By Ben Anderson
27 March, 2000
(CNSNews.com) - The chairman of the House Government Reform Committee Chairman is calling on Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a "special counsel" to investigate obstruction of justice charges against the White House regarding the missing White House emails.
Chairman Dan Burton (R-IN) in his letter to the Attorney General noted that Reno is "incapable of conducting a legitimate investigation of the White House."
Burton also cited what he believes to be common perceptions that Reno is incapable of doing her job and is "predisposed to provide unfair advantages" to her political colleagues in matters involving the campaign finance scandal.
"(Y)ou cannot use the Campaign Financing Task Force, supervised by yourself, to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced to Congress, Independent Counsels, and your own Campaign Financing Task Force," Burton's letter to Reno read.
"It is important that the Department of Justice remove itself entirely from this investigation and appoint an outside counsel. The individual chosen should be completely independent, should have no current ties to the Justice Department, and should be seen by the American people as fair and impartial."
The latest development in the missing email controversy came after a full day of testimony in the matter last Thursday from White House personnel and contractors who operated the White House email system. White House Counsel Beth Nolan is scheduled to testify before the Committee this Thursday.
More than 100,000 White House email messages concerning Clinton-Gore campaign finance abuses, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Filegate and Chinagate were never turned over, despite subpoenas from at least three congressional committees and a federal grand jury.
A computer glitch supposedly prevented the emails from showing up during a White House computer search, but later, when the Northrop Grumman contractors discovered the problem, they were allegedly told by White House higher-ups they would go to jail if they told anyone else about it.
Allegations of jail threats surfaced around the same time as the Office of Independent Counsel announced its conclusions that no prosecutions are warranted in the FBI files matter (commonly known as Filegate), nor in the matter concerning whether former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum testified falsely before the House Government Reform Committee.
The emails in question involved some 500 White House computers and when those sent by Monica Lewinsky alone were printed they amounted to nearly 1,500 pages, according to a source close to the investigation.
The missing emails, once discovered by the Northrop Grumman contractors, were reportedly referred to by senior administration officials as "Project X" and were re-labeled as classified documents.
As for the English language thing.... Your writing style suggests that English isn't your first language. That is your thing, and neither here nor there.
My point is that NONE of us is in the position pretend to know in advance what the Bush administration's intentions are regarding ANYTHING, unless HE makes his own intentions clear. Given what most of us know about the antics of the Clintonistas, there's hardly a snowball's chance in a firey pit that those emails survived once their importance as incriminating evidence became clear to the Clinton administration.
I am a 'ma'am' not a 'sir'.