THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1996
January
- The
- The CIA releases a report on terrorist abuse of Islamic charities. Of the 250 local and foreign-based nongovernmental charitable organizations (NGOs) that operate worldwide, over 50 are international Islamic NGOs conducting humanitarian work. Available information indicates that approximately one third of these Islamic NGOs support terrorist groups or employ individuals who are suspected of having terrorist connections. This report describes the terrorist-related activities and linkages among 15 of these NGOs operating in other part of the world. Individuals connected to some of these NGOs have plotted to kidnap or kill US personnel. The entire report is transcribed here.
- The UN opens the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty for member ratification; the US refuses to sign. (NATO and UN History)
- In a badly planned reorganization, the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center is combined with a number of other Pentagon analytical shops and the Defense Mapping Agency into one unwieldly construct, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). The entire department is placed under Pentagon control. Many veteran CIA photo analysts retired as a result of the formation of the new department; the loss of their expertise still resonates through the intelligence community. It is only after the 9/11 attacks that the Bush administration will authorize the spending necessary to provide NIMA with up-to-date computer systems able to process the photographs and digital images it works with on a daily basis. (Philip Taubman)
- In his Paradise Valley home, Barry Goldwater says to Bob Dole, "We are the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?" (Arizona Republic)
January 1996
- January 4: White House aide Carolyn Huber belatedly discovers a packet of old Rose Law Firm billing records that had previously been subpoenaed by the OIC. Republicans on the Senate Whitewater committee have been making accusations of obstruction of justice for weeks; the discovery of the documents, in a box of documents in the Old Executive Office Building, sets off a firestorm of accusations of obstructionism and Republican claims that the records had been deliberately withheld. Huber, who once worked as an office manager at Rose, testifies that she originally found the time sheets in August 1995 in the "book room" on the third floor of the White House, inside the Clinton's private quarters, and, without bothering to see what they were, stuck them inside a box and took them to her office for later filing, where she promptly forgot about them. When she came across them again on this date, she testifies, she gets frightened; in August 1995 they were merely a stack of old, dusty photocopies of computer printouts, but today they are subpoeaned records that have not yet been made public. White House lawyer David Kendall admits that Huber's initial explanation to him was inconsistent and flustered; she was "very confused about the timing" of when she found them the first time. Kenneth Starr launches into a barrage of accusations about obstruction of justice; the press speculates at length on "smoking guns." Newsweek's Michael Isikoff goes one step further, saying ominously that the documents "were covered with the late Vince Foster's handwriting. ...It is Foster's suicide that lends Whitewater its aura of menace." Unfortunately for the press's conspiracy theory, once the OIC examines the documents, they find nothing of import except information that clears the First Lady of any wrongdoing (naturally, this fact does not find its way into major media news releases). It is this incident that impels New York Times columnist William Safire to call Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar;" Clinton is furious over the characterization, with press secretary Mike McCurry later saying that if Clinton weren't the president, he "would have delivered a more forceful response to that [column] on the bridge of Mr. Safire's nose." (Washington Post, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- January 11: Time magazine predicts tremendous drama in today's session of Alfonse D'Amato's Senate hearings on Whitewater, with "bright young lawyer" Rick Massey, a former employee of Rose, appearing to contradict Clinton's previous statements to the commission. The New York Times's William Safire advises the president to hire himself a separate criminal defense lawyer because his wife is about to go to jail. Time, and Safire, are to be disappointed.
- Massey not only fails to contradict the First Lady's previous testimony, his own statements bolster Clinton's own words. He confirms that, as Clinton has previously testified, he was contacted by Madison Guaranty's John Latham for advice about how to raise money for the institution. Massey testifies that he brought Madison on board as a client, but that Madison founder and CEO Jim McDougal didn't pay his bills on time; Rose sent Hillary Clinton to McDougal's office to make payment arrangements. The entire foundation of assistant independent prosecutor Hickman Ewing's prepared indictment against the First Lady rests upon Massey's inability to remember whether he asked Clinton to visit McDougal, or if she suggested the visit to him -- a matter of no consequence and nothing approaching any hint of criminal activity. Massey confirms that he, not Clinton, did almost all of the work for the law firm involving Madison, with Clinton serving as his supervisor. "In terms of who was in the trenches and doing the work, Senator, it was me." In addition, his explanation of the Madison preferred stock deal, the allegedly illicit transaction that the New York Times's Jeff Gerth had written was at the heart of the "scandal," is clear and precise, showing nothing except routine and quite legal transactions.
- Of course, the media has its own spin. "At Whitewater Session, A Struggle to Recall," proclaims the New York Times; in another Stephan Labater article, the Times writes that Massey had trouble recalling details of his work with the Rose Law Firm surrounding Madison Guaranty, and ominously writes of a sinister deal between McDougal and Bill Clinton to funnel cash into Hillary's pocket. By this time, the Times and its fellow news outlets have abandoned fact for fiction. A similar article by the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt tells a complete lie, saying that Massey didn't believe he signed up McDougal as a client, as Hillary Clinton had previously testified. The article uses selected quotes from Massey taken completely out of context to bolster its fabrications. Of course, the much more thorough and fact-based investigations of the Pillsbury Report authors disprove this entire farrago of nonsense, concluding that the niggling discrepancies between Massey's and Clinton's recollections aren't worth serious consideration. Once again, the report, which is issued in its final form on February 25, places the blame for any criminal malfeasance squarely on the shoulders of Jim McDougal.
- Some news media outlets finally seem to grasp their jobs -- to report the truth. ABC's Nightline airs a segment that discusses D'Amato's failure to prove a single one of his sensational predictions. The New York Times runs an "Editor's Note" stipulating that Labater's latest article about the hearings, which, like Schmidt's, verged on libel, should have taken a more balanced approach and included the testimony from the First Lady that "seemed to support" her previous statements. And Times columnist Anthony Lewis becomes the first to break with the media surge of anti-Clinton smear pieces, writing on January 15, "Three years and innumerable investigations later, Mrs. Clinton has not been shown to have done anything wrong in Whitewater. One charge after another has evaporated." The obviously exasperated Lewis compares D'Amato to former senator Joe McCarthy and his notorious Communist witch hunts, but notes one huge difference: "On Whitewater, the press too often seems an eager accomplice to the accusers.... Some of the coverage of Whitewater reads as if the reporters or editors were committed to finding something wrong -- as if they had an investment in the story." Lewis is more right than he may know. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- January 15: Angered at his complete failure to disprove Hillary Clinton's testimony that she had properly handled documents from her old employer, the Rose Law Firm, that Starr believes proves her culpability in the Whitewater investigation, Kenneth Starr leaks to the media that documents related to the Whitewater investigation were clandestinely moved from Rose to the Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock. While some documents were moved from the Rose offices to the campaign headquarters, none of the documents had any connection to Whitewater; Starr's leak, though making a media splash, is entirely false. (Washington Times/James Carville)
- January 22: Kenneth Starr subpoenas Hillary Clinton to testify before a grand jury. She does so four days later, the first First Lady in history to do so. Clinton uses the recently rediscovered Rose Law Firm billing statements to prove that her earlier sworn statements regarding her lack of contact with Jim McDougal's real estate ventures. The investigators who produced the recently released Pillsbury Report examine the billing statements and conclude, once again, that no one at Rose, particularly Hillary Clinton, did anything illegal or unethical in her work with Rose; Starr, unwilling to accept that conclusion, spends years investigating Clinton's work without finding any evidence to the contrary.
- However, the media presents an entirely different story. Time runs a cover story promoting the woefully inaccurate book Blood Sport, by James Stewart, featuring a photograph of Hillary Clinton that looks like a post office "Wanted" poster. Time columnist Rochard Stengel writes that "Hillary Clinton now faces a crisis even the most artful public relations may not be able to fix." (Washington Post, H.R. Clinton, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- January 25: Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer finally gets to testify before Alfonse D'Amato's Senate hearings into Whitewater. The hearings are meandering to a close, having run for 70 days, far longer than either the Watergate or Iran-Contra hearings, and have proven absolutely nothing of any criminal or unethical conduct against the Clintons. D'Amato is hoping that Bassett Schaffer will turn the hearings around. He does not get his wish. Ever since she agreed to a 1992 interview with the New York Times's Jeff Gerth, who twisted and misrepresented her words and used the information provided to him by the notoriously unreliable Jim McDougal to paint her as a part of the "Clinton conspiracy," Bassett Schaffer's life has been reduced to a shambles. In 1993, she was literally chased down the streets of Fayetteville, Arkansas by David Bossie and an NBC camera crew guided by Bossie's Citizens United group, she has been vilified on "Wanted" posters by Citizens United, was blasted by Jim Leach's House hearings without ever being allowed to present her side, and has had to abandon her law practice to spend her days defending herself against Kenneth Starr's investigators. Her husband, a PR executive with Tyson Foods, was indicted for the "crime" of inviting Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy to the annual meeting of the Arkansas Poultry Foundation, which fell on the same day as Don Tyson's birthday celebration. Bassett Schaffer and her department had been vindicated by the Pillsbury Report, and told by Starr's office that she would not be indicted for any crimes; only pressure from Senate Democrats gave her the chance to testify at these hearings. Though D'Amato's senior counsel, Michael Chertoff (later the head of the Department of Homeland Security), attempts to grill her over her 1986 warning to then-Governor Clinton that Jim McDougal was under investigation by state and federal regulators, she is able to show that it was her job to inform the governor of McDougal's status, and because of her judgment that the loose-lipped McDougal might attempt to drag Clinton into his legal troubles. She tells Democratic senator Paul Simon that her entire Whitewater ordeal has been unfair both to her and the state of Arkansas. "It's really been very personal, very vicious," she says. "It's been an attempt to vicariously destroy Bill Clinton piece by piece by ruining the people that he trusted, that worked for him -- good people, who didn't do anything wrong. The job's been done very well. And a lot of people have been hurt unnecessarily for the purpose of winning an election. And I just think there's something wrong with that."
- Bassett Schaffer is the last witness of consequence to be interviewed by D'Amato's committee. The Republicans' penchant for promising sensational evidence and producing nothing more than baseless accusations, and the failure of the committee to bring a single indictment on the promised charges of perjury and obstruction, not only cost the Republicans a great deal of credibility, it lost both D'Amato and fellow senator Lauch Faircloth their positions -- both would be soundly defeated for re-election in 1998. Probably the most embarrassing moment for the committee comes with the February 14 testimony of Helen Dickey. The 25-year old aide, a former nanny to Chelsea Clinton, tearfully rebuts every charge made by the now-infamous state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, who claimed that she called the Arkansas governor's mansion with the news of Vince Foster's death hours before the White House was informed of Foster's suicide. Dickey and her family were very close to Foster; it is obvious that Dickey was devastated by the suicide. Instead of calling Perry at 6 pm, over two hours before the Secret Service learned of the death, telephone records bear out Dickey's assertion that she called her mother and father shortly after 10 pm, much later than the troopers' own statements allege. It was hours later, after spending time wandering around the White House in a grief-stricken daze, that she called the governor's mansion. As for the story that she said Foster had shot himself to death in his car in the White House parking lot, she says, "That's absolutely not true.... I never heard that. I never would have said that, because that's not the facts as I knew them at the time." D'Amato is forced to apologize, and justifies his pursuit by claiming that pressure from the media and the citizenry impelled him to pursue the inquiry. The Republicans on the committee, embarrassed by the attempted grilling of such an emotionally vulnerable young woman, decide not to bring the two troopers in to testify at all, fearing that the presentation of their tissue of lies and salacious charges against Clinton will backfire tremendously on them. Instead, Patterson peddles his tale to an appropriately shocked Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. The troopers' charges continue to gain plenty of media coverage; the media virtually ignores Dickey's testimony. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
