It was a nice try by Al Gore to select Sen. Joe Lieberman as his
running mate.
It was a conscious decision to put distance between the Gore 2000
ticket and the last eight years of Clinton-Gore corruption.
By choosing Lieberman, one of the most vocal Democratic critics of
that corruption, Gore hoped he could portray himself as different from
the president with whom the nation is so fatigued.
But, remember, folks — Gore is a key player in the corruption. He
always has been. And his excuses for his personal role in many of the
scandals ring more hollow than Clinton’s.
Here’s what Bill Clinton’s own hand-picked
FBI director, Louis
Freeh, had to
say about the absolute need for an independent counsel to investigate Gore’s role in campaign fund-raising abuses:
“In the face of compelling evidence that the vice president was a very active, sophisticated fund-raiser who knew exactly what he was doing, his own exculpatory statements must not be given undue weight,” he wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno in a 1997 memo.
That was just prior, of course, to
another memo sent to Reno by
her chief prosecutor in the case, Charles LaBella, who urged the same action and also accused his bosses of controlling their investigation to avoid triggering an independent counsel appointment.
Freeh added that the Justice Department appeared to be “relying almost exclusively on the vice president’s own statements to draw inferences favorable to him even when those statements are contradicted by other reliable evidence.
“The evidence tends to show that the vice-president was an active participant in the ‘core group’ fund-raising efforts,” wrote Mr.Freeh, “also that he was informed about the distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ money, and also that he generally understood there were legal restrictions against making telephone solicitations from federal property.”
On June 6, a House committee released hundreds of pages of evidence against Gore, as well as Clinton, gathered by FBI agents and federal prosecutors. Here’s what they found, as my colleague
Paul Sperry has
reported:
- The ’96 fund-raising abuses weren’t random and unconnected, but organized from the top by the White House.
- The culprits weren’t just a loose-knit band of hustlers and opportunists, but a team recruited and coached by White House and Democratic National Committee officials with the knowledge, if not participation, of the president, vice president and first lady.
- The ’96 Clinton-Gore campaign enlisted communist Beijing bagmen to help finance it, jeopardizing national security in the process.
- And it cheated to win. By defrauding voters, it may have illegitimately assumed power.
Al Gore was not a spectator to all this. He was a major player. He used his government office, phone, stature and privileges to shake down political contributors. He attended the Buddhist temple fund-raiser and claimed, incredibly, that he thought of it only as a community outreach. When his testimony before investigators was crossed up, he claimed he had drunk too much iced tea and must have missed something during a potty break. As a last resort he told America that he didn’t break the law because, as a member of the executive branch of government, he was virtually immune from prosecution — that there was “no controlling legal authority.”
Now, it’s true, I’ve never liked Gore or Clinton — never had any use for either one. If Hillary Clinton wants to dismiss me as a member — or even the ringleader — of the “vast, right-wing media conspiracy” against her husband and his team, I guess she can try that. But what about Freeh? What about LaBella? What about every objective investigator who has examined the record of these criminal conspiracists in the executive branch of government?
Now Gore is running for president, of course. And, frankly, I’m stunned that none of this criminality is being discussed by all those convention pundits, Sunday morning talking heads, nor even the editorial page commentators of the supposedly “serious,” establishment press.
What gives? Can America stand another four or eight years of this kind of stench?
The evidence strongly suggests that Clinton and Gore illegally bought their elections in 1992 and 1996 — not that it was tough with the inept competition they faced. But this man shouldn’t be running for president on a major party ticket. He, like his mentor, ought to be in jail.
