Congressman Barr lowers the boom

Insight on the News, Dec 8, 1997 by Jennifer G. Hickey

Nearly 24 years after the impeachment inquiry about President Nixon was initiated, Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, a former federal prosecutor, asks similar questions about President Clinton.

On Oct. 11, 1996, Bill Clinton proclaimed National Character Counts Week, declaring, "Individual character involves honoring and embracing certain core ethical values: honesty, respect, responsibility, hard work, fairness, caring, civic virtue and citizenship.... My administration has made this a top priority."

Clinton didn't declare good character a top priority of his administration when he announced National Character Counts Week on Oct. 17 of this year. Perhaps this is because that claim is being challenged by former U.S. attorney Bob Barr, an experienced prosecutor and a GOP congressman from Georgia. Barr has introduced HR304, a resolution calling for an Inquiry of Impeachment, for which he immediately was joined by 17 cosponsors. The object is formally to begin the process of investigating whether grounds exist to impeach the president.

While Barr has taken the first step in the impeachment process, he is not citing specific grounds. Nor does the resolution have a higher priority than any of the other resolutions introduced daily in the House. However, its impact will change dramatically if it is voted out of the House Rules Committee and proceeds to the full House for a vote. If it passes then, the House Judiciary Committee will be instructed to "investigate and report to the House whether grounds exist to impeach William Jefferson Clinton."

Why take the first steps of the impeachment process now? Barr tells Insight that the appearance of Attorney General Janet Reno before the House Judiciary Committee on Oct. 15 was one factor in his decision to introduce the resolution. "It became patently obvious that the Department of Justice was not going to move on any of these allegations in any serious way," he says.

Barr often has expressed frustration at the inability or unwillingness of the Justice Department to move forward to prosecute of officials of the Clinton administration for apparent violations of law. "One can argue over whether a violation of law ought to be prosecuted--prosecutorial discretion ... but I don't think anyone can with a straight face listen to the testimony [of Hillary Rodham Clinton's former chief-of-staff Maggie Williams], listen to what the vice president has said about his [fund-raising] phone calls and conclude anything other than that, on the face, these are violations" of the law.

Barr referred to a case of possible campaign-finance-law violation by Williams for accepting a $50,000 check from Chinese businessman Johnny Chung in the White House. Another factor was the "systematic abuse" he says he has witnessed in his capacity as a member the House Judiciary and Government Reform and Oversight committees. Barr cites the alleged influence of the Chinese Communists in the 1996 elections, the financing of the Clinton-Gore campaign, the White House Travel Office firings and the improper seizure of nearly 1,000 privileged FBI files on leading Republicans as evidence that Clinton has violated the trust of the American people.

Violation of the public trust as grounds for impeachment was outlined in the Federalist No. 65 by Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that grounds for impeachment involve those offenses which "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

Barr says, "What I see here and what I think others see here is a systematic abuse of office, which I think puts it in a category that is far different from Watergate. Watergate was a situation where we had a few people doing illegal acts--we didn't see a whole system being corrupted."

But even by mentioning the term impeachment, much less calling for an impeachment inquiry, Barr has elicited emotional and partisan reaction. Asked to comment on the inquiry, Clinton resorted uncharacteristically to ad hominem argument and attacked the messenger. "Well, Congressman Barr, as I remember, was the man who carried the NRA's water to try to beat the Brady bill and the assault-weapons ban, and he's always had a rather extreme view of these things."

In fact, the former U.S. attorney's allegedly "extreme view" in the impeachment matter is based constitutionally, in part, on the research Hillary Rodham conducted in 1973 and 1974 while working as a staff counsel with future Clinton White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. "One of the most eloquent researchers on this was Hillary Rodham Clinton and the work in which she participated back in '73 and '74 and came to the exact same, correct, historical analysis and conclusion," Barr tells Insight.

But do Clinton's alleged ethical foibles and those of members of his administration warrant impeachment--short of proof of an open-and-shut crime? One need only refer to the February 1974 report by the House Judiciary Committee and the research conducted by Rodham and Nussbaum. According to that report, "Of the 13 impeachments voted by the House since 1789, at least 10 involved one or more allegations that did not charge a violation of criminal law." In fact, judges have been impeached for social abuses such as being intoxicated while sitting on the bench. One of the four charges against Judge John Pickering in 1803 was that he was "a man of loose morals and intemperate habits."