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Group urges panel to expand queries Judicial Watch pursues its Clinton charges Tuesday, September 29, 1998 By Pat Griffith, Post-Gazette Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has some 20 lawsuits outstanding against the Clinton administration, yesterday presented the House Judiciary Committee with its own "interim report" aimed at prodding lawmakers to go well beyond the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in considering possible impeachment charges against the president.
The 145-page report, accompanied by eight volumes of depositions and other evidence, alleges that President Clinton and top White House aides have violated criminal laws by misusing FBI files and the Internal Revenue Service, selling seats on overseas trade missions in exchange for campaign contributions, accepting illegal campaign contributions from China, and orchestrating "smear" attacks against critics, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill.
Although many of the charges have been aired at congressional hearings without finding evidence of presidential wrong-doing, Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch chairman and general counsel, said his assorted investigations have gone further to uncover what the report called "crimes and other offenses" by Clinton "warranting his impeachment and removal from elected office."
The report urged the House to consider the "additional evidence" he has developed, much of it stemming from the improper collection of some 900 FBI files of former Republican officials and lower-level employees early in the Clinton presidency and numerous charges related to campaign fund-raising in 1996.
It claimed to show that Clinton "condoned, directed and effected" lawbreaking with help from first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, the late Commerce Department Secretary Ron Brown, Attorney General Janet Reno and top White House aides.
Shortly before Klayman delivered his findings to the front steps of the Rayburn House Office Building, where the Judiciary Committee is based, Hyde told a news conference the committee has a duty to consider all relevant material "no matter where it's from. If it's exculpatory, if it's accusatory -- we read everything people give us, or we try to."
However, he added, "that doesn't mean we act on it or we feel that it merits more than just reading it."
He said he couldn't predict what will happen with the Judicial Watch report, but noted that "I don't particularly want to have this an endless inquiry." The more the committee considers, "the more burdensome our task becomes," he said. But because the committee has a "real duty" to look at information pertaining to the president's fitness for office, "you have to judge each item on its own merits."
In 1996 Judicial Watch filed a $90 million class action lawsuit against Mrs. Clinton, former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, former White House director of personnel security Craig Livingstone and others in connection with the improper collection of FBI background files in 1993 and early 1994 of people who worked in the Bush or Reagan administrations. The suit charges this violated privacy statutes and was done to obtain derogatory information to use for political purposes.
The report given to the House said that in the course of its investigation into the FBI files, Judicial Watch uncovered "substantial evidence of unlawful misuses of information in government files, abuses of power and violations of the Privacy Act" for the "obvious purpose" of using the information "to discredit, if not destroy, perceived adversaries and critics of the president."
Among those targeted, according to Judicial Watch, were Linda R. Tripp, who taped Monica Lewinsky's phone conversations, and Kathleen Willey, who testified to a federal grand jury about an alleged sexual advance Clinton made to her in the White House.
Earlier this month Judicial Watch subpoenaed Tripp to take her deposition about what she knows about the collection and possible misuse of FBI files, but at the request of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, the deposition was stayed by a court order.
Klayman said yesterday he still expects to be able to question Tripp, who worked as a "holdover" employee in Nussbaum's office at the time the FBI files were requested and reviewed at the White House.
She has told Judicial Watch that she saw FBI files on former Republican employees "stacked up to the ceiling" in the office of former assistant White House Counsel William Kennedy, who has been subpoenaed to give a deposition on the matter in Little Rock, Ark., on Thursday.
Tripp has also said she saw FBI files being copied onto a computer.
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