It now appears inevitable that Bill Clinton will be forced from
office — one way or another — because of his abuse of power, his
obstruction of justice, his lying, his perjury and his witness
tampering, all in an effort to cover-up his sordid sexcapades with a
21-year-old White House intern.
There’s no question he needs to go. And if the best a $40 million
probe by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and all the investigative
powers of the Congress of the United States can come up with is this,
I’ll take it. But it is something of a disappointment. It’s a letdown.
It’s anticlimactic for me — a person who has not only spent the last
four years investigating widespread Clinton administration corruption,
but also someone who has been a victim of its ugly wrath.
Yeah, there’s a lot more to the Clinton scandals than Monica
Lewinsky. Chinagate. Travelgate. Whitewater. Drugs. Payoffs. Graft.
Maybe even worse.
Sometimes I think the Clinton administration’s strategy was to light
so many brushfires of corruption as to obscure the biggest bonfires of
all.
Just one of those bonfires is the White House political abuse of the
Internal Revenue Service.
To recap, in 1994, my organization began investigating Clinton
administration corruption. By the end of that year, we were prominent on
the official Clinton enemies list as represented in White House
associate counsel Jane Sherburne’s famous 11-page memo. A year later, I
was even more prominent in the 331-page Communication Stream of
Conspiracy Commerce report authored by the White House. My Western
Journalism Center was said to be at the source of “the media food chain”
with respect to breaking Clinton scandal stories. I was the only
journalist in America actually profiled over five pages in the report.
Coincidentally, we are to believe, the following year my organization
was targeted for audit. But this was no routine financial review. In our
case, the IRS wanted to know why we were investigating the White House;
why we were using certain reporters; how such determinations were made.
The documents requested initially were all related to the content of our
work rather than the bookkeeping procedures.
When we questioned the propriety of all this, the agent assigned to
the case said: “Look, this is a political case and the decision (as to
whether our tax-exempt status would be revoked) would be made at the
national level.”
Huh? Was he admitting what we thought he was admitting? Yes, indeed.
Agent Thomas Cederquist repeated that statement two more times, and
never personally backed off from that assessment during the nine-month
ordeal.
When I exposed this scandal to the light of day in the Wall Street
Journal in late 1996, it caused a momentary political earth tremor. Not
only did I reveal what we had been through as an organization, but also
what many other Clinton “enemies” had endured at the hands of the IRS.
Within months, IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson resigned.
Our case was assigned to another agent, who quickly closed it and
extended our tax-exempt status. The high-profile hearings into IRS abuse
in the Senate followed.
Nevertheless, Clinton got away clean. Even today you will hear his
defenders say he didn’t abuse the IRS like some of his predecessors. The
fact of the matter is, Bill Clinton raised political abuse of the IRS
and other police agencies to a new level of artistry.
My response to all this earlier this year was, in conjunction with
Larry Klayman’s Judicial Watch, to file a $10 million lawsuit against
officials and ex-officials of the White House and IRS in federal court.
The evidence for our claims must be pretty persuasive, because the
response from those named in the suit has been to defend themselves on
only the most narrow, technical and frivolous grounds.
Isn’t that so typical of this administration and its minions.
My one hope remains that, in light of what we have learned about the
character of this White House over the last seven months, claims like
this one will be taken more seriously by the media, by judges, by juries
and, most of all, by that pathetic, reactive, cowardly bunch of
procrastinators known as the U.S. Congress.
