Clintongate is getting so multifarious and confusing, it makes your head hurt. Just when you think you’re getting close to figuring out how a couple of political bozos at the White House got hold of confidential FBI files on big-shot Republicans like Jim Baker, Ken Duberstein, Tony Blankley-and more than 400 other people-a bunch of Republican senators across town dump a 769-page report detailing Whitewatergate, Madisongate, Thomasesgate, Nussbaumgate, Williamsgate, Ickesgate, and other subgates of Hillarygate. Then a bunch of Democratic senators dump a nearly 400-page report dismissing the Republicans’ 769 pages as a bunch of bull, to borrow from President Bill Clinton’s elegant rebuttal of allegations by one David Hale.
(Pop math quiz: If the probability that Hillary Rodham Clinton is telling the truth is charitably assumed to be 50-50 on Travelgate, and 50-50 on the belated appearance in her house of her subpoenaed billing records with her fingerprints on them, and 50-50 on her denial that she tried to hide documents in Vincent Foster’s office from investigators after his suicide, and 50-50 on her involvement in the allegedly fraudulent Castle Grande real estate deal, and 50-50 on how she made $100,000 on a $1,000 investment in the commodities market, then what is the probability that she is telling the truth on all five of these things?
Answer: One divided by the number of words in the next paragraph.)
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is mulling whether to invoke the Constitution to help Clinton’s lawyers stall PaulaJonesgate past the election. And two more erstwhile Clinton banker buddies are on trial in Arkansas.
What’s a body to make of it all? Whom can we trust to give us the straight poop? Alfonse D’Amato-the guy who made $37,125 on a hot stock in a single day in 1993, thanks to special treatment from a brokerage firm? Hah!
Amid all this fog, 1 can make at least one thing perfectly clean the difference between politics and bribery.
As we survey the slippery slops of sleaze-from the legal high ground of property packaged campaign contributions to the slimy swamp of quid-pro-quo cash in the pocket-we will examine two illustrative case studies. One involves the flow of tobacco money to Bob Dole. The other involves the flow of Arkansas bank money to Bill Clinton.
Dole’s approach is a textbook case in the right way to collect big bucks form special interest groups while doing them big favors-safe sleaze, so to speak.
Tobacco companies, have of course, become the Republicans’ most generous sugar daddies, dumping millions in "soft money" into their campaign coffers, while paying far smaller dues to the Democrats. Dole himself has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from tobacco interests over the years.
And Dole has been pretty nice to tobacco. Just this month, he floated the preposterous suggestions that cigarettes might not be addictive and that a daily dose of tobacco may pose no more danger to health than a daily glass of milk. Dole has also assailed proposed Food and Drug Administration restrictions on tobacco advertising and vowed to fire FDA Commissioner David Kessler, which would delight tobacco companies. Over the years, Dole has also helped spread cigarette addiction by opposing tobacco tax increases and leaning on South Korea to open its market to U.S. tobacco products.
The pattern of mutual back scratching is clear. But it poses nothing even close to a legal problem. The legal definition of bribery requires a quid pro quo, and there is no evidence that Dole has ever been so déclassé as to condition overtly a promised official action benefiting a tobacco company upon receipt of money from said company. Nobody could prove that Dole wouldn’t have done just as much for tobacco interests if he weren’t getting money from them. Nor is there any evidence that Dole has improperly put tobacco money into his personal piggy bank.
In short, Dole has kept his nose squeaky clean in the eyes of the law, retaining his reputation as a man of admirable character while taking money from, and crawling into bed with, corporate merchants of death. A neat trick.
On the other hand, President Clinton’s receipt of far smaller sums of money from the two owners of the hick-town Perry County Bank-the delectably named Herby Branscum Jr. and his partner, Robert Hill-was much messier.
That may be one of the reasons why Branscum and Hill had the misfortune to capture the attention of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and are now on trial in Little Rock on charges that include misapplying bank funds to help then Gov. Clinton’s 1990 re-election campaign and falsifying bank records to cover their tracks. Prosecutes have suggested that Clinton’s most trusted aide, Bruce Lindsey, is an unindicted co-conspirator.
Nobody has charged the bankers with bribing Clinton or him with taking bribes. But the prosecution’s allegations paint a picture a bit closer to a classic quid pro quo, and a bit more akin to money flowing into Clinton’s personal bank account, than a careful politician would want it to be.
Among the allegations are that Hill personally handed Clinton more than $15,000, including $7,000 of the bank’s money, at a December 1990 meeting in the governor’s office; that the subject of the meeting was Branscum’s hope that the newly re-elected Clinton would give him a powerful patronage slot on the Arkansas Highway Commission; that Clinton did so the next month, while also reappointing Hill to the Arkansas Banking Board; and that Clinton used the post election contribution to retire part of the $180,000 in unsecured personal loans that he had taken from the same Perry County Bank and used to fund his campaign.
With all respect to the venerable traditions of the great state of Arkansas, there are more aesthetically felicitous ways of doing such things. Indeed, the Branscum-Hill episode helps illustrate what I will modestly call Taylor’s Law: Every politician should have a criminal defense lawyer on hand to help structure his or her campaign’s financial operations.
A better-advised politician than Clinton would, for example, have arranged for Branscum to give the money to a campaign operative like Lindsey-rather than handing it over in the governor’s office-and would have put a decent interval of space and time between the passing of the money and the discussion of the job.
"They were stupid in the way they handled it," as Betsey Wright, Clinton’s old friend and former chief of staff in Little Rock, told the Senate Whitewater Committee.
They could have been stupider, of course. At least (as far as the record discloses) Hill had the sense to deliver checks, rather than cash, which would have been unduly reminiscent of Spiro Agnew swapping contracts for bags of greenbacks. And at least Hill apparently had the sense to discuss only Branscum’s desire for a patronage job, not his own. And at least he came bearing only a relatively modest gift. ("Hell, the highway commission costs a lot more than that," Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, recently quipped.)
Besides, there is no evidence that Clinton said (or needed to say) anything to Hill along the lines of, "If you want me to give Herby that Highway Commission job, first you’ll have to cough up a $15,000 down payment." Nor that Clinton said anything else overtly inconsistent with his lawyer’s droll claim (and Clinton’s expected trial testimony) that he appointed Branscum entirely on the basis of merit.
So even if Branscum and Hill end up being convicted of misapplying bank funds, the Clinton-Hill meeting seems to fall-clumsily, to be sure-on the legal side of the line between politics and bribery.
Indeed, as Michael Isikoff observes in Newsweek, "If it were a crime for governors to hand out patronage jobs to their top rainmakers, Herby Branscums in all 50 states would be in prison." Along with the governors.
And while just about everyone in the whole grand influence-peddling bazaar known as the U.S. Congress rounds up campaign money from special interests who expect something in return ("access" is the usual euphemism), no member in recent memory, if ever, has been criminally convicted for doing favors for campaign contributors.
To get convicted, you have to act like former Rep. John Jenrette Jr., who discussed a proposed $100,000 personal bribe with a federal undercover agent, on videotape, in the 1979 Abscam sting, while proclaiming, "I’ve got larceny in my blood. I’d take it in a goddam minute."
So the difference between polities and bribery comes down to this: If you’re as stupid as Jenrette, it’s bribery. Otherwise, it’s just politics.
Which reminds me of (Michael) Kinsley’s Law: The scandal is not what’s illegal; it’s what’s legal.