Al Gore's voter mill.

What was strongly suspected on Capitol Hill during last year's campaign for President is now confirmed by congressional investigation: the Clinton Administration, in particular the Office of the Vice President, engineered a frantic effort to swear in as citizens as many aliens as it could before Election Day. And internal Administration memos that have now become public leave no doubt about the underlying purpose: securing as many new Democratic votes as possible.

To say that other concerns -- like making sure violent criminals weren't awarded the highest privilege America has to offer -- were deemed to be of secondary importance within the White House is gross understatement. Over 180,000 immigrants were awarded citizenship and given the right to vote without their criminal records' being checked. Undoubtedly, thousands of them were convicted felons. Indeed, more than 71,000 aliens whose histories were checked had arrest records -- almost 11,000 of them for felonies -- but were made citizens anyway. The Justice Department is now checking how many of those were convicted for felonies, in which case an attempt may be made to revoke their citizenship --but that won't be easy: it happened only twenty times in 1995, after months of bureaucratic work.

The involvement of Vice President Gore's staff in this operation, which is very clear from their own memoranda, may make Gore wish he could trade in his troubles for President Clinton's Lincoln Bedroom frolics by the time the 2000 campaign arrives.

The National Performance Review was the agency set up supposedly to allow the Vice President to "re-invent government." How odd that the Immigration and Naturalization Service should become the top candidate for an efficiency overhaul. One March 1996 memo to President Clinton from Doug Farbrother, a top NPR staffer, notes that Clinton "asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens." The memo adds that the Immigration and Naturalization Service "warns that if we are too aggressive at removing the roadblocks to success, we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill and even risk having Congress stop us."

The first of several "controversial actions" on which the memo then gives the pros and cons for the President's consideration comes under the heading, "Lower the standards for citizenship" -- a heading dropped from revised versions of the memo. It says, "The basic standards are in law -- years of residency, basic knowledge of English and Civics, and good moral character -- and we wouldn't change those. But INS adjudicators have broad latitude to interpret those standards and decide who meets them. INS management has already begun training new adjudicators, and 're-educating' the older ones, to be more liberal."

The Farbrother memo's "quick solution" was "to delegate to the senior INS managers in . . . five cities broad authority to waive headquarters rules." That happened, and much more.

The director of the Fresno INS office, for instance, in a letter to a San Francisco labor-union president, wrote that "the INS has been told to naturalize everyone who filed [for citizenship] prior to April 1, 1996, in time for them to register to vote in the November election."

In order to "get the results the Vice President wants," Farbrother asked INS Deputy Commissioner Chris Sale to sign or have INS Commissioner Doris Meissner sign an order to "waive INS rules and regulations" for the agency's district directors. Sale then gave "full authority to waive, suspend, or deviate from [Department of Justice] and INS non-statutory policies, regulations, and procedures" as long as laws were not broken.

On March 26, Mrs. Meissner increased Citizenship USA funding by 20 per cent, giving district directors "full authority over these funds" as well as "full authority to determine the most appropriate, expedient methods" in hiring new employees. At the same time, production goals were increased 40 per cent, to 814,000, for April -September 1996.

Two days later, however, Farbrother still wasn't satisfied; he complained in a memo to Gore that "unless we blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the frontline managers, we are going to have way too many people still waiting for citizenship in November. I can't make Doris Meissner delegate broad authority to her field managers. Can you?"

On March 29, Farbrother asked if he could replace Sale: "Rather than having me appear to be working against Doris, put me to work for her. Move Chris Sale into another job (like Deputy Director for Programs at the NPR) and make me the INS Deputy Commissioner. From there, I could do more, faster."

In the same memo, Farbrother again touches on how the Administration can cover its political tracks: "To blunt any charge that we are running a citizenship/Clinton voter mill, I am working with the FBI to find a way to tighten up the ridiculously loose fingerprint check system . . . A breakthrough here will look good to the anti-alien lobby."

Instead of a breakthrough, the Administration now has to deal with an INS clerk in Los Angeles charging that amidst all the Citizenship USA fracas, between four thousand and six thousand fingerprint cards were discarded instead of being given to the FBI. The INS says the cards were smudged and unreadable.

Meanwhile, the White House had been pressuring the INS to send every new citizen a congratulatory letter from President Clinton --right in time for the 1996 campaign. "The Commissioner's goal is to naturalize 1.2 million person [sic] in FY96," an internal INS memo from September 1995 notes, adding, "And as you know, the White House is rather insistant [sic] that the Clinton letter be distributed to each new citizen. I do not think any of us want to be caught short."

Even the INS's huge backlog of over a million applicants may be politically engineered by the agency's own aggressive "outreach program." In Chicago, for example, 60 per cent of citizenship applications come from "community-based organizations" encouraged by the INS to bring in applicants. In other major cities, similarly high percentages of requests come from such groups. So the INS has been trying to get rid of a "backlog" it largely produced itself.

In a letter to the editor regarding my July 1, 1996, NATIONAL REVIEW article charging that Gore's staff shifted personnel from the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies to speed up Citizenship USA, Commissioner Meissner charges that I was "simply wrong." But an April 4, 1996, memo from another top NPR staffer, Elaine C. Kamarck, to Gore says, "So far IRS in San Francisco, [the Department of Energy] in Illinois and Los Angeles, [the Social Security Administration] in New York have offered federal employees as details, either on a full time or on an overtime basis."

In the same memo, Miss Kamarck tellingly added: "Only by working 7 days a week and longer hours can we hope to make a significant enough dent in the backlog that it will show up when it matters" (emphasis added).

Documents show that in March 1996, Farbrother and his NPR colleague Laurie Lyons began traveling to INS offices around the country to speed up naturalization

"The President is sick of this and wants action," Elaine Kamarck complained in a March 21, 1996, memo to Farbrother. "If nothing moves today we'll have to take some pretty drastic measures."

Farbrother replied: "I favor drastic measures . . . If we don't get what we need, I will call for heavy artillery."

It was only after the election that checking criminal records became a greater priority than swearing in new voters. In early December, the INS stopped pushing through applications even when it didn't hear back from the FBI fingerprint division after 120 days.

"We were fighting for this before the election, and they said we were crazy," fumed Rep. Bill Zeliff (R., N.H.), who headed the House probe of Citizenship USA, the day the stricter policy became public. "And now -- it's like going to church -- they've got religion."

Obviously the new citizens didn't make the difference in last year's presidential stakes, but they may have been the deciding factor in a close race like that of the colorful Rep. Bob Dornan in immigrant-rich Orange County, California. Dornan had a claim on being Clinton's most virulent critic in Congress.

Now the Department of Justice is conducting a review of over a million cases of citizenship being granted. "Clearly the system was broken," admitted Justice spokesman Carole Florman. But what is also clear is that Al Gore and his people broke it, apparently to get votes. Will that break Al Gore's chances in the year 2000? Further congressional probing is on the way.