Email Archives

Print Reprint

November 6, 2005 -- SOME in the media are treating the in dictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, as one of the great scandals of American history. Louis J. Freeh's memoir reminds us that scandals weren't unknown in the administration in which he served. And he seems to use this memoir to settle old scores.

Freeh got the job as FBI director after Clinton tried and failed to get his own man in the job. The president had ousted William Sessions (on charges later found to be baseless), but then the Travelgate scandal broke, and, as Freeh writes, "it became politically difficult for the president to put a friend in the politically sensitive job of FBI director."

Clinton had been warned that Freeh, then a federal judge, "was too political and self-serving," but he appointed him anyway, Clinton explains in his own recent memoir, "My Story."

Clinton also writes that Freeh ultimately took an adversarial position toward the White House to cover for his own mistakes. "There had been a whole series of missteps on Freeh's watch: botched reports from the FBI forensic laboratory that threatened several pending criminal cases . . . the release of FBI files on Republican officials to the White House and the naming and the apparent entrapment of Richard Jewell, a suspect in the Olympic bombing case who was subsequently cleared," Clinton claims.

In Clinton's view, Freeh supported the appointment of a special prosecutor in the Whitewater matter and recommended that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate contributions made by the Chinese intelligence service to the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1996, all to deflect attention from himself.

Media attention on "My FBI" has focused on the spat over the Khobar Towers investigation. But the most significant criticism Freeh makes of Clinton concerns his successful effort to frustrate the FBI investigation into illegal Chinese campaign contributions in 1996:

"Bill Clinton and his lawyers seemed to be inventing some new executive privilege every 15 minutes or so, both to keep the wraps on potential witnesses and to forestall turning over documents.

"It's hard to say when the claims hit rock bottom — there were so many of them — but to me I think the moment came when the president tried to invoke an 'executive protection privilege' to prevent Secret Service agents from testifying before the grand jury during the [Chinese contributions] investigation.

"According to the claim, an agent could not testify about what he or she heard the president say or saw him do even if it was criminal because requiring an agent to do so would compromise the security and protection of the president since, in the future, the president might not want to have the Secret Service around when he's committing a crime."

Kenneth Starr investigated Whitewater, which morphed into an investigation of the president's sex life. An investigation by another special prosecutor that began in 1995, into whether Clinton cabinet officer Henry Cisneros had lied to the FBI about payments to his mistress, is just now being wrapped up. And we're well into the third year of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of whether it was a crime for a White House official to tell reporters, truthfully, that Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been dispatched to Niger at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA officer.

But we've never had a thorough investigation of whether a hostile foreign power bought influence and military secrets with illegal campaign contributions.

Louis Freeh's memoir is a reminder of how Washington makes much ado about nothing and pays little attention to what is truly important.

Jack Kelly is national-security columnist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Toeldo Blade. E-mail: jkelly@post-gazette.com