The Bush White House claims that President Clinton's own
representatives agreed with its decision to make the documents available
-- and it was, if anything, actually assisting the former president rather
than acting to embarrass him.
The truth is rather different.
Under the Presidential Records Act, which is the
1978 law governing the custody of current and former
presidents' records, requests for presidential
documents follow a two-tiered decision-making
process. Requests from congressional committees
are forwarded from the National Archives (where the
records are stored) to the White House. The White House then makes a
decision about what is and what isn't classified, and thus what's available
to be subpoenaed and what's not. That decision is made by the White
House Counsel's Office in consultation with the National Security Council.
If the current White House gives the go-ahead, the former president in
question still has the right to try to invoke executive privilege to block the
release.
In the case of the Clinton-Barak transcripts, the normal procedure would
have been for the White House simply to reject Burton's request.
Transcripts of private conversations between presidents and foreign heads
of government are simply not made available to congressional committees
-- certainly not when the conversations are only months old. It wasn't just
"out of the ordinary," said one of former President Clinton's high-level
advisors. "It was extraordinarily out of the ordinary." Nonetheless, Bush
White House counsel Al Gonzales' office decided to be
uncharacteristically generous and declassify the material the Burton
committee wanted to look at (and, presumably, to leak).
This put the matter back on the former president. Clinton could have
attempted to invoke executive privilege to prevent the release of the
transcripts. But as the Bush White House Counsel's Office well knew,
such an attempt would have been legally questionable and, more
importantly, politically disastrous. Early in the pardon scandal, the former
president had pledged full cooperation with all investigations and
specifically ruled out any executive privilege claims, so he had little choice
but to let the documents go. "The standard response would have been to
deny access to these records," said one legal source close to the former
president back in August. "But the current White House declassified
[these] portions of the tape, thereby putting it back on the [former]
president."
In other words, narrowly speaking, the former president did indeed agree to
the release of the documents -- but that was only because the Bush White
House gave him no choice. Once the current White House Counsel's
Office took the nearly unprecedented step of declassifying the transcripts,
their release was pretty much a fait accompli.
In common parlance, the new occupants of the White House had put the
squeeze on the old one. But that's not the end of the story.
After Newsweek published the Clinton-Barak excerpts, lawyers close to
former President Clinton decided that other excerpts that had not been
released would place the conversations and Clinton's actions in a more
benign context. Former deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, now
acting on the former president's behalf, filed a request with the National
Archives to secure the release of all the passages in which Clinton and
Barak talked about the Marc Rich, not just those the Bush team had
already sent to Congress.
Following established procedures, the National Archives sent the request
along to the Bush White House. But the reply they received was a firm
"no."
The reason from the White House? Those other passages were classified.
Ah, but at least the Cabal is bring honor and dignity
back to the White House, from the drunken, lying pretzelboy
at the top to the sleazy, crooked Enron appointees to
the drunken, drugged out family members.
