Posted on 12/23/2002 10:03:14 AM PST by joesnuffy
Bush Shields Clinton Scandals
NewsMax.com Wires Friday, Dec. 14, 2001
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration, citing executive privilege for the first time, refused Thursday to honor subpoenas from a House committee investigating campaign finance violations in the Clinton administration and the use of informants in organized crime investigations.
Justice Department officials said the refusal would keep investigations "free from political influences."
Republicans and Democrats alike excoriated the decision, suggesting Bush was creating a ``monarchy'' or ``imperial'' presidency to keep Congress from overseeing the executive branch and guarding against corruption.
The House Government Reform Committee claims the decision to reject the subpoenas reflected a policy of the Bush administration to refuse cooperation with Congress on criminal investigations, even when the cases are closed.
The panel released previous public statements from Attorney General John Ashcroft's tenure in the Senate in which he defended similar congressional oversight.
``Everyone is in agreement you guys are making a big mistake,'' Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., told Justice lawyers at a hearing after the announcement. ``We might be able to go to the [House] floor and take this thing to court."
Burton said in his opening statement: "What we've been told is that the Justice Department will not provide any deliberative memoranda from any criminal investigation to any congressional committee, ever. It doesn't matter if the case has been closed for 20 years.
"This new policy is utterly unprecedented. And if this new policy stands, it will be virtually impossible for any congressional committee to conduct meaningful oversight of the department."
Extending executive privilege to Justice Department decisions isn't new. During the Reagan years, the privilege was cited as the reason the department did not tell Congress about memos in a high-profile environmental case.
Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, advised Clinton in 1999 that he could invoke the privilege to keep from disclosing documents detailing department views on 16 pardon cases.
Among the documents requested of the Bush administration by Burton's committee: those relating to the decision not to pursue an independent counsel to investigate Clinton-era campaign finance violations, a former Clinton White House official and a former federal drug enforcement agent.
The Mob Case
Most of the documents requested by Burton's committee focus on a 30-year span of investigations into organized crime figures in New England. The committee has been investigating how the Federal Bureau of Investigation oversaw the use of several informants in Boston organized crime that used their position as "agents" of the FBI to better manage their criminal empires.
The two top informants in the probe, Stevie 'The Rifleman" Flemmi and James "Whitey" Bulger, continued to manage and expand a criminal operation throughout Boston while under the supervision of FBI agents, who allegedly falsified records and ignored procedure in allowing them to continue operating as mobsters. Those operations included as many as two-dozen murders.
Flemmi and Bulger began working with the FBI in the early to mid 1970s.
Flemmi is awaiting trial on a litany of charges. Bulger fled before his indictment in 1995 and continues to elude capture.
The investigation into Bulger and his handlers also led congressional and Justice Department investigators to discover that an even earlier case involving infamous Mafia assassin Joe "The Animal" Barboza and Stevie Flemmi's brother, Vincent. Both men are suspected of helping the FBI solve a 1965 murder outside Boston, but apparently supplied intentionally false information that convicted four innocent men for the crime.
Documents uncovered by the committee earlier in the year determined that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew that the informants had given misleading information about the participants in the murder and that the convicted men most likely did not commit the crime.
Committee investigators have said that freeing the men would have cast doubt on Barboza's credibility as a witness in several other cases against suspected members of La Cosa Nostra in the 1960s. Because Barboza was the first major witness to help the FBI convict La Cosa Nostra members, Hoover appears to have been unwilling to free innocent men if it meant damaging the other cases made by Barboza's testimony, committee investigators found.
The committee decided to continue investigating the situation relating to not only the earlier murder, but also the handling of Bulger and Flemmi as informants for a nearly 20-year period. As part of this investigation, Burton subpoenaed 17 sets of documents related to the FBI investigations and informants beginning in 1965 and continuing through the present hunt for Bulger.
Every request was denied, apparently under orders of the president.
According to a memo to Ashcroft released by the committee and signed by President Bush, the requested documents should not be turned over because of their effect on internal decision making.
"I also understand that you believe it would be inconsistent with the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers and the department's law enforcement responsibilities to release these documents to the committee or make them available for review by committee representatives," Bush wrote. "It is my decision that you should not release these documents or otherwise make them available to the committee."
In testimony before the committee, Michael Horowitz, chief of staff at the Justice Department's criminal division, defended the refusal as necessary to protect decision-making within the department.
"We submit that having thousands of federal prosecutors throughout the country writing prosecution and declination memoranda knowing that Congress may someday dissect and second-guess their assessments of witness credibility and their exercise of prosecutorial discretion will not promote justice," he said. "Nor will it lead to fairer decisions in sensitive matters if we deprive the attorney general of the benefit of frank and unvarnished recommendations from his closest advisers."
But Republican Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut said this argument amounted to a refusal to participate in the constitutionally mandated oversight function of Congress.
"No entire class or category of document can be arbitrarily declared beyond congressional reach," Shays said. "Conceding total exclusion of so-called 'pre-decisional' material produced by the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, or any agency fatally undermines congressional oversight authority."
Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Clinton Scandals
George W. Bush
Janet Reno
Now I've heard it all! However, I'm sure that many good freepers will defend Bush to the bone.
FBI Raids Hillary's Warehouse in Whitewater Deja Vu - June 2002
An excerpt:
Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman suggested the raid may represent something of a turnabout in thinking among Attorney General John Ashcroft and his colleagues.
"Mr. Paul could have turned the documents about the Clintons over to the FBI months ago under a cooperation agreement," Klayman noted. "Instead, he waits in a Brazilian dungeon for the Ashcroft Justice Department to get serious about this corruption case. So it is a welcome sign that the Justice Department is turning up the heat on this new crime scandal concerning the Clintons."
The FBI raid may also be a sign that the reported no prosecution deal for the Clintons, demanded by Democrat leaders as the price for President Bush getting some of his legislative agenda implemented, is beginning to unravel - since Democrats seem to have kept little if any of their part of the bargain. (See: Bush Insider Claims Clinton Deal Torpedoed Pardongate)
Ummmm...you might want to check the date on his article...it is 2001.
You need more information here, Fred, to weigh what is going on. There is always an ongoing battle between the Legislative and Executive branches, and this could be a pi**ing contest that cares little about the subject and more about the process. So if anyone has more information about this matter, I'd appreciate their input, because I really don't trust NewsMax to tell the entire story here.
See post #6...he posted a year old article.
See post #6...he posted a year old story.
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