The public be dunned
THE CLINTON administration may
be past, but the plea bargaining
continues. Now the Clintons want the rest of us to pay legal bills they ran up during the nigh endless crisis-and-bore that was Whitewater. Here’s the bright side: Senator Hillary Clinton now of New York has assured the Associated Press that neither she nor her spouse (you remember him) will ask to be reimbursed for their legal fees connected with L’Affaire Lewinsky. "Whatever was asked for," she explained, "was related to Whitewater only." What, not Travelgate? Not Filegate? Not the aptly named Billingsgate? Or does she consider those missing billing records part of Whitewater? It’s hard to tell; it all seems to run together. The way deception and corruption have a way of doing. But the Clintons say they’re asking to be paid only for Whitewater. Not for any of the other -gates their administration produced with such appalling regularity. What restraint.
But how do you separate out one strand from the whole ball of string known as Whitewater? It’s hard to imagine L’Affaire Lewinsky unfolding as it did if there hadn’t already been an independent counsel investigating the Clintons, reporting to the same judicial panel, and primed to pounce. Without Whitewater, there wouldn’t have been an Office of Independent Counsel to interview Monica Lewinsky. Sure, the two cases can be separated on paper, but how separate them in what passed for reality during the Clinton Years? Monicagate was a natural outgrowth of the whole pattern of deceit, denial, and manipulation that was the Clinton eraeven if some accusations never panned out, others did, and still others have been left to history and acrimonious debate.
WHITEWATER isn’t the name of
just one disputed land deal; it
started a whole, multiplying series of scandals investigated by the Office of Independent Counsel. The five-volume collection of editorials from the Wall Street Journal on the Clinton Years is entitled simply Whitewater. The Whitewater deal may have started as a simple plan, but one thing always leads to another in these matters.
Did you see A Simple Plan, that chilling movie with Billy Bob Thornton? It’s a story about how moral corruption spreads. If they ever make Whitewater into a movie, Billy Bob would be a natural for the role of Jim McDougal.
There is an inevitable quality to the Whitewater story, as if it all had been fated, like the natural result of some character defect. This saga has almost every element of classical tragedy except nobility. There is the hubris of the principal character, and the tragic flaw that leads to his inescapable downfall. But the comparison can be carried too far. Unlike the Clintons, Oedipus never asked for legal fees.
Whitewater has almost faded from the public consciousness, but this request from the Clintons brings it back to center stage. Are we now going to assign a team of lawyers to go through the records and determine when one scandal ended and another began, and which lies are reimbursable and which are not? Where does Whitewater end and Monicagate begin?
One might as well try to separate out all the divergent parts of Watergate, the eventually all-enveloping scandal of the Nixon Years, and decide which parts of it should be assigned to Richard Nixon’s account, which should have been billed to cronies and accomplices, and finally which innocents should have their legal expenses paid because they were guilty of nothing more than being in the vicinity at the time.
Richard Nixon didn’t actually have anything to do with Watergate, if by Watergate we mean only the original, thirdrate burglary of an office in a building by that name. (It’s always the cover-up that gets our leaders in trouble.) So should Mr. Nixon have been duly reimbursed for any legal fees connected with that original offense? And should the Clintons get a refund because the original deal they made with Jim McDougal was innocuous? Or was it all, whether Watergate or Whitewater, just one ever-widening circle in a muddy pond? This is a question for novelists and moral philosophers to consider, but we’re stuck with lawyers and cost accountants. We’ll be told it’s just a matter of bookkeeping. And in the end the most relevant question of all won’t be asked. It’s the same never-answered question poor Bob Dole raised in 1996: Where’s the outrage?
NOR IS reimbursement for legal
expenses in these cases automatic
when no charges are pressed; a court must make the final judgment. And who will represent the taxpayers’ interest in this latest Clinton case—the remains of the Independent Counsel’s Office, which may still harbor a few diehards who remember what a job it was to pin the Clintons down, or a Justice Department that just wants to close the books and get on with business?
Before writing a check to the Clintons, the American public is entitled to have a question or two answered. For example, who was responsible for prolonging this investigationthe prosecutors pursuing William J. Clinton et ux, or the defendants-in-chief, who couldn’t produce billing records, argued for delays, and generally bobbed and weaved? Are we now supposed to compensate them for running up the legal meter?
We’re not just talking law here—there are plenty of people around who get paid to do that—but also about justice. Or are those two considerations, law and justice, no longer related?
And when Hillary Clinton wants the taxpayers to assume her legal fees in connection with Whitewater, is she talking about the case she said she never really worked on? Or does she mean the case by the same name that, once her disappearing billing records had reappeared, it seems she’d devoted 80 hours to? And are the taxpayers liable for a defense that depends on this kind of trespass on our credulity? Of course by now there’s almost nothing Mr. or Senator Clinton can say without arousing suspicion, including Good Morning, let alone Pay Our Legal Bills. Query: Is there any precedent for the public’s paying the legal fees of a suspect for defending himself against some accusations after he’s plea-bargained others? Once again the Clintons may be setting records. Or as the Church Lady would say, they’re spe-cial. And finally, if anybody’s going to be reimbursed, why should it be the Clintons instead of their legal defense fund—an operation that raised some $8 million on their behalf and by now has shelled out almost all of it? Or will the fund bill us separately?
MRS./SENATOR Clinton
mentioned that she was just
following the precedents set by Presidents Bush and Reagan, both of whom were reimbursed for their legal fees in connection with Iran-Contra. She felt no need to go into detail, namely that neither of those presidents was ever indicted or impeached.
The purpose of the law under which those presidents were compensated is to protect officials who are drawn into a scandal—rather than those who draw others in. And we’ve lost count by now of how many members of the Clinton circle were dragged into Greater Whitewater as it became a torrent.
Let it also be noted that Ronald Reagan waived all legal privilege when Iran-Contra was being investigated, and opened his records.
The Clintons could at least release the request they’ve made for reimbursement. But it is still under court seal.
And just how much money do they want from the rest of us? Mrs. Clinton declined to say.
If the public is going to pay the Clintons’ legal bills, those bills should be made public. The country still hasn’t been told just how much they owe in legal fees. And we’re not about to take Bill Clinton’s word for it—especially under oath.