Part of it:
Oliver dispatched his own team to the State Department to examine what was behind the mysterious passport criminal referral. When Oliver learned that the evidence consisted only of staple holes, he blew the whistle on what looked like another GOP dirty trick. Within days, the FBI, too, rejected the tampering suspicion. The passport gambit backfired on the Bush campaign.
Though little noted by political reporters who covered the 1992 campaign, the outcome of the passport case was a key factor in ending the 12-year Reagan-Bush reign. The fiasco hobbled Bush during his planned sprint to the election finish line and blocked the Bush campaign's hopes to exploit another conveniently timed criminal referral -- over Clinton's Whitewater real estate investment. Clinton hung on to win the election.
After Bush's defeat, Baker grew depressed, blaming himself for the passport disaster and the re-election loss. On Nov. 20, 1992, at 10:30 a.m., a despondent Baker visited Bush. "Jim Baker came in here ... deeply disturbed and read to me a long letter of resignation all because of this stupid passport situation," Bush wrote in his diary. But Bush rejected Baker's offer to resign.
At the urging of the State Department's inspector general, the passport case also prompted the appointment of a special prosecutor. But the conservative-dominated three-judge panel that picks special prosecutors named a trusted Republican, Joseph diGenova, to head the probe.
Also luckily for the Bush legacy, diGenova was hiring staff in early 1993 just as the House October Surprise task force was disbanding. Despite strong evidence to the contrary, that task force had cleared William Casey, George Bush and other Republicans of long-standing allegations that they had interfered with President Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran.
As reported in the first eight issues of The Consortium, the task force reached its conclusion by constructing bogus alibis for Casey, applying irrational arguments and hiding evidence pointing to Republican guilt. DiGenova snapped up six veterans of the October Surprise staff, including deputy independent counsel Michael Zeldin, who had served in the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, and associate independent counsel David Laufman, who had worked for the CIA.
DiGenova's team went to work explaining away the obviously criminal acts involved in the passport case. Though Clinton's privacy rights had been violated and the leaking of a confidential criminal referral was a felony, diGenova said he could not figure out who had committed the misdeeds. So he constructed elaborate rationales to clear all the Republicans of any wrongdoing.
Indeed, the government official who came under diGenova's sharpest criticism was the State Department's Inspector General Sherman Funk -- for demanding the investigation in the first place. The diGenova team castigated Funk for "a woefully inadequate understanding of the facts and a blithely naive view of the job responsibilities at the State Department."
Later, one senior Clinton administration official reviewed the whitewashing of the October Surprise issue and similar handling of the passport case. The official shook his head in disgust. "They're the cleaners," he said about the investigative team, a reference to ruthless intelligence experts who are brought onto the scene of a botched operation to clean up the incriminating evidence.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/bullet1.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
