by Ann Coulter
On the other hand, the nine hundred FBI files ultimately discovered in the Clinton White House were certainly not being used to create a “friends” list. Unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, the Clinton White House’s possession of FBI raw files was against the law. Also unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, there was no national security reason for the White House to have these files, as the Clinton administration has admitted, trying to portray the nefarious files business as a “snafu.”
Indeed, the only rational explanation for the Clinton administration’s possession of the files on many Republicans—and some prominent Republicans—was to harass Clinton’s political enemies more easily. Recall that former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos said that the “whisper[s]” around the Clinton White House were that Clinton’s people were going to start blackmailing their political opponents to survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal—Stephanopoulos called it the “Ellen Rometsch strategy.”
And we know the Clinton White House illegally sought the FBI file on at least one individual citizen “for purposes unrelated to national security,” but whom the White House had a political interest in damaging. Perhaps there have been others.
Someone at the Clinton White House is responsible for hiring the men who implemented an unprecedented violation of nine hundred Americans’ civil liberties. Someone at the White House is responsible for hiring the men who abused the powers of the executive branch to engage in political espionage against its presumed enemies, on a scale only dreamed of by the Plumbers, whose activities brought down Richard Nixon. According to this country’s most recent precedent on impeachable offenses, that someone is the president.
Framer James Wilson noted that the Constitution provided the president with no “screen” from misconduct in the executive branch. The president would not be able to “act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention.” Any attempt to do so, Wilson explained, would render the president impeachable.27 Another participant at the Constitutional Convention, James Iredell, a strong proponent of the Constitution at the North Carolina ratifying convention, and later a Supreme Court justice, said that it was the president’s personal responsibility that demonstrated the “very different nature” of the president “from a monarch.” William Davie noted that the “predominant principle” of making a single president responsible for the entire executive branch was to establish “the more obvious responsibility of one person.”
All these quotes from the framers were admiringly cited in the Rodino Report, which explained to the nation the grounds for impeachment the last time a United States president faced impeachment, just a quarter century ago.
Chapter Thirteen
Auditing the Enemy
The second article of impeachment against President Nixon charged him with “endeavor[ing]” to cause income tax audits, “in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens.” A president’s use of the IRS for political purposes is such a clear, egregious abuse of power that even trying to do it constitutes an impeachable offense. If success is any measure of effort, Nixon didn’t try very hard. Not only was Nixon unable to trigger any political audits of his enemies, he was also unable to stop the IRS from auditing him while he was president.
Twenty-five years later, few critics of President Clinton seem to have escaped audits by the IRS.
BILLY DALE
The IRS audited beleaguered Travel Office head Billy Dale after the Clinton administration fired him. In addition, of course, Dale endured a full FBI investigation and prosecution and a review of his sensitive FBI file by political flacks in Clinton’s White House months after he had been summarily fired.
You would think Billy Dale was Carlos the Jackal. Assorted felons, hustlers, and bribe-takers had streamed through the Clinton administration, and high-level government officials, and Clinton himself, had always played the unwitting dupe. But the one executive branch employee who couldn’t even jaywalk on Clinton’s watch was Billy Dale. The reason was simple: Dale was an enemy of the administration. He had made them look bad by not having engaged in criminal conduct when they said he had.
And this time, not only was an enemy of the administration actually audited, but also there was a smoking gun indicating that the audit was political.
Congressional investigators looking into the White House Travel Office massacre uncovered that memo about Billy Dale written by White House lawyers that summarized Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy’s remarks. Kennedy informed the lawyers that IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson was “on top of it.”
Richardson was a political appointee, not one of those “career professionals” so often used as camouflage for the Clinton administration’s misconduct. Recall that she was a friend of Hillary’s at Yale Law School, had advised Clinton during his 1992 campaign, and had served on Clinton’s transition team. While she was commissioner of the IRS, Richardson attended the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
What exactly might Richardson have been “on top of”? This was not a White House memo generally reviewing Richardson’s job performance at the IRS. It was a memo about the Travel Office. It was written soon after the Travel Office firings, as Clinton’s people were desperately investigating Dale for some sort of criminal conduct. And, of course, Billy Dale would eventually be personally audited.
That alone—the use of the IRS for a single political audit—would have been enough to call for the impeachment of any other president at any time in this nation’s history. As the Rodino Report explained, the president is “personally responsible for any abuse of the great trust reposed in him.”1 But, amazingly, nothing happened. President Clinton was never held accountable for this abuse of power so grand that Nixon was charged with impeachment for thinking about it.
And, recall, that wasn’t the only smoking gun. According to the White House’s own internal report on the Travel Office firings, Kennedy had informed an FBI agent that he would order the IRS to investigate if the FBI refused to start an investigation of Dale within the next fifteen minutes.2
And, of course, one week after Kennedy’s warning, IRS officers burst into the offices of UltrAir, the charter airline used by the White House Travel Office.3
It is difficult to write off this unannounced visit by the IRS as a mere coincidence. Not only was there Kennedy’s threat to call in the IRS to investigate the Travel Office, but also, as a newly formed company, UltrAir had not yet had occasion to file a single tax return.
It didn’t stop with Dale and UltrAir. The evidence that Clinton used the powerful IRS as a political attack machine would begin to accumulate rapidly.
CAN’T WIN IN THE SUPREME COURT? CALL THE IRS
Consider this: Which American citizen has caused Clinton more trouble than any other? That’s easy: Paula Jones. Jones was the one “bimbo eruption” Clinton’s attack squad couldn’t squelch. No Paula Jones, and there would have been no Monica Lewinsky, no job offers from U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, no chauffeur-driven limousine with Vernon Jordan, no perjurious affidavit, no Linda Tripp subpoena, no talking points, no tapes—and no perjury by the president. Paula Jones was the one Clinton antagonist who was holding him responsible in a court of law.
Now, guess who got audited by the IRS. Paula Jones. Jones’s audit letter arrived just a few months after Clinton lost his contrived “presidential immunity” claim in the Supreme Court. Not only that, but it arrived just days after settlement negotiations had broken down. Unless they reached a settlement, the Supreme Court’s ruling meant Jones’s lawyers could begin deposing other women immediately. Negotiations had collapsed on account of Jones’s steadfast insistence on an apology from President Clinton. Overseeing the IRS means never having to say you’re sorry.
Rejecting the White House’s popular “bureaucratic snafu” excuse, Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry said of the Jones audit, “We do dumb things from time to time, but we are not certifiably crazy.” The standard White House defense had transmogrified from w
e’re not evil, just incompetent, to that is too evil even for this administration, so don’t even think about it. But as a New York Times columnist said of another Clinton scandal—the fire sale on plots at Arlington National Cemetery—because it’s Clinton, “the charge was plausible.”4 (And this was before Arianna Huffington established that what was plausible was actually true.)
After the Dale audit, replete with not one but two smoking guns, it would not be “certifiably crazy” for the White House to assume it could get away with anything.
The IRS audit of Jones, especially on the heels of her 9-0 victory over Clinton in the Supreme Court, was suspect on another count: Tax lawyers say that individuals who make less than $50,000 a year are more likely to be struck by lightning than audited by the IRS. Paula Jones is a housewife, and her husband earns less than $37,000 a year. According to Investor’s Business Daily, the IRS’s own data indicates that Jones and her husband “were part of the least audited income group.” But during the Clinton administration, the chances of being audited by the IRS apparently turned more on politics than on income.
Paula Jones and Billy Dale had done more harm to the president’s poll numbers than any other two individuals—with the possible exception of journalists covering the president’s troubles with Jones and Dale. Both were in the least-audited income group. Both were audited by the IRS. If no other Clinton antagonists had been audited, if there had been no smoking guns, these two audits would be remarkable.
But there were other suspicious audits.
THE LIST GOES ON
Patricia and Glenn Mendoza became targets of the IRS soon after becoming a nuisance to the president. In July 1996 Mrs. Mendoza had expressed her opinion of the president as he approached her and tried to shake her hand. Mrs. Mendoza synthesized the opinions of millions of Americans with the succinct and punchy phrase, “You suck.” This latter-day Patrick Henry was immediately pounced upon by Secret Service agents and, along with her husband, was held for twelve hours. (The Secret Service is another federal agency that has been in overdrive investigating critics of the Clinton administration.)
One month later the Mendozas received a letter from the IRS threatening to confiscate their property to satisfy an alleged $200 debt to the IRS. At first glance, that might seem insignificant. However, not only was there the Dale and Jones matter, and not only had the Mendozas been shaken down by the Secret Service like a couple of international terrorists, but also the charge turned out to be a mistake. As the IRS eventually explained, the letter was due to a “computer error.” Oops, sorry, our mistake.
In the abstract, the Mendozas would seem to be too insignificant to inspire a political audit from any administration. But the Mendozas weren’t too insignificant to be arrested and held for twelve hours by the president’s Secret Service detail. Billy Dale wasn’t too insignificant for the White House to demand a full FBI investigation and prosecution. Kathleen Willey wasn’t too insignificant for the White House to try to smear.
As journalist Joe Sobran has said, it’s the corner-of-the-eye facts that tell you what kind of man Clinton is. He’s the kind of man who doesn’t take on Saddam Hussein; he takes on Billy Dale.
Under Clinton, political IRS audits of every tobacco and firearm manufacturer in the nation would be less believable than political audits of these lone gadflies. (Another “little guy” audited by the IRS was Kent Masterson Brown. He brought the lawsuit that compelled Hillary’s health care task force to reveal the names of its members.)
Still not convinced?
Consider this partial list of conservative groups that have been investigated by Clinton’s IRS: National Review, The American Spectator, the Christian Coalition, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Oliver North’s Freedom Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the Western Journalism Center, the National Center for Public Policy Research, Fortress America, and Citizens Against Government Waste.
And these are just the ones that are public knowledge. IRS audits are not a matter of public record, and most targets of an IRS investigation don’t like to talk about it. But variations of this list have been published in numerous articles in a variety of newspapers, along with the claim that no comparable liberal groups have been audited. No one has disputed that claim. No liberal outfit has stepped forward to say that it is being audited, too. The IRS has not denied the charge.
Either President Clinton has abused the most fear-inspiring arm of the federal government, or there has been a mathematically improbable series of coincidences involving IRS audits under Clinton. It is difficult to brush off the accumulated evidence that the Clinton administration used the IRS to conduct politically motivated audits. But this is, after all, the Clinton administration.
Under the Clinton administration, the president’s employees have audited Clinton’s enemies (coincidentally or not); they have hauled secret Republican files from the FBI for inspection by White House employees; they have summarily fired the White House Travel Office staff and then brought criminal charges against the head of the office to cover the nepotism (criminal charges that were swiftly rejected by a jury); and they have interfered with an FBI investigation into Vince Foster’s White House office—which contained the personal legal work Foster had been performing for the Clintons.
And that’s just what they did in Clinton’s first year in office alone. This omits the many other notorious Clinton administration officials who popped up after the most ethical president’s inaugural year, such as convicted felon and former Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell (see Chapter 16), Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt (see Chapter 18), Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy (under investigation for taking illegal gifts), Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros (under investigation for false statements to the FBI about a mistress), and Vice President Gore (for felonious fund-raising calls from the White House). Bad apples just seem to gravitate to the Clinton administration.
But the president cannot surround himself with con men and criminals and then demand a signed confession or photographic evidence that he was directly responsible for their transgressions before he is held accountable. The whole idea of having a single president, subject to impeachment, Hamilton said, was to ensure that the president would not be able “to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.”5 If he gets away with this, Clinton will have accomplished precisely what the Constitution was designed to prevent.
ASSIGNING RESPONSIBILITY
As the Rodino Report noted, “[T]he impeachability of the President was considered to be an important element of his responsibility,” so that “there should be a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.”6
Clinton is president, and he is responsible. He is responsible for the politicization of the IRS. He is responsible for nine hundred FBI files illegally obtained by his White House. He is responsible for the abuse of the FBI for a political investigation. Yet he repeatedly acts as if he is just another White House employee, like Craig Livingstone. Outrageous abuses of power are constantly being unearthed in his administration, and he acts like he’s just another cog in the wheel of some huge bureaucratic morass he doesn’t understand himself.
It is true that an innocent president could have bad actors in his administration from time to time, but an innocent president would attempt to rout out corruption in his own administration rather than wait for the Washington Post to do so. An innocent president would promptly fire knaves in his administration, without waiting for his allies at the New York Times to demand their heads.7 An innocent president would take steps to see that abuses do not continue. An innocent president would set a tone so that corruption and abuses of power do not become a pattern.
It is interesting that the Clinton administration’s repeated “bureaucratic snafus” have not ordinarily come to light as a result of the administration’s own internal investigation. Wrongdoing in the Clinton administration has almost invariably been exposed only through the media or congressional i
nvestigators—at which point President Clinton says he knows only what he reads in the papers. Contrast that with Iran-Contra in the Reagan administration. Iran-Contra was first disclosed at a press conference held by Attorney General Edwin Meese. He knew because of an internal investigation conducted by the administration.
President Clinton has fired wrongdoers only after a hue and cry has gone up in the friendly press. He has clearly failed to set a standard that prevents abuses from occurring, since they occur habitually. It is not enough to fire the wrongdoers once they get caught, if the president keeps filling his administration with a never-ending cast of scoundrels.
Nixon was almost impeached for thinking about political IRS audits. (Actual result: he himself got audited.) He was threatened with impeachment for thinking about trying to influence an FBI investigation. (Actual result: an FBI investigation was delayed for two weeks, until the president himself ordered that it be resumed.) He was threatened with impeachment because one of his aides misused one security file.
That’s what it means to be president. Or that’s what it used to mean. Now, the president can duck all responsibility for actual and repeated abuses of power by his administration and demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that he was responsible. But there doesn’t need to be a jury trial to “fix the blame,” as the Rodino Report put it; Clinton is responsible because he is president.
It is implausible that the administration of a blameless president would: use the FBI for a political prosecution, be caught with nine hundred FBI files in its possession, or use the IRS to audit the president’s enemies. It defies logic that all three of these abuses of power could occur in one administration without the concurrence of the president. That much corruption can be the responsibility only of the man at the top—even under a less exacting standard for presidents than the one Hillary Rodham delineated for a different president in 1974.
