhaps even present ones: nearly a dozen former Reagan/Bush White House staffers currently working on Capitol Hill were among those whose files were pulled.
23
The citizens whose rights have been so egregiously violated brought a class action suit under the Privacy Act against President Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and former White House aides Bernard Nussbaum, Craig Livingstone, and Anthony Marceca.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth has denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss, holding that the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, provides a basis for a civil suit against the defendants by Republicans whose files were pulled, noting that “[t]he Privacy Act was passed by Congress to prevent exactly this kind of behavior.” The act was passed in 1974 following revelations about political spying by the FBI and other government intelligence agencies.
Lawyers for Mrs. Clinton had argued that “there is simply no precedent” for alleging an invasion of privacy for transferring personal data from the FBI to the White House. No controlling legal authority. Judge Lamberth rejected the first lady’s arguments, curtly noting that “despite the characterization of Mrs. Clinton, this is not a case concerning the transfer of information from one part of government to another.”
THE PRESIDENT’S RESPONSIBILITY
 
Can no one higher than Craig Livingstone,
a.k.a. Chicken George, be held accountable for Filegate? Richard Nixon’s men illegally obtained one person’s security file; Chuck Colson did seven months as a result. Nixon—who did not know about the Daniel Ellsberg or Watergate break-ins beforehand—was forced out of office for creating an environment that encouraged such adventures.
A president whose aides pull such stunts can escape responsibility only by coming clean, as President Reagan did in the Iran-Contra matter. Reagan had his own attorney general break the news to the public; in the months that followed, he and his aides cooperated with Congress and the independent counsel, and he waived executive privilege for all Iran-Contra communications.
In contrast, the various Clinton White House players have denied, evaded, stonewalled, fled, taken the Fifth (in Livingstone’s case), and made claims of ignorance. Claiming ignorance isn’t enough.
In the 1974 Rodino report, the House Judiciary Committee made a persuasive case for impeaching President Nixon for having people like Craig Livingstone around him. The report noted that, following the end of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of Charles II (1660-1685), “a more powerful Parliament [than had existed under the Commonwealth] expanded somewhat the scope of ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ by impeaching officers of the Crown for such things as
negligent discharge of duties
and improprieties in office” (emphasis added).
The second article of impeachment against Nixon charged that he had “misused” the FBI in violation of “the constitutional rights of citizens” by “directing” the FBI to wiretap or investigate individuals “for purposes unrelated to national security.” At that time, it was not illegal for a president to authorize wiretaps without a court order—even “for purposes unrelated to national security.” FDR had begun the practice of using the FBI to wiretap the press and investigate his enemies. This political skullduggery was expanded upon by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
24
By contrast, Nixon had authorized FBI wiretaps exclusively for national security purposes. The FBI had installed a grand total of seventeen wiretaps, thirteen of which tapped the phone lines of government officials and four of which tapped reporters who had published classified national security information.
25
Several of the bugged government employees had been designated for wiretaps by their boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had authorized wiretaps on all his aides “who had seen or handled various documents which had been leaked.”
26
In neither intent nor execution were the wiretaps used against Nixon’s “enemies.” They were going after leaks of potentially damaging national security information.
On the other hand, the nine hundred FBI files ultimately discovered in the Clinton White House were certainly not being used to create a “friends” list. Unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, the Clinton White House’s possession of FBI raw files was against the law. Also unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, there was no national security reason for the White House to have these files, as the Clinton administration has admitted, trying to portray the nefarious files business as a “snafu.”
Indeed, the only rational explanation for the Clinton administration’s possession of the files on many Republicans—and some prominent Republicans—was to harass Clinton’s political enemies more easily. Recall that former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos said that the “whisper[s]” around the Clinton White House were that Clinton’s people were going to start blackmailing their political opponents to survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal—Stephanopoulos called it the “Ellen Rometsch strategy.”
And we know the Clinton White House illegally sought the FBI file on at least one individual citizen “for purposes unrelated to national security,” but whom the White House had a political interest in damaging. Perhaps there have been others.
Someone at the Clinton White House is responsible for hiring the men who implemented an unprecedented violation of nine hundred Americans’ civil liberties. Someone at the White House is responsible for hiring the men who abused the powers of the executive branch to engage in political espionage against its presumed enemies, on a scale only dreamed of by the Plumbers, whose activities brought down Richard Nixon. According to this country’s most recent precedent on impeachable offenses, that someone is the president.
Framer James Wilson noted that the Constitution provided the president with no “screen” from misconduct in the executive branch. The president would not be able to “act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention.” Any attempt to do so, Wilson explained, would render the president impeachable.
27
Another participant at the Constitutional Convention, James Iredell, a strong proponent of the Constitution at the North Carolina ratifying convention, and later a Supreme Court justice, said that it was the president’s personal responsibility that demonstrated the “very different nature” of the president “from a monarch.” William Davie noted that the “predominant principle” of making a single president responsible for the entire executive branch was to establish “the more obvious responsibility of one person.”
All these quotes from the framers were admiringly cited in the Rodino Report, which explained to the nation the grounds for impeachment the last time a United States president faced impeachment, just a quarter century ago.
Chapter Thirteen
 
Auditing the Enemy
 
The second article of impeachment
against President Nixon charged him with “endeavor[ing]” to cause income tax audits, “in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens.” A president’s use of the IRS for political purposes is such a clear, egregious abuse of power that even
trying
to do it constitutes an impeachable offense. If success is any measure of effort, Nixon didn’t try very hard. Not only was Nixon unable to trigger any political audits of his enemies, he was also unable to stop the IRS from auditing him while he was president.
Twenty-five years later, few critics of President Clinton seem to have escaped audits by the IRS.
BILLY DALE
 
The IRS audited
beleaguered Travel Office head Billy Dale after the Clinton administration fired him. In addition, of course, Dale endured a full FBI investigation and prosecution and a review of his sensitive FBI file by political flacks in Clinton’s White House months after he had been summarily fired.
You would think Billy Dale was Carlos the Jackal. Assorted felons, hustlers, and bribe-takers had streamed through the Clinton administration, and high-level government officials, and Clinton himself, had always played the unwitting dupe. But the one executive branch employee who couldn’t even jaywalk on Clinton’s watch was Billy Dale. The reason was simple: Dale was an enemy of the administration. He had made them look bad by not having engaged in criminal conduct when they said he had.
And this time, not only was an enemy of the administration actually audited, but also there was a smoking gun indicating that the audit was political.
Congressional investigators looking into the White House Travel Office massacre uncovered that memo about Billy Dale written by White House lawyers that summarized Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy’s remarks. Kennedy informed the lawyers that IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson was “on top of it.”
Richardson was a political appointee, not one of those “career professionals” so often used as camouflage for the Clinton administration’s misconduct. Recall that she was a friend of Hillary’s at Yale Law School, had advised Clinton during his 1992 campaign, and had served on Clinton’s transition team. While she was commissioner of the IRS, Richardson attended the 1996 Democratic National Convention.

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