Al Gore's war on terrorism? [Hugh Hewitt gives you the lowdown on this loser]

This Independence Day is not your ordinary 7-4. Quite a lot has changed. Thousands of Americans have been killed by a malevolent enemy, and that enemy will be around for years to come trying to do the very same thing again and again.

There's "noise in the system" that the enemy will try to gin up another hit soon.

And there are thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on the hunt for the enemy.

This is the biggest change from a year ago. The enemy was already there, plotting and scheming on July 4, 2001. But a year ago, they were confident of American weakness and certain of American impotence. They had been misled by an unbroken span of years of ineffectual American responses to previous outrages. They believed that all that would follow from any attack would be a missile or two.

Which brings me to Al Gore. He's a shameless hypocrite. And it is about time the American press began to call him on it.

Saturday night, Gore attacked the president for having let Osama bin Laden get away, and for refusing to allow sufficient international peacekeepers to take up posts in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Colin Powell responded to a tape of those remarks by labeling them "patent nonsense" and by noting that the previous administration "hadn't even made a serious try" to kill off the enemy. Powell's assessment was too mild.

Gore's attack has no parallel in American political history. Imagine Wendall Wilkie attacking FDR in September of 1942 for the failure of the United States Marines to have secured Guadalcanal. (The six-month battle for the island began on Aug. 7, eight months after Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor.) Wilkie would have been justly condemned by all quarters and marginalized as a reckless self-promoter, if not worse.

Imagine Neville Chamberlin attacking Churchill for the evacuation of Dunkirk, the fall of France, or for the failure to halt the Luftwaffe's bombs. A full year after assuming power from the incompetent Chamberlin, Churchill watched as the Nazis seized the key island of Crete. Chamberlin had died of cancer in November of 1940, but had he lived, it is inconceivable that he would have attacked Churchill then or at any time during the course of the war. Chamberlin, you see, had class – if not wisdom – and understood well his personal responsibility for the plight of Great Britain.

Gore, by contrast, is oblivious to his own record. His attack on the conduct of the war earned some tut-tuts from the punditry, but not one elected Democrat rose to blast him. When Gore accused President Bush of "using the war" for political purposes, he was, in fact, projecting his own ham-handed grandstanding onto the administration. "Chutzpah" has a new face.

It is easy enough to understand why Gore is trying this tactic. The Clinton administration is increasingly revealed as wholly incompetent in the war on terror. It turned down the chance to grab bin Laden when Sudan offered the master terrorist up. Gore was focused on global warming and not global warnings – on the cost of pills and not the price of appeasement.

Until Powell's smack-down of Gore on Sunday, the Bush administration had been content to look forward and to allow the Clinton-Gore team the opportunity to avoid an accounting for their reckless mismanagement of national security.

I hope Powell's example is the new order of the day. Too much nonsense is being spouted by the left to allow it to go unanswered.

It is one thing to see Democratic senator after Democratic senator condemn the out-of-control Ninth Circuit for its Pledge ruling while allowing the nominees to vacancies on that Court to sit for more than a year due to Leahy's blockade, and it is one thing to read Tom Daschle's hilarious assault on the president's economic policies when he blocked a Senate majority from permanently repealing the death tax. I can handle Paul Wellstone's moralism against the backdrop of his twice-made and twice-broken pledge to run for only two terms in the U.S. Senate, and I can even find some sympathy for an at-sea – and quite obviously scared – Maureen Dowd and her like-minded colleagues on the far left of syndication land.

But Al Gore lecturing Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on how to run a war is too much. I hope the search begins in earnest now for Gore's role in the "war on terror" circa January 1993 to January 2001. Gore was there, remember, "the most powerful Vice President in history," the equal partner to the buffoon-in-chief – Mr. Kyoto, Mr. U.N.

On this Independence Day, as Americans are literally fighting and dying for our freedom, is it too much to ask for independence from blame-shifters and paper tigers? Is it too much to ask for a little shame?

There always chasing the wrong dog. Just stick him in prison.

The Vice President Broke The Law

The Washington Post
By David A. Price
Wednesday, April 2 1997; Page A17

Partial Transcript:

Did the vice president break the law when he made fund-raising calls from his office? The Post considered that question ["The Independent Counsel Issue," editorial, March 16] and came down firmly on the side of agnosticism. That's too bad, because the law on this issue is pretty simple -- and Al Gore was on the wrong side of it.

Section 607 of the federal criminal code says, "It shall be illegal for any person to solicit or receive any contribution" in a federal building. The law carries a penalty of up to three years in prison.

Gore and others have maintained that his calls were perfectly all right. But that isn't what the administration's own lawyers have been telling it up to now. In a July 12, 1993, memorandum circulated to the White House staff, the White House counsel at the time, Bernard Nussbaum, correctly pointed out that "solicitation or receipt of contributions in Federal buildings" is "prohibited." Period. Nussbaum advised: "White House telephones must not be used, even locally, for regular committee activities such as recruiting volunteers or fundraising."

And lest anyone not get the message, he added, "Certain staffers may also be subject to investigation and possible prosecution by an Independent Counsel in connection with alleged violations of these statutes."

One of Nussbaum's successors, Abner Mikva, also warned against West Wing fund-raising in an April 27, 1995, memo. (The Bush administration issued similar guidance to its White House staff in 1991.)

Nussbaum and Mikva were addressing the staff, not Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But on its face, section 607 applies to the president and vice president the same as anyone else -- as the Carter Justice Department concluded in a 1979 legal opinion.

...Another of Clinton's former White House counsels, Jack Quinn, claimed in a New York Times op-ed article last month that Gore didn't solicit "on" government property because he was phoning people who were someplace else.

To support this notion, he pointed to a 1908 Supreme Court case, where someone had mailed a solicitation letter to a government building. The court said there was still solicitation in the building, where the letter was received. And since Gore's solicitations were "received" outside the White House, Quinn explained, Gore is safe.

What Quinn didn't mention was the inconvenient fact that the court was upholding the conviction in that case. The court was broadening the reach of the law, not narrowing it. The court held that you can be guilty under section 607 even if you weren't on government property. It didn't say -- nor would it have made sense to say -- that the reverse is true: that you are innocent if you are on government property and soliciting the outside world.

The soft-money defense, raised by Attorney General Janet Reno, holds that the law does not cover donations to a political party rather than an election campaign. Reno based that conclusion on the fact that the law covers only donations made "for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office."

Of course, that was exactly why Gore was beating the bushes for money -- whether he happened to be asking his donors to write the checks to Clinton-Gore '96 or to the Democratic National Committee. Gore has said so himself: At his March 3 news conference, he repeatedly said the phone calls were to raise funds for "the campaign."

...The anti-solicitation law isn't rocket science.

The writer covers legal affairs for Investor's Business Daily.

Justice Department Failed to Review Legality of Gore White House Solicitations

'My Counsel Advises Me . . . ' - for the record - The Wall Street Journal - March 5, 1997
"As 18 U.S.C. 607(a) states: "It shall be unlawful for any person to solicit or receive any contributions . . . in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties . . . any person who violates this section shall be fined not more than $5,000, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

Documents Show Gore Made 86 Fund-Raising Calls From His Office

The New York Times
By Leslie Wayne
August 27, 1997

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Al Gore, who has played down his role in making fund-raising calls from the White House, was asked by the Democratic National Committee to make 140 fund-raising telephone calls and made 86, all from his White House office, according to documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators.

The calls were made to Democratic donors thought willing to give at least $25,000. Another set of calls, also from the White House, was made by the vice president's former chief of staff, Jack Quinn.

Gore acknowledged in March that he had made fund-raising calls "on a few occasions." Earlier this month, the White House put the number at 48. Documents obtained Tuesday, said to offer the best information White House officials have, indicate a number about twice as high.

"Last March, Mr. Gore made a statement on the fund-raising calls he made from his West Wing office," said a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "More documents have become available and that analysis bears out the statement that Mr. Gore said in March. They are consistent."

The White House also repeated Gore's assertion that his solicitations did not violate the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees to engage in partisan fund-raising activities from federal buildings. Congressmen generally leave federal buildings and make solicitation calls from their party headquarters.

But the vice president has argued that "no controlling legal authority or case" has ever tested his situation. The Hatch Act does not apply to the White House and the president, except for fund-raising activities, and on that point, many lawyers have differed over an array of legal distinctions since Gore's March statement.

"There was nothing inappropriate about these calls," the White House official said. "We feel very confident that nothing was illegal or inappropriate."

The documents obtained Tuesday have been turned over to the Senate Government Affairs committee, which is investigating campaign finance abuses. This fall, when the committee resumes its hearings, Gore's activities and those of the Democratic National Committee will come under closer scrutiny.

The calls made by Gore were to the top tier of Democratic donors and fell into two main categories: "cold calls" to 56 donors, in which Gore directly asked for a donation, and "thank you" calls to 30 other givers who had pledged big donations but had not yet forwarded the money to the Democratic National Committee.

The "thank you" calls, which the White House official acknowledged were fund raising in nature, were typically in conjunction with a special Democratic fund-raising gala.

"These are big givers, they are multiple givers," the White House official said.

It is unclear how much money was raised by these phone calls, which were made using a Clinton-Gore campaign telephone credit card. The campaign was reimbursed by the Democratic National Committee.

For each solicitation Gore was to make he was given a call sheet that provided the amount of a donor's previous contribution, personal background information about the giver and "talking points" to remind Gore about any personal meeting he may have had with the donor.

For instance, a call sheet for Ann Getty, a member of the Getty oil family, described her as a philanthropist and reminded Gore that they had met in San Francisco in October and discussed a media campaign. Ms. Getty was asked for a $50,000 contribution. On the top of her call sheet in large handwritten letters was the word: DONE.

Of the 56 people whom Gore called to ask for money, 46 had a conversation with the vice president. He was unable to connect with 10 others.

Among those who talked to Gore were Leon Hess, chairman of Amerada Hess Corp.; Jim Hormel, chairman of Equidex, parent of the Hormel meat and packaging company; Eli Broad, a Los Angeles real estate developer; Marvin Davis, a Los Angeles oil and real estate executive; Merv Adelson, a Los Angeles entertainment industry executive; and Penny Pritzker, a member of the Chicago real estate family.

The call sheets also suggested pitches. Regarding a Florida lawyer, the call sheet said: "Ask him to participate in Miami Gala and contribute 100 K." Of a donor with a Spanish surname, Gore was warned, "He only speaks broken English." And of a New York executive, Gore was told, "Tony has mentioned he is interested in making a major contribution. Ask Tony to give $50,000."

The "thank you" phone calls followed a similar pattern. They were made to co-chairmen of a May 1996 Democratic fund-raising gala in Washington and of Gore's fund-raising salute to President Clinton in June 1995.

Co-chairmen were people who pledged either to donate or raise at least $25,000. The White House official said Gore made no calls to anyone donating less than $25,000.

In these calls, Gore thanked donors for their fund-raising pledges and said he was "counting on" them to follow through with the money.

Documents were also released showing call sheets for Quinn, Gore's former chief of staff, who was given 32 people to call, each of whom had donated a minimum of $25,000. These calls, too, were made from the White House. The call sheets include Quinn's handwritten notes showing whom he spoke to and when.

Gore Shows He's Learned From the Master
Pin Them Down
Time For Gore To Go
Gore's Collect Calls
Several of Gore's White House fund-raising calls not on credit card
Gore's Calls On Public Dime
Al Gore Meets the Enemy
Justice Department looks at Gore's fund-raising calls

'To Avoid Such a Disgrace'

The New York Times
By William Safire
September 7, 1997

WASHINGTON -- If by the first week in October Attorney General Janet Reno does not seek appointment of Independent Counsel, she may well be the first Cabinet member since William Belknap in 1876 to be impeached.

That is the clear import of three coordinated letters, all dated Sept. 3 and delivered to the Justice Department last week.

One is a 23-page missive signed by every member of the majority of the House Judiciary Committee, delineating evidence that Federal crimes may have been committed by officials covered by the Independent Counsel Act. The crimes include bribery, use of the White House for political purposes, misuse of tax-exempt organizations and extortion of campaign contributions.

The second letter, from every member of the majority of the House Rules Committee, notes that the weak excuse given by Ms. Reno for refusing to trigger the act -- that Vice President Gore's solicitations from the White House were only for "soft money" -- had been shattered by the revelation that the Democratic National Committee allocated funds raised by Gore from Federal property as "hard money" for the Clinton-Gore campaign.

Because Congressional committees do not issue threats, a third letter came from an individual member, House Rules Chairman Gerald Solomon, to inform her of the serious consequences of her continued stonewalling.

"With credible evidence reported by Mr. Robert Woodward in today's Washington Post that Vice President Gore . . . may have committed a felony," wrote Solomon, "I can not conceive you can so willfully neglect your duty . . . I should inform you that the mood in Congress to remove you grows daily. I beg you to avoid such a disgrace by appointing a special counsel today."

If it should ever come to that, Ms. Reno's best defense would be to blame the egregious ineptitude of the vaunted "career professionals" in what Justice laughably calls its Public Integrity Section.

It is now 11 months since the Asian Connection story broke. In all that time, it never occurred to those bumbling Justice bureaucrats to travel a few blocks over to the D.N.C. to find out if money raised from inside the White House was used to buy Clinton-Gore commercials. They waited to read about the crime in The Washington Post. Their lame excuse: "The focus of our energies was elsewhere."

But those conflicted, slow-walking "energies" have not been focused on tracking down and bringing back Little Rock's Charlie Trie, a suspected dirty-money conduit now lying low in Beijing.

We rightly criticize Whitewater Independent Counsel Ken Starr for being slow; Clinton's in-house Dependent Counsel are hip-deep in Democratic molasses.

The sad part of all this is that Reno and Gore are paying the price for the political fund-raising strategy set not by them but by Bill Clinton in his infamous Sept. 13, 1995, Oval Office sellout to Riady, Huang and company.

Gore is a serious person, solid on foreign affairs except for some global warming nuttiness, and I confess to liking and often admiring him. But Clinton's anything-goes political morality reduced Gore to describing 86 wrongful calls as "a few occasions." John Huang, D.N.C. fund-raising vice chairman, brought a Buddhist leader into Gore's office to arrange a temple event; the event illegally raised $100,000; now Gore professes to never have known it was a fund-raiser.

But here's a campaign memo from Gore's scheduler asking him to choose: give a speech to a Long Island Jewish group or "do the two fundraisers in San Joe and LA." Gore replies, "if we have already booked the fundraisers then we have to decline." To call that Buddhist fund-raiser "community outreach" takes a long reach.

Gore's followers, who see him as a Clinton with integrity, are circling the wagons, expecting two years of assault by Independent Counsel when Reno chooses honor over impeachment. Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic, has just fired his editor-columnist, the gutsily gifted Michael Kelly, for taking too strong a stand against Clinton-Gore campaign crimes.

But John Huang and Johnny Chung will be flipped; Web Hubbell will be re-indicted and Jim Guy Tucker convicted; House committees will surprise; the F.B.I. will shake its shackles; media momentum will build; and justice, despite the Department of Justice, will be done.

Gore Says Campaign Finance Reform a Top Priority

"I believe what he[Gore] did was legal and the Justice Department has to make its own determination, which I am confident they will do based on the law"
Bill Clinton - Martha's Vineyard - Sept. 1997

Reno Grilled on Gore by Senate Panel

Reno decides not to investigate Gore

Republican House and Senate waddle home. Gore runs for President. Now he's running again. Moving on....Moving on....Moving on.

Al Gore shouldn't even be a topic of discussion, unless of course groups wanted to organize a committee for a letter writing campaign to him in prison. But then, well, there are those spineless Republicans and......

The GOP Folds On Fund Raising

Investors Business Daily
09/22/97 Editorial

E D I T O R I A L S
The GOP Folds On Fund Raising
Date: 9/22/97

To see cowardice at work, just look at Republicans on the Senate panel probing campaign finance abuse. They've caved in to the Democrats' tack of downplaying illegal fund raising, and now they'll focus on campaign finance reform.
The White House probably can't believe its good luck. After months of trying to change the subject from illegal fund raising during the '96 campaign, the Clinton-Gore team got its wish Friday.
''It is the intent of the committee to conduct public hearings, starting on Sept. 23 or Sept. 24 and continuing for two or three weeks, on the subject of campaign financing. These will be public policy hearings,'' reads a joint statement by panel Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and the ranking panel Democrat, Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio.
Democrats, from President Clinton on down, have long whined that any illegal fund raising was due to the system. It wasn't their fault, they said, and besides, everybody does it.
Up till Friday, Republicans on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at least tried to keep the focus on fund-raising crimes, not excuses. But they folded, big time, on Friday.
What makes their collapse all the more outrageous is that their efforts were bearing fruit. Things were just starting to get interesting.
Consider what the committee learned in the last two weeks:
Florida businessman R. Warren Medoff said Friday that Harold Ickes, former deputy White House chief of staff, wanted to steer millions of dollars to nonprofit groups ''friendly to the president's campaign.'' Medoff said Ickes then asked him to shred a list of these groups that Ickes had faxed to him.
8E told the panel earlier last week how the need for campaign cash motivated the White House. She said officials from the CIA, the Energy Department and the Democratic National Committee urged her to drop her opposition to giving White House access to controversial oil financier Roger Tamraz, a big DNC donor.
Tamraz told the committee that, in his view, his $300,000 in gifts to the DNC were the only reason he got a chance to tell Clinton about his plans for a Mideast oil pipeline. We have to agree. Given his dubious record -he's wanted in Lebanon on embezzlement charges -he had nothing going for him but his cash.
If the committee was waiting for a clear case of money opening doors, this was it.
Former DNC head Donald Fowler told the panel he couldn't remember any contact with the CIA about Tamraz. But the committee had CIA memos that detailed his contacts. Fowler admitted, though, he regularly called officials on behalf of big donors.
Karl Jackson, who worked in the Bush White House, said a White House coffee he attended featured a blatant fund-raising pitch by DNC money man John Huang. Other witnesses, all Democrats, disputed Jackson's view of the coffee.
Vice President Al Gore made more than 80 fund-raising calls from his office at the White House. He's maintained the calls were legal because they only sought ''soft money'' for party building and get-out-the-vote drives. But the committee learned early this month that the DNC had diverted some of those funds into accounts for specific candidates -so-called hard money. And Gore got memos outlining this plan.
These actions suggest that several laws may have been broken. The White House may have been coordinating the actions of the nonprofit groups in support of Clinton's campaign. Shredding papers related to a possible crime is a crime in itself. Fund raising on government property is a crime. So is influence peddling.
Since Attorney General Janet Reno has so far refused to hand these matters over to an independent counsel, they've been left to the committee.
And now the panel is punting.
Campaign finance law probably needs fixing. But that does not excuse what the Clinton- Gore team did.
In their sleazy thirst for campaign cash, the line between legal and illegal was blurred, if not erased completely.
For the Republicans to let them off the hook begs for an explanation. Do they have their own fund-raising skeletons they want to hide? Or are they so tired of raising funds for their own campaigns that they'll rush to back a reform bill that limits campaign spending (and is probably unconstitutional)?
Or are they just spineless?

(C) Copyright 1997 Investors Business Daily, Inc.

Under Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department's Campaign Finance Task Force, which for the last four years has probed allegations that the Clinton-Gore White House solicited illegal donations is apparently winding down.
BUSH JUSTICE DEPARTMENT BLOCKS RENO DEPOSITION
Investors Business Daily - "Allowing principals in a political corruption case to disappear without asking every last question is not good government or even good politics. Rather, it's an evasion of responsibility for which future generations will pay."
"If Americans ever come to accept the argument that the "people's business" has nothing to do with the rule of law and our fundamental equality before it, and that presidents should be held to a different standard than other citizens because the economy is doing well, it will signify nothing less than that the idiotes, the intemperate, licentious individual who cares for nothing but his private pleasures, has replaced the citizen; that we have descended into what Tocqueville called "soft despotism; " and that republican government has reached a sad end."

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Hugh Hewitt MEGA PING!!!

E D I T O R I A L S
The GOP Folds On Fund Raising

Hugh Hewitt MEGA PING!!!

E D I T O R I A L S The GOP Folds On Fund Raising

E D I T O R I A L S
The GOP Folds On Fund Raising