Home : For The People : Clinton :

Five Federal Investigations

Poor, inconvenient Billy Dale. He had the misfortune of holding a White House job - director of the Travel Office - coveted by of one of the Clintons' Hollywood friends, Harry Thomason. To get rid of Dale, the idealistic first couple deployed the full force of the federal government against him. The FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS - even an independent contractor who happened to be working in the White House one weekend - were all called in to look for dirt on Dale.

The White House must have assumed that anyone could be found guilty of a crime if only investigated. Unfortunately for the Clintons, that assumption proved false. Investigations into the Clintons, after all, usually uncovered wrongdoing. On closer inspection, almost every wild accusation against the Clintons would turn out to be true-from the first lady's work on Castle Grande - a fraudulent land deal in Arkansas - to the sale of a burial plot at Arlington Cemetery. But Dale was clean as a whistle. Civil Society: 1; the Clintons: 0.

Harry Thomason, the Hollywood television executive famous for producing such shows as Evening Shade and Designing Women, was a major Clinton fund-raiser. He is an old friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, having first met the future president when Thomason was an Arkansas high school football coach in the 1970s. (One of the most priceless descriptions of the Thomasons' kindness to the Clintons was this: "It was the Thomasons who served as their ambassadors to Hollywood in 1991 when the Clintons were thought of as hicks.")

Thomason had helped "produce" various campaign events, culminating in his orchestrating the January 20, 1993, presidential inauguration. Following the inauguration, Thomason was given a White House pass and a White House office. Ironically, Thomason's job was to create events to burnish the president's image. He was to report to the president.

Thomason was part-owner of an air-charter consultant firm, TRM, Inc., that had teamed up with the Clinton campaign's travel agency, World Wide Travel, to help arrange press travel during the campaign. Little Rock-based World Wide Travel was a hotbed of Friends Of Bill's - including the longtime Clinton supporter Jackson T. Stephens, and the Rose Law Firm, where Mrs. Clinton was a partner. World Wide Travel officials themselves had, of course, contributed to Clinton's campaign.

While roaming about the White House, Thomason spread rumors about the Travel Office. He was the first one to plant in the heads of Mrs. Clinton and President Clinton the idea of removing the long-serving White House employees. Thomason told Hillary Clinton that the Travel Office staffers were disloyal and should be replaced.

Another FOB with an interest in World Wide Travel usurping the functions of the White House Travel Office was Clinton's third cousin, twenty-five-year-old Catherine Cornelius. Her contributions to Clinton were murkier. During the campaign she had worked with World Wide Travel, coordinating travel arrangements for the press. Cornelius assumed that travel arrangements, among other things, would continue in the White House as they had in Little Rock. Before Clinton had even taken office, Cornelius had written up a plan for World Wide's takeover of the White House Travel Office - with herself at the helm.

Clinton put Cousin Cornelius on the White House staff as a secretary to David Watkins, assistant to the president for management and administration. During her mere two months in Watkins's office, Cornelius kept up her campaign to oust the Travel Office staff. Just three days after Clinton's inauguration, Cornelius sent out a memo describing herself and another White House aide, Clarissa Cerda, as the future codirectors of the White House Travel Office. On February 15,1993, Cornelius and Cerda coauthored an eight-page memo describing their planned reorganization of the Travel Office and, again, calling themselves "codirectors:" They denounced the Travel Office staff as "complacent" and "overly pro-press.”

In April, Cornelius was reassigned to the coveted White House Travel Office. However, she was not yet codirector - only a spy on a reconnaissance mission for Watkins. More than a month later, the day the Travel Office staff was fired, Watkins noted in a memo to Mrs. Clinton that Cornelius "had been observing the Travel Office for 45 days" and that she believed the office was engaging in "criminal activity." Coincidentally, right about the time Cornelius began "observing" the Travel Office, papers started disappearing.

The day of the purge - May 19, 1993 - the president set the tone. Explaining his role in the firings (none) Clinton elaborated: "All I know about it was I was told the people in charge of administering the White House found serious problems there and thought there was no alternative.”

The same day, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers held a press briefing to inform reporters that an independent audit of the Travel Office had uncovered evidence of "gross mismanagement" and "very shoddy accounting practices:" Harry Thomason and Director of Media Affairs (and Cornelius boyfriend) Jeff Eller followed up in "off-the-record" briefings, telling reporters that the FBI was looking into "kickbacks" at the Travel Office.

(Eller had already tried to help his girlfriend's career plans by asking FBI agents for damaging information on the Travel Office employees. When it came out in the press that the leaker's inamorata was none other than Cornelius, Eller expressed his empathy for the fired employees by bitterly complaining: "It's unfortunate that my personal life is getting dragged into this.”)

Even months after Dale's November 1995 acquittal on embezzlement charges, the first lady was still trying to portray him as a crook. She explained to ABC's 20/20 that her interest in the Travel Office firings was limited to "the financial mismanagement" in the office.

All seven Travel Office employees were fired and then defamed by the announcement of an FBI investigation, even though only two Travel Office employees, Dale and his assistant, had anything to do with the office finances. In some respects, what was done to the White House Travel Office employees is the worst of the Clinton scandals. There is no more pernicious abuse of power than using the police powers of the federal government for personal or political gain.

In one of the five federal investigations into the Travel Office putsch, one small fact slipped through the White House stonewall: White House officials had pulled Billy Dale's FBI file in an after-the-fact attempt to justify his firing. It is important to recall the scrolling series of excuses the Clinton administration issued for its inappropriate possession of Dale's file, ordered from the FBI seven months after Dale's abrupt termination.

First, the White House claimed Dale's records had been retrieved from the White House archives, where Dale's file had been left from an earlier effort to complete unfinished "background information folders." Then, when it turned out the White House had not requested Dale's file from the FBI until seven months after firing him, the White House said Dale's folder had been pulled at the request of the General Accounting Office (GAO), which was conducting an investigation of the Travel Office firings. In short order, however, the GAO denied having requested Dales's FBI file.

When those excuses turned out to be inoperative, the White House was forced to make a dramatic revelation: Dale's file had been part of a slew of FBI files mistakenly requisitioned by the White House as part of an effort to update the background files of White House employees. The White House admitted that it had improperly pulled the files on as many as three hundred former White House employees, including prominent Republicans, but wrote the incident off as a "bureaucratic snafu:" As solid proof that there was no illegal, unconstitutional intent, the White House repeatedly pointed out that the names on the improperly pulled FBI files went up only to the letter G.

On the theory that enemies lists are not assembled in alphabetical order, the White House supposedly proved that it had no nefarious purpose. As one syndicated columnist wrote of the White House's possession of hundreds of extremely sensitive FBI files: "But a major scandal, no. [Anthony] Marceca [one of the government employees involved] says the search of the outdated lists halted at the letter ‘G.’ Real enemies lists don't run out of steam."

Thrilled by the surprise news that the requisitioned files "stopped at G," the White House went in high dudgeon at the thought that anyone could have imagined that the files snafu demonstrated anything other than the White House's well established incompetence. "This is proof positive that Billy Dale's file was not singled out," boasted White House Associate Special Counsel Mark Fabiani.

Ann Lewis, deputy manager for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, asserted that the fact that the file-gathering had stopped at the letter G conclusively established that there was no "sinister conspiracy" to create a White House enemies list, saying the files matter was like Sesame Street: "[A] conspiracy-minded president who really wanted to misuse power for his own political ends does not stop part way through the alphabet." Even Republican lawyer Joseph diGenova conceded, "That makes me doubt a major plot.”

George Stephanopoulos demanded an apology from Republicans for having suggested that the White House had obtained Billy Dale's file as part of a vendetta: "These guys should be apologizing.... The charge they made earlier was wrong.” When asked to comment on the investigations being undertaken by the FBI, the independent counsel, and House investigative committees, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry dismissively sniffed, "Surprise, surprise. What else?"

And then it turned out that White House excuse #3 was not true. They had plenty of files on Republicans with names like "Brent Scowcroft" (President Bush's national security adviser). Marceca even had the chance to review his own file, presumably filed under "M." We know Marceca saw his file because of the astonishing fact that he later brought a lawsuit against two women, Lilly Stephenson and Joyce Montag, for their unflattering remarks about him recorded in his FBI file.

It also turned out that the White House held hundreds more files than it had initially owned up to. Week by week the number would grow - three hundred, four hundred, six hundred, seven hundred. The Clinton administration eventually admitted that it had pulled at least nine hundred raw files, most of which dealt with former White House employees from the Reagan and Bush administrations. And the files hadn't stopped at the letter G. Was this now an enemies list?

The known perpetrators of this abuse of power were Democratic dirty-trickster Craig Livingstone, director of personnel security, and his enemies list assistant, Anthony Marceca, a small-time private eye and Democratic operative.

Who hired Livingstone remains one of Washington's great mysteries. No one who could have hired him will admit to so much as knowing Livingstone prior to his showing up as White House security director. As far as the Clinton administration is concerned, Livingstone's tenure in that job was part of the Lockean state of nature, or the Rawlsian original position. Or perhaps an effect of El Nino.

In 1994 George Stephanopoulos said of Livingstone, "He does a terrific job. All I know is that anything that has anything to do with security or logistics - Craig's going to take care of it. You don't have to tell him how to do it, when to do it. Just that it needs to be done, and he does it. And he knows how to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done.” After Livingstone's demonstrated bureaucracy-busting skills came to light in the Filegate matter, Stephanopoulos said, "I don't know him that well. He's a guy that was around.”

The president and the president's men - including former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who was nominally responsible for the office Livingstone headed - have all taken the position that none of them hired Livingstone, and none of them knows who did. Apparently no one is capable of finding out who did either, so could we all please drop the subject? Such claims are, according to the Rodino Report, the reason for the constitutional impeachment power.

The nine hundred FBI files ultimately discovered in the Clinton White House were certainly not being used to create a "friends" list. Unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, the Clinton White House's possession of FBI raw files was against the law. Also unlike the Nixon administration wiretaps, there was no national security reason for the White House to have these files, as the Clinton administration has admitted, trying to portray the nefarious files business as a "snafu."

Indeed, the only rational explanation for the Clinton administration's possession of the files on many Republicans-and some prominent Republicans - was to harass Clinton's political enemies more easily. Recall that former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos said that the "whisper[s]" around the Clinton White House were that Clinton's people were going to start blackmailing their political opponents to survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal - Stephanopoulos called it the "Ellen Rometsch strategy."

And we know the Clinton White House illegally sought the FBI file on at least one individual citizen "for purposes unrelated to national security," but whom the White House had a political interest in damaging. Perhaps there have been others.

Someone at the Clinton White House is responsible for hiring the men who implemented an unprecedented violation of nine hundred Americans' civil liberties. Someone at the White House is responsible for hiring the men who abused the powers of the executive branch to engage in political espionage against its presumed enemies, on a scale only dreamed of.

Ann Coulter. . Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C. 1998.

---

top of page

back a page