Ground Hog Day with Al Gore

But he wasn't doing either. And we already knew that because a) we're not stupid, b) he told us so. In that preposterous "no controlling legal authority" speech, Gore said of his calls from the White House, "I made telephone calls... to ask people to make lawful contributions to the campaign" and to-help reelect Bill Clinton." Oh, and one other thing: An awful lot of the money he solicited in those calls somehow ended up in "hard money" accounts at the DNC.

So now we find out that the Department of Justice investigation turned up various "inconsistencies," as the Los Angeles Times put it, in even this ludicrous story. LaBella's report concluded that Gore "may have provided false testimony."

In addition to common sense and the felon's own account of his phone calls, the LaBella task force also found notes and memoranda indicating that Gore's phone calls were part of a massive fund-raising effort launched over a meeting, which Gore attended, in November 1995 in the Map Room of the White House. The discussion was about raising hard money-not reelecting the mayor of Chicago or selling Girl Scout cookies. Gore told investigators that he -did not recall such conversations or the memos.

Candid Camera

Gore's sworn explanation to the FBI? As the report describes it, Gore said "he drank a lot of iced tea during meetings,. which could have necessitated a restroom break."

But White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta told FBI agents that he remembered Gore "walking through the papers" and "attentively listening" to discussions about the hard money aspects of the fundraising. The Task Force actually discovered photographs of Gore at that very meeting reviewing the memos he claimed he cannot remember seeing.

On the basis of all this, Janet Reno concluded that there was not enough evidence to support appointment of an independent counsel-simply to investigate further.

She also called off a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who was already investigating Gore's Buddhist temple fundraiser on the grounds that it might be "covered" by the Independent Counsel statute. But she then refused to invoke the Independent Counsel statute. Gore had initially claimed he was shocked-shocked!-that fundraising was going on in that temple, but months later admitted that he knew it was a "finance-related" event, that it was "a political event," and that "there were finance people that were going to be present."

Next year, the Los Angeles Times will unearth something along the lines of an entry in Gore's diary admitting that he committed a slew of felonies as Vice President, and I'll have to write about this all over again. As long as these criminals are at large, none of us will ever escape this journalistic Ground Hog Day.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Mar 24, 2000
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