Great Rewards for Bad Behavior

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 29, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

Seems just about everyone in Washington, from the president to Janet Reno to the lawyers of the K Street corridor to the omnipresent Monica Lewinsky, is cashing in on lies and deceit.

Whether the Associated Press intended it all to be tongue-in-cheek is doubtful -- wire services are not known for a sharp sense of humor. But the report from Park City, Utah, the ski resort at which the Clintons spent a long weekend as February turned into March, courtesy of their Hollywood chum Jeffrey Katzenberg, read that way. The March AP dispatch had White House adviser Doug Sosnik explaining how excited the president was about returning to the Beltway to do the people's business. "He's just ready to go back, go back to work." And then the wire copy runs: "The president is scheduled to fly to New Jersey for a fund-raiser in Newark."

That just about says it all. Political money, from election contributions to donations for legal-defense funds, always has been of the highest priority for this president, notwithstanding all the Clinton chatter about campaign-finance reform. Commander in chief?. Fund-raiser in chief is more like it -- not that Ronald Reagan was a slouch at $100-, $500- or even $1,000-plate dinners, but the Comeback Kid has a special touch when touching the faithful. Of course, being ready obligingly to lay the institutions of government at the feet of contributors helps, whether it is for something sublime or ridiculous. Want to sell state-of-the-art rocket technology to China? No problem. A sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom at Chez Clinton? You'll actually get cream instead of milk to accompany your coffee -- and no Al Gore drop-by to deliver a lecture on global warming.

And, since spoilsport Ken Start got his comeuppance, the cash has been flowing. Clinton's legal-defense fund is awash in dollars, thanks in part to Tinseltown. The president even was able to pay cash when buying three books from Dolly's, a Park City store, after discovering his American Express card had expired the previous day. Among the generous big-time donors? Robert De Niro who, from his mafia roles, knows about payoffs.

The IRS could learn a thing or two from the nation's chief fund-raiser. As Clinton was winging his way back from his hols on board tax-funded Air Force One -- well, you never know when Saddam may strike -- the revenue service was being lambasted by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, for its failure to get its sums right. Fraudulent refunds totaling millions of dollars, failure to keep track of IRS assets, including computers and cars, and substandard security controls marked the work of the service. "The IRS cannot do some of the basic accounting and record-keeping tasks that it expects American taxpayers to do," opined the audit's overseer. What the IRS needs is a commissioner with a sharp eye for the greenbacks. How about Clinton/Gore bagman Terence McAuliffe, a man steeped in the ways of the Teamsters before the Jim Hoffa reformers arrived? The advantage of such an appointment would be efficient tax collection and unusual powers of persuasion. The downside? The IRS would be merged, no doubt, with the Democratic National Committee to assure the latter a permanent cash cow.

An added joy of any such appointment would be that the White House wouldn't have to worry about wrongdoing or ethics violations -- there will be no one around to check up on Terry and the Pirates. The Justice Department under Janet Reno started laying the groundwork in the first week of March to free executive-branch members of the worry of scrutiny and accountability. Justice now is recommending the Independent Counsel Statute not be renewed when it lapses this summer. According to Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder's reasoning, there is "no way to adequately fix the law." (What is it with bureaucrats and split infinitives?) There is no need, according to Holder, for special prosecutors, as Main Justice is perfectly able to probe official wrongdoing.

Holder, who seems to have relinquished his secret hope of leaping from his current Democratic perch to being appointed a Republican attorney general in the event the Democrats lose the White House in two years, probably had in mind his department's masterful handling of the allegations of 1996 Clinton/Gore fundraising abuses. Yup, that was a real model investigation with Fifth Amendment pleadings galore and sudden the-key-is-under-the-mat departures to China. Not since the Justice Department and the FBI failed back in 1972 to trace the Nixon plumbers' checks to Tricky Dick's reelection campaign has an investigation gone so swimmingly for the incumbent. Another suggestion from an unusually constructive "Washington's Week": Use that fundraising probe for training FBI recruits at Quantico.

What a turnaround from 1993, when Reno was eulogizing the independent-counsel system and calling for its renewal. She said: "It is my firm conviction that the law has been a good one, helping to restore public confidence in our system's ability to investigate wrongdoing by high-level executive-branch members." A Starr turn and a Lewinsky later, the picture has changed. To be honest, Reno may have a point. With a helping hand from the dignity-obsessed Senate, the independent-counsel system has done little latterly to restore any public confidence: Those who thought Clinton never should have been hauled before the bar of the Senate think independent counsels are just an excuse for a Spanish inquisition, and people who thought the president should have been impeached, either before or after he was hanged, see no salvation in having special prosecutors, as they aren't effective.