The Battle to Remove Bill Clinton

The effort to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency was essentially a political operation. At the very least, it would serve the conservative goal of establishing the illegitimacy of his regime and associating Democrats with shabby morality. The White Water affair, the pretext for the long investigation, had been quickly investigated and resolved in a report of impartial auditors. The Republicans carried their vendetta too far and lost some seats in 1998, but the persecution of Clinton paid dividends in the 2000 election when some voters punished Albert Gore for standing by Clinton.

At a summer, 1994 luncheon in Nantucket, millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife bragged that he was launching a effort to “get” Clinton; and he proved to be good as his word. Through investigations and litigation, he sought to nullify the 1992 election results. Conservative groups, including Judicial Watch, which he partially funded, launched numerous law suites that helped derail Clinton policies and drain the funds of the president’s aids. These initiatives were quickly followed by a frenzy of congressional investigations. Scaife poured $2,400,000 into the Arkansas Project, an effort financed by Richard Mellon Scaife to discredit Clinton. It began as an effort to help the sleazy Municipal Judge David Hale to tie Bill Clinton to illegal activity. Despite testifying to the satisfaction of independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, Hale was checked into a federal prison in 1996. Future Solicitor General Ted Olsen represented Hale at one point and secretly wrote some Arkansas Project articles for the American Spectator. Over three years, $2.4 million dollars were spent exploring Clinton’s private life and encouraging witnesses to speak against the president. Much attention was devoted to finding criminal conduct in the Whitewater venture, a failed 1978 Arkansas land deal in which the Clinton’s had an interest and lost money.

Some of that money found its way, through a third party, to David Hale, who became Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s chief witness in the investigation of Clinton’s business dealings. Later Starr stated that a 168-page report by the Justice Department’s career employee Michael Shaheen revealed that Hale had received no money for testifying against Clinton. Starr refused to make any part of the report public, and the press did not question his decision. Indeed, without seeing it, The Washington Post asserted that the report proved that there was no vast, right-wing conspiracy and that Starr was correct in relying upon Hale’s testimony. The Post did not look into Shaheen’s background or why Starr selected him to do the secret report. Four years earlier, In These Times claimed that Shaheen was using the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibilities to cover" up the wrongdoing of the Reagan and Bush administrations and Y exploiting its investigative powers to smear potential enemies." Starr’s office was in the habit of leaking information from the Whitewater probe to Insight Magazine and The Washington Times, both owned by South Korea’s mysterious Rev. Moon. Insight was advertised as providing balanced journalism, but it was a partisan sheet edited by Neo Conservative John Podhoretz. Peter Smith, the Chicago financier-insurance magnate provided the money that was used to circulate the story that Clinton fathered a “love child” by a black prostitute. Smith was a major contributor to Gingrich’s GOPAC, the Republican National Committee, and the Heritage Foundation, and he was one of the first to invest large amounts to dredge up rumors about Clinton’s sex life.

A much longer version could be posted later.


Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum