Posted on 03/22/2007 9:40:54 AM PDT by quidnunc
In a March 3 memo, the Senior Minority Counsel on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee outlines for Sen. John Glenn (Ohio) what he hopes will be the ranking Democrat's contribution to the Asiagate investigation — 11 subpoenas on conservative activist groups. The list, since forwarded to committee chairman Fred Thompson (R., Tenn.), reads like a "Who's Who" of the conservative movement, including Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Christian Coalition, and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.
In mid March, Senate Republicans agreed to open the door to this potential harassment of their allies after a high-stakes battle over the scope of Sen. Thompson's investigation. Thompson, the hulking 54-year-old former actor who looks the part of a President and wants to play one in real life, laid the predicate for this in February by acceding to the demands of Democrats for an investigation broad enough to include a hunt for GOP wrongdoing.
This set off alarm bells among his Republican colleagues, who fear he will keep stoking his amazing media hype by playing the bi-partisan reformer at their expense. So, privately, they discussed shutting Thompson down and, instead, hoping for an independent counsel.
Majority Leader Trent Lott avoided the fantastic spectacle of Republicans scrapping their own investigation with a deal passed through the Senate Rules Committee. Thompson would get his high-profile investigation, but his committee's mandate would be confined to "illegal" activities, ensuring that he would spend time investigating Al Gore, not Grover Norquist. The situation seemed saved — except that Lott didn't have his votes nailed down, including that of Fred Thompson.
From the start, Senate leadership aides have bristled at what they characterize as Thompson's arrogance and "free-lancing." They complain that he didn't consult the leadership when he first ran into trouble with Democrats on his committee and wasn't forthright about the depth of his opposition to the Lott-brokered compromise. It's unclear to what extent Thompson and his ally John McCain (R., Ariz.) worked against the Lott language among their colleagues, but leadership aides fume over the pair's efforts to spike the deal.
The question came to a head at the weekly Tuesday Republican policy committee lunch in the Capitol. McCain first spoke up for broadening Thompson's inquiry to include "illegal and improper" activities. An angry discussion ensued in which it became increasingly clear that an eclectic collection of senators would hand Thompson a key victory. The usual weak sisters, like Arlen Specter (Pa.), wanted a broader inquiry. But so did others.
Republicans who serve on Thompson's committee, like Susan Collins (Me.) and freshman Sam Brownback (Kan.), had voted in favor of Thompson's original broad language in committee and felt they couldn't reverse themselves, especially with Thompson characterizing such a move as a hypocritical flip-flop. The opposition of the conservative Brownback in particular signaled the end for the Lott deal.
Thompson says he will devote the first phase of his investigation to Democratic wrongdoing anyway, but many Republicans won't believe it until they see it. One longtime Senate aide warns that the Democrats are "too smart, too clever, too everything for Thompson." They've certainly enjoyed manhandling him so far. At a Rules Committee hearing a few weeks ago, Democrats signaled they wouldn't question Thompson about Asiagate when he testified — then piled into the room to berate him over the investigation.
Thompson can expect more of the same. Thompson has said he hopes the Clinton scandals will produce the equivalent of a Watergate-era Howard Baker, a senator willing to turn on his own party. But Democrats typically don't behave that way. Indeed, the only party-defying "Howard Baker" to emerge from the scandals may yet prove to be Fred Thompson himself.
Opening the second week of his Asiagate hearings in the Hart Senate Office Building hearing room, Sen. Fred Thompson remarks dryly: "Today we'll hear from some of the few people who worked for Lippo who have remained in the United States." Sitting at the center of a raised semi-circular dais draped in red velvet, Thompson has his own gravitational field. Whenever he stands up or sits down, cameramen whirr and click around him. Whenever he speaks, it's in a low, grave voice that commands attention. This morning, his 6'5" frame hulking behind the microphone, Thompson announces: "I call Juliana Utomo, please."
And nothing happens. Juliana Utomo is one of the few Lippo employees still in the country because she was just a bookkeeper who briefly had an office on the same floor as John Huang. But where is she now? A minute or so passes, the committee room silent except for the rustlings of reporters and spectators. The assembled senators face an empty witness table, the three or four microphones pointing at unoccupied black, high-backed chairs. Finally the diminutive Miss Utomo is escorted from a door at the front of the room, but the brief delay raises the question: What if you held major Senate hearings and no one showed up?
It's a query that must have occurred to Thompson more than once in recent weeks. Neither major witnesses nor the TV networks have shown up at his hearings, the former either somewhere in Shanghai or ready to plead the Fifth, the latter not convinced Thompson has anything more newsworthy than the latest diet-pill controversy. It has made the early going for Thompson a schlep through passive-aggressive or uninformative witnesses, in a patient attempt to build a convincing enough circumstantial case of Administration wrongdoing that the public will begin to pay attention. For now, neither Charlie Trie nor Mike McCurry is sweating.Thompson is fighting not only public apathy, but also a Democratic defense that is well coordinated, dogged, and often downright low. His hearings got off to a difficult start when ranking minority member John Glenn wrong-footed him with John Huang's surprise offer of testimony in exchange for "partial immunity" (which, it turns out, a congressional committee can't grant). Thompson was told of the letter making the offer just 15 minutes before the hearings. Chief GOP counsel Michael Madigan would later complain to reporters that Democratic committee staff were in contact with Huang's lawyer as late as 6:30 A.M. the day of the hearings — putting rushed final touches on their ambush.
The Democrats have demonstrated again and again that they regard the hearings only as an occasion for partisan warfare. With Juliana Utomo at the witness table, committee Republicans marched through a series of documents showing that three Lippo holding companies were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1992 and 1993 at the same time they were making major contributions to the Democrats. In one case, Lippo's California-based Hip Hing Holdings contributed $50,000 to the DNC Victory Fund; then Huang wrote to Lippo in Jakarta, Indonesia, asking for a reimbursement. The $50,000, then, was a direct flow of foreign money into Democratic coffers, and the other contributions seemed to be as well.
Chief Democratic counsel Alan Baron nonetheless tried to show that the Lippo companies had enough, or in some cases, almost enough income to cover the contributions. He deliberately ignored the expense side of the ledger, which left each of the companies deep in the red and dependent on foreign funds. Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) — who with his bifocals and comb-over looks like the grandfather from the Addams Family — mentioned a shady contribution from Japanese-born businessman Michael Kojima to George Bush in 1992, "since it happens to be the same year" (even reporters laughed at this). It took moderate Sen. Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.) to admit that the source of the Huang contribution looked foreign, but even then Sen. Bob Torricelli (D., N.J.) started again to insist the Lippo companies could have covered their own contributions.
No one embodies the Democratic scandal defense quite like Lanny Davis, a White House official whose career is devoted entirely to debunking alleged Clinton wrongdoing. Needless to say, he is a busy man. Otherwise unremarkable — average height, dark complexion, eyeglasses with clunky out-of-style frames — Davis attracts a crowd of scribbling reporters outside the hearing room ready to get their background "White House official" quotes. As Davis talks, his fingers compulsively knead a battered notebook he holds in his hands, perhaps an unconscious reaction to being forced every day to dispense spin that rarely passes the laugh test — even with himself.
The day after news of the $50,000 Huang contribution breaks, Davis tells a group of reporters that there was "not a word in your coverage about Mr. Kojima. We only ask for some even-handedness." The reporters chuckle, and Davis too smiles. The next day he is furiously denouncing Thompson as a partisan attack-dog, waving around a newspaper editorial, and begins baiting the wry GOP chief counsel, Michael Madigan, who is standing just steps away sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. At moments like this Davis resembles nothing so much as a College Democrat, free of any restraint of scruple or maturity. In the midst of the display, a TV reporter asks Davis if he would step in front of the cameras. Davis, bad on TV, demurs. Why? presses the reporter. "Bashful," says Davis, and smiles again — another untruth.
Sen. Lieberman did step in front of the cameras during the second week of the hearings to say — in his always measured tones — that he too was convinced that there had been a secret Chinese plan to influence the 1996 U.S. elections. Thompson had alleged the plan in his remarks opening the hearings, and Democrats — even Lieberman — had attacked him for a week for going beyond the evidence. But after an FBI briefing, committee Democrats agreed that there had been a Chinese plan, although it was unclear whether it had been implemented or extended to the presidential level.
The most titillating possibility is that John Huang was somehow an agent of that plan. Huang's former superior at the Commerce Department, Jeffrey Garten, testified that Huang was "totally unqualified" for his job. Even though Garten "walled off" Huang from Asian policy, he routinely received classified briefings. Huang called the Lippo offices or Lippo-related people some four hundred times during his tenure at Commerce (a number that is "troubling" says Lieberman). And he would sometimes mysteriously repair to the offices of the Lippo-affiliated Stephens Company, where he had access to a copier, telephone, and fax machine. Meanwhile, Huang was in and out of the White House as often as a Cabinet member.
None of which proves anything necessarily. Democrats emphasize the more innocent circumstances. A former White House personnel official testified that placing Huang at Commerce was such a high priority because he was a diversity hire. Huang got his classified briefings not at his own prompting but that of his immediate boss. He always went to the Stephens office in broad daylight, and his calls to Lippo were typically brief. So the only thing that can be said for sure about Huang is that he probably wasn't — as a Democratic lawyer strained to imply — picking up faxes at Stephens in connection with his work with Maya Lin and Yo Yo Ma on the Asian-American civic group, the Committee of 100.
The latter suggests why Madigan has been complaining to reporters that committee Democrats are acting like Huang defense lawyers. When he conveyed Huang's immunity offer, John Glenn explained that Huang "has been described to me as a man proud of his heritage" and he wants to testify because "He believes the interests of the [Asian-American] community have been harmed by allegations surrounding him." But Huang will never testify without more immunity protection than Republicans are willing to grant, and neither will the other major players. This doesn't stop Democrats from complaining almost daily about the parade of low-level witnesses before the committee.
And sometimes they don't want to hear even from them (the only witness they are really interested in is former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour). For weeks, Republicans have wanted to grant immunity to Buddhist nuns involved in the Gore temple fundraiser. But the Justice Department has been objecting, even though the nuns can't possibly be targets for prosecution. When Thompson wanted to vote on immunity near the end of the second week of hearings, John Glenn balked. No need to rush, he explained, because the witnesses in question could have backgrounds including "bank robbery or murder." (So much for vows of poverty.) No reporter could sleep through the resulting round of guffaws.
Whether or not Glenn eventually goes along with immunity (for daily updates see www.nationalreview.com), he bought a couple of days. Considering the December 31 deadline for the committee's work, every delay is precious, as Democrats try to duplicate the result in the Travelgate and Filegate scandals — numerous outstanding, deeply troubling questions erased by the indifference of time. The biggest risk Democrats have is over-reaching. In response to the latest revelations, even the New York Times urged serious scrutiny of the China allegations. The same day the DNC rushed out a press release saying it wanted "one thing absolutely clear: We fully support an investigation into any effort by the Chinese government to influence the U.S. political process." Who says the Thompson hearings haven't produced news?
(Rich Lowry in National Review, August 11, 1997)
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Excuse me, but shouldn't Fred Thompson be gearing up for his presidential campaign about now? His admirers consider him a natural: charismatic, articulate, savvy, tough. His resume is one of the most unusual and appealing in politics. But he has endorsed his fellow Tennessean, Lamar Alexander, for president.
"I kept my options open," says Thompson, but "as time went on it just didn't feel right. For me, not having an inherent personal desire to run, there would have to be a very good reason. The person and the times must come together." His service as Republican counsel to the Watergate committee, his midlife career as a movie actor, his election to the Senate — all of these things, he says, came naturally and unexpectedly. "I have never been one to plan things out. In some respects, I'm the exact opposite of my buddy Lamar. Lamar sees a goal, he plans, and more likely than not he achieves what he wants. I don't do that."
Besides which, he says, "these are kind of strange times. I think that, as a nation, we're in a caretaker stage right now. We've had peace and prosperity. There's no perceived need for any particular direction." Our era, he maintains, is one of "small ideas," as exemplified by President Clinton's push for school uniforms. A leader has to be prepared not only to follow public opinion, but to suggest a different course. And "that's not the way I want to spend my time: trying to convince people they're not as well off as they think they are."
In the Republican sweep of 1994, no politician showed more promise than Thompson. He was, in fact, the pride of the whole, eager bunch. Mere weeks after the election — before he was sworn in, even — Thompson was tabbed by then-majority leader Bob Dole to give the GOP response to an economic address by Clinton. The senator-elect's five-minute talk wowed both the party establishment and the press. "A Star Is Born," ran the New York Times headline the next day. The comparisons to the great Reagan himself came fast and furious. A New Republic article on the senator was titled "Reagan Redux." The mentioning class began to mention him as a possible vice-presidential nominee in 1996, and certainly as a contender for the top prize in 2000.
Says one Republican insider, now grown cold on Thompson, "We were so excited to have him. He was so magnetic, so talented — not geeky like the rest of us. Everyone wanted to love him, especially [majority leader] Trent Lott. We were going to have a camera guy! He could have been our champion! But Trent got his heart broken over him, as so many of us did."
What happened is that Thompson, as chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, led the investigation into the campaign-finance abuses of 1996 — this was the "Asia fundraising scandal." Republicans wanted White House blood; and Thompson, in their view, failed to draw enough. One veteran Republican operative says, flatly, "He made a hash of it," outfoxed and out-bullied by the Democrats. Thompson's conservative critics also lament his support for campaign-finance reform and his antipathy to tort reform. On top of all that, they think he seems joyless, arrogant, and hostile to the political p's and q's that ordinarily make for success in Washington.
In short, there is a perception in GOP-land that Thompson's career is stalled, if not defunct. The mentioners do not mention him as veep next year. After the conclusion of the fundraising investigation, one column in The Tennessean began, "A year ago, [Thompson] looked like a rising star. Today he looks more like a fading comet." He may continue to be chairman of a powerful committee; but Reagan, mutter his detractors, has yet to be reduxed.
Thompson takes these complaints largely in stride. He is a thoughtful, plainspoken, physically imposing fellow, the only human being you will ever see rock back in a large wingback chair. He points out that he has held office for only four years, and, in Washington, "people get built up fast, and they get taken down fast." Sure, conservatives hungry for a spokesman were tickled by that response to Clinton's address back in 1994, but "the idea that they would build me up based on reading a five-minute speech into a monitor is kind of silly." And then they were "disappointed that I wasn't able to 'get Bill Clinton' in my hearings, so they consider the hearings a failure. That's just part of life."
As for the impression that he is unhappy in the Senate — one observer reports that he often scowls and seems to grind his teeth — Thompson says, smiling, "That's just my natural countenance." He then allows, "I'm agitated and frustrated a good part of the time. There's no question about it. A lot of it has to do with scheduling and the way the place operates. Maybe I haven't been here long enough to settle in and get the flow of it." He notes that "I waited until I was a little older before I came here, so it's not that being a senator is in and of itself enough to cause you to walk around with a smile on your face all the time. If I were 36 instead of 56, maybe I'd feel differently."
Was Thompson, like most of his party, disappointed in the outcome of his Asia-gate probe? "Of course I was disappointed, on many levels. Mainly on the level of truth and justice." But "on the level of process and doing as well as we could with the opportunity we had, I'm satisfied" — though "you can't be completely satisfied when you know you got stiffed, in certain respects."
Thompson is referring chiefly to the behavior of his committee's Democrats, the memory of which visibly appalls him even today, a year and a half later. Republicans faulted him for bending over backwards to accommodate the minority; that minority — the Democrats — tarred him as a partisan witch-hunter anyway. Thompson says that he had Watergate in the back of his mind — "too much so, in some respects" — and tried to follow the Watergate model, which demands a certain broadness.
"A lot of my friends," he says, "thought that if we could just get something on the Democrats — and God knows there was a lot to get — we'd be in clover." But Thompson opted to tread lightly, recognizing that "today the accuser is almost as suspect as the accused. There's a good deal of skepticism about all of us in the political process" — which, he argues, happens to be "the major part of Clinton's success." Indeed, "that's why he survived." What Thompson had not sufficiently appreciated is the vitriol, coupled with a knack for sabotage, of the Democrats.
"There was nothing I could have done," he pleads, "to cause John Glenn [the senior Democrat on the committee] to try to have a fair, down-the-middle investigation." Could he hazard a guess as to why Glenn, in the waning days of a long and relatively dignified career, chose to play the part of White House protector? After a long pause, he answers, "I got some ideas, but I'd just rather not get into it. I can only say that it's one of the most disappointing things that I've ever encountered. I've been around hearings and practiced a lot of law and all, but I didn't expect that. I can't read his mind, but it was consistent, it was persistent, and there never was a moment when he deviated from what he had decided to do."
What about the suspicion that there was an exchange between Glenn and the president: obstruction for a valedictory space flight? "Well, that's between him and the good Lord," says Thompson. "I certainly don't know the answer and never will."
Thompson has concluded that traditional investigative hearings are a thing of the past. As it stands, "You have to find out all you're going to find out beforehand and use your hearings to demonstrate what you've already discovered." Why? Because "there's too much partisanship and too short an attention span among the media, especially television. We were deemed a failure literally the day after our hearings started." Most of the press considered the hearings too dull, too cautious, too fussy. Thompson held some off-the-record meetings with reporters, "and I said, 'Look, guys: Pay attention. I don't have John Dean and a taping system, but there's some very interesting stuff here. This was the most corrupt political campaign we've ever seen. You need to keep up with it, even if it doesn't seem blockbuster.' And they all nodded, said they understood. Bullsh**: They didn't. I should have saved my breath. The name of the game is the president: Are you going to get him or not?"
The Asia-gate investigation led by Rep. Chris Cox in the House, Thompson believes, shows that "you can still succeed." (The results of that inquiry are as yet unknown to the public.) "But they didn't have hearings. They did all their work behind closed doors, in secret, which doesn't necessarily portend good things."
Not only was "ol' Fred," as the senator calls himself, unable to destroy the president over China; many conservatives are miffed that he voted to acquit Clinton on one of the impeachment counts — that concerning perjury. (He voted to convict on obstruction of justice.) Thompson explains that he found himself "encumbered" by his legal education; the perjury charge was inconsistent with "the facts, the Constitution, and my perception of what the Founding Fathers had in mind."
As for Clinton himself, Thompson has given this extraordinary figure some thought: "He's a man of his times. He's forgiven for more than people have traditionally been forgiven. Less is expected of him. We're more into personal relations and everyone's motivations than we are what they stand for." Because of nonstop and pervasive media, "the president is there with you, lives with you, on a daily basis. And we're more comfortable with a buddy than we are with a father." The remarkable thing about Clinton is "his utter lack of shame. He literally — I mean this — has no shame. He's not affected the way normal people are by humiliation. For him, it's all a part of the game. It's a matter of maneuvering to the next point. And it serves him well in the kind of environment we have now."
Confronting further conservative criticisms, Thompson cheerfully acknowledges that he is "off the [Republican] reservation" on campaign-finance reform. He contends that "it's just not right to take large sums of money from people who have legislation before you. It's that basic. The idea of mixing policy and money in that way is just so obviously a problem … It's kind of like an elephant in a bathtub: If you don't see it at first glance, chances are you never will." The situation "may not be fixable," he says — but ought to be.
In answer to his critics on tort reform — one of them complains that he is "in the pocket" of his fellow trial lawyers — Thompson has a single word, which he freely expands on: federalism. The question, says Thompson, should not be, "Do we think people are being sued too much this week?" It should be, "Do we believe that certain decisions ought to be made at certain levels of government?" Moreover, "we're not supposed to legislate by anecdote." For every "coffee-in-the-lap" story, Thompson and others are happy to provide a tale of a litigant unjustly squashed.
Fred Thompson's political career is not dead; but it is quieter than it was at the beginning, when balloons and confetti were everywhere, and hopes were at their highest. He is content with his committee positions and disavows any interest in a leadership post. He may indeed run for president someday, "if I feel, This is my time and place. It would have to be soon, obviously." Thompson, says one close to him, is like Reagan, not only in his naturalness before the camera, but in that he has other places to go: He didn't make his career in politics; he may well end it outside of politics.
In the meantime, says the senator, "my main ambition is to be involved in some good causes, do exactly what I think is right, and at the end of the day feel that I've made a difference" — a decent aspiration, however modest.
(Jay Nordlinger in National Review, May 17, 1999)
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ping
Norquist
Trying to squash Thompson when he has not even entered the race. Boy of boy, is that pathetic. Thompson is the man to watch because if he enters, he will win. Donks, the party of jackasses, are really worried about him, so is at least one person here. Hmmmmm........
Or maybe he is establishing his conservative bona fides priopr to consenting to being McCain's running mate.
Whatever the case, Thompson does not have the chops to be president.
The bottom line is that when the time came for him to show his mettle he folded, proving himself to be deficient in leadership and judgement.
Asia fundraising scandal.
THAT'S the Thompson I remember. Unremarkable and so like all the other lame Republicans in dealing with Democrats. He should stay in show biz.
Neither does Rudy.
Unless he switches parties.
"Koreagate"?
Had to go back ten years for that, didn't you? LOL!
Sounds like he didn't kiss enough ass to satisfy some people.
BAAAAAAHHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!
Well. THIS didn't take long, now did it?
Fred has said just in the last few days that obviously CFR ISN'T WORKING...
Run, Fred, RUN!!
Absolutely!
Unfortunately, when it comes to backing candidates, all too many Freepers seem to prize a gift for gab much more than they do proven competence.
As evidence of this I offer up Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich and Alan Keyes.
Nothing he's ever done will matter or gain traction.
Supporters of his "potential" rivals are in desperation mode, because Fred looks like the guy who can win it all and unite the GOP.
So who are your choices Hillary, Paul, Tancredo?
Bump to read later...
Nope, and how utterly pathetic. Fred Thompson's "possible" entry sure has supporters of others worried sick.
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