When it comes to Whitewater and its aftermath, I never did get it. What’s more, I think the reporters covering the meandering and expanding investigation didn’t get it either.
That last is surmise, of course, but, I think, reasonable surmise. Their stories implied that Whitewater involved serious, perhaps jailable, offenses on the part of Bill and Hillary Clinton–implied further that the reporters knew a good deal more than they were prepared to tell about those offenses. No matter. It was all going to come out pretty soon.
It didn’t, of course–at least not in ways that tied the Clintons to much of anything. And now that part of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation apparently has been shut down.
And what we have now, after all these years and all those millions, amounts to little more than allegations of sexual hanky-panky.
I hasten to say (my wife reads this column) I don’t approve of sexual hanky-panky–think it’s awful, no self-respecting husband, etc. etc. But it is absurd on its face that America should spend nearly six years and upward of $40 million pursuing an investigation that, in the end, comes down to suspicions of sexual dalliance.
When the thing was supposedly about Whitewater, reporters had reason to believe that something real and important was out there–even if it always seemed to be tantalizingly just beyond their grasp. They would just keep plugging away, pretending to know more than they knew, pleading for a leaked morsel or two and importuning the president to just put it all out there, make a clean breast and get on with the business of running the country.
But now they know that the investigation is more about personal sin than public crime, and still they are loath to say they’ve been snookered. I suppose it’s too embarrassing. Well, yes, I was one of the leading reporters on the Whitewater scandal. Now I’m heading the team that’s trying to find out whether the president may have had a little action on the side.
Ken Starr’s cover (and the reporters’ as well) is that the investigation isn’t about sex–not a crime anyway–but about such serious matters as perjury and obstruction and subornation.
Well, sure. But the offenses underlying the perjury matter, too, if only to help prosecutors retain a sense of proportion. A treasonous seller of nuclear secrets who asks his co-worker to lie for him and a commuter who asks his carpool mate to swear to the cops that he was only doing a couple of miles above the limit may both be suborning perjury. But on which subornation investigation would you spend millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours? Again, not to make light of marital infidelity, the case against Clinton strikes me as a lot closer to the carpooler’s than to the nuclear traitor’s.
It’s starting to appear that Starr may not have the goods even on the sexual stuff. If Monica Lewinsky says there was a sexual affair (contradicting her own previous sworn testimony), but denies being pressured to lie about it, what does Starr have? Not much, it seems to me.
And this doesn’t even get to Steven Brill’s report that Starr has admitted leaking information to selected members of the media–a report that, if true, knocks Starr right off his moral-high-ground perch and exposes him as a prosecutorial zealot with no sense of proportion.
Starr, of course, has been at great pains to deny he’s done anything wrong, and the reporters who were the beneficiaries of his leaks can hardly be counted on to gainsay him. (I still say that the great investigative story waiting to be done is: Who leaked what to whom, and to what effect? Whose water has the press been carrying for all these years? What crimes have the media been party to?)
Brill’s own work (widely denigrated by both Starr and those who cover him) is about as close as we’re likely to come to getting those questions answered. Pity.
Maybe reporters really didn’t know what lay behind Whitewater, the investigation of which has tarnished reputations, sent people to prison and ruined lives–all for charges that became federal offenses only because they were brought by the independent counsel.
But they know what lies behind the Lewinsky scandal, and it isn’t much. Why don’t they stop playing Ken Starr’s game and help close this show down?
