From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Look, Ma, No Hands
Clinton won't release his library's donor records. What's he hiding this time?
We've come full circle. Once again, Bill Clinton is about to fight a subpoena for documents--this time the list of donors to his presidential library foundation. That's the group to which Denise Rich generously gave at least $450,000 before Mr. Clinton granted a midnight pardon to her former husband, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich.
We've been here before. Back in 1993, the White House stonewalled its own Justice Department when the department sent over two lawyers to examine Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster's office as part of its investigation into his suicide. White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum refused to let the lawyers into the office, precipitating a furious phone call from Phil Heymann, the No. 2 official at Justice.
"I remember being very angry and very adamant," Mr. Heymann says. Mr. Nussbaum promised to phone back but never did. Instead, he called the Justice attorneys into Foster's office and had them watch as he sorted through the documents himself. That night, Mr. Heymann called Mr. Nussbaum at home with a pointed question: "Bernie, are you hiding something?" Mr. Nussbaum promised he wasn't, and that was the official line until later that year, when it was revealed that Foster's Whitewater files had been taken upstairs to the first lady's quarters. That led to the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater and ultimately an impeachment referral over the Lewinsky scandal.
Now David Kendall, the lawyer for the Clinton library foundation, vows to fight a congressional subpoena for its donor list. "Any demand for a list of our donors would be flagrantly violative of the First Amendment, and we would resist it," Mr. Kendall was quoted as saying.
The Clinton foundation has a budget of $200 million its first year, only half of which will be spent on the creation of a 27-acre presidential library complex in Little Rock, Ark. The remainder will go to support the president's "postpresidential agenda," says a library spokesman.
President Clinton's library foundation is unusual in that it raised most of its money before he left office. People who contributed $1,000 to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign last year were required to disclose that fact, but anyone can give hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to the presidential library and it remains confidential. Normally that wouldn't be a problem. But when Bill Clinton--the man who once said "I never changed a public policy solely on the basis of campaign contributions"--is involved, you have to wonder.
Mrs. Rich last week asserted her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and refused to answer 14 House Government Oversight Committee questions related to her ex-husband's pardon. Committee lawyers are subpoenaing her bank records to determine if any of the more than $1 million she has given to Democratic candidates actually came from Marc Rich, who renounced his U.S. citizenship years ago. The same questions apply to the $450,000 that Mrs. Rich has donated to the Clinton presidential library. News reports say she may have pledged to donate more than $1 million more in future years.
Rep. Dan Burton, the committee's chairman, says it has a legitimate interest in obtaining the library's records. Indeed in 1998, it requested donor lists from the foundation that runs President Clinton's boyhood home in Hope, Ark. They were turned over with no complaint or constitutional argument.
"I've never seen information withheld by private entities from Congress unless there's an attorney-client privilege or by government agencies unless there's government privilege," says Burton spokesman Mark Corallo. Indeed, it would be passing strange if the group--a tax-exempt nonprofit foundation--could withhold the names of its donors from the government.
Mr. Kendall surely knows he's likely to lose his argument in the federal courts and be forced to cough up the information. But that could take months, and during Ken Starr's investigation Mr. Kendall proved himself a master at gumming up the courts and buying time. By the time information was pried out of the White House it was always declared "old news."
Former Clinton adviser Dick Morris told Fox News that he believes the library is "a permanent slush fund to support Bill Clinton" and that its budget is far in excess of its brick-and-mortar requirements. Mr. Kendall's refusal to release the library's records coupled with Mrs. Rich's taking the Fifth has Washington observers fearing that the Rich pardon scandal is on the verge of metastasizing.
After all the past stonewalling, let's hope Congress follows through on threats to hold the Clinton foundation in contempt if records aren't surrendered. We've seen such behavior before from the Clintons, and it calls to mind Mr. Heymann's old question: Are you hiding something?
If you think the Clintons aren't hiding something this time, raise your hand. I don't see a lot of hands.
