In a revelation that may have obvious and immediate implications for Al Gore's White House bid, the Justice Department's campaign-finance task force disclosed yesterday that it has undertaken a criminal investigation to determine the whereabouts and the contents of White House e-mails, some of them dating back to 1994. Several witnesses White House computer contract workers from Northrop Grumman testified yesterday at a hearing held by the Committee on Government Reform that the missing e-mails may include messages with potentially damaging information about the Lewinsky investigation, DNC foreign-money contributions, "Filegate," and myriad other Clinton-Gore scandals.
According to the White House, the missing e-mails resulted from a simple computer glitch and are "the sole result of human mistakes and entirely unintentional." Anyone who works with or on computers even infrequently can imagine such a glitch, but after seven-plus years of dissembling and outright lies, it's worth being a bit skeptical of such White House claims.
Even with a magnanimous suspension of disbelief about the cause of the missing e-mails, serious questions remain. According to court records and documents produced by the White House, senior White House officials includng then White House Counsel Charles Ruff and current chief of staff John Podesta were alerted to the computer problems in 1998 and failed to disclose them. What's more, two contract employees offered detailed testimony about White House efforts to keep this crucial information from outside ears.
Betty Lambuth, the manager of the Northrop Grumman team that first found the glitch, told lawmakers that she and her employees "were threatened . . . with loss of our jobs, arrest and jail if we told anyone." "I quickly came to the conclusion that the Clinton White House had no intention of fixing the problem," she continued. "My conclusion was based on the fact that nothing was done to fix the problem and the e-mails continued to be left out of any searches in response to subpoenas and other document requests."
Lambuth's colleague, Richard Haas, also claims that he was told by White House computer director Laura Crabtree, "there would be a jail cell with my name on it" if he disclosed the team's findings to anyone, including his wife. Crabtree denies Haas's account, and says he either misunderstood her or has an "overactive imagination." Mark Lindsay, White House Director of Management and Administration, also denies making threats. "I did say ... that this was a matter that I believed that needed to be kept in bounds with those people who needed the information to perform repairs to the system," he told the panel.
This could be just another in the exhausting series of Clinton administration gnat-scandals allegations of serious malfeasance constantly buzzing around the White House that the administration dismisses with a lie and a wave of the hand. The difference may be the existence of hard evidence in the form of White House computer back-up tapes. What if anything these tapes will reveal, and how soon if ever we can learn their contents is unknown.
What is clear, however, is that these revelations and the serious, credible charges that accompany them, will at a minimum keep Clinton-Gore fundraising abuses in the news. Even with an electorate that may be taking a break from presidential politics, the longer these charges gurgle about in the media the more they exacerbate the very real, if cliched "Clinton Fatigue" already plaguing Gore's candidacy. The charges also render laughable Gore's already implausible effort to capture the McCain Minority by campaigning hard as the candidate of reform.
Republicans, of course, planned all along to "beat Gore like a drum" on the fundraising issue. But with these recent developments, Bill Bradley's words throughout the Democratic primary will come back to haunt Gore and the White House much sooner than they had anticipated. "I believe that there are enough questions surrounding the 1996 fund-raising that we know the Republicans are going to come at us hard," Bradley said repeatedly, "that there have to be fuller explanations."
Indeed.
