Another Republican Hatchet Job
The latest leaked charges against Al Gore are
more
the product of partisan politics than any new
hard evidence.
By my good friend Joe Conason
June 24, 2000 | As we ought to have learned from costly experience
with the
failed Whitewater, travel office and FBI files investigations, illegal
leaks and
partisan rhetoric can make headlines but they can't make a case. Of
course,
that doesn't matter much to the Republicans who are so nakedly scheming
to
bully Janet Reno into naming a special counsel to investigate Al Gore.
They will deploy any tactic to discredit him.
Until we learn what "new evidence," if any, exists to support Justice
Department
attorney Robert Conrad's preliminary recommendation for a special prosecutor,
the current flap is nothing more than a tired rerun of an old flop.
Without fresh
proof of wrongdoing, there is no more reason today than there was two
years ago
to believe that Vice President Gore raised funds illegally during the
1996 campaign
-- or that he lied about the controversy later.
In fact, as Roger Parloff pointed out in an exhaustive analysis published
by American
Lawyer last month, the case against Gore has grown weaker rather than
stronger.
The successful prosecutions of Democratic fundraisers, including the
chief organizer
of the famed Buddhist temple event, have turned up no testimony or
documentation
implicating Gore in the illegal contributions to the 1996 Democratic
campaign.
Quite the reverse: Everything on the public record so far indicates
that Gore thought
he was attending a "community outreach event" at the temple, not a
fundraiser. That key
distinction was blurred in a screw-up by Democratic activists who canceled
a separately
scheduled fundraiser at the last minute and mistakenly merged the two
events. So in the
absence of proof to the contrary, the fair presumption remains that
the vice president
spoke truthfully when he said he knew of no effort to collect money
from Buddhist nuns,
let alone about any scheme to funnel contributions through them in
defiance of federal law.
The second relevant question for the Justice investigators concerned
whether Gore
knowingly raised "hard money" as well as "soft money" when he called
Democratic
contributors from his office. Conceivably, his fundraising calls to
party fat cats might have
violated the Pendleton Act, a little-used 1883 statute designed to
prevent shakedowns of
federal employees by elected officials. As yet we have seen nothing
new on that
score, either. At worst Gore's conduct constituted, as FBI director
Louis Freeh
acknowledged in his own confidential memo urging the attorney general
to appoint
an independent prosecutor, a "technical violation."
Now, unable to establish that Gore did in fact break the law, certain
unnamed Justice officials
have told reporters that they think the vice president lied about his
knowledge and action.
They are pumping insinuations of perjury into the highly receptive
news media. But again,
the evidence to support a perjury investigation of the vice president
is thin and ambiguous,
according to memos provided to Reno by senior officials at Justice.
There does seem to be something suspicious going on here, however.
Why did a preliminary recommendation by Conrad, the lead attorney since
last December
on the Justice Department's Campaign Financing Task Force, leak this
information now,
at a moment of political vulnerability for Gore? Why did Sen. Arlen
Specter convene a
press conference so swiftly to confirm that leak?
And by the way, who is Robert Conrad Jr.?
The answers to the first two questions seem obvious enough; the latter,
however, is
considerably more interesting. Identified in most news stories simply
as "a federal prosecutor"
or "Justice Department attorney," Conrad appears to be a product
of the ultra-right-wing
Jesse Helms machine in North Carolina. He was hired in 1989
to serve as an assistant U.S.
attorney in Charlotte, N.C. by U.S. Attorney Tom Ashcraft, who himself
had formerly
served as chief legislative assistant to Sen. Helms.