All the president's fault - US First Lady Hillary Clinton's dismissal of public employees

Reason, April, 1996 by Michael McMenamin, James Oliphant

April 1993. Cornelius removes files from the White House Travel Office and takes them home. Martens meets with presidential aide Bruce Lindsay and sends a memo urging him to have the president issue an executive order on the audit of nonmilitary planes and give the job to TRM.

So far, so good. They can't lay a glove on Hillary. By contrast, the president's fingerprints are all over Thomason's prong of the conspiracy. Thomason, in turn, can be seen supporting the Cornelius prong of the conspiracy to put more friendly faces in the Travel Office and give him and Martens a shot at brokering the White House charter business. Watkins is just following orders. As the president already told him, Thomason is "sharp," and Watkins knows that Thomason and his wife are old-time Arkansas FOBs. Hillary, by contrast, is nowhere to be seen.

If she were smart, she would have kept it that way and stuck to her health care task force or started writing her book a lot earlier. Unfortunately for Hillary, Thomason was a close friend of hers as well. According to David Watkins, he is the one who got her involved: "Thomason briefed the first lady on his suspicion that the Travel Office was improperly funneling business to a single charter company and told her the functions of that office could easily be replaced and reallocated. Once this made it on to the first lady's agenda, Vince Foster [White House deputy counsel and close friend of Hillary] became involved, and he and Harry Thomason regularly informed me of her attention to the Travel Office situation - as well as her insistence that the situation be resolved immediately by...the firing of the Travel Office staff."

Wednesday, May 12, 1993. Thomason meets with President Clinton for 15 minutes, subsequently with Vince Foster, and thereafter with Mrs. Clinton. Thomason then meets with Watkins, Cornelius, and Foster to discuss the corruption rumors about the Travel Office. Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy joins the meeting, and Foster directs him to contact the FBI about initiating an investigation of the Travel Office. Kennedy does so. This violates government guidelines which prohibit the White House from initiating low-level contacts with the FBI, a post-Watergate reform implemented by the Carter administration to avoid political abuse of the FBI and continued by Reagan and Bush.

Thursday, May 13, 1993. Thomason meets with the president for half an hour. Hillary meets with Foster and Mack McLarty and asks what is being done about the Travel Office. Kennedy calls the FBI again, demands an immediate response about the Travel Office, and threatens to call in the IRS. FBI agents meet at the White House with Kennedy and Foster and tell them insufficient grounds exist for an FBI investigation. The FBI modifies its position after Cornelius tells them about the kickback rumors. Meanwhile, Foster and Watkins devise a plan to conceal the improper contact with the FBI the day before. They determine to conduct a quickie financial audit of the Travel Office using the accounting firm working for Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, which will then serve as an after-the-fact basis for calling in the FBI.