Accounting for the Clintons - investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton's financial dealings with the Whitewater Development Corp. real estate firm - Editorial

National Review, April 4, 1994

EVEN AS the Whitewater scandal has spread--to encompass reports of documents shredded in Little Rock, and consultations between regulators and the White House debate has arisen over whether the investigation should be narrowed. Should the ball be carried entirely by special prosecutor Robert Fiske and his grand juries? Or should Congress get into the act as well?

Mr. Fiske insists on the priority of his own efforts, perhaps to preserve possible trials from taint, perhaps from personal and bureaucratic imperatives. But when Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen used the Fiske inquiry as an excuse to avoid answering questions in a recent House subcommittee hearing, critics feared the worst. William Satire charged Mr. Fiske with "doing the job the Clinton Administration hired him to do"--that is, to keep a lid on the scandal; the Wall Street Journal, somewhat less sternly, only said that his investigation was '"beginning to look" like a cover-up.

Mr. Fiske's motives are unknowable and should be moot. What should determine this question is the separation of powers. Representative Jim Leach, the ranking minority member of the House Banking Committee, reminded him of Congress's role. "Traditionally in all Western democracies," wrote Mr. Leach, "it is the responsibility of the party out of power to hold the party in power accountable for breaches of the public trust." The Founders did not envision political parties. But they did provide for different branches of government, whose ambitions would act as checks upon one another. If one branch was guilty of illegal or unethical conduct, its peers were expected to expose it so that the people, at the next election, could have a chance to punish the offenders. The electorate is getting political information it should have had in 1992. Better late than never. Robert Fiske should read the Federalist Papers before he calls for blacking it out.