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“KEY PRINCIPLES OF FREEDOM” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E739-E740 on May 1, 1998.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
KEY PRINCIPLES OF FREEDOM
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HON. NEWT GINGRICH
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Thursday, April 30, 1998
Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I believe that there are two key principles at the root of our freedoms. The first is the right of America's people to know the truth if a crime was committed, and the second is the principle that under the United States Constitution, no one is above the law.
When 19 Democrats voted to deny immunity for four witnesses on illegal campaign contributions, they blocked the people's right to know. Michael Kelly's column explains the dangers facing Democrats if they decide that cover-up is a party principle. I commend this article to my colleagues.
The Case Against the Clintons
(By Michael Kelly)
As we head into what is either going to be a summer dog days or the summer when the last dog dies, the party line among those who man President Clinton's high stone wall against impeachment is that there is not any there here. Tellingly, no one seriously makes the public argument that Clinton is not guilty of at least some of the offenses of which he has been accused--say, at least, perjury in the Lewinsky matter.
Instead, the liberals' defense goes like this: Okay, our boy did a few things he maybe shouldna. But who amongst us is poifect? And, anyway, these things weren't crimes, or they shouldn't be. And, also anyway, the president's persecutors are the real danger to the republic; their partisan, out-of-control witch hunt is far worse than any of the allegations they are investigating. And so on, fortissimo, con allegro, ad infinitum.
There is one truffle of truth buried in all this: Clinton certainly has enemies who seek to ruin his presidency. No fair-minded person can impute fair-mindedness to Richard Mellon Scaife, who has bankrolled years of anti-Clinton scandal-mongering on several fronts, or to Congressman Dan Burton, the chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee investigation into Clinton's conduct whose mask of magisterial impartiality slipped a wee bit recently when he called the president a ``scumbag.''
But it is always the case with politicians who are accused of scandalous behavior that at least some of their accusers are motivated by partisan animus. That is the way it is in politics; that is the way it was for Richard Nixon. Partisanship is relevant only when it is corrupting--when the prosecutors are running not a fair investigation but a railroad job. Is that the case here?
First, to the accusation that Starr is, as Hillary Rodman Clinton has said, ``scratching for dirt . . . doing everything possible to try to make some accusation against my husband.'' It is true that Starr repeatedly has expanded his investigation from his original task of probing the Whitewater land deal. But these expansions--into the death of Vincent Foster, travelgate, the Lewinsky matter and other areas--were undertaken at the request of, and with the approval of, Clinton's own attorney general, Janet Reno, who decided in each case that there was enough ``serious and credible evidence'' of wrongdoing to mandate investigation.
Was Reno right? Did these accusations merit investigation, or do they represent, as the Clinton defense argues, the criminalization of the ordinary business of politics and the ordinary affairs of life?
Here is the essence of the allegations: that a small group of politically connected Arkansans, including the governor of the state and his wife, abused power and privilege to conspire in a series of thefts that ultimately caused the failure of a savings and loan at a cost to taxpayers of $58 million; that, facing exposure, these political insiders engaged in a long campaign of obstruction of justice, perjury and intimidation of witnesses; that this behavior is part of a pattern of abuse of power and that it extends to other areas: for instance, in the president's sexual exploitation of women who worked for him.
Perhaps these allegations are false. Perhaps the officials of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. were wrong when they testified that a legal document drafted by Hillary Clinton and Webster Hubbell in 1986 was used ``to deceive regulators'' about the financing of the Castle Grande real estate development, a project that the federal insurance investigators have called ``a sham'' intended as a vehicle for the insiders' fraud scheme. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton did not commit perjury when she testified under oath that she did not remember doing any legal work on the Castle Grande matter.
Perhaps there is nothing criminal in the fact that friends, aides and political benefactors of the president worked to funnel $600,000 in make-work ``consulting fees'' to Hubbell after he resigned in disgrace from the Justice Department and while he was negotiating a plea bargain with Starr, a bargain which Starr's prosecutors believe he reneged upon. Perhaps the $600,000 was not hush money to the sole witness who could, perhaps personally implicate Mrs. Clinton for involvement in a fraud and for perjury.
And perhaps the president did not have sex in the workplace with a young female employee and perhaps he did not lie under oath about this, nor encourage others to lie, nor otherwise seek to obstruct justice. And perhaps he did not abuse his position of privilege to make crude sexual advance to a woman seeking employment, and perhaps he or his agents did not encourage this woman and others to lie about this.
Perhaps the truth will exonerate Clinton. But until then, is it really liberalism's position that the truth isn't worth finding out?
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