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Posted on 09/30/2002 10:58:46 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
WASHINGTON – Not long after GOP Sen. Fred Thompson opened his Chinagate hearings in July 1997, his office received an anonymous package.
The manila envelope contained dirt on Sen. Bob Torricelli, the Democrat on his committee working hardest to block the probe into illegal White House fund-raising.
The material that landed on Thompson's then-chief of staff's desk was "quite personal, some of it politically sensitive," as Elizabeth Drew reported in her 1999 book, "The Corruption of American Politics," which was largely brushed off by the media elite once they found out roughly 90 percent of it was about the corruption of Democrats in the scandal-plagued Clinton-Gore era.
Indeed, the sensitive papers came from Torricelli's trash. Among the documents that fell into Thompson's lap were copies of the crooked New Jersey Democrat's personal bills and bank statements.
The anonymous sender included a note: "If you want to see more, put an ad in [a New Jersey paper] saying, 'Wet birds never fly at night.'"
Not only did Thompson not ask to see more (which of course, may have been a trap), he ordered his aide Tom Daffron to march the package down to his adversary and assure him he "doesn't want to play this way," Drew wrote.
It was the classy thing to do, and Drew said that Torricelli told colleagues he was touched (not to mention no doubt extremely relieved).
He then repaid Thompson's collegial gesture by working with President Clinton to derail Thompson's hearings and make the Tennessee Republican look like a jackass in the media for ever holding them. Every chance he got, Torricelli tried to score sharp, partisan points against Thompson, who appeared absolutely flummoxed throughout the hearings.
According to Drew, Torricelli stayed in close touch with Clinton, who was eager to shut down Thompson's hearings not only to limit political fallout for his party, but to reduce the pressure on Attorney General Janet Reno to throw the Chinagate case to an independent prosecutor.
Torricelli even took late-night calls from Clinton during the rancorous hearings to complain about Republican charges, and apparently to feed Torricelli talking points and strategy on how to defend him.
He also "conferred with the president to keep him informed about what was going on in the committee," Drew said.
When Thompson first looked like he was throwing in the towel, Torricelli phoned Clinton's political director, Harold Ickes, and "told him that he was off the hook," Drew wrote.
Torricelli worked feverishly to defend what seemed to be indefensible White House fund-raising abuses, because he knew that such loyalty would be returned in kind. He had his own shady Asian donors in his closet. If he helped keep Hill investigators away from Clinton, the president would keep U.S. prosecutors away from him.
And it worked, for awhile.
But there was more at stake in the Thompson hearings than just Torricelli and Clinton. The very future of the Democratic Party was on the line. Democrats almost exclusively were swept up in the 1996 Chinagate scandal, and they "were hearing the death rattle," Drew quoted one Democratic staffer saying.
Ironically enough, Senate Democrats recently shamed President Bush into signing campaign-finance reform – even though the fund-raising corruption ran deep among them. Torricelli at the time was vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And the co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 shakedown of foreign donors was Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
It's hard to fault former film actor Thompson for being a nice guy, for playing fair, for pulling punches.
But this isn't Hollywood. He took an oath to uphold the Constitution and defend the country against all enemies, including domestic ones – even when they're right down the hall from him and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, as was the case in 1997.
By not playing hardball with Torricelli when he had the chance, he let the Democrats hijack his hearings.
As a result, it can be argued, Torricelli ducked responsibility for his abuses for another five years. Clinton and Al Gore escaped accountability for their role in Chinagate. The Democrats now control the Senate. And Thompson is leaving the Senate a largely ineffectual politician.
Oh, and there's that little unconstitutional matter of a ban on soft money and political speech, which had its genesis in the Thompson hearings.
Campaign-finance reform was predicated on the notion that both parties – Democrats and Republicans – pushed the limits of the law in the 1996 campaign, giving great currency to the idea that the entire political system is fraught with corruption and in need of major overhauling.
But in fact, only Democrats broke the law in 1996, and to a lesser extent in 1992. Not a single Republican donor or fund-raiser has been charged with breaking campaign-finance laws in a campaign-finance investigation controlled by a Democratic administration.
Again, crimes were committed exclusively by Democrats – a fact ignored by the Washington media, and one that Thompson, bending over backwards to be fair and nonpartisan, failed to drive home during the hearings.
You'd think such a one-sided fund-raising scandal would undermine the case for reforming the whole system.
Yet in the end, it took a Republican donor friend of a Republican president to finally move the reform bill through Congress, even though there was no evidence of a quid pro quo. Bush signed the bill, making the DNC's 1996 shakedown – which raised foreign cash from communists and led to more than two dozen Democratic convictions – seem almost unrelated, even though it was the original catalyst.
Existing campaign-finance laws didn't need to be changed. Democrats simply needed to be punished for breaking them, as Torricelli's case yet again demonstrates.
Thompson had a duty to get to the bottom of the Chinagate fund-raising scandal. But like the rest of the country-club Republicans here, he played his politics like a game of badminton.
By naively giving Torricelli a break, which Torricelli never planned to give him, Thompson let Torricelli, Clinton, Gore and the entire Democratic Party off the hook for federal crimes involving bribery, racketeering and possibly treason. That allowed Democrats to grow in power and gall to the point where they managed to turn their own fund-raising scandal on Republicans and force a Republican president to guiltily sign an unconstitutional reform that was never necessary if Republicans had just had the collective spine to insist that existing laws be enforced back in 1997.
Thanks, Fred. See you again in the movies where maybe we'll get to at least see you act like an uncompromising statesman.
I thought it was pretty bad, but what I have witnessed since they left office makes them even more slimier. I watched those Chinagate hearings and always thought there was something really wrong with them. And certainly didn't think that Thompson did a very good job.
What bothers me about Thompson is that he said he was running again, dropped out all of a sudden, went into TV's Law and Order and now all of this comes out. Something is rotten here!
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