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Authors: Ann Coulter

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That day Lindsey called the elusive Loretta Avent from Air Force One and asked her to investigate the Chippewa’s casino application at Interior. Avent responded to Lindsey’s call that very day by sending a memo to Harold Ickes, White House deputy chief of staff, curtly informing him that “the legal and political implications of our involvement in the Hudson casino case would be disastrous.”
2
Also on that day, Michael Schmidt in the White House’s Domestic Policy Council sent a memo to the same effect to the White House Counsel’s Office stating that O’Connor “must stop telling others that he had access to the White House” on the Chippewa casino issue. Schmidt’s memorandum said O’Connor’s boasts would be “political poison” for the president.
3
Ickes was unmoved by Avent’s and Schmidt’s concerns. Between April 25 and 28, 1995, Ickes repeatedly left messages for O’Connor. On May 8 O’Connor replied to Ickes’s phone calls in a letter: “I appreciate your calling me concerning the above subject on Tuesday, April 25, and again on Wednesday, April 26. I assume these calls were prompted by my discussions with the president and Bruce Lindsey on April 24 when they were in Minneapolis.”
O’Connor wrote that he wanted “to relate the politics involved in this situation” to Ickes, and proceeded to tick off the Republicans and Democrats arrayed on either side of the casino project: “Governor Thompson of Wisconsin [a Republican] supports this project.” He continued, “Senator Al D’Amato [a Republican] supports this project.” In addition, he noted, “[t]he chairman of the [Chippewa] Indian tribe in the forefront of this project is active in Republican party politics.” On the other hand, referring to an April 28 meeting between DNC Chairman Donald Fowler and the representatives of the anti-Chippewa tribes, O’Connor noted,“[a]ll of the representatives of the tribes that met with Chairman Fowler are Democrats and have been so for years. I can testify to their previous financial support to the DNC and the 1992 Clinton/Gore Campaign Committee.”
4
Similarly unconcerned with—or unaware of—the resistance by some White House staffers to becoming involved in the Chippewa casino issue was a lobbyist from O’Connor’s firm, Thomas Corcoran. On April 25, the day after O’Connor’s little chat with Clinton and Lindsey, Corcoran called Babbitt’s office and talked to aide Heather Sibbison. He informed her that she would soon be hearing from Loretta Avent at the White House. Bruce Lindsey, he told her, was on the case.
5
Meanwhile, the rival tribes opposed to the Chippewa casino were working on a parallel track. On April 28, 1995, leaders of the objecting tribes smoked the peace pipe with Chairman Fowler of the DNC.
6
In explaining the purpose of the meeting, the executive director of the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association, John McCarthy, wrote to the leaders on April 25, saying: “A meeting has been set… with Mr. Don Fowler, the head of the Democratic National Committee, a top-level White House staff member, and [others]….
The people we will be meeting with are very close to President Clinton and can get the job done
” (emphasis added).
7
Wampum is the mother’s milk of politics.
Soon thereafter Fowler began lobbying Ickes himself. “I called Mr. Ickes, explained to him the nature of the situation, and I called someone at the Department of the Interior,” Fowler told Senator Fred Thompson’s Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on September 9, 1997.
8
On May 5, 1995, Fowler wrote a letter to Ickes, requesting his assistance on the casino issue.
On May 15, 1995, Babbitt attended a political meeting at the White House. After the intimate, one-hour meeting, Babbitt attended a DNC dinner thrown by Fowler at the Hay Adams hotel for various cabinet secretaries.
9
Two days later, on May 17, 1995, Chippewa lobbyist Paul Eckstein and his clients met with the Interior Department’s head of Indian gaming. Eckstein emerged from the meeting confident that the casino proposal would be approved. But he did not realize the fix was in: that very evening, Babbitt’s senior Interior Department aides decided they should reject the Chippewa’s casino application, putatively on the grounds of local opposition, which is practically inevitable with all casino applications.
Babbitt’s attorney, Washington super lawyer Lloyd Cutler, explained that it was “just coincidental”
10
that the decision came so soon after the DNC dinner, and after Fowler’s lobbying campaign.
Wasting no time in spreading the good news, Heather Sibbison was on the horn to the White House the next day, May 18, informing them that the Chippewa’s application would probably be denied. The career official at Interior who made the decision—or thought he was making the decision—testified that he did not “make up [his mind]” about the Chippewa casino until June.
11
The decision to reject the Chippewa casino application was formally announced on July 14, 1995. Later that very day Paul Eckstein met with his friend, former partner, and law school classmate, Secretary Babbitt. The testimony of Eckstein becomes crucial at this point. According to Eckstein’s amazing testimony before the Thompson committee on what Babbitt had said:
Harold Ickes had directed him to issue the decision that day…. The Secretary said, at some point, when we were standing up, asked me, rhetorically, “Do you know how much”—I believe it was these tribes but it is not clear to me what these tribes referred to—“had contributed to either the Democratic Party or the Democratic candidates or the DNC?” I can’t be certain of that, but I am certain he asked me the general rhetorical question. I said I don’t have the slightest idea. And he responded by saying, “Well, it’s on the order of half a million dollars,” something like that.
 
Also on the day the decision was formally announced—it was a busy day all around—Pat O’Connor, lobbyist for the triumphant tribes, made a notation in his calendar to discuss “fund-raising strategies” with Ickes and Fowler. Whether he did so or not, on September 14, O’Connor sent a Democratic fund-raising letter to his client tribes reminding them of the favorable decision he had just won for them from the Interior Department. Over the course of the next eighteen months, the rival tribes contributed $286,000 to the Democratic Party.
12
THE LAWSUIT
 
The casino-less Chippewa
—whose leader was known to have been “active in Republican party politics,” according to O’Connor’s letter to Ickes—sued the Interior Department in December 1995. Not without reason, they alleged that campaign contributions had colored the Interior Department’s decision-making process. (The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Barbara B. Crabb, said she “believe [d] there is a distinct possibility that improper political influence affected” the Interior Department’s decision.
13
)
Unfortunately for Babbitt, Eckstein was no Susan McDougal. Consequently, in the summer of 1996 the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs began an inquiry into the Chippewa casino rejection, particularly Eckstein’s claim that Secretary Babbitt had blurted out the decision was based on the rival tribes’ generous contributions to the Democrats. Senator John McCain, chairman of the committee, sent a letter to Secretary Babbitt on July 19 requesting an explanation.
In a letter dated August 30 Secretary Babbitt replied to Senator McCain, “I must respectfully dispute Mr. Eckstein’s assertion that I told him that Mr. Ickes instructed me to issue a decision in this matter without delay. I never discussed the matter with Mr. Ickes; he never gave me any instructions as to what this department’s decision should be, or when it should be made.”
More than one year later, Babbitt’s memory of his conversation with Eckstein would markedly improve.
On October 10, 1997, Babbitt wrote a letter to another committee, the Thompson committee, which was investigating campaign finance abuses. This time Babbitt recalled that he had mentioned “something to the effect that Mr. Ickes wanted a decision” after all. But, he claimed, he was lying when he said this.
It was only as an awkward attempt to get Eckstein out of his office
. Babbitt denied that he mentioned the rival tribes’ campaign contributions to the DNC, and maintained that political contributions and White House pressure had not improperly influenced his department’s decision.
The Thompson committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury on the basis of Babbitt’s testimony on this point.
THE CASE AGAINST BABBITT
 
Obviously, Babbitt’s testimony
is irreconcilable with Eckstein’s. It is also in conflict with reams of other evidence, to say nothing of common sense.
On February 11, 1998—the day Attorney General Janet Reno decided to seek an independent counsel to investigate whether Secretary Babbitt lied to Congress
—
Babbitt, relying on a modified version of the Clinton “He said/She said” defense, said, “This is a disagreement between two people about the exact words spoken in a meeting they had alone two years ago. We’ve each told our version and we disagree. There’s nothing else to say about it. My attorneys say it can’t possibly form the basis of any legal charges.”
14
And Monica’s lawyers told her perjury doesn’t count in a civil case.
But it’s not as simple as that. There may not be more than twenty hours of tape, but there is substantial evidence that makes Eckstein’s version of events much more credible than Babbitt’s.
To begin with, in order to believe Babbitt’s recollection—his October 30, 1998, recollection, not his August 30, 1996, recollection—one would have to believe that Babbitt lied to Eckstein, an old friend, about a very serious matter just to get Eckstein out of his office. Claiming he was under pressure from Ickes is not just an awkward white lie. It is an allegation of conduct that is certainly improper, and possibly illegal under the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. 201 (criminalizing the receipt of anything of value in exchange for the performance of any official act). So Babbitt’s improved recollection to the Thompson committee asks us to believe that he gravely slandered Harold Ickes just to get an old friend out of his office, when a glance at his watch and a remark about a meeting in five minutes,
Love to talk, really jammed this week
, would have done the job just as well.
And why would Ickes’s name have sprung to mind in the first place? Even if we assume Babbitt had to allege federal crimes in order to make Eckstein leave, there seems to be no reason why he would instantly choose Ickes for his culprit—unless, as suggested by Patrick O’Connor’s May 8, 1995, letter to the deputy chief of staff, Ickes had become crucial to what would ordinarily have been a routine Interior matter.
Ickes, for his part, tepidly endorsed Babbitt’s assertion that the Clinton administration was
not
, in fact, selling government policy decisions to the highest bidder. Ickes testified, “I don’t have any recollection of it, [of] talking to Interior about this.”
15
Babbitt aide Heather Sibbison also somewhat corroborated her boss’s recollection that the casino rejection was not bought and paid for by the rival tribes. Sibbison stated under oath that she was completely unaware of any lobbyists’ contacts with the White House, and that the decision was made on the merits, not politics.
16
Sibbison was, of course, directly contradicted on this point by lobbyist Thomas Corcoran, who said under oath that he told Sibbison his firm was lobbying the White House, and that she should be expecting a call from White House Indian Affairs aide Loretta Avent.
In addition, there is evidence that Sibbison was, in fact, keeping the White House aware of progress on the Chippewa’s application, which would seem strange unless she had some reason to believe the White House was interested in this one little government decision. A White House memorandum dated May 18, 1995, from a White House aide to Harold Ickes, states that “Heather Sibbison” at Interior had relayed the datum that the Department had concluded that the Chippewa casino was “probably a bad idea.”
Moreover, then-Chairman Dan Burton’s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee went over the bills that O’Connor & Hannan sent to the anti-Chippewa tribes whom they represented, and found charges for the following items that seem to suggest that the DNC was involved in the casino issue. The invoices included the following:
• Meeting at DNC with Truman Arnold [high-profile Texarkana businessman and FOB] and Chairman Don Fowler.
• Calls to the White House and the DNC regarding tribes meeting with Don Fowler.
• Appointment at White House with Harold Ickes.
• Calls to DNC regarding White House appointment.
• Report to L. Kitto [Larry Kitto, a Wisconsin-based lobbyist who worked for the anti-Chippewa coalition] regarding President Clintons [
sic
] comments about “our friends and racetrack issue” [racetrack may refer to the fact that one of the properties that the Chippewa entrepreneurs wanted to turn into a casino was a dog racetrack].
• Memorandum to T. McAuliffe of Clinton/Gore Re-Elect Committee [Terry McAuliffe, finance chairman of that committee].
• Long distance telephone conference to T. Corcoran [Thomas Corcoran of O’Connor & Hannan] regarding Terry McAuliffe arranging appointment with Harold Ickes.
• Discussions with several aides on the White House staff, including aides to [then-Chief of Staff] Leon Panetta and Harold Ickes.
• Discussion regarding necessity to follow-up with Harold Ickes at the White House, D. Fowler at DNC and Terry Mac at the Committee to Re-Elect, outlining fund-raising strategies.
17
BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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