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Wednesday, October 7, 1998
Saving Kathleen Willey's Cat
by Jeffrey Hart Sometimes a major criminal matter contains a seemingly small detail that upon examination becomes a signature of the entire thing, as in the case of the dog that should have, but didn't bark. During the 1992 presidential primary season, when the Gennifer Flowers scandal emerged, Clinton aide Betsey Wright was given the mission of traveling to Arkansas to suppress further 'bimbo eruptions.' Just how does one 'suppress' an eruption? With cash? Dirt on the bimbo? Physical threats? Kathleen Willey has reported that when she went to the Oval Office to ask Clinton to help in finding a job, he groped her, put her hand on his aroused crotch and requested the usual. Willey's account on '60 Minutes' seemed to many persuasive and damaging. Furthermore, Linda Tripp, working in the White House, had been quoted in Newsweek as saying that Willey had emerged from the Oval Office on that occasion disheveled and flustered. Recently, Willey reported that her cat has disappeared, her tires have been slashed, and, after that, she was accosted by a stranger on a jogging path. A man ran up to her and asked about her cat, questioned why she didn't 'get it' and suggested that her children might be next. In the material most recently released by the prosecutors, Monica Lewinshy tells Tripp that she is afraid of her life if word of her affair with Clinton gets out. After the article in Newsweek, Tripp was involuntarily transferred to the Pentagon, where she both lost her civil-service status and was raised to a higher pay grade. In other words she became vulnerable to dismissal and, due to the higher pay, encouraged to be friendly: stick and carrot. Fatefully, it was at her new job in the Pentagon that Tripp met Lewinsky, who also had been exiled from the White House. One recalls that Flowers had received a state job in Little Rock over another woman who had superior qualifications. After Tripp turned over her Monica tapes to the prosecutors, the Pentagon illegally released her personal file to reporters from The New Yorker. This matter has yet to be cleared up, but obviously the orders came from the White House. Former Clinton strategist Dick Morris, the toe fetishist-turned-columnist, reports that former Miss America Elizabeth Gracen, in return for denying allegations of an affair with Clinton, was offered Hollywood acting hobs through the connections of Clinton crony Mickey Kantor, who also was Clinton's chief trade negotiator. Gracen says that her hotel room was ransacked in what she thinks was an attempt to find incriminating tapes. According to Morris, longtime Clinton confidant Dolly Kyle Brown has reported numerous attempts to intimidate her into shutting up about an affair with Clinton. And Paula Jones' husband was dismissed from his long-standing job at Northwest Airlines just as the CEO of the airlines was seeking (unsuccessfully) the Democratic nomination for governor of California. After learning all of this, I thought about Willey's cat and remembered the case of a Little Rock Clinton foe who, though not in possession of a shotgun, found several shotgun shells on the driver's seat of his car. The Clinton team, to be sure, has not yet been said to have left a horse's head in anyone's bed, but you begin to get the idea. Dangerous to Clinton at the moment is a sustained effort, reported in the Washington Post, to dig up dirt on potential Clinton accusers. Morris advises Congress to investigate private eye Terry Lenzner, a former Harvard football player who now specializes in digging up suck dirt for various clients, including supermarket tabloids. Morris also recommends that Congress look into detective Jack Palladino, who was hired in 1992 to investigate women who might pose a threat to the Clinton campaign. A key question would be about who is paying salaries for these black-bag operations - 'money trail,' as it was called in the days of Watergate. Lenzner, Morris reports, was granted, without bidding, a contract to train Haitian police, and this deserves investigation. We still don't know who paid the legal bills of Craig Livingstone, the bar-room bouncer who handled the 900 FBI files the Clinton administration had regarding prominent Republicans, an obvious dirt-dredging expedition. Meanwhile, the Clinton defenders have been insisting that the whole mess is much ado about mere sexual private matters, and much public opinion, inclined to be 'nonjudgemental' about sex, has gone along. No way, says Judge Robert Bork in the Oct. 12 National Review; lying under oath, indeed, repeated lying under oath in a deposition or before a grand jury, is a public act and a serious attack on the basis of our legal system.
Such perjury directly violates the president's constitutional obligation 'to faithfully execute the laws.' Far from being excused from this obligation by his high office, the presidential oath specifically underlines his constitutional duty: 'I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' These are solemn public obligations, the violation of which constitutes a direct attack on the body politic. Thus, Alexander Hamilton, commenting on the grounds for impeachment -- 'high crimes and misdemeanors' -- defined them as public acts. The grounds are 'offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may, with peculiar propriety, be nominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself.' The 11 counts of impeachable offenses listed by Starr sternly conform to
Hamilton's definition, and are entirely public acts. I would be inclined to include as 'public acts' such private behavior as brings disgrace upon the office of the presidency - weakening it in its public function - and also the kind of sleaze, much of it no doubt criminal, described earlier in this column, in an effort to cover up and intimidate potential accusers.
The president of the United States is not supposed to be some sort of criminal godfather running intimidation and blackmail operations out of the White House, and probably doing so with public money.
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