From: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=65000139 ANOTHER GORE SCANDAL Abusing the INS The vice president put the heat on to naturalize a million aliens considered likely to vote for the Democrats in 1996. BY DAVID P. SCHIPPERS Wednesday, August 23, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore has been talking a good game recently about integrity in politics. But that's not how he always plays it. In June 1998, as part of our oversight investigation of the Justice Department, my staff and I, reporting to the House Judiciary Committee, were looking into the White House's use of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to further its political agenda. The most blatant politicization of the agency had taken place during the 1996 presidential campaign, when the Clinton-Gore administration pressured the INS into expediting its Citizenship USA program to grant citizenship to tens of thousands of aliens the White House considered likely Democratic voters. The handling of this pressure campaign, the end result of which was the circumvention of long-established policies at the INS, was left to Mr. Gore. He and his office were responsible for keeping the pressure on, a job they did admirably, as e-mails we recovered clearly showed. The White House's INS campaign started early in the election year, but ran almost immediately into a roadblock: Commissioner Doris Meissner didn't want to speed up the naturalization process, and she warned the White House that such a move might be viewed as politically motivated. Undaunted, the White House asked Douglas Farbrother of Mr. Gore's recently formed National Performance Review staff to look into removing barriers to citizenship. As early as March 1996, Mr. Farbrother was reporting his efforts and results to Mr. Gore's office. Mr. Farbrother met with both INS and Justice Department officials in March, asking them to delegate broad authority to the local managers, waive "stupid rules" and recruit local people to process alien applications. Mr. Farbrother reported to Mr. Gore that unless those reforms were implemented, the backlog wouldn't be "processed in time." At one point Mr. Farbrother sent an e-mail updating Elaine Kamarck, an official in the vice president's office. Ms. Kamarck responded in all uppercase type: "The president is sick of this and wants action. If nothing moves today, we'll have to take some pretty drastic measures." A week later Mr. Farbrother sent a lengthy e-mail directly to the vice president lamenting that district directors weren't being given enough discretion to produce one million new citizens by the registration cutoff day. "Unless we blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on front-line managers, we are going to have way too many people still waiting for citizenship in November," he wrote. He added: "I can't make Doris Meissner delegate broad authority to her field managers. Can you?" Mr. Gore answered: "Will explore it. Thanks." By the end of March, Ms. Meissner had seen the light and delegated authority. By April 4, 1996, Ms. Kamarck was able to report to the president that everything was in place to naturalize over one million aliens in time for them to vote in the 1996 election. For aliens to obtain citizenship, federal regulations require that their application be accompanied by a complete set of fingerprints. Fingerprint cards are sent to the FBI to determine if the applicant has a criminal or arrest record. An application may be denied if the alien has a serious criminal record or if he falsely denies ever having been arrested. The FBI fingerprint check is an essential and critical part of the naturalization process since it is the only method of preventing violent felons, dope peddlers and other criminals from obtaining citizenship. It was in this area that Mr. Gore's pressure caused the biggest breakdown. To save time, FBI arrest records weren't inserted into the aliens' files, and as a result aliens with criminal records were granted citizenship. Even those files with fingerprints skipped through the system: Just prior to the voter-registration deadline a box was discovered in the Chicago INS office containing nearly 5,000 FBI arrest reports that had never been cross-checked against aliens. Later, when it was discovered that thousands more FBI reports were never processed, the Clinton-Gore administration sought to convince the public that the foul-up really didn't really harm the process. They cited statistics showing that the rejection rate of 17% was just about what it had always been. But the INS numbers didn't take into account the thousands of aliens who weren't rejected, but would have been under normal procedures. If the traditional process had been followed, the rejection rate in the summer of 1996 would have easily exceeded 30%. In the end, the White House got its one million voters and re-election. The U.S. got 75,000 new citizens who had arrest records when they applied; an additional 115,000 citizens whose fingerprints were unclassifiable and were never resubmitted; and a final 61,000 who were given citizenship without even having their fingerprints submitted so that no check was possible. Those numbers were developed by the accounting firm of Peat Marwick as a result of an audit of the 1996 Citizenship USA program. In June 1998, we undertook to again pick up the investigation of the program. Our interest intensified when we heard that a similar plan may be in the works for the 2000 presidential election. Among other things, we wanted to find out if the criminals who were given citizenship in 1996 were continuing their criminal activity in the two years since. My staff pulled out about 100 of the most violent or serious crimes that were committed by aliens prior to naturalization and documented by arrest records. Of those 100 records, some 20% showed arrests for serious crimes after the subject was given citizenship. The charges included murder, rape and child sexual abuse. Based on those results, we resolved to ask for updates on every arrest record. Had we been given enough time to put together evidence and witnesses, Citizenship USA might even have figured in Mr. Clinton's impeachment trial. This is not what I call "integrity." Rather, this is just one more example of the Clinton-Gore administration's two working mottoes: "The end justifies any means," coupled with "win at any cost." Mr. Schippers, chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment trial, is author of "Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton's Impeachment" (Regnery, 2000). 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