FYI
MICHAEL SPITZER wrote:
> Washington Times-EDITORIAL • June 8, 2000
>
> Perjury and the vice president
>
> For two and a half years, Attorney General Janet Reno has
> obstinately refused to disclose several internal Justice
> Department documents and memorandums relating to the department's
> investigation of campaign-finance abuses during the 1996
> presidential election. For years, Justice has argued that
> publicly disclosing the memos would provide defendants with a
> road map of the task force's investigation. On Wednesday, the
> House Government Reform Committee publicly released numerous
> internal documents, including memos written by former task force
> chief Charles LaBella and FBI Director Louis Freeh strongly
> arguing that the law compelled Miss Reno to seek the appointment
> of an independent counsel to investigate President Clinton, Vice
> President Al Gore and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, among
> others.
>
> It immediately became clear why Miss Reno has refused to
> disclose these documents. Declaring that the documents "expose
> the bankruptcy of this investigation," Rep. Dan Burton, the
> committee chairman, conveyed the exasperation that Messrs. Freeh
> and LaBella have felt for years, noting, "If this is a road map,
> it's a road map of a car going around in circles."
>
> The first of the controversial documents was a Nov. 24,
> 1997, memo written by Mr. Freeh to Miss Reno, who had to decide
> within the next 10 days whether Mr. Gore's federally regulated
> hard-money fund-raising solicitations from the White House should
> be investigated by an independent counsel. The previous March,
> Miss Reno absolved Mr. Gore of any guilt on the basis of Mr.
> Gore's assertion that only unregulated soft money had been
> raised.
>
> In September 1997, however, newspaper reports disclosed that
> Mr. Gore had in fact raised substantial sums of hard money for
> the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from his White House
> office. Mr. Gore subsequently claimed he did not know hard money
> was being raised. In his Nov. 24, 1997, memo, Mr. Freeh argued:
> "In the face of compelling evidence that the vice president was a
> very active, sophisticated fund-raiser who knew exactly what he
> was doing, his own exculpatory statements must not be given undue
> weight." Indeed, Mr. Freeh warned Miss Reno that the Justice
> Department was ignoring "reliable evidence" that "contradicted"
> Mr. Gore's statements. Miss Reno ignored Mr. Freeh's
> recommendation to seek an independent counsel.
>
> In July 1998, Mr. LaBella, who had been selected by Miss
> Reno in 1997 to head the task force after it had become mired in
> chaos, sent his 94-page memo to Miss Reno arguing that the law
> compelled her to seek an independent counsel to investigate Mr.
> Gore, the president, the first lady and Deputy White House Chief
> of Staff Harold Ickes, whom Mr. LaBella described as a "Svengali,
> assuming power — with the imprimatur of the president — to
> authorize DNC and Clinton/Gore '96 expenditures." Noting that Mr.
> Gore had received a series of memos from Mr. Ickes and attended
> several meetings, all of which discussed the status of the DNC's
> hard-money accounts, Mr. LaBella wrote, "Curiously, though
> renowned as a policy wonk, the vice president claims he did not
> read the memos and cannot recall the meetings." Accusing the
> Justice Department of "gamesmanship" and "contortions" to avoid
> seeking the appointment of an independent counsel, Mr. LaBella
> described his Justice Department superiors as "intellectually
> dishonest." Miss Reno ignored the advice of her own hand-picked
> task force chief.
>
> The following month, however, news reports revealed that a
> potentially incriminating Democratic fund-raising memo had
> surfaced. The memo, which served as the talking points for a Nov.
> 21, 1995, White House fund-raising meeting attended by Mr. Gore,
> contained numerous hand-written notations by David Strauss, Mr.
> Gore's then-deputy chief of staff. Mr. Strauss's notes referred
> to the requirement that the DNC's media fund must finance its
> so-called issue ads according to a "65 percent soft/35 percent
> hard" split. And Mr. Strauss's notations defined soft money, in
> terms of contributions to political parties, as "corporate or
> anything over $20K from an individual." Thus, the first $20,000
> that Mr. Gore raised for the DNC from individuals would be, by
> definition, hard money. This was important because unregulated
> soft money was easy to raise, but highly restricted hard money
> was not. The difficult part would be raising the hard money
> component (35 percent) of the media fund. Mr. Strauss also noted
> how eager Mr. Gore was to make the solicitations: "VP: 'Is it
> possible to do a reallocation for me to take more of the events
> and the calls?'" and "VP: "Count me in on the calls.'"
>
> Several days after the memo with Mr. Strauss' notations
> surfaced, Miss Reno initiated another 90-day preliminary inquiry
> to determine whether an independent counsel should be appointed
> to investigate Mr. Gore for perjury, among other things. Miss
> Reno received a memo from the FBI about a week before her
> decision was due. According to recent testimony before the Senate
> Judiciary subcommittee on administration, in a Nov. 20, 1998,
> memo to James Robinson, the assistant attorney general for the
> criminal division, FBI General Counsel Larry Parkinson wrote, "Is
> there sufficient evidence as a matter of law to prove that Vice
> President Al Gore made a false statement when he told the
> investigators on Nov. 11, 1997, that he believed the media fund
> [used to finance DNC issue ads] was composed solely of soft
> money? We believe the answer to that, this first question, is
> clearly yes." Responding to questions by Sen. Arlen Specter, Mr.
> Parkinson referred to 13 memos Mr. Ickes had written to Mr. Gore
> that were "indications of discussions between the time period of
> August 1995 and July 1996 that referred to a hard-money component
> of the media fund, which was the central issue in the preliminary
> inquiry." The FBI did not believe Mr. Gore's claims that he never
> read Mr. Ickes' memos.
>
> Notwithstanding Mr. Strauss's contemporaneous notes and
> corroboration by four participants, including then-White House
> Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, all of whom recalled Mr. Gore's
> attendance at the Nov. 21, 1995, meeting and a discussion of the
> hard-money component in the media fund, Mr. Gore contemptuously
> told the FBI that he had consumed an excessive amount of iced tea
> and might have been in the restroom when meeting participants
> discussed hard money. But the FBI found that Mr. Gore attended a
> total of at least three meetings and was an active participant at
> each one. According to the FBI's interview with Mr. Panetta, the
> "hard/soft money breakdown of the media fund [was] discussed at
> all three meetings; there was always discussion [and] an
> examination of the overall DNC budget and, at a minimum, a
> reference to the hard/soft breakdown of the media fund."
>
> Mr. Parkinson's Nov. 20, 1998, memo exhaustively chronicled
> the evidence detailing why the FBI clearly believed Mr. Gore had
> made "a false statement" worthy of investigation by an
> independent counsel. Also in November, a Justice attorney, whose
> name was redacted, wrote in a memo that "the evidence we now have
> . . . supports an argument that the vice president had to have
> known that hard money was a component of the media fund" [italics
> in the original]. Two months before, moreover, in a September
> memo, Robert Litt, a high-level political appointee in the
> department's criminal division, noted, "It is not uncommon for us
> to bring a perjury case where the defendant's statements are
> contradicted by documents that were sent to him, or statements at
> a meeting he attended, and for the defendant to claim that he did
> not read the document or pay attention during the meeting."
> Nevertheless, four days after receiving Mr. Parkinson's memo,
> Miss Reno wrote a memo to a federal judicial panel in which she
> reported that "the evidence fails to provide any reasonable basis
> for a conclusion that the vice president may have lied."
>
> Thanks to Miss Reno's judgment, a very grateful, if
> undeserving, Mr. Gore soon embarked upon his campaign without the
> worry of being investigated for perjury. It seems he hasn't
> learned to tell the truth since.
>
> =================================================================
> Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
>
> FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
> Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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