Now it appears that Clinton’s most trusted aide has joined the lengthening list of those caught up in the Whitewater scandal. Sources told NEWSWEEK and other news organizations that Stephanopoulos had two phone conversations last Feb. 25 that may constitute an attempt to obstruct a regulatory investigation of Madison Guaranty, the failed Arkansas S&L at the murky center of the affair. A detailed diary, kept by a Treasury Department aide and turned over to special counsel Robert Fiske, describes at least one of the conversations. Sources say that during the calls-one to Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, the other to Treasury chief of staff Joshua Steiner Stephanopoulos asked about the possibility of removing Jay Stephens, a prominent former Republican prosecutor hired by the Resolution Trust Corporation to investigate civil claims against Madison.
The latest revelations came only 36 hours after the president’s most elaborate attempt yet to free his administration from Whitewater. In a prime-time news conference last Thursday, Clinton confidently affirmed a new willingness to answer all legitimate questions about the affair “so that I can go back to work doing what I was hired to do.” But the allegations against Stephanopoulos brought the inquiries into the administration’s conduct in Whitewater closer to the Oval Office than ever before-and plunged the White House back into a frenzy of damage control. Clinton’s domestic agenda, already impeded by all the talk of cover-up and deceit, may now be in danger of stalling completely. To make matters worse, the widening scandal raised new tensions and mutual distrust among an embattled White House staff. “That’s what is most upsetting, that people are attacking each other,” says one worried adviser.
Until March 1993, Jay Stephens had been the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He’d also been pursuing a criminal investigation of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski for alleged misuse of House funds. When the incoming Clinton administration sought the resignations of all incumbent U.S. attorneys, Stephens implied that he was being forced out to protect the powerful Ways and Means chairman. According to sources, Stephanopoulos was furious on Feb. 25, when he learned that Stephens’s Washington firm had been hired for the Madison inquiry. He regarded Stephens’s political grievance against Clinton as a clear conflict of interest.
The most potentially damaging of the two calls was to Steiner, an old friend from the campaign. Stephanopoulos acknowledges raising the issue with Steiner, but says he has no memory of inquiring about Stephens’s ouster. “I was puzzled and blew off steam over the unfairness of the decision,” Stephanopoulos told NEWSWEEK, but he added, “Once I got the facts from josh, that ended the matter as far as I was concerned.” Much of the conversation, says Stephanopoulos, concerned Altman’s decision to recuse himself from RTC deliberations involving Madison. Altman had been rebuked by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee that week after acknowledging that he’d met with senior White House staff earlier that month to discuss potential civil actions against Madison. But Steiner, scheduled to testify before the Whitewater grand jury this week, may offer a different recollection of the conversation in a diary he turned over to Fiske.
That same day, according to sources, Stephanopoulos also raised the Stephens issue with Altman, who was also serving as acting head of RTC. This time, Stephanopoulos was joined by deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes. A knowledgeable source says either Stephanopoulos or Ickes it is not clear who asked about sacking Stephens. “Is there anything that can be done?” one of them reportedly asked Altman. Again, Stephanopoulos says he has no memory of such a question. Nor does Ickes.
The White House says Clinton learned of the phone calls only last Friday. News of the conversations, first reported last Saturday by The Washington Post, sent a new jolt of anxiety through the White House. New presidential counsel Lloyd Cutler said it was “perfectly natural” for officials to express surprise at Stephens’s appointment, and cautioned against blowing the matter out of proportion. But he also took pains to distance the administration from the calls by Ickes and Stephanopoulos, saying that he didn’t think they were “authorized” under White House policy. Other officials said privately that the two did nothing more than protest a flatly inappropriate hiring decision by RTC. “It’s not like we don’t like Republicans. Fiske is a Republican,” says one senior adviser. “But this guy held a press conference to accuse Bill Clinton of a secret plot to get rid of him. "
Last week’s events continued the White House’s troubling pattern in Whitewater: denial followed by fragments of disclosure. Claims of openness are repeatedly tainted by evidence that it has actually been working harder to control and contain damaging information. Along with the phone calls, a cluster of other issues has turned scandal management into a full-time job at the White House. New ones may crop up; others may fade. But for the moment, these problems are driving Whitewater:
The release of the Clintons’ long-withheld tax returns from the late ’70s seemed to establish that they lost money on the Ozark vacation-home development they co-owned with S&L operator James McDougal. But it also provided details about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lucrative flier in the cattle-futures market (box). Although the deal is completely legal, it carries the whiff of hypocrisy for a couple that campaigned in 1992 against ’80s greed-S&L abuses, insider trading, public officials who used their positions to enrich themselves. Her good for-tune came through a friendship with a lawyer for one of the state’s largest and most influential employers.
The financial disclosures also evoked the least attractive aspect of Clinton’s political personality: his facility for convenient evasion. Such a moment came at the Thursday-evening press conference, when he explained that he’d revised the estimate of his Whitewater losses downward (from about $70,000 to $50,000) because galleys of his mother’s autobiography reminded him that $20,000 had actually gone to buy her a house. Accurate or not, it conjured memories of an earlier Clinton, one who suddenly remembered his induction notice.
The deputy treasury secretary keeps generating new suspicions about improper White House involvement in the Madison probe. Last week, he offered a fourth correction to congressional testimony on his contacts with the White House regarding the Madison investigation. He originally told the Senate Banking Committee that he remembered only one White House meeting-a “heads up” session to discuss nothing more than procedural questions about civil suits against the bank. Altman later amended his comments to include what he said were two brief hallway conversations with the then White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Ickes. Now Altman says the discussions were more extensive, and involved his desire to recuse himself from RTC investigations, which he did at the end of February.
Altman is also rapidly becoming a man without allies. Since Fiske’s operation is regarded as “airtight,” Clintonites suspect that the original leaks disclosing the two phone calls under investigation came from the Treasury Department. Their surmise only adds to tensions between Altman and the White House aides, building ever since he confessed the “heads up” session to the Senate and then publicly recused himself without informing Clinton aides.
The administration’s new difficulties will further energize congressional Republicans who already smell blood. Until last week, the most visible face of GOP antagonism on Whitewater was Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, who has had his own ethical problems. That was before Rep. Jim Leach, an Iowa moderate who radiates ‘Main Street Republican probity, took the House floor to make two dramatic charges: that the Clintons are not telling the truth about losing money in the Whitewater venture, and that the administration tampered with the investigation of Madison, owned by James McDougal, the Clinton’s partner in the Whitewater land development. Federal investigators believe Madison accounts were drained by McDougal to subsidize other business interests, including Whitewater. Leach put up a fragile case for his first allegation. Using RTC documents, he notes $70,000 passed from Madison affiliates to Whitewater during one six-month period in 1985. But his thesis that the Clintons pocketed Madison cash is unproven.
He offered more disturbing evidence for his charge of political interference. His strongest exhibit was a sheaf of notes from Jean Lewis, the criminal investigator who led the Madison inquiry in RTC’s Kansas City, Mo., office. She charged that superiors in Washington pressed her to ignore evidence that the Clintons’ Whitewater venture played a significant role in draining Madison’s accounts. Most telling was Lewis’s account of a Feb. 2 meeting in which RTC attorney April Breslaw told her the agency was under pressure to conclude that Whitewater did not contribute to Madison’s losses. “She felt like they wanted to be able to provide an ‘honest answer’,” Lewis quoted Breslaw, “but that there were certain answers that they would be happier about, because it would get them off the book.”
According to her notes, Lewis told Breslaw she believed that the Clintons benefited from a check-kiting scheme that drew money from Madison into the foundering Whitewater development. She cited no evidence of the Clintons’ complicity. But she wondered why they apparently asked no questions of McDougal, who assumed their interest payments on Whitewater land in the mid-1980s despite his own financial difficulties. “Wouldn’t you question the source of the funds being used to your benefit?” Lewis asked. Breslaw has denied Lewis’s account.
Special counsel Fiske, busy in Washington pursuing White House revelations, may have gained important ground in Arkansas when he cut a deal with former Little Rock municipal court Judge David Hale. Facing trial on fraud and conspiracy charges, Hale pleaded guilty, hoping for lenient sentencing in exchange for testimony on Whitewater. The agreement allows Fiske to question the one figure in the affair who directly accuses Clinton of wrongdoing. Hale, who ran a federally backed finance company, has charged that in 1986 Clinton pressured him to make a $300,000 loan to a firm owned by McDougal’s wife: $110,000 was funneled to Whitewater. But Fiske has big credibility problems. A new General Accounting Office report on Capital Management Services, Hale’s firm, shows he secretly owned 13 of the 57 companies to which he made loans.
The unending trickle of bad news has given way in the White House to a bleak acceptance that Whitewater is now a permanent part of the administration’s political landscape. “The question is, can we continue to make progress with Whitewater as background music?” asks one senior official. For the moment, the answer is yes. Some issues still have constituencies that outstrip political problems caused by the scandal. Last week the outlines of a compromise on health reform began to emerge, and a major education initiative setting national academic guidelines passed the Senate.
Yet Whitewater is forcing the administration to work doubly hard for victories it should already have in hand. Clinton was counting on passage of the $22 billion crime bill before the press conference, to demonstrate that Whitewater has not swamped his legislative agenda. But White House lobbyists and Democratic congressional whips, consumed with staving off Whitewater hearings, allowed Republicans to gain the procedural advantage and deny Clinton a bill until after Easter. One top Republican strategist says continuing uncertainty about Whitewater will make it more difficult for Clinton to form majorities on a range of issues. “Because the question is, what’s next and how low can he go?” he said. “People on the Hill will hedge their bets and they do that better than anyone.” The bad news for the president-and the country-is that until the new questions get answers, all bets could be off.
The deputy treasury secretary oversaw the regulators investigating Madison Guaranty. At first he said he had one contact with White House officials. Then he admitted to another, then another, and another. There’s no evidence Altman squelched the key investigation, but each changed story hurts his credibility. The good news is that he rebuffed Stephanopoulos’s overheated inquiries about Jay Stephens.
The Clintons first said they lost $69,000 on Whitewater. Last week Clinton said it was $47,000. The difference matters little, if it was a loss. Representative Leach says the Clintons actually made money but has so far produced little proof. If he’s right, the next question is far more serious: were the “profits” really a way for cronies to funnel funny money to Clinton? That would send the meter shooting to 6 or 7.
title: “In The Line Of Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Maia Bush”
title: “In The Line Of Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-28” author: “Lester Horning”
Coedited by Horst Faas and Tim Page, both respected photojournalists who also did time in Vietnam, ““Requiem’’ (Random House) is a way of honoring their fallen comrades. Page, who was inspired to produce the book after returning to Southeast Asia in 1990, points out that Vietnam was ““the first and last war covered without the accustomed censorship.’’ It was a loose scene. Anyone with a plane ticket could go. Dana Stone had to be shown how to operate a Nikon when he arrived in Saigon in 1966. A year later his pictures were running on the covers of national news magazines. The photographers came from all over, and between 1945 and April 13, 1975, 135 of them died or disappeared.
A few of them, such as Robert Capa and Larry Burrows, were well known. But most of the names are unfamiliar, and the book gives you little information about them. Who, for example, was Everette Dixie Reese, whose pristine images of Southeast Asia in the ’50s are among the most heartbreaking in the book? One answer comes from Associated Press correspondent Tad Bartimus: ““They were all loved; they were all unlucky. None lived to grow old . . . It is for their photographs, not their dying, that the world remembers them.’’ That puts the emphasis where it belongs. Years from now, when no one is left who knew anyone in this book, these powerful photos will endure.
title: “In The Line Of Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-19” author: “Mark Shaffer”
Los Angeles, CA. 8/10/99 Weapons: Uzi semiautomatic, Glock 9mm handgun Buford O. Furrow Jr., 37, a white-supremacist, opened fire at a Jewish community center, wounding three children, a teenager and a 68-year-old receptionist. He later shot and killed a postal worker.
Pelman, Ala. 8/5/99 Weapon: .44-caliber Glock semiautomatic handgun Alan Eugene Miller, 34, allegedly shot two co-workers to death at their office. Authorities say he then killed a third man who worked at a company from which Miller had been fired earlier this year.
Atlanta, Ga. 7/29/99 Weapons: Glock 9mm pistol, Colt .45 pistol, .22-caliber Raven pistol, .22-caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver Mark Barton, 44, shot and killed nine and wounded 13 after bludgeoning his wife and two children to death.
Illinois and Indiana 7/2/99 - 7/4/99 Weapons: Bryco .380 handgun, Ruger .22-caliber pistol Benjamin Nathanial Smith, 21, a white-supremacist, killed two people and injured nine in a racially motivated three-day rampage before shooting himself.
Conyers, Ga. 5/20/99 Weapons: .22-caliber rifle, .357-magnum revolver T. J. Solomon, 15, is charged with entering Heritage High School and opening fire. Six students were injured, and Solomon reportedly threatened to shoot himself in the head with the revolver before an assistant principal intervened.
Littleton, CO. 4/20/99 Weapons: TEC-DC9 handgun, sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, pump-action shotgun, 9mm semi- automatic rifle Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before shooting themselves in the library at Columbine High School.
Salt Lake City, Utah 4/15/99 Weapon: .22-caliber Ruger Sergei Babarin, 71, a schizophrenic, allegedly killed a woman and a security guard, and wounded four others at the Mormon Family History Library. He was fatally shot by police as they attempted to apprehend him.
Washington, DC 7/24/98 Weapon: .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver Russell Eugene (Rusty) Weston, 41, is accused of killing a policeman and a federal guard, as well as wounding a female visitor while charging the Capitol building. He was seriously wounded in an exchange of gunfire.
Springfield, OR. 5/21/98 Weapons: .22-caliber Ruger semi-automatic rifle, Glock 9mm pistol Kipland Kinkel, 15, allegedly killed two Thurston High School students and shot 22 others. He is also charged with killing his parents the day before.
Jonesboro, Ar. 3/24/98 Weapons: Remington .30-‘06 rifle, .44-caliber Ruger, Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, Remington 742 and a Universal .30-caliber rifle Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, are charged with killing a teacher and four schoolmates, and wounding 10 others.
Paducah, KY. 12/1/97 Weapon: .22-caliber Ruger pistol Michael Carneal,14, a B student and the son of a suc-cessful lawyer, is charged with firing 12 shots at a prayer group in Heath High School, killing three students and wounding five others just after the assembly recited its final “Amen.”
Pearl, Miss. 10/1/97 Weapon: .30-caliber hunting rifle Luke Woodham, 16, stabbed his mother to death and then drove to Pearl High School, where he opened fire, killing two students, including his ex-girlfriend, and wounding seven others. He has been sentenced to life in prison.
title: “In The Line Of Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Sandra Morrison”
At that moment, Serbian troops and armor were on the move in Kosovo, rumbling across the rolling hills that lie along Europe’s fault line of faith. Outside a Kosovar Albanian rebel stronghold called Llap, tanks revved their engines in growling announcements of their might. Nearby, soldiers cleaned rifles for the next mission. As Clinton knew it would, the civil war in Kosovo dominated his press conference–and this seemingly intractable conflict could also color the twilight of his presidency.
True, in the Age of the Bull Market it is difficult to focus Americans’ attention on faraway crises. Kosovo, however, could be the ultimate booby trap for a man who thinks he can soothe, if not erase, even the most ancient feuds. In Kosovo, Christian Serbs and Moslem Albanians are locked in a struggle that Clinton is committed to ending–even if it means sending cruise missiles, warplanes and U.S. troops. The Yugoslavian army, fighting to retain the birthplace of Serbian Orthodoxy, has massacred scores of Kosovar Albanians and turned thousands of others into refugees. The Kosovars signed a peace deal last week, but Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic remained defiant. U.S. and NATO warplanes were ready to launch on command.
This may be Clinton’s hardest test yet: selling a skeptical electorate, wary Republicans and the world on his vision of planetary peace. Though he’s never come up with a slogan for it, Clinton–the ingratiating stepson in a tumultuous home–espouses a kind of global preventative humanitarian empathy. No dispute is too small or too ancient for the United States to ignore if the suffering is real enough and there’s the risk of a spreading security contagion–or a threat to the growth of world trade. But after a long run of shrewd moves and good luck in pursuit of that ideal–and real accomplishments in the Balkans, in Ireland, in the Middle East and in China–the trouble spots are turning hot.
Republicans were lining up to take their whacks–while of course trying to keep their distance on Kosovo. Clinton’s foreign policy, charged Sen. John McCain, is a swamp of “strategic incoherence and self-doubt.” Sen. Robert Smith, a favorite son in his pivotal state of New Hampshire, vowed to block funds for airstrikes unless they are authorized directly by Congress–a vote most of his colleagues would just as soon never have. “Americans are going to be killed,” warned Sen. Robert Bennett. “They are going to come home in body bags, and they will be killed in a war that Congress has not declared.”
Kosovo alone would be enough of a task. But the real danger is that one downward spiral could reinforce another. The Russians, for example, lost their innocence about the virtues of “cowboy capitalism” long ago, and are in no mood to see their Serbian allies humiliated by the West. If there are strikes, Russia could bolt the peacekeeping alliance and cause trouble for whatever U.S.-led NATO force eventually settles into Kosovo. Nor are the Russians willing to forgo the hard dollars they get from dumping their cheap steel in the United States. Administration globalists want to protect the Russian economy any way they can–even if that means losing some American jobs.
The issue has caught the president (and Al Gore) in a political vise. The House, led by erstwhile Clinton ally Dick Gephardt–voted overwhelmingly last week to clamp down on steel imports from Russia and elsewhere. But Clinton has hinted that he might veto such a measure, which could pass the Senate this week. Senate Republicans, allied with big business, will probably back him. The controversy could weaken support for new loans to the febrile Russian economy. (Paging Pat Buchanan: your Y2K populist issue in New Hampshire is ready.)
China is another bad dynamic waiting to happen. Clinton’s vision of a prosperous millennium depends heavily on vigorous trade with Asia, especially China. But expanding trade and other relations with China is suddenly more difficult, thanks to evidence of Chinese espionage in the ’80s–and the administration’s laxity about it in the ’90s. Republicans are planning hearings on the matter, and will release a lengthy, still classified, report on it. At his press conference, the president offered a classic, hairsplitting defense. The Chinese, he suggested, may have stolen information–but it’s not clear their actions amounted to “espionage.” In other words, they didn’t inhale.
Even without the spy issue, it’s hard to imagine how America could import much more from China–or anywhere else. The trade deficit in January set a new record: a colossal $17 billion. Cheap imports put downward pressure on the price of American goods–to which the rest of the world responds by cutting their prices even more. At some point, the United States will have all the Monopoly money and all the hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, and everyone else will be out of the game. Who could blame Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for calling an emergency trade meeting on Saturday?
In the Balkans, meanwhile, the urgency of war was in the air. In Belgrade, Americans lined up in their Jeep Cherokees to evacuate the U.S. Embassy. In Kosovo, NATO inspectors convoyed out to Macedonia, just in case the Serbs tried to take them as hostages. And in the rebel stronghold of Drenica, thousands of refugees fled Yugoslav forces that torched villages and reportedly carried out summary executions. “They didn’t waste much time, did they?” one Western observer said of the army. Neither, it seemed, would the allies. The bombing was expected to begin any day.
