Criminals in the White House?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 17, 2000 | by Larry Klayman

A U.S. District Court judge will decide the fate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and their underlings in what may be the worst case of obstruction of justice in U.S. history.

The future is now!" Those words of former Washington Redskins football coach George Allen perfectly fit the current state of the ever-burgeoning Clinton-Gore scandals. After seven years of investigations and 57 Judicial Watch lawsuits, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and their minions and spinners have led the elite media to believe that they have escaped responsibility for their crimes. In fact, recent events have underscored their legal vulnerabilities.

Whatever might be said about a dormant and apparently compromised independent counsel or a politically impotent Congress, it now has been left to the courts to take charge and commence proceedings to uncover and prosecute what, including Watergate, may be the largest incidence of obstruction of justice in U.S. history.

Insight and its sister daily, the Washington Times, broke the details of this obstruction of justice. First, there were the revelations by a former White House computer specialist, Sheryl Hall, and then by another White House whistle-blower, Betty Lambuth. Both came forward to Judicial Watch and testified that hundreds of thousands -- and, perhaps more than 1 million -- e-mails and 457 hard-drive cartridges have been suppressed by the White House in the face of subpoenas and document requests served by Judicial Watch, the independent counsel and Congress. Hall and Lambuth confirm that these e-mails contain incriminating evidence against the Clintons, Gore and their coconspirators in the Filegate, Chinagate and Monica Lewinsky scandals.

According to employees of the Northrop Grumman Corp., the contractor that ran the White House e-mail and telephone databases, had these documents been provided sooner they likely would have resulted in impeachment of the president of the United States and forced criminal prosecutions even by the Reno Justice Department. Rather than turn over these smoking-gun communications, the Clinton-Gore White House threatened to prosecute and illegally use the Justice Department (as in Travelgate) to jail White House employees and contractors who refused to remain silent about the cover-up. The whistle-blowers say that first lady Hillary Clinton most likely was behind this.

After the story broke, Judicial Watch made Hall available to Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana and his staff on the House Committee on Government Reform. Simultaneously, Judicial Watch filed a motion in its $90 million Filegate class-action lawsuit asking that Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington take immediate action to hold an evidentiary hearing that would place on the record the underlying facts concerning this mammoth and blatant obstruction. Having received information that the White House already had destroyed smoking-gun records, Judicial Watch asked Lamberth to charge U.S. marshals immediately to enter the White House and seize the e-mails to preserve them.

Thus far, only congressional investigators have met with employees of Northrop Grumman who oversaw e-mail and telephone records. These witnesses have confirmed the accounts of Hall and other White House whistle-blowers that the e-mails contain information on Filegate, campaign-finance abuses, Chinagate and Lewinsky, and that the documents never were reviewed for subpoenaed materials as required by law. A hearing last week before the House Government Reform Committee appears to have revealed further obstruction. As Insight went to press, the country was awaiting Lamberth's decision on whether to hold the evidentiary hearing. Typically, the Reno Justice Department filed a last-minute brief arguing that, because its campaign-finance task force now had decided to "investigate" the missing e-mails, Judge Lamberth should delay the hearing. It was a ruse.

Unlike Congress, which for arcane political reasons has been unwilling to hold accountable the perpetrators of the Clinton-Gore obstructions, Lamberth has both the authority and power to do so. Previous decisions by Lamberth concerning the Hillary Clinton health-care task force, Chinagate, the looting of an American Indian trust fund and other litigation are to be admired. But the nature of Lamberth's prior rulings has not allowed him to hold any high-level Clinton-Gore official individually accountable. To his credit, the judge has expressed frustration at this. But White House aide Ira Magaziner was not made to pay for lying to the court in the healthcare task-force case; neither were Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt nor Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin required to cough up monies for their contempt-of-court citations in the Indian trust-fund case.

Now, however, Lamberth has an opportunity to hold individuals accountable for what everyone concerned with these cases knows has been a massive criminal cover-up. Like Judge John Sirica during Watergate, Lamberth has the power to change the course of history and to restore the rule of law. He has said that he knows who the responsible White House parties are and that if records are destroyed or hidden he will hang the perpetrators. No one doubts that he means it.