The real blood sport: the Whitewater scandal machine.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan's assistant attorney general Theodore Olson and the House Judiciary Committee faced off in a dramatic exchange over the administration's handling of environmental policy. After the committee demanded documents that Olson could not, or would not, provide, the committee produced a 3,100-page report about Olson's alleged obstruction. And then it got serious: The Democrats pressured Attorney General Edwin Meese to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Olson. After six months, independent counsel Alexia Morrison found no basis on which to prosecute Olson. But with the resources and purview of the independent counsel at her disposal, she pressed on--for four more years.

Understandably desperate, in 1987, Olson and two other former Justice Department officials went to court to argue that the Ethics in Government Act, which gave independent counsels virtually unlimited power to pursue wrongdoing, was unconstitutional. A federal appeals court agreed, with a judge writing that special prosecutors feel pressure to "justify" their appointment by bringing indictments and are therefore inherently biased against the people they investigate.

But the Supreme Court reversed the decision, and the investigations continued, finally concluding in 1988. Olson was never indicted, but six years of his life, and more than $1 million of his money, had been consumed by congressional and independent counsel investigations. When Olson recently testified before Congress on the flaws in the independent counsel law, he spoke with authority.

You would think, then, that he might feel at least some sympathy for Bill Clinton, who has spent the last three years enduring similar investigations over what's collectively known as Whitewater. To the contrary. Olson is instead representing the President's chief accuser, David Hale, on matters relating to the Senate investigation of Whitewater. Olson defends his representation of Hale, who has alleged that then-Governor Clinton pressured him to make an illegal loan, with the argument that he's always been willing to represent people being investigated by independent counsels--Olson was, for example, Ronald Reagan's attorney during the Iran-contra investigation. "[Hale] is someone who had charges brought against him in connection with the independent counsel's investigation, who has been investigated by the independent counsel," Olson says.

Saying David Hale is being "investigated" by the independent counsel, however, is a bit disingenuous. Hale has been investigated by the independent counsel only as a means to landing bigger targets, beginning with the President's former business and political associates, and ultimately, perhaps, the President himself. What seems more likely is that Olson, like many Republicans who condemned independent counsel investigations launched against Reagan and Bush administration officials and the accompanying press and congressional feeding frenzies, has found that things seem eminently more reasonable from the other side.

Once again, the "modern scandal production machine," as Suzanne Garment termed it in her book Scandal, has been revved up. Garment was referring to the unholy alliance of ideological interest groups, the press, congressional committees, and, sometimes, independent counsels that pursue executive branch officials and judicial nominees. What starts as a reasonable inquiry snowballs into something akin to the Salem witch trials. Initially legitimate questions about potential crimes or constitutional abuses give way to a potent alchemy of gossip upgraded to news by an eager press, an easily manipulated investigatory process, and artfully crafted political theater.

Throughout the eighties, conservatives bore the brunt of this persecutory zeal and were thus the most outspoken critics of its excesses; one of the first and at the time only, liberals to acknowledge the existence of the "machine" was columnist Juan Williams, during Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings. Now, of course, Williams has company: Many liberals see a conservative "machine" at work in Whitewater and are outraged by it. And conservatives, who once condemned such tactics, are using them enthusiastically.

In Whitewater, the ratio of scandalmongering to real wrongdoing is especially disproportionate: Even if, at worst, President Clinton was somehow knowingly involved in the tangle of shady, decade-old transactions that sparked the original Whitewater stories, it has no bearing on his presidency. Watergate and Iran-contra, in contrast, did involve the commission of real crimes that related directly to performance in federal office. Yet Whitewater has been draped in all the trappings of its predecessor scandals, most notably a far-reaching independent counsel investigation and congressional hearings.

The Whitewater scandal may have been initiated by the Clintons' political opponents, but it has been legitimized and perpetuated by years of front-page press coverage. In part, that resulted from the media's misguided belief that fairness requires that every scandal be treated equally. But it also sprang from journalists' lust for scandal. And so a press hungry for scoops and a capital thirsting for juicy revelations plunged in.

Perspective, then, has been missing from much of the coverage of Whitewater. And so has an awareness that the acts committed in the investigation of potential wrongdoing are a story in themselves. In his book Blood Sport, for example, which is subtitled "The President and His Adversaries," James Stewart skewers the former but does little to probe the machinations of the latter; the book's reviewers have followed his lead. Until very recently, the national press has glossed over, or straight out ignored, the story of the scandal machine itself--how it works, and who drives it.

Making Hale White the Sun Shines

As various charges against the Clintons are disproved or dismissed, much of the Republican effort to tar Bill Clinton hinges on David Hale, the only person to accuse Clinton directly of breaking the law. Hale is the backbone of Kenneth Starr's investigation in Little Rock, and of the trial of Jim Guy Tucker and James and Susan McDougal that is currently underway (he provided information on 17 of the 21 counts being tried). Hale will be a star witness before Senator Alfonse D'Amato's Whitewater committee. And the frequent recycling of his charges against the President is, of course, a boon to Clinton's political opponents.

So you would think that Hale would have come under vigorous scrutiny from the press since he began making his unsubstantiated allegations about Clinton in 1993, when he was under investigation by the FBI for loan fraud. Hardly: To read most of the national and Washington press coverage of Hale is to acquire the impression that first, Hale is a victim of a vengeful Arkansas establishment; and second, that he is a soft-spoken Southerner who once had some trouble with the law and the truth but is now trying to "get right." In 1994, for example, The New Yorker's Peter J. Boyer described Hale as a "picture of sad-eyed contrition." Yes, Boyer conceded, Hale was under federal indictment in connection with his Small Business Administration dealings, "but [Hale] feels he is being made the `fall guy' for Arkansas politicians he helped with his investment company, including Clinton."

To read the Arkansas papers, however (both Republican- and Democrat-leaning), and to talk to people who have followed Arkansas politics and Hale's career for years, is to walk away with a somewhat different picture--a picture of a man with a fierce paranoid streak, a history of financial shenanigans, and an unbroken habit of playing fast and loose with the truth.

To start, Hale has had more than his fair share of trouble with the law. Most notable, of course, were Hale's management practices at Capital Management Services, the investment firm through which he loaned money to the McDougals. In return for matching funds from the SBA, Hale was supposed to administer loans to "disadvantaged" businesses. Hale has also admitted that of the 57 companies Capital financed, he secretly owned 13. As the judge who sentenced him to prison noted, "You are not a victim." Indeed. Hale was once sued successfully for swindling a girlfriend's grandparents out of their farm. Currently, he's under investigation on charges that he robbed an insurance company he owns of $150,000--money that poor residents of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had put aside for their burials.

During the Tucker/McDougal trial, witnesses trooped to the stand in Little Rock and testified, one after the other, that what Hale said could not be believed. You might expect that the defense would try to make Hale look bad--but these have been witnesses for the prosecution. Hale himself has admitted to lying to the FBI and the SBA. He also recently conceded on the witness stand that when he entered his guilty plea before a district judge in 1994, he lied when he said that none of the many businesses he owned had received SBA money. Hale continued to tell that false story as late as his sentencing hearing--before the same judge--this March. (W. Ray Jahn, the associate independent counsel, insisted after Hale's testimony that his star witness had not told a lie, but rather made a mistake.)

The trial's spotlight on Hale's "mistakes" posed something of a problem for papers, like The Washington Post, that have used Hale to hint at wrongdoing by then-Governor Clinton. So one couldn't help being curious: After dutifully repeating Hale's charges for years, how would the Post report evidence showing that he doesn't appear to have put his problem with the truth behind him? Here's how the Post played Hale's testimony: After prominently featuring stories about Hale's anti-Clinton allegations on the witness stand, the Post managed to avoid running a story on April 10, the day after Hale had admitted lying to the judge who heard his guilty plea and sentenced him. (The putatively anti-Clinton Washington Times, to its credit, put the story on the front page.) The next day, April 11, the Post ran a prominent story about Hale's double-hearsay-based embellishment of his charges against Clinton ("Hale Says He Was Told of Clinton Meeting; Whitewater Witness says Then-Governor Discussed Loan at Mansion"). Finally, on April 21, the Post ran a story on Hale's dissembling and less-than-perfect credibility.

Like most non-Arkansas papers, the Post invariably accompanies references to Hale with the fact that he has been "in hiding for two years." It doesn't seem to have occurred to them to investigate exactly what he was hiding from. The Arkansas Times, in contrast, has made repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to find any state or federal law enforcement agency investigating the alleged threats against Hale's life.

Security at the Little Rock trial, where Hale has been the government's chief witness, has been minimal; each night Hale has left the court alone, or with his family, seemingly unconcerned for his safety. Arkansas Times editor and columnist Max Brantley asked deputy independent counsel W. Hickman Ewing Jr. whether he had evidence that Hale's life had been threatened. "I don't have any evidence," Brantley says Ewing replied, but Ewing added that his office had believed Hale's tales of people calling his house and hanging up and mysterious cars driving by his house.

As a municipal judge whose cases were mostly traffic violations and drunk driving complaints, Hale was known for demanding security precautions, such as double metal detector's, that seemed somewhat excessive to his fellow Arkansans. Some of them, accordingly, suspect that Hale imagined the threats that have kept him in hiding. Of course, it's also possible that the threats were concocted or exaggerated to give Hale's allegations greater weight and to keep him sheltered from scrutiny. The independent counsel's office has conducted some 40 interviews with Hale, but officials of the SBA, the main victim of his deceptions, haven't been allowed anywhere near him.

Hale conceded during testimony in Little Rock that he had lobbied for an independent counsel in the hope that it would help him get leniency. He was quite prescient: Starr has gone to great lengths to coddle the linchpin of his Little Rock investigation. Hale pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy in 1994, but with Starr's help, he avoided sentencing for two years. When Hale finally was sentenced, Starr pleaded for leniency: "I believe [Hale] is genuinely remorseful for his criminal past." Hale got 28 months (half the maxiinum) and a $10,000 fine. And after the Tucker/McDougal trial is over, Hale--or Starr --can request that his sentence be reduced still further. Hale has also received immunity for any other crimes that Starr may unearth.

And there's more. Already the beneficiary of a $1,900-per-month state pension, Hale began receiving payments for living expenses--payments that have cost the taxpayers more than $60,000 in the last two years (money Hale recently admitted he hadn't planned to pay taxes on). Keep in mind that Hale owes the government $2 million in restitution. Hale also has the comfort of knowing that when he faces the Senate, he will have Starr's former partner and Justice Department colleague at his side: Starr and Olson worked together at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and then follow William French Smith to the Justice Department. Hale, by the way, claimed during testimony that he is broke--and then insisted that he is paying Olson's several-hundred-dollar-an-hour fees himself.

The Trouble With Al

As a prominent Washington attorney, Olson will lend Hale some needed credibility when he appears before the Senate Whitewater Committee. The million dollar question, however, is when Hale will make that appearance. As soon as the "Arkansas" phase of the investigation began, Senate Democrats were extremely anxious to have Hale testify. "He is the only person who has made a direct allegation against the President," says Richard Ben-Veniste, the special counsel to the minority on Whitewater. "He had done all his accusing through the the media, [and it was] carefully orchestrated. The public was entitled to the other side of the coin, which was to test the veracity of the allegations ... to see whether [Hale] was still lying."

The Republicans claimed they too were eager to call Hale. "I believe it's an absolute necessity that [Hale] should come here," D'Amato said in late November, and added that it should be done "sooner rather than later" to avoid compromising the Little Rock trial or the presidential election. In the fall, D'Amato instructed Ben-Veniste to work with Michael Chertoff, Ben-Veniste's counterpart on the majority, to expedite Hale's appearance before the committee. Starr had said he didn't want Hale called because it could hinder and impede his investigation; D'Amato indicated to the minority he might be willing to call Hale anyway.

But months passed, and Hale was never called--and it appears that was how D'Amato wanted it. After all, polls show that most Americans don't care much about Whitewater, but Hale will raise questions about the President's character and accuse him of breaking the law in a nationally televised forum. The closer this comes to November, the more damaging to Clinton it will be. It seems unlikely that this would displease Al D'Amato, who is also national co-chairman of Bob Dole's campaign for president.

D'Amato, of course, has accused congressional Democrats of trying to limit the hearings' length in order to obscure the truth, and it is likely he will resurrect that charge to try and extend the hearings past the agreed-upon mid-June closure date. For that reason, it's important to examine carefully the chronology of events--most notably the failure to call David Hale--leading up to the hearings' expiration at the end of February.

For an extended period, the primary obstacle to calling David Hale was that Staff didn't want him testifying, an objection Starr explained in letters to and meetings with both Republicans and Democrats on the panel. To avoid the appearance of partisan scheming, special committees--such as those that investigated Watergate and Iran-contra--have always attempted to maintain majority and minority consultation, particularly when it came to sensitive negotiations with, say, an independent counsel. Republicans on the Whitewater committee were following the same protocol.

Or so the Democrats thought. In a hearing on November 28, D'Amato let slip that there had been unilateral Republican communication with Staff. Confused by a reference D'Amato made to a conversation with Staff, Senator Paul Sarbanes, the ranking minority member, asked D'Amato "whether you've had any discussions with Mr. Starr" subsequent to the last time both parties had met with the independent counsel.

D'Amato demurred, and Sarbanes pressed him. Finally, D'Amato admitted that "I did speak to [Staff] on the telephone" to discuss when David Hale would be called. Democrats suspect, understandably, that that was not the only call between D'Amato and Start. Even Republicans won't deny that there was more than one call. "I believe the chairman made one call and may have made another call to Judge Staff about David Hale," says Robert Giuffra, the chief counsel for the Senate Banking committee and one of D'Amato's closest aides. Deborah Gershman, Starr's spokeswoman, will say only that "we don't comment on conversations with the Senate."

Ben-Veniste continued to try to call Hale. As the minority, the Democrats do not have the power to subpoena, but Ben-Veniste did what he could: He sent letters and memos to Chyrtoff urging him to begin the process, and ever drafted a document subpoena for Hale. There was no response from the majority. In the beginning of January, Ben-Veniste finally reached Chertoff and asked him what was going on with Hale. [D'Amato] is handling this personally ... [I am] out of the loop," Ben-Veniste said Chertoff told him.

Meanwhile, there was another hitch in the effort to call David Hale: Conveniently for the Republicans, Ted Olson wanted Hale to testify later radier than sooner, partly because of his own busy schedule, Again, there was undateral Republican communication regarding Hale, this time with On son. Again, it emerged only inadvertently. On January 31, Sarbanes was trying to find out why Hale still had not been subpoenaed. D'Amato began a lengthy discussion of Olson's schedule. Olson, he said, "advised us that he, was not in the position ... to begin to consider bringing Mr. Hale in, inasmuch as he had two Supreme Court cases to argue the end of January ... and that he would not consider that nor could he take the time until he had disposed of these matters." D'Amato went on to say that the January blizzard had pushed one of Olson's cases back until February, which meant that the committee couldn't consider calling Hale until after that.

All of this was news to the Democrats, who had been excluded from discussions with Olson about both his schedule and Hale's willingness to come before the committee. As with the conversations with Start, the majority has trouble recollecting its contacts with Olson. Giuffra, who knows Olson from bar activities, says, "The chairman, myself, and Mike Chertoff have spoken to Ted Olson on less than a handful of occasions about the availability of obtaining David Hale's testimony." son remembers "two or three" conversations with D'Amato or Chertoff or Giuffra.

Ben-Veniste then tried to contact Olson to discuss Hale's willingness to testify, but Olson told him that he had been advised by D'Amato's staff not to negotiate with Ben-Veniste. Ben-Veniste called Giuffra, who, he says, "advised me that the chairman was going to handle the issue of calling David Hale himself" Ben-Veniste asked Giuffra to go back to the chairman for more information. Giuffra then said, according to Ben-Veniste, "that the chairman said the ball was in Olson's court and that Olson would get back to the committee after he had heard from Hale."

What worried Ben-Veniste was that the Republicans would use Hale as an excuse for extending the hearings. His concern, he says, was that "They might be--just might be--setting this up as a reason to use for continuing these hearings because they could not get him as a witness." This infuriated him personally and offended him professionally. He had spent months trying to get Hale called, with no response or cooperation from the majority. As he said in a letter to the majority in late February, "It would be a distortion of the record to argue that there hasn't been time to call Hale."

But that's precisely what happened. On February 29, the resolution expired. The next day, Chairman D'Amato issued a press release calling for an extension. In the release's final paragraph came this statement: "We suspect the Democrats don't want the American people to hear David Hale testify."

D'Amato also blamed the White House for dragging its feet in complying with his requests. But D'Amato bears blame for the committee's laggardness too. As the Special Committee approached its expiration date, one might have expected them to work at breakneck speed. After all, the Iran-Contra committee held 21 days of hearing over a one month period as it approached its deadline.

Instead, the Whitewater committee held only seven days of hearings in January, and eight in February. No hearings were held at all in the week before the resolution expired. When the Committee did have hearings, they usually began at 10:30 or 11 o'clock and concluded by early afternoon. Yet in January and February, the Senate was not voting on the floor, which meant there was little competing legislative business to distract committee members.

The House was holding Travelgate hearings in January, including the testimony of Billy Dale. On January 16 and 18, the Senate held Whitewater hearings, but the House took time off from Travelgate. On Wednesday the 17th, the situation was reversed: Travelgate, but no Whitewater. The next week, the same thing: Whitewater Monday and Wednesday, but not Tuesday, and Travelgate on Tuesday. However the scheduling happened, it was an awfully effective way of commanding maximum press attention for both sets of hearings.

Take I From Dole

When D'Amato requested an extension of the resolution funding the Whitewater committee, the majority and minority began to wrangle over how much more time (and money) the committee would get. The Democrats agreed to keep it up until June--but D'Amato demanded an unlimited extension. The Democrats refused, and filibustered the resolution. "The minority members of the Senate don't want the investigation to continue," Olson told me.

In fact, the Democrats were simply resisting what would be a first in the history of Congress--no hearings have ever been extended without a termination date, including the Iran-Contra hearings, which Democrats wrapped up before the presidential campaign went into full gear, even though they knew its continuation would politically injure the GOP. As the Democratic-controlled Senate was considering how long to extend Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, one Senator offered some useful perspective: "The American people are concerned about the Iran-Contra matter, but they are also concerned about the budget, about the trade bill, about health care, and a whole host of issues that will have to be addressed in this chamber. The problems of the past, as important as they are, are not as important as the tasks of the future."

That senator was Bob Dole. Now, of course, he's majority leader--and his Senate suddenly seems much more concerned with the past than the future. Public education, the number one concern of the American people, according to several recent polls, has gotten three days of hearing--out of the more than 400 since the 104th Congress began. By consuming a hefty portion of our political culture, Whitewater diverts us from more urgent issues.

Whitewater is also, of course, consuming a large number of our tax dollars: Robert Fiske's investigation cost $6 million, and at last count Kenneth Staff's had cost approximately $19.6 million. The Resolution Trust Corporation spent an additional $3.6 million for the Pillsbury Madison & Sutro report. Special Senate appropriations have so far come to $1.3 million, with more to come. That brings the total--so far--to approximately $30 million.

That figure does not include what the House spent on Whitewater-related hearings, nor the costs that various agencies--from the SBA to Park Police--have incurred to comply with the requests of Starr and the Senate, which has now accumulated more than 10,000 pages of documents. Complying with D'Amato's subpoena of thousands of e-mail messages, for example, will ultimately cost the White House Executive Office of the President close to $200,000. This doesn't include the White House staff's work hours to comply with the request. And, as of yet, the committee has produced nothing of relevance obtained from the e-mail. As Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times puts it, "Don't spend my tax dollars to solve ultimately political questions."

A fund-raising letter for Citizens United, a conservative anti-Clinton group, reads, "Now, Bill and Hillary Clinton are involved in a massive coverup.... They have ulimited resources of the U.S. Government to back them up. And they are using those resources." The President does indeed have access to massive resources. But considering the furor that erupted when Clinton officials even toyed with the idea of using the executive branch to ascertain the progress of the RTC's Whitewater investigation, it's unlikely they'll attempt that again. "Remember Roger Altman" would be on too many lips.

In fact, it's Kenneth Staff--who has invaded Little Rock with 20 prosecutors and 50 IRS and FBI agents--who has the unlimited resources of the U.S. government at his disposal. Conservatives who vociferously oppose big government have been conspicuously silent on the independent counsel's vast reach and resources, and the way the federal government's power has been brought to bear on the people of Arkansas. That issue was implicitly raised in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, who documented the independent counsel's attempts to secure cooperation from potential witnesses by threatening them with prosecution.

With stories like Mayer's, the press coverage of the Whitewater investigation has begun to turn; The New York Times has clearly scaled down its Whitewater coverage recently, and Mayer's story, among others, prompted the Times's editorial page to call for Starr's resignation. What's remarkable, though, is that of all the revelations about Starr that the editorial cited, not one had been uncovered by the Times (or The Washington Post, which has also continued to make Whitewater a front-page story). Information about Staff's extensive private legal work--for clients ranging from the Republican National Committee to the ultra-conservative Bradley Foundation to Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.--was first reported by The Washington Times's Frank Murray last September (proof that the "machine" is not a monolith). It took The Washington Post and The New York Times six months even to mention Starr's conflicts. The Post and Times have yet to report an intriguing chain of events first noted by the Associated Press (and detailed in the Monthly's March issue): Sen. Lauch Faircloth, an avid Clinton opponent, and Judge David Sentelle lunched; Sentelle replaced Robert Fiske with Starr, Faircloth hired Sentelle's wife.

Similarly, it was neither the Times nor the Post, but Joe Conasan and Murray Waas in The Nation, who broke the story about a much more serious Starr conflict: his investigation of top RTC officials even as they were suing his law firm, Kirkland Ellis, for doing legal work for a failed savings and loan. The Times at least editorialized against it; at the time this issue went to press, the Post had made only an obscure reference to it in a larger story about Starr.

Indeed, almost all of the, revelations about the wizards behind the curtain of the scandal machine have come from The Washington Times, The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Review of Books, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Times, and The Washington Monthly. None of this has come from opinion-making papers like the Times and Post. The mainstream national press seems to have misplaced its skepticism about the Clintons' opponents, perhaps because it's been so extraordinarily skeptical about the Clintons themselves. (Republican staffers seemed dumbstruck when I asked about the timing of the hearings and about communication between D'Amato and Staff, which suggests that they hadn't encountered those questions before.

As Gene Lyons first pointed out in the Monthly in 1994, the Times invested an extraordinary amount in Whitewater being a story. To admit that the story wasn't worth the reporting resources expended would be to end up with, well, egg on its face. Remember that front-page Times story that alleged document-shredding at the Rose Law Firm and compared Whitewater to Watergate? The shredding turned out to be innocuous, but the Times has mentioned that only in passing. You can understand their predicament: Do they run a correction saying, "We erred when we placed Whitewater on par with Watergate?"

Still, the fact that some major papers feel trapped by the way they played Whitewater in the past doesn't justify how they have dragged their feet in examining the other side of the coin. When Arkansas Judge Harry Woods threw out an indictment against Governor Tucker, The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt reported that Woods's involvement raised questions about "the independence of judges and prosecutors who come out of the same Arkansas political power structure that is under close scrutiny in the case." But there are other political power structures at work in Whitewater as well-particularly the interlaced network of Republican judges and politicians and foundations and individuals who have a personal, political, or career interest in seeing the Clinton presidency weakened or ended. Prominent among them are D'Amato and Staff, but there are others.

Consider the Eighth Circuit panel that overturned Woods's ruling on the grounds that the judge was a friend to the Clintons and therefore ought to have recused himself Most appeals court cases are randomly assigned. This one was not randomly assigned, and it ended up with a three-judge panel composed of three Republicans and led by Judge Pasco Bowman, a Jesse Helms protege who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan. Bowman is also a former board member of the Landmark Legal Foundation, which co-represented L. Jean Lewis, the RTC official who made sure the Clintons' names ended up as witnesses on RTC indictments. (See sidebar.) As Brantley says, mocking the common perception of Arkansas politics, "All you Arkies might not have broken any laws, but it sure looks bad."

The mainstream media have also exhibited an almost total absence of skepticism toward one of their favorite sources on Whitewater, Citizens United, an anti-clinton interest group based in Fairfax, Va. Citizens United head Floyd Brown and his right-hand man David Bossie have done more to shape media coverage of Whitewater than anyone else in Washington or Arkansas. They have produced much of the documentation and information on which the major media's stories, as well as congressional hearings, have been based; they brought David Hale to the public via the press; and Bossie even accompanied members of the media on investigative trips to Arkansas.

Citizens United has been emboldened by its success in spoonfeediog the press and Congress. As Floyd Brown wrote in a recent fundraising letter, "Our top investigator, David Bossie, is on the inside directing the probe as Special Assistant to U.S. Senator Lauch Faircloth on the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee." Brown is perfectly open about his contacts with Bossie. "I talk to him all the time. . . . I'm an interested citizen, and I'm a journalist. . . . I talk to all kinds of senators, congressman, journalists, staffers."

Then Brown changed the subject: "I don't think who I talk to is very interesting. I'm more interested in who Hillary talked to the night of Vince Foster's death." Brown is deft at deflecting scrutiny of Citizens United, but the group could use some: A quick trip to the Federal Elections Commission revealed that the group's political action committee, the Citizens United Political Victory Fund, has received seven monthly "failure to file" notices from the FEC--meaning that it has not complied with FEC regulations requiring reports of disbursements and receipts since last July. This is the group, remember, devoted almost exclusively to documenting which laws and regulations the Clintons failed to comply with a decade ago.

But with Bossie shepherding Whitewater through Congress, Brown, the self-proclaimed muckraker of the right, is moving on. When I asked Brown what he thought of Blood Sport, he said, "It was a pretty fun read . . . but I would have done it differently." The man who has spent three years tracing every thread of the Whitewater transactions suddenly dismisses them, and says, "I would have focused more on the relationship between Clinton and Dan Lasater."

Who?

"Lasater went to prison for dealing drugs," Brown explains eagerly. "He was a major contributor to Clinton in the 1980s. Roger Clinton worked for him. In fact he may have gotten Roger involved with drugs. He and Clinton had a very close relationship and Lasater made hundreds of thousands of dollars off the state bonding business when Clinton was governor. I would have spent more time on that than Stewart did. . . ."

The Dan Lasater hearings: produced by Floyd Brown, directed by Al D'Amato, and favorably reviewed by the national press--coming to a Senate hearing room near you this October?

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Are media critics justified in alleging that today's reporters have lost their identification with the average man because they have become part of the elite" The charge is, of course, not true of all reporters, as those of us who work for The Washington Monthly are painfully-aware. On the other hand, there was an interview with Lesley Stahl in a recent issue of Bon Appetit in which she was asked, "Which hotel do you prefer for room service?" Her answer: "The Ritz Carlton--the Ritz Carlton anywhere

There's a struggle going on over who will hand out the jobs and contracts that will come from the Democratic National Convention. In one corner is the Democratic National Committee. In the other is Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Millions of dollars are at stake....

Conflict of interest between a husband's job and his wife's is an increasingly common story in Washington. The latest example is the case of Jonathan and Susan Sallet. He is the newly appointed chief policy counsel for MCI Telecommunications and she is director of public affairs at the FCC, an agency whose policy rulings have more than a little to do with the future of her spouse's company....

Department of Energy employees who are being furloughed for two days without pay are asking why Hazel O'Leary can't display the ingenuity in finding funds to pay them that was so conspicuous in the financing of her travels, such as the $400,000 she had moved from a defense account to defray expenses on her trips to South Africa. "When Hazel O'Leary took her trips," Deborah J. Bullock, a DOE employee, complained to The Washington Post's Sharon Walsh, "money was reprogrammed. If she can find money to go to India, China, Africa and take an entourage, she could find the money for us." Civil servants at the DOE are also less than thrilled by the news that O'Leary's political appointees are exempt from the unpaid furlough. Why? Because their salaries come from a separate account, silly...

Rep. Don Young, the Alaska Republican who chairs the House Resources Committee, is no friend of Bruce Babbit. The congressman's attitude toward the Interior Secretary's environmentalism can be divined from the new name he wants to give the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Young would rechristen it the "Arctic Oil Reserve." According to columnists Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein, Young likes to torment Babbitt and his staff by drowning them in requests for documents, some of which are a bit unusual. For example, Young wanted all photographs taken of the Secretary during any trips in 1994, 1995, and thus far in 1996....

Bob Dole was behind in his race for the Senate in 1974. His opponent was a doctor-turned-congressman who had performed a few abortions to save the mother's life. The doctor was far ahead in the polls, when in the final seconds of a debate, Dole asked him, "Why do you do abortions? And why do you favor abortion on demand?" Dole went on to win the election in a year that was otherwise pretty much of a Democratic sweep nationwide. Richard Ben Cramer in his mostly sympathetic portrait of Dole in What It Takes, says Dole was so depressed by what he had done that he told one aide, "I'm just not sure it's worth it." Apparently, Dole has decided it is worth it once more. According to USA Today, this year when he had to win the South Carolina primary after consecutive losses in New Hampshire, Delaware, and Arizona, he told the Christian Coalition, "I have a flawless record on standing up for the unborn ... In fact, the first time this was an issue was in my race in Kansas in 1974 ......