As the WSJ points out, firing a handful of US attorneys pales beside what the Clinton administration did:
Congressional Democrats are in full cry over the news this week that the Administration’s decision to fire eight U.S. Attorneys originated from–gasp–the White House. Senator Hillary Clinton joined the fun yesterday, blaming President Bush for “the politicization of our prosecutorial system.” Oh, my.
As it happens, Mrs. Clinton is just the Senator to walk point on this issue of dismissing U.S. attorneys because she has direct personal experience. In any Congressional probe of the matter, we’d suggest she call herself as the first witness–and bring along Webster Hubbell as her chief counsel.
As everyone once knew but has tried to forget, Mr. Hubbell was a former partner of Mrs. Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock who later went to jail for mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also Bill and Hillary Clinton’s choice as Associate Attorney General in the Justice Department when Janet Reno, his nominal superior, simultaneously fired all 93 U.S. Attorneys in March 1993. Ms. Reno–or Mr. Hubbell–gave them 10 days to move out of their offices.
At the time, President Clinton presented the move as something perfectly ordinary: “All those people are routinely replaced,” he told reporters, “and I have not done anything differently.” In fact, the dismissals were unprecedented: Previous Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, had both retained holdovers from the previous Administration and only replaced them gradually as their tenures expired. This allowed continuity of leadership within the U.S. Attorney offices during the transition.
Transterrestrial Musings blog reinforces what may be a critical aspect:
Where was all the fuss and bother in 1993, when Janet Reno fired every single US attorney bar one (over ninety of them) in a single day? As Judge Bork noted:
(Janet Reno) was not in charge from the beginning. Upon taking office, in an unexplained departure from the practice of recent Administrations, Miss Reno suddenly fired all 93 U.S. attorneys. She said the decision had been made in conjunction with the White House. Translation: The President ordered it. Just as the best place to hide a body is on a battlefield, the best way to be rid of one potentially troublesome attorney is to fire all of them. The U.S. attorney in Little Rock was replaced by a Clinton protege.
Just as Whitewater was heating up. Just a coinkydinky, one can be sure.
But here’s the current and future political problem: the firings can be used to help shield Hillary Clinton from one of her biggest liabilities.
In 1993, the Clintons fired White House Travel Office manager Billy Dale and the rest of the Office staff, allegedly in order to transfer travel business to a Clinton crony.
The dismissals presented the Clintons with an image problem because Mr. Dale had worked at the White House for 32 years, and the office itself was a non-political service. Throwing a bunch of ordinary Americans out the door in order to reward a supporter is bad optics, and the Clintons knew they had to do something.
The Clintons started the process of covering their own tracks by requesting the FBI’s file on Dale. The IRS then conducted an audit on Dale, and in December 1994 the Justice Department brought charges for embezzlement. (The jury acquitted Mr. Dale in two hours, and Congress voted to pay his legal expenses.)
The recent US attorney firings give the Democrats a way to conflate what the Clintons did to the travel office staff with political terminations by Republicans. Now, “everybody does it,” with the specific “it” in question being allowed to dissolve in what can be portrayed as a partisan pissing contest.
If these firings help let Mrs. Clinton off the hook, it was a very dangerous hook indeed:
The firing of Dale and his colleagues in the early months of the administration spawned enormous controversy. The first Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B. Fiske Jr., found the furor over the firings was a factor in the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster in July 1993.
The White House was accused of pushing out veteran workers to make way for friends of the Clintons, and of bringing in the FBI to trump up criminal charges to justify their actions. Dale was tried and acquitted of charges he embezzled money from the travel office.
A grand jury, empaneled this week in Washington, will begin hearing evidence on whether administration officials tried to impede investigators looking into the dismissals.
Doubly-dangerous, because it had the potential to directly and seriously damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Despite “substantial evidence” of her involvement, no charges will be brought against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Clinton administration’s 1993 dismissal of seven White House Travel Office employees, Independent Counsel Robert Ray announced Thursday.
The evidence, Ray’s office said, directly contradicts Clinton’s longstanding denials that she had nothing to do with the controversial job turnover in the office that handles travel arrangements for the president, White House staff, and the traveling press corps. Nevertheless, “The independent counsel has declined prosecution of Mrs. Clinton.”
It’s possible the Administration’s action of firing the eight US attorneys has created an opportunity for a rhetorical counterweight that lets the Democrats explain away the Travel Office firings as routine Washington business, and the accusations leveled against the Clintons in the wake of the firings as normal partisan bitterness. So perhaps its small wonder that we find Mrs. Clinton commenting directly on the attorney firings.
We may be able to gauge whether the Democrats have figured out they can use the attorney firings that way by the measures Congress now adopts to elevate the firings in the public consciousness.
If the Democrats raise an uproar out of all expectation, it’s perhaps because they’ve figured out how to use this Republican gaffe to Hillary Clinton’s advantage a year from now.
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