The White House counterattacks

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 30, 1998 | by Tiffany Danitz, | Jennifer G. Hickey

The White House is in attack mode, cocking hired guns in the form of private investigators and fine-tuning its press machine. Have the president's corpopals crossed the line?

This police action involving the president and his nemesis, Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, has been going on for five years. Occasionally the skirmishing has erupted into full-scale battle, but then dies down to a stalemate. Now, with $40 million in spending in his wake, sexual allegations by a 24-year-old former intern on tape and possible perjury charges against the president, Starr has thrown down the gauntlet.

President Clinton's lawyers, too, have raised the stakes, hiring private investigators to look into the prosecutor's background, leaking damaging stories to the press, declaring an all-out war. The press stands in the middle -- occasionally becoming the pawn of scandal leaks but ever reporting the unfolding events vigilantly to the public. And yet this war, this conflict of two sturdy wills each determined to emerge victorious, is supposedly being waged for the public's benefit.

Some say the White House has crossed a line by investigating its accusers under the rubric that all is fair in love and war. Others argue that Starr, too, has crossed a line -- maybe not a legal one, but an ethical one -- by subpoenaing Robert Weiner, the White House spokesman for drug policy, and Sidney Blumenthal, a former reporter turned Clinton adviser. The press office at the White House has a sophisticated team ready to jump in and smear, leak or obfuscate for the good of the country -- or at least the good of their boss. By the end of the battle, who knows whether the First Amendment will have been trampled, or how many hard-earned tax dollars will have been spent on both sides of the conflict.

ABC News' Sam Donaldson, who often can be spotted in the front row at the White House press briefings, tells Insight that while the hiring of private investigators may appear to be shrewd politically, it isn't necessarily right. Does he object to the tactics? "Only because we ought to have an investigation that gets to the facts," he explains, adding, "They [the White House] don't want Judge Starr to do his job. Why? I think the question answers itself."

At first the White House denied hiring private investigators Jack Palladino and Terry Lenzner to look into the backgrounds of Starr's team. White House press secretary Mike McCurry told reporters, "We don't retain private investigators to go snoop around about prosecutors, reporters or Joe DiGenova," the former independent counsel who lobbed the snooping charge on Meet the Press. McCurry later parsed the statement, admitting to the use of private sleuths for legwork but not for "digging up dirt on people's private lives" or "looking up dirt on prosecutors and reporters."

Donaldson notes that if it were "Bill Clinton, private citizen," the allegations of hiring a private investigator would not be an issue. But he adds, "The idea that private investigators are involved is off-putting. At this moment of history we need him [Starr] to finish his investigation. In other words, put up or shut up."

Some believe that it was this offensive move by the White House team that induced Starr to subpoena controversial reporter-turned-Clinton-adviser Blumenthal. But that is also when Starr crossed the line, according to Lanny Davis, former Clinton counsel: "In two concrete instances I believe Mr. Starr has crossed the line" into "prosecutorial misconduct, specifically the misuse of the subpoena power of a grand jury. Those two instances would be the subpoenaing of Mr. Robert Weiner and the subpoenaing of Mr. Sidney Blumenthal."

Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman for the Freedom Forum in Washington, agrees that an ethical line was crossed by Starr: "In this situation what the prosecutor's office did was send a very clear message that criticism would be met with a grand-jury subpoena and that is not the American way. It was the people's First Amendment right that was abrogated here."

"Neither of those subpoenas," adds Davis, "could conceivably be based on the possibility of a crime having been committed or the development of evidence leading to a crime. And if this is the case, then I believe the Justice Department should launch an investigation of Mr. Starr to determine whether there was misconduct -- and if there was, that would be grounds for removal."

Mark Levin of Landmark Legal Foundation disagrees with Davis on this charge, arguing that it is Attorney General Janet Reno's obligation to "ensure that federal prosecutors are not the subject of efforts to undermine an investigation."

Defenders of Clinton say that interviewing lawyers about a prosecutor's skills and tactics and searching the news for published information on the prosecutor's record are all standard defense tactics. Defense lawyers in important cases have been known to hire private investigators to build dossiers on the opposition to develop legal tactics on behalf of their clients. Former prosecutor and independent counsel Michael Zeldin, who now works for investigative services at Price Waterhouse, has stated that as long as investigators don't break the law, then "investigation is always appropriate in the context of litigation."