Online NewsHour: Gigot & Oliphant -- February 13, 1998

POLITICAL WRAP

February 13, 1998

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript

Tom Oliphant, columnist for the Boston Globe, joins Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot for a look at two men currently under close scrutiny in Washington: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
February 11, 1998:
The NewsHour analyzes Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Sec. Babbitt.
October 30, 1997:
Sec. Babbitt testifies before the Senate governmental affairs committee defending his department's decision to turn down a proposed Indian casino.
February 6, 1998:
Perspectives on the Starr investigation from beyond the beltway.
January/February, 1998:
The NewsHour's coverage of Special Prosecutor Kenneth's Starr expanded investigation of the President.
February 11, 1998:
U.N. Ambassador Richardson discusses Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow United Nations inspectors access to numerous suspected weapons sites.
Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the White House and legal issues
Browse the Shields and Gigot index page.

PHIL PONCE: Mark Shields is not here tonight but NewsHour regular and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot is, and joining is Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant. Gentlemen. Paul, how would you assess Kenneth Starr's performance?
PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: I don't think you can answer that question unless you start at the beginning and look back four years ago to where--how Ken Starr began. He was at the time every Democrat's favorite Republican lawyer. When the Senate wanted to look at the Packwood diaries, they needed Bob Packwood's personal diaries. They needed a non-partisan source, somebody who they thought could look at them fairly and assess them.

PHIL PONCE: To look at the sexual harassment charges.

Kenneth Starr: "They've turned Clark Kent into a super prosecutor who's playing their own rough brand of politics."

PAUL GIGOT: That's right. Who did they call? Ken Starr. John Kerry said he's certainly a neutral party. He's a professor type. He was brought in precisely to be special counsel precisely for that reputation. He's not a prosecutor. What happened over time is he found himself having to perform more like a prosecutor and particularly found himself up against the smash mouth brand of politics that this administration has played. The administration unleashed first Carrier, James Carville on 'em, started hitting him up for his clients, which he shouldn't have kept--I agree--tobacco companies, playing a very rough brand of politics. And over time I think that has had the ironic effect of hardening him to the task, making him more like some of the prosecutors he's brought in, and slowly to exaggerate the point but still make it, they've turned Clark Kent into a super prosecutor who's playing their own rough brand of politics.

PHIL PONCE: Has Ken Starr morphed into something evil, as he would put it maybe?

PAUL GIGOT: I don't think evil. He's playing a rougher game.

PHIL PONCE: Overstating your position; acknowledged.

TOM OLIPHANT, Boston Globe: I think there's an awful lot in what Paul just said that I agree with from a different perspective. Where I think the problem arises is what the office under this stupid law does to the man. And I'm reminded of what it did to a very similar man with a very similar image, Lawrence Walsh a decade ago. He could not extricate himself from the quagmire of Iran Contra, and the deeper he got into it against an administration that played smash mouth politics against him, the more he became wedded to a particular theory of the crime, the more he spun stories, the more money he spent, the more he got nowhere.

Very much the same thing has happened to Judge Starr. He has become part in a way of the allegations, spin, fight over scandal politics system that Washington has evolved into. And as a result, he has become more an advocate for a particular point of view than a dispassionate investigator in the public's eye, and particularly in recent weeks since this controversy burst into full bloom, he has appeared to be a part of the spin mechanism behind a number of specific stories that have not turned out to be true, above all involving eyewitnesses to events that somehow disappear the more you examine them. So I don't think the fault is in the man. I think the problem is what this particular office does to people who cannot figure out a way to bring investigations to a conclusion.

PHIL PONCE: Paul, but how about this man's specific tactics, for example, bringing in Monica Lewinsky's mother?

Kenneth Starr's tactics: rough but standard operating procedure.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think you can fairly say that Starr's made mistakes, but I think they've been political mistakes, not legal mistakes. He shouldn't have taken that detour to Malibu, nice as it is, for a while, resigning temporarily, and he should have dropped his clients to avoid even the--other clients to avoid even the appearance of any conflict of interest. But the tactics he's playing, while considered rough, are, nonetheless, standard operating procedure for an awful lot of prosecutorial investigations. Remember, you're dealing with an administration that has resisted and litigated everything he's wanted to do. It's always fought. It's always resisted, and he's found himself to get to the essential truth and to the bottom he's had to play that kind of prosecutorial effort.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, do you think those are standard prosecutorial tactics?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, you know, Paul is right. If you look at each one of these decisions, whether to hold Monica Lewinsky without a lawyer more or less for several hours, whether to call her mother before the grand jury and subject her to the particular kind of questioning and exposure to those audio tapes that he did, any one of those decisions can find its parallel in things that prosecutors do every day. But if you take them as a whole, I think you can say accurately that every time he's had a call to make, he has chosen the roughest, most invasive procedure and in a political contest, which is what this is in the end, you have to take responsibility for--one forgets that the target of this investigation is the president of the United States. All of the chips are on the table right now. This is not a decision about whether to indict him. He is not going to indict him. It is when to submit evidence to the House of Representatives. And I think in some ways Judge Starr may be mixing the idea of impeachment investigator and independent counsel in a way that the public has problems.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, I just wanted to clarify something that I think you might have said. Are you saying that when Monica Lewinsky's mother was in the grand jury room that they played--

TOM OLIPHANT: My understanding of what happened in that room is that the prosecutor would play a particularly raunchy section of those audio tapes for her, and then ask her questions like: Did your daughter ever say anything like that to you? And I think, from what we understand after she left the grand jury, was that the cumulative effect of that kind of exposure, as it would be on any parent, was particularly painful for her.

PAUL GIGOT: He has a lot better grand jury sources than I did. But I will say this about these leaks. We don't know that Ken Starr's people are the source of things. There are a lot of FBI agents who know an awful lot here, and there are an awful lot of other people, attorneys on all sides, who know some things, and one thing I've tried not to do in this city is run down leaks because you can't.

TOM OLIPHANT: Paul makes a point that's very important and I happen to agree with it. I think the problem comes not from leaking but from spinning, which makes you appear to be a political partisan on one side.

PHIL PONCE: And speaking of spinning, Paul, do you think the White House has been successful in making Ken Starr and his conduct the focus of attention, as opposed to any allegations involving the president?

PAUL GIGOT: Judging by the last five minutes on this show, yes. I don't think there's any question that in a narrow political sense it's worked, the strategy has worked. Ken Starr is down there with Newt Gingrich in the polls. They've really demonized him, and ultimately that might help them as Tom points out when this goes to the House Judiciary Committee as a report, because it'll affect the credibility of what is presented there because of the author. But in a legal sense it may not be working, and that means--that gets back to the point I made earlier, and that it has hardened Ken Starr and it has hardened his people to their duty, and I think that that may end up making them more determined to actually pursue this all the way to the end as far it goes.

The decision to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Secretary Babbitt...

PHIL PONCE: Tom, switching gears, what is your reaction to the attorney general's call for an independent counsel--yet another one--this time to investigate Interior Secretary Babbitt?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, first of all, that if we needed a final nail in the coffin of this stupid law, the attorney general's decision this week I think constitutes that nail, and it goes to the nature of the case that is now about to be referred. This is a perjury case, at least on its face, against a man with probably the finest reputation of anybody in public life I've ever run into in the last 30 years. Half of this case was thrown by Janet Reno into the waste basket. This involved the dispute and the testimony as to whether there was a mention of campaign contributions. She found the accusation not credible; she found the former friend of Babbitt who made the accusation not credible--deep-sixed, no basis to proceed. What's left is a conflict in Senate and House testimony--or Senate testimony basically between Babbitt's former friend and Babbitt over whether or not Harold Ickes had anything to do with the timing of the announcement of this decision on the casino license.

PHIL PONCE: And it boils down to a conversation the two of them had.

TOM OLIPHANT: That's correct. And underneath that conflict the attorney general says, I don't have any basis for believing that Babbitt lied, that he had any criminal intent. But because there's a conflict--

PHIL PONCE: The conversation between Babbitt and the lobbyist.

TOM OLIPHANT: And the lobbyist, that's right. But because there's a conflict in the testimony, I can't resolve it, so there has to be an independent counsel. If Bruce Babbitt's name were Joe Schmo, this case wouldn't exist.

PHIL PONCE: Final nail in the coffin, Paul?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, she didn't do Bruce Babbitt any favors because the focus of the issue is really on him and on his truth or the falsity of his statements. But what you did was I think she did the administration--the broader administration a political favor because she kept the framework very narrow, focused on Babbitt, and she basically said, ask the court that has to appoint an independent counsel and the counsel not to expand it to the broader questions which have prevailed here and which have been most politically risky for the White House.

PHIL PONCE: General questions regarding fund-raising. The China connection and that kind of thing.

PAUL GIGOT: And in this specific case, was the casino decision by Bruce Babbitt overturned because of White House pressure or political contributions, and she basically said, don't go after that.

Is Congressional support of a military strike on Iraq decreasing?

PHIL PONCE: Paul, real quickly in the time we have left, what is your sense of the amount of congressional support there is for an attack against Iraq?

PAUL GIGOT: Less this week than last week, if you can believe that. Usually when an administration makes it case, it increases the support. This week, there were some very, very tough, testy internal sessions, meetings up there where Secretary of State Albright went to make her case with the National Security Council Sandy Berger, one Republican senator said this was the gang that couldn't shoot straight, very tough, the Secretary said, well, we didn't leave Saddam there. That was implying that that was George Bush who left him in place after the Gulf War. There's real doubts up there about the plan and the strategy, number one, and there's also doubts on Capitol Hill about--real doubts about how much they can trust the administration to follow through.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, I'm sorry. We're out of time. Thank you both.

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