-Caveat Lector-
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
A Stonewall of His Own
Does Gore feel accountable to anyone?
Thursday, November 2, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
Days away from the Presidential election, the Clinton State
Department has fallen into a dispute with Congress over the text
of a 1995 arms-related agreement between Vice President Gore and
former Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin. State is refusing to
turn over the documents to Congress, which wants to determine if
the deal breached a 1992 law, co-sponsored by Senator Gore,
banning weapons sales to Iran.
Meanwhile, a federal judge will hold a hearing in Washington
today at which Administration lawyers will try to explain again
why they haven't disclosed the full operational details about the
White House's controversial e-mail system. At issue here for Mr.
Gore is whether an enormous volume of missing e-mails,
acknowledged by the White House in late 1998, include evidence
that is material to the campaign fund-raising investigations at
Justice and the Independent Counsel's office.
Needless to say, it would be unhelpful and conceivably disastrous
for the Gore campaign if something awful existed in those
Chernomyrdin weapons papers or if something incriminatory exists
in the e-mails, and it became public now.
So what? Laying aside the many denizens of the just-win school
of politics, serious people should be able to agree that
accountability matters, that high public officials don't own the
government but must answer to some counterbalancing authority.
Al Gore is the one who is running on his vaunted high-level
experience as Bill Clinton's Vice President. What Congress wants
to know about the Chernomyrdin agreements is whether Mr. Gore,
representing the United States, gave Russia permission to sell a
significant amount of weaponry to Iran, and if in so doing he
broke a U.S. law. It would be ludicrous to argue that this is
not a legitimate basis for inquiry by the second branch of
government (though in the past eight years, Congressional
Democrats have come close to holding the view that the oversight
function is null and void).
The State Department says "sensitive diplomatic negotiations" are
at issue, and Mr. Gore's office suggests the deal was never
secret and the agreements were announced at the time. And we're
supposed to believe this and move on.
So, five days before the vote, we would like to ask: Will the
Clinton Presidency's record and habit of large-scale stonewalling
carry over to a Gore Presidency?
And will a President Gore regard the principle of accountability
for his office with the same contempt that Bill Clinton did?
As an issue of dispute, the Chernomyrdin deal is at least small
enough to get your arms around. The e-mail controversy, as the
determined coverage of the Associated Press described it Tuesday,
sprawls across "a federal judge, four congressional committees
and five sets of investigators." The undisclosed e-mails are
potentially relevant to investigations and outstanding subpoenas
into matters involving Monica Lewinsky, Waco, the Puerto Rican
terrorist pardons, Whitewater, the Travel Office and campaign
fund-raising, specifically the Buddhist temple event.
A month ago, for instance, reconstructed computer tapes turned
over to Congress revealed that an April 1996 e-mail from a Gore
staffer clearly described the temple event as a fund-raiser, not
an outreach event.
Well, we all experience IT problems, some might argue. It
doesn't look like it. Back in March, when the Administration
testified on the e-mail problem before Congress, the White
House's third most important person, counsel Bruce Lindsey, sat
in the front row, actively engaged.
Today in Judge Royce Lamberth's courtroom, White House counsel
Beth Nolan will describe how it has now been discovered that
internally circulated e-mails are also missing; until now, the
lawyers had said that only e-mails sent from outside the White
House weren't archived. Commenting in court Tuesday, Judge
Lamberth denounced the White House's admission that all its
previous testimony on this matter was wrong.
Mr. Gore, asked in June on Fox News about the problem of his
office's missing e-mails, replied: "I don't know about the backup
tapes. I read about that in the papers recently. I don't know
anything about why that happened or how it happened. I'm not an
expert on computers."
By way of separating himself from the part of the Clinton legacy
that most offended the public, his uncertain character, Mr.
Gore has asserted repeatedly that he is own man. Other than the
kiss, where's the evidence of that?
Bill Clinton, with his famous "permanent campaign," ran a
Presidency that clearly felt itself accountable only to the
people who had cast votes for him, rather than to the whole
nation. Mr. Clinton never, or rarely, seemed able to rise above
his campaign.
The stonewall now building around Al Gore on Iran and the
e-mails, suggesting that Mr. Gore is accountable to nothing
beyond himself or whoever is willing to vote for him Tuesday,
again raises the question: What reason do we have to believe that
his Presidency will be any different?
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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