Loral & Hughes/China Missile Guidance - after the fact waiver

William Sessions investigation of Department of Justice

Madison Guaranty and others (Atty Gen Janet Reno fired all U.S. Attorneys in joint decision with White House 2 weeks into her tenure.)

Tyson complaints, when Smaltz failed to answer, DOJ took important elements of the investigation away

Lums claim Hubbell interceded for them

Ron Brown tip off to Lums

In the Supreme Court's orders in June 1998, denying Ken Starr's petitions for certiorari before judgment was " The motion by the Solicitor General, on behalf of the United States acting through the Attorney General, for access to sealed portions of the record is denied. "

BCCI Investigations (See 12/92 Senate Report and also the Firing of all U.S. Attorneys)

Releasing documents where the National Security Council doctored the 1995 annual report on arms control matters to remove words showing the administration was alarmed by evidence that M-11 missiles had been transferred from China to Pakistan, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms accused the Clinton administration of ``fudging'' and said that ``the Clinton administration's callous disregard of U.S. law is bouncing around at a new low.''

The Special Committee investigating Whitewater concluded that the evidence established that White House officials engaged in a pattern of deliberate obstruction of, and interference with, efforts by law enforcement authorities to conduct their several investigations into Mr. Foster's death. These include: senior White House officials ignoring specific requests by the Park Police to seal Mr. Foster's office on the night of his death, Hillary Clinton's close involvement in the handling of documents in Mr. Foster's office and the access by investigators, the search (Bernard Nussbaum, Margaret Williams, Patsy Thomasson, Betsy Pond) for a suicide note, Ms. William's removing file folders, discussing them with Mrs. Clinton and transferring some to the White House Residence, the impeding of the Park Police investigators from entering the office, the participation in the interviews with White House staffers, Mr. Nussbaum breaking the agreement with Deputy Attorney Heymann for procedures for reviewing documents, including reviewing the documents by himself and providing only a "generic description" to the investigators, deliberately disrupting the chain of custody of Mr. Foster's documents highly relevant to ongoing criminal investigations of Whitewater and Travelgate, not telling the FBI in interviews that Mrs. Clinton had seen "the note" and that Susan Thomases was told about it before it was disclosed to the authorities.

In March of 1993, a Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) employee notified Roger Altman at Treasury that RTC was forwarding a criminal referral mentioning the Clintons' involvement in Whitewater to the Justice Department. Altman, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Interim CEO of RTC, immediately forwarded information relating to the Clinton's involvement in Whitewater to White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Both Nussbaum and Altman testified that they had no recollection of this exchange, contradicting a paper trail of facsimiles transmitting the information between the two. This exchange further contradicts Mr. Nussbaum's testimony that he had no knowledge of matters relating to Whitewater until September, 1993. It is alleged that Altman improperly tipped off the White House as to the existence of a secret criminal investigation, thereby facilitating the White House obstruction of the investigation.

Two Clinton appointees, Joseph Tarver and Mark Shulhof, ransacked 160 personnel files of the former Bush administration. The State Department Inspector General, Sherman Funk called it a criminal breach of the Privacy Act, but the Justice Department declined action.

Rosemary O'Neill, the daughter of former Democrat Speaker Tip O'Neill, used State Department stationary to raise funds for left-wing charities. Timothy Hunter, a State Department employee forwarded the O'Neill file to Janet Reno's Justice Department. Several weeks later, Hunter was terminated without the usual 30 days notice. When he reported to work on April 21, 1995, there were two armed guards waiting for him to empty his desk and escort him from the building. The O'Neill case was closed.

From the affidavit of Nolanda Hill: ".9. I further learned through discussions with Ron that The White House, through Leon Panetta and John Podesta, had instructed him to delay the case by withholding the production of documents prior to the 1996 elections, and to devise a way not to comply with court's orders. "

From the affidavit of Nolanda Hill: ".13. I have reviewed the deposition video of Melissa Moss and, based on my knowledge, she has not told the truth in response a number of questions concerning Commerce Department trade missions, as well as other representations she has made under oath. "

Kirby Behre, the Washington DC lawyer with ties to the White House counsels - who told Linda Tripp to destroy the Lewinsky tapes, is a most likely candidate as the one responsible for allowing a reporter to listen to the tapes, which were privileged material between him and his client. Behre is one of three individuals to have held the tapes long enough to make copies; neither of the other two would have cause to damage Tripp. Aware of the stories that other White House accusers have had their homes ransacked for evidence, Tripp allowed Behre to hold the tapes for safekeeping. When she began to distrust Behre, Tripp retained James Moody as her new attorney late in 1997. When Moody attempted to obtain the tapes from him, Behre stated that he had not yet finished duplicating the tapes "for his protection." Behre turned the tapes over to Moody over forty-eight hours later. Only Kirby Behre, Kenneth Starr and Lucianne Goldberg have had the tapes long enough to make copies.

Lucianne Goldberg said Mr. Behre was fired after he sought to give the tapes to Mr. Clinton's personal attorney, Robert S. Bennett and that Mr. Behre returned the tapes but only after his office had transcribed them. Mr. Behre said last year that Mrs. Tripp was "outraged" when former White House volunteer Kathleen E. Willey first came forward to accuse Mr. Clinton of a sexual advance in the Oval Office and that Mrs. Willey had wrongly "injected" his client's name into stories concerning the Jones suit by saying Mrs. Tripp could corroborate the encounter and that Mrs. Tripp "never witnessed any inappropriate behavior by the president" and said his client had "no information even remotely relating to Paula Jones or her allegations."

In July 1995, in a meeting with Reno and top aides, amid mounting pressure from the White House and prominent Arkansans, Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz is told to stop investigating poultry giant Tyson Foods.

In April 1996, top Public Integrity officials Lee Radek and Jo Ann Farrington sign an unprecedented motion before the Special Division of the U.S. Court of Appeals seeking to limit the Smaltz probe.

Janet Reno refusals to appoint independent counsel in campaign finance (incomplete): 11/26/96, 4/30/97, 12/2/97. Janet Reno refusal to appoint independent counsel for presidential involvement in Indian casino 12/15/97, appoints one for Secreatry Babbitt 2/11/98

Mike Romano ".On April 6, 1995, Al Marion received a surprising letter from his boss, US Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas. At the time, Marion was supervisor of an independent investigative bureau of the Forest Service known as the Timber Theft Task Force, which Congress established in 1991 to pursue white-collar timber crimes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Nobody expected the task force to do much more than inoculate the Forest Service against critics, but it won a string of stunning convictions, including a record-setting $3.2 million case against the Columbia River Scaling Bureau in 1993. Later that year, Marion's 10-man team launched a law enforcement initiative unprecedented at the Forest Service--three concurrent investigations, into allegations of million-dollar timber theft, accounting fraud, and obstruction of justice by Forest Service field managers. The task force was midstride in this three-pronged operation when Marion received Chief Thomas' letter, politely thanking him and his investigators for their "outstanding contributions" and declaring that the task force had "accomplished its mission." Their jobs were eliminated, effective immediately.."

The Washington Weekly 7/19/98 Carl Limbacher "Five summers ago this week the body of Vincent Walker Foster, Jr. was discovered near an antique cannon in an out of the way Virginia park. Two independent counsels, two congressional probes and one federal police investigation have determined he died by his own hand. Still, in national polls taken in 1995 and 1997, the American people by overwhelming margins say they do not believe Foster died as officials say. Yet even with this popular mandate, no investigator was willing to act on serious evidence of a White House cover-up of Foster's death. .new evidence had emerged in the Foster case that could have been politically lethal - had the scent been followed. Three independent handwriting experts determined that Foster's suicide note, which was discovered sans fingerprints, was a forgery. A last gasp exhaustive search of the park where Foster's body was found failed to turn up the missing bullet -- the only forensic evidence that would have linked his death to the scene. A previously unknown White House meeting featuring several major Foster case witnesses was revealed to have taken place at a key point during Robert Fiske's Foster probe. But the gathering of Bill Clinton, Webb Hubbell, Michael Cardozo, Marsha Scott, Shelia Foster- Anthony and Foster's widow Lisa apparently prompted little investigative interest, even though the meeting took place on May 7, 1994. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Washington Post - 5/3/97) Just two days later the widow Foster was scheduled to be questioned for the first time by Fiske. In fact, all the participants had spent time with Foster during his final days. And all were key to floating the depression alibi, except Lisa - who hadn't yet remembered how sick her husband had been. The press brushed off this "getting our stories straight" session as an innocent reunion of old Arkansas friends, even though Cardozo wasn't from Arkansas..."

The New York Post 7/17/98 Dick Morris has suggested parallel between Maryland prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli's interest in investigating key anti-Clinton witness, Linda Tripp in the midst of a federal grand jury probe to an earlier case: Two years ago Little Rock prosecutor Mark Stodala "made an eerily familar announcement, namely that Kenneth Starr's witness against then - Governor Jim Guy Tucker would be indicted on state charges of insurance fraud. Hale gave damaging evidence against Tucker and the McDouga;s. Says Morris: "The pattern is all too obvious. Clinton's allies are using the identical M.O. whenever they need to discredit a threatening accuser. Within weeks of (Stodala's) announcement, contributions from Clilnton allies began pouring into Stodola's congressional campaign. Juhn Huang, Charlie Trie, Don Tyson, Tyson Foods' political action committee, Jim Blair (Hillary's commodities investment advisor) and Stephens, Inc (the Arkansas investment firm that bankrolled the '92 Clinton presidential campaign), all gave. Rush Deacon, an associate of James Riady of the notorious Lippo Group, chipped in. So did Ernest Green, who had arranged for a Chinese arms dealer to visit the Oval Office. After giving $50,000 to the DNC a day after the visit, he sent in $500 for Stodola."

US News & World Report 8/3/98 Marianne Lavelle, Kenneth Walsh, Julian Barnes "Several Starr supporters view Kendall's leak investigation as a bald effort to neutralize one of Starr's most important deputies just as the independent counsel approaches his endgame. "If you wanted to target somebody on Ken's staff who has the capability of taking very difficult witnesses who don't want to testify . . . and getting them to tell you the truth, then the person to target would be Jackie Bennett," says W. Ray Jahn, a former Starr prosecutor. Tough guy. Clinton's defenders deny any effort to "take out" Bennett. But regardless of the intentions behind it, the White House anti-leak strategy has already hampered Bennett--the prosecutor that one source familiar with Starr's team calls, admiringly, one of the "more pugilistic of the bunch." Bennett has been responsible for some of the most aggressive moves in the Whitewater and Lewinsky probes, including the decision to call White House communications adviser Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury.

Washington Post 7/27/98 Alan Charles Raul "Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals performed the nation a great service in his opinion this month on Secret Service privilege: He reintroduced the notion of "honor" to the way we judge our public officials. Dedication to this virtue has not been a priority lately among our leaders, and the paucity of available role models has diminished ethical standards from top to bottom. Silberman wrote a startling opinion concurring in the D.C. Circuit's recent decision to reject a new form of privilege that would have protected the president from testimony by his bodyguards. Silberman made a point of holding the U.S. attorney general accountable for acting both legally and honorably. Silberman was "mindful of the terrible pressures and strains of conscience that bear upon senior political appointees of the Justice Department when an Independent Counsel (or special prosecutor) is investigating the Presidency of the United States." He concluded, however, that the attorney general's participation in the "war" declared on independent counsel Kenneth Starr was not legal -- because the Ethics in Government Act specifically precludes the Justice Department from interfering in an independent counsel investigation -- and it also was not honorable. This second issue bears special attention."

7/21/98 Doug Thompson Capitol Hill Blue White House attorneys are attempting to influence testimony by Secret Service agents subpoenaed to testify before the Whitewater grand jury -- an overt action which some of the agents feel is pressure to keep them from telling the truth about what they saw and heard, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. "We're not talking about coaching here," says a source close to the agents. "This is pressure, an attempt to control what the agents say and how they say it." The White House had admitted advising the agents not to answer questions which deal with "national security or attorney-client privilege," but some agents are said to be angry over what they consider to be an outright attempt to "spin" their testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury. .One of the agents subpoenaed to testify has confided to colleagues that he feels the White House wants him to lie. "He said the message is clear. He was reminded that he is sworn to protect the President at all costs and that sometimes the President needs to be protected from more than just physical harm," one agent told Capitol Hill Blue on Monday."

7/29/98 Investor's Business Daily Editorial "Attorney General Janet Reno either is incompetent or is shielding President Clinton, Vice President Gore and other Democratic honchos. Nothing else explains Reno's rejection of an independent counsel to probe the '96 fund-raising scandal.Yes, several shady fund- raisers were recently indicted: Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung, Maria Tsia. But the charges were narrow. They focused on money-laundering. They ignored the longtime friendships and frequent meetings the three had with Clinton, Gore or both men. Reno and her prosecutors seem to have ignored the nation's security as well.

Detroit News 9/7/98 Tony Snow ".Sen. Orrin Hatch stalked out in a lather. "This matter has now passed the point of reasonableness," the Utah Republican told reporters, "and I am no longer willing to give the attorney general the benefit of the doubt. It is now beyond dispute that she is not living up to her duty to enforce the law." Dan Burton, chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, repeated his assertion that Reno "appears to be trying to protect the president and vice president." .Although everybody in the top tier of management at the Justice Department supports the appointment of an independent counsel, Reno has resisted the call for 18 months - thus allowing malefactors to destroy evidence and the evidentiary trail to grow cold. Moreover, as Hatch notes, the Justice Department "hasn't investigated the main characters who caused the campaign-finance violations." ."

Washington Post 9/9/98 Edward Walsh ".Rep. David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.), chairman of a House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee that has been investigating the White House's use of a computer database during the 1996 campaign, said he will also ask the Justice Department to investigate whether the White House was guilty of "theft of government property" by using information stored in the government database for campaign purposes. McIntosh said the investigation had uncovered "very strong evidence" that Mills lied to Congress when she testified last year that she thought documents dealing with the database actually concerned another computer system at the White House. He said there also was strong evidence that the White House shared information in the database with the Democratic National Committee for fund-raising and other political purposes and that that would amount to "theft of government property." ."

Freeper report ."... Remember Blumenthal's appearance before Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury last summer? Following his testimony, Blumenthal denounced prosecutors for having the nerve to grill him about his contacts with reporters Blumenthal also phoned New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and told him he'd been asked a series of intrusive questions about Bill Clinton's religion and his sex life. That led Lewis to denounce the dangerous ... degradation of the legal process, One problem: Neither allegation turns out to be true. We know this thanks to the final batch of grand-jury transcripts released by the House last weekend. Publicly, Blumenthal declared that he'd been forced to answer questions about my conversations, as part of my job, with a laundry list of news-media organizations, adding that Starr's prosecutors demanded to know what I had told reporters and what reporters had told me ... Liar. In fact, Blumenthal was asked whether he knew anything about any talk-ing points related to the Lewinsky matter. After acknowledging that he'd received such a document from the Democratic National Committee, he was asked if he'd ever given it to anyone outside the White House. If reporters called me or I spoke with reporters I would tell them to call the DNC to get those talking points, responded Blumenthal - who then voluntarily rattled off that laundry list of news organizations he claimed Starr's people had demanded from him. Members of the grand jury had watched Blumenthal's turn in front of the TV cameras - and they were outraged by his deception. We had some serious concerns, the forewoman told Blumenthal. The work we are doing here is very serious, and the integrity to our work as representatives of the people of the United States of America is very important to us. We are very concerned about the fact that, during your last visit, that an inaccurate representation of the events that happened were retold on the steps of the courthouse.."

AP 10/7/98 Larry Margasak "President Clinton said today that members of the House should cast ``a vote of principle and conscience'' on whether to approve a broad, Republican-written impeachment inquiry against him. He denied he was trying to pressure lawmakers. ``It's up to others to decide what happens to me and ultimately it's going to be up to the American people to make a clear statement there,'' the president told reporters in the Oval Office. ``More important than anything else to me is they do the people's work and then let the people decide where we go from here.'' In return, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the senior Democrat in the Senate, offered ``friendly advice'' to the White House: ``Don't tamper with this jury.''."

NY Times 10/8/98 William Safire "Remember John Huang? He's the banker who was placed by Indonesia's Riady family in the corrupted Clinton Commerce Department. For 18 months he read top- secret cable traffic, was briefed 37 times by the C.I.A., viewed 500 pieces of raw intelligence -- and made 261 calls to the Lippo banks. He frequently slipped across the street to a Riady banker's "drop" to send and receive faxes and packages that did not appear on Commerce records. Huang also paid 67 recorded visits to the White House complex. After deceptively signing in as a visitor to the President's secretary, he met in the Oval Office with his new and old bosses, Bill Clinton and James Riady. Clinton had Bruce Lindsey arrange with Harold Ickes to reassign Huang to the D.N.C., where he raised $2 million from illegal Asian sources. .Then this: According to "a senior Justice official," reported Roberto Suro of The Washington Post, "some investigators have concluded that Huang does not have information that would support the prosecution of the Democratic officials who received and spent the funds he raised or the White House officials who promoted his career in Washington." Huang home free? But nobody at Justice has interrogated him in these two years. Although he has taken the Fifth Amendment to duck Congress, he has never had to exercise his rights against self-incrimination to Reno's parade of hamstrung prosecutors. "Regarding the Department of Justice," his attorney, Ty Cobb, tells me, "John Huang has not had the occasion to take the Fifth." Imagine that: With no questions asked of the untouchable Huang, a "senior Justice official" reports investigators "concluded" this essential witness has nothing to say about Clinton-Riady dealings. Justice is reportedly considering giving Huang immunity to go after small fry, thereby protecting the President..Small wonder the House refuses to limit the impeachment inquiry to lying under oath about sex. There's more to Clinton's fund-raising lawbreaking than meets the F.B.I.."

Capitol Hill Blue 10/7/98 Daniel J. Harris Teresa Hampton "Spurred by angry Democrats who were threatened with the loss of vitally-needed last-minute campaign funds if they didn't vote against an impeachment probe of President Clinton, House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt Tuesday told the President to "back off" its intensive lobbying campaign on the Hill. Sources close to Gephardt told Capitol Hill Blue today that the minority leader was "visibly rattled" after receiving complaints from Democrats who said White House callers, including First Lady Hillary Clinton, had threatened to withhold campaign funds from the Democratic campaign committees to any party member who voted for the impeachment probe. Gepharddt, in a heated phone call to Clinton, said the heavy-handed lobbying campaign was backfiring and could drive fence-straddling Democrats over to the Republican-backed open-ended impeachment vote that faces sure passage on Thursday."

Washington Weekly 10/12/98 Marvin Lee (on The Burton Committee's Interim Report) ". Take the case of Venezuelan money launderers, the Castro family. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was investigating the family for money laundering and bank fraud when he made a surprising discovery: a number of canceled checks showing donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign going all the way back to 1992. Even more disturbing were faxes from the DNC telling the Castro family how to launder the illegal contributions to escape detection by the Federal Election Commission. And finally, a picture of Bill Clinton shaking the hands of a member of the Castro family surfaced. Robert Morgenthau realized that this was serious stuff. It was documentary evidence of a scheme to funnel illegal foreign contributions to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. One of the defendants, Jorge Castro Barredo, became a cooperating witness and agreed to testify against his contact at the DNC. In October of 1996, a month before the election, Morgenthau referred the DNC aspect of the case to federal prosecutors at the Miami U.S. Attorney's office. But the case was also brought to the attention of Lee Radek, head of the Public Integrity Division of the DOJ. He realized that the statute of limitations on the donations to the Clinton campaign would run out in September of 1997. So he decided to run out the clock by stalling the case with at times farcical means. First, he removed the case from the U.S. Attorney in Miami. Then he refused to answer repeated inquiries from Morgenthau's office about the progress of the case. As soon as the clock had run out on the DNC crimes, Radek, also overseeing the Justice Department's Campaign Financing Task Force, sent a letter to the attorney for the cooperating witness, Jorge Castro Barredo, saying that he had "concluded that there is at this time no further role for him to play in matters under investigation by the Task Force." No wonder. He had just run out the clock. So the DOJ had dropped the clear-cut case of the illegal DNC contributions. As a consequence, the testimony provided by Castro Barredo was not used, and despite his offer to testify against the DNC he received a full sentence of three to ten years in prison on unrelated bank fraud charges stemming from the original Morgenthau investigation.."

Washington Weekly 10/12/98 Marvin Lee (on The Burton Committee's Interim Report) ".But the most egregious case is that of John Huang, the master coordinator of the scheme to launder money from the Chinese government, through hundreds of intermediaries, to the Clinton campaign. In addition, Huang is a long-time friend of Bill Clinton and is suspected of espionage on behalf of the Chinese government while at the Commerce Department with a top secret clearance obtained without a background check. Two weeks ago, the Justice Department leaked through the Washington Post that "investigators have concluded that Huang does not have information that would support the prosecution of the Democratic officials who received and spent the funds he raised or the White House officials who promoted his career in Washington." Incredibly, this conclusion was reached without ever talking to John Huang. The Justice Department reportedly is considering giving John Huang immunity so that he cannot be prosecuted for espionage either. The pretext for the immunity is that he will be able to testify against subordinates. Come again? This "Chinese coup" at the Justice Department came after the removal of Charles La Bella, the prosecutor who had been brought in to replace Lee Radek after charges of cover-up by William Safire, had found evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the President warranting the appointment of an Independent Counsel. How can Lee Radek and Janet Reno get away with this? The answer is that the rule of law has been compromised and nobody gives a damn except Dan Burton and William Safire."

CNN Transcript 10/11/98 Wolf Blizter and Congressman Dan Burton ".BLITZER: With impeachment hearings on the horizon, the White House is bracing for a difficult autumn. Welcome back to this 90 minute LATE EDITION. Congressman Dan Burton, one of the president's harshest critics chairs the committee that just issued an interim report on Democratic campaign fundraising. His conclusion: Democrats should have returned another $1.7 million dollars in possibly tainted contributions and joining me now is Congressman Dan Burton..BLITZER: And the DNC as you know has issued a statement in response to your report denying that they were engaged in any wrong doing whatsoever in raising these funds? BURTON: That's why I brought this. These two volumes contain bank records which we have subpoenaed. We have over 1,000 pages of documents and about 700 pages of footnotes that show conclusively that these facts that I just gave you are accurate. And the Democrats on my Committee headed by Henry Waxman had one page -- one page, refuting all of this information that we have. So, I would just say that the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission needs to go through the facts we have and make their own judgment on that..BLITZER: Are you satisfied with Janet Reno's cooperation and with the White House's cooperation now in your investigation? BURTON: Absolutely not. Janet Reno in my opinion is protecting the president of the United States. Mr. LaBella and FBI Director, Louis Freeh and that ... "

Drudge 10/12/98 ".A congressional subcommittee has written a blistering report that will level new charges against the president and first lady, accusing them of taking part in the 'theft of government property.' . Concluding its two year investigation into the White House Database, the subcommittee charges that "the president's involvement in the plan to convert government property to the DNC and the ultimate accomplishment of that plan motivated the White House to mount an extraordinary effort to delay and impede the investigation." Deputy Counsel to the President Cheryl Mills [a Harold Ickes recruit] has been hit with a charge of "lying to the committee and obstructing the investigation by withholding documents." The Mills matter has been referred to the Department of Justice for investigation..A deputy White House lawyer had warned all involved in the project that data from the computer may be provided to sources outside of the federal government "only for authorized purposes." David Watkins, then assistant to the president, said in an eyes only "privileged and confidential" memo: "The White House Database will be government property and can not be used by a campaign entity." The report accuses the White House of sharing files from the database with the DNC and the Clinton/Gore reelection campaign -- even using White House staffers to transfer the information. The trail from White House to DNC is detailed in hundreds of pages of documents and testimony. The report's summary concludes: "The committee has obtained evidence that Deputy Counsel to the President Cheryl Mills perjured herself and obstructed the investigation to prevent Congress and the American public from finding out that the president and the First Lady were involved in the unlawful conversion of government property; the president and the first lady were involved in the unlawful conversion of governments property to the use of the DNC and the Clinton/Gore campaign; and numerous other individuals, including Erskine Bowles and Marsha Scott were also involved in the unlawful conversion of government property to the use of the DNC and the campaign through the diversion of data and resources." ."

Reuters 10/12/98 ".A top House Republican Monday blasted President Clinton's fund-raising for House Judiciary Committee Democrat Charles Schumer and said Schumer should bow out of a presidential impeachment inquiry. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, third-ranking House Republican, said Clinton's efforts on behalf of someone who might sit in judgment of him in impeachment hearings were "unseemly'' and described the White House's active lobbying against the inquiry as "jury tampering.'' Democrat Schumer is locked in a bitter election campaign with Republican Sen. Al D'Amato for New York's Senate seat. Clinton traveled to New York Monday to appear at two fund-raising events for Schumer. "I think it's quite unseemly for the president of the United States, whose fate is in the hands of the Judiciary Committee, to be going to raise a lot of money ... for a member who sits on that committee,'' DeLay told reporters. "There will be decisions made by the committee that directly affect the president, whether they vote for impeachment or not. And Mr. Schumer, frankly, ought to recuse himself from the committee because of the president being in New York City raising money for him,'' he said. ."

WorldNetDaily 10/7/98 Sarah Foster "In an unprecedented effort to control the direction of questioning and flow of testimony during Travelgate hearings, White House counsel went so far as to prepare special scripts for Democrats on a congressional investigative committee -- enabling members to ask friendly witnesses approved questions and to fend off potentially embarrassing ones, WorldNetDaily has learned. "Extensively detailed briefing papers and a series of questions ... were prepared to script the Democrat members of the [House] Committee on Government Reform and Oversight" -- the Oversight Committee said in its 186-page report: Investigation of the White House Travel Office Firings and Related Matters. "Such meticulous executive branch scripting for congressional hearings is something even the Nixon White House did not dare to undertake," the committee observed. Although the report was released in September, 1996, the scripting of committee members was something the public and the media overlooked -- the matter being eclipsed by the report's revelations about the notorious "Sherburne Memo." .."This is a huge issue," Morton told WorldNetDaily. "The public and the press are talking about Bill and Monica -- but here's Clinton and his cronies taking over Congress -- intervening in its affairs and investigative work." The Sherburne Memo and the scripts were part of a cache of some 2,000 pages of subpoenaed documents which the White House had refused to release to the committee, claiming the usual "executive privilege." Not until August 15, 1996, did President Clinton finally agree to relinquish them -- and then only after the committee threatened White House Counsel John M. Quinn with criminal contempt of Congress.."

WorldNetDaily 10/7/98 Sarah Foster ".More importantly, collusion between the White House and Democratic members of committees continues, according to John Williams, press secretary for Rep. Burton. Williams cites a letter dated Aug. 4, to Rep. Burton from Janet Reno, in which the attorney general attempts to justify her refusal to turn over certain documents the committee had requested. Reno had phoned the committee earlier that very day asking permission to address the committee the following day to explain her decision. But the agenda had been set, and adding an additional witness would have meant shortening the time allowed for the testimony of such witnesses as FBI Director Louis Freeh who was scheduled to appear. Rebuffed, Reno put her explanation (with the inevitable claim of executive privilege) in a letter addressed to "the Honorable Dan Burton, chairman" --- with a copy sent to ranking minority member Henry Waxman. Waxman's office saw to it that the Democratic members of the committee received copies as well. There was only one problem. The letter was never sent to Burton. He and his staff knew nothing of it "until Tom Lantos started waving a copy in the air, " Williams recalled. "Here were the Democrats with a copy of a letter from the attorney general to the chairman -- which the chairman never received," Williams said. "That's just one more example of the administration -- in this case the Justice Department -- working in tandem with Democrats on the committee."

NPR 10/14/98 ". There were new questions Wednesday about independent counsel Kenneth Starr's conduct in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. National Public Radio has learned that Starr consulted with lawyers in the Paula Jones case as many as half a dozen times before he became independent counsel. According to Justice Department officials, Starr failed to disclose those consultations to Attorney General Janet Reno in January when he sought to expand his investigation of President Clinton to include the president's testimony in the Jones case. Legal ethics experts say that Starr had a duty to disclose the contacts with Jones's lawyers so that the Reno and judges involved with Starr's investigation would be informed about the possible appearance of conflict of interest. Starr's office has not returned repeated calls from NPR seeking comment."

NoHoldsBarred 10/14/98 CJBarr concerning the above item ".The NPR "Scoop" about telephone conversations between Judge Starr and Gil Davis is bogus. First: Starr was called by Gil Davis for informal advice on the Constitutionality of Clinton's claim of civil immunity, not on any of the substantive issues of the case. Second: The conversations were informal and were not compensated. Third: Starr, it has always been well known, was considering filing a brief in the Supreme Court case. Is it not reasonable to assume that he had talked to the Jones' lawyers? Fourth: Gil Davis has talked openly about the calls on various cable shows. At least one of these shows predated the Lewinsky matter. During it, he was questioned in detail about the nature of his discussions with Starr. He made it clear that he was asking only for Starr's legal opinion about the validity of the immunity argument. Even if the informal contacts should have been made known to the Justice Department, they were already in the public domain."

FoxNews 10/15/98 Freeper report "Bob Benett wrote a letter of protest back in 1994 telling the DOJ about Ken Starr's contacts with the Paula Jones lawyers."

The Boston Globe 10/17/98 Ann Scales ".It's President Clinton's modus operandi - using his appeal to raise big bucks for Democratic allies, including those on Capitol Hill, in the final push before an election. But this year, shadowed by impeachment clouds, there is concern that Clinton's fund-raising on behalf of Senate candidates is inappropriate and should cease because the full Senate would sit in judgment of the president if he is impeached by the House. Republicans and congressional watchdog groups are warning that with a constitutional process now in play, such fund-raising activities have the appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly when support from Democrats is so crucial to whether Clinton stays in office.."

From Freeper quidam Vol 6 Page 2469 8/11/98 Kenneth Starr to Deputy Attorney General Holder ".Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure binds all attorneys for the government, including those employed by the Department of Justice who are privy to information regarding "matters occurring before the grand jury." And, as Chief Judge Johnson has recently written, Rule 6(e) protects against the disclosure not merely of the actual testimony of grand jury witnesses before the grand jury but also of the substance of their testimony as conveyed to government attorneys and agents in anticipation of their grand jury appearance. The enclosed article from Newsweek magazine recounts in detail what Officers Muskett and Byrne told "Secret Service and Justice Department lawyers." The article identifies its source as these "government lawyers" and makes out a potential & facie case that attorneys for the Department of Justice (and possibly Secret Service) involved in the litigation have violated Rule 6(e). Please advise me at your earliest convenience of the steps you are taking to identify the source of these disclosures and prevent future violations of Rule 6(e) so that I may take appropriate action."

RNC Press Release 11/14/97 ".The Washington Post today reported that the Justice Department sat on files containing evidence that an organizer of Vice President Al Gore's Buddhist Temple fundraiser was a Communist Chinese "agent." The story, by Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, "provides the strongest evidence yet that the Justice Department cannot be trusted to investigate Clinton- Gore fundraising abuses," according to Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "According to the Post, the FBI had files in their possession that would have confirmed what Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has said all along - that there was an organized campaign by the Communist Chinese to influence U.S. elections," Nicholson charged. "The files contain confidential surveillance data indicating that Maria Hsia, John Huang's co-chair for Al Gore's fundraiser at the Hsi Lai Temple, was a Chinese 'agent' who was 'doing the bidding' of Beijing. Worse yet, the FBI sat on these files until five days after the suspension of the Thompson Committee hearings in the Senate." The story reports that Maria Hsia, working with Huang and James Riady of the Lippo Group, set up a fundraising group called the "Pacific Leadership Council" which made significant contributions to the Senate campaign of Vice President Al Gore. The files also contain "reliable but unconfirmed" reports indicating that Huang, while working as a senior Commerce Department official, passed a classified document to the Chinese government, according to the story."

House of Representatives 9/11/98 Chris Cox R-CA ". Rep. Christopher Cox. That is exactly right, and furthermore, what I have just covered is the list of the names of these scandals, but the memo, which is quite lengthy, goes on then to describe the strategy for dealing with each of these scandals so that anyone trying to investigate would not be able to get to the bottom of it, and I will give you one example. ne page 4 of this memo there is a heading, `Security,' by which they mean White House security slash Livingstone issues. Now keep in mind that this was dated December 13, 1994. You may recall approximately when Craig Livingstone came upon the national scene, became a household name because of that Clinton scandal. It was not in 1994, but in 1996, 2 years later. But listen to what this memo says back in 1994. `Review Livingstone file.' Now, presumably they did. `Interview Livingstone.' They wanted, apparently, to deal with Livingstone problems back in 1994, all of which were covered up so that the Congress and the American people did not find out about them and did not find out at all about Filegate, literally hundreds of files on Republicans who had worked in the White House in previous administrations, FBI files which had been collected by this White House under Craig Livingston.."

Washington Weekly 2/17/97 ".Whitewater witness Judge David Hale dropped a bombshell in an interview with the Associated Press last week: The FBI has destroyed evidence he had against Bill Clinton. On July 21, 1993, FBI agents raided the office of David Hale and seized his loan files. Among the loan files were the file on the illegal $300,000 loan that Clinton pressured David Hale to make to Susan McDougal. When the government filed suit against David Hale for loan fraud -- Clinton appointee U.S. Attorney Paula Casey refused to hear Hale's evidence against Bill Clinton as part of a plea bargain -- Hale's attorney needed access to the files and asked the FBI to see it. "The file on the $300,000 loan was three to four inches thick when the FBI took it, but when my attorney and I asked to see it a month or so later, the U.S. attorney's office gave us maybe an inch of stuff," Hale says. Jim McDougal now confirms the allegation David Hale has made against the President. McDougal recently told New Yorker correspondent James Stewart that Clinton was present at a 1986 meeting in which the illegal $300,000 loan to McDougal's former wife Susan was discussed with David Hale. The allegation of FBI destruction of Whitewater evidence comes at the heels of evidence of FBI witness tampering in the Vince Foster and Oklahoma bombing investigations as well as intimidation and retaliation against FBI whistleblowers Dennis Sculimbrene and Fred Whitehurst in the Filegate and Oklahoma bomb investigations."

Washington Weekly 11/9/98 Wesley Phelan ".(following from interview with Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch).".QUESTION: The big story right now is the election. As you know, it was a wash in the Senate and the Democrats picked up five seats in the House. Many people are interpreting this as a statement by the voters that the Republicans have pursued impeachment too aggressively, and that the voters are tired of Monica and sex stories and want Congress to move forward. How do you respond to that? KLAYMAN: Certainly the more serious Clinton scandals go far beyond Monica into Chinagate, Filegate, misuse of the Internal Revenue Service, and laundering of money through legal defense funds. In that respect it is not surprising that the public has not focused on Monicagate, particularly given the spin the Democrats have put on it that it's just about sex. It's not "just about sex, stupid!" It's about potential breaches of national security, the selling of government-financed services for campaign contributions in violation of law, misuse of federal agencies to harm perceived adversaries and material witnesses, and money laundering. So in that respect I understand why there has not been a more forceful public response. You can't expect the American people to support the efforts of Congress unless Congress takes the time to explain to them why this is important..With the exception of Bob Barr and Gerald Solomon, the Republican Party has been almost completely silent about these other, more serious scandals. From that point of view, the Republicans reaped what they sowed. If the Republicans try to walk away from the massive corruption that currently exists in Washington, particularly in the White House, they then become accessories to these crimes. Their job is to clean up this corruption. The fact that they are now appearing to bail out on the impeachment inquiry to me suggests that they themselves will have culpability for not doing their jobs. ."

Laisse-Faire City Times 11/2/98 ".Kathleen Jonoski, the top photographer for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, took the only pictures showing an apparent bullet hole in former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's head. She has filed a suit, along with two other top pathologists, against the military, which demoted all three after they exposed the problems surrounding no autopsy of Brown's body. This interview [excerpt] is conducted by former Washington Weekly reporter Wesley Phelan. QUESTION: So you don't believe the story of the defective x-ray cassette? JANOSKI: No. About 6 months after the crash I had a conversation with Jeanmarie Sentell, a naval criminal investigative agent. She told me the first set of head x-rays on Ron Brown were deliberately destroyed because they showed a lead snowstorm. I said, "What are you talking about?" She explained to me what a lead snowstorm is: metal fragments breaking up from a bullet. And she proceeded to tell me that the first set of x-rays was deliberately destroyed and a second set was taken. The exposure was changed in an attempt to eradicate or diminish the metal fragments.."

Washington Post 11/14/97 Bob Woodward ".The FBI has acknowledged overlooking key intelligence information gathered as far back as 1991 that investigators believe shows further Chinese government efforts to buy political influence in the United States, senior U.S. government sources said yesterday. Attorney General Janet Reno learned of the new evidence Nov. 5. A senior Justice Department official said Reno was "livid" at the FBI foulup and two days later apologized to Sen. Fred Thompson, R- Tenn., for failing to disclose information that was germane to Senate hearings into campaign fund-raising abuses. Thompson had suspended his committee's hearings Oct. 31. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who also apologized to Thompson, has replaced the senior FBI official overseeing the bureau's investigation into suspected Chinese influence buying, officials said. The newly discovered intelligence, much of it culled from electronic surveillance conducted by the FBI and other U.S. agencies over the past six years, includes evidence of the magnitude and means by which Beijing hoped to influence U.S. elections, several officials said. The evidence also shows links between the Chinese government and several U.S. citizens, including a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles whom several officials characterize as an "agent" for the Chinese. Officials would not provide details of the classified intelligence.The belatedly discovered files indicate that Maria Hsia - a Taiwanese American immigrant who for a decade has raised money for Democratic causes - was "doing the bidding" of Beijing as a Chinese agent, a senior official said. Hsia became significantly involved in Democratic Party fund raising in 1988 with James Riady, a wealthy Indonesian businessman who once lived in California and whose Lippo Group has been at the center of inquiries over the past year into campaign-finance irregularities. Hsia, 46, set up an Asian-American fund-raising group called the Pacific Leadership Council with Riady and John Huang, later a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser. The two largest recipients of PLC money in the 1990 election cycle were then-Sens. Albert Gore Jr., D-Tenn., and Paul Simon, D-Ill.."

Laisse-Faire City Times 11/2/98 ".Kathleen Jonoski, the top photographer for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, took the only pictures showing an apparent bullet hole in former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's head. She has filed a suit, along with two other top pathologists, against the military, which demoted all three after they exposed the problems surrounding no autopsy of Brown's body. This interview [excerpt] is conducted by former Washington Weekly reporter Wesley Phelan. QUESTION: So you don't believe the story of the defective x-ray cassette? JANOSKI: No. About 6 months after the crash I had a conversation with Jeanmarie Sentell, a naval criminal investigative agent. She told me the first set of head x-rays on Ron Brown were deliberately destroyed because they showed a lead snowstorm. I said, "What are you talking about?" She explained to me what a lead snowstorm is: metal fragments breaking up from a bullet. And she proceeded to tell me that the first set of x-rays was deliberately destroyed and a second set was taken. The exposure was changed in an attempt to eradicate or diminish the metal fragments.."

Washington Post 11/14/97 Bob Woodward ".The FBI has acknowledged overlooking key intelligence information gathered as far back as 1991 that investigators believe shows further Chinese government efforts to buy political influence in the United States, senior U.S. government sources said yesterday. Attorney General Janet Reno learned of the new evidence Nov. 5. A senior Justice Department official said Reno was "livid" at the FBI foulup and two days later apologized to Sen. Fred Thompson, R- Tenn., for failing to disclose information that was germane to Senate hearings into campaign fund-raising abuses. Thompson had suspended his committee's hearings Oct. 31. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who also apologized to Thompson, has replaced the senior FBI official overseeing the bureau's investigation into suspected Chinese influence buying, officials said. The newly discovered intelligence, much of it culled from electronic surveillance conducted by the FBI and other U.S. agencies over the past six years, includes evidence of the magnitude and means by which Beijing hoped to influence U.S. elections, several officials said. The evidence also shows links between the Chinese government and several U.S. citizens, including a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles whom several officials characterize as an "agent" for the Chinese. Officials would not provide details of the classified intelligence.The belatedly discovered files indicate that Maria Hsia - a Taiwanese American immigrant who for a decade has raised money for Democratic causes - was "doing the bidding" of Beijing as a Chinese agent, a senior official said. Hsia became significantly involved in Democratic Party fund raising in 1988 with James Riady, a wealthy Indonesian businessman who once lived in California and whose Lippo Group has been at the center of inquiries over the past year into campaign-finance irregularities. Hsia, 46, set up an Asian-American fund-raising group called the Pacific Leadership Council with Riady and John Huang, later a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser. The two largest recipients of PLC money in the 1990 election cycle were then-Sens. Albert Gore Jr., D-Tenn., and Paul Simon, D-Ill.."

Associated Press 11/12/98 Karen Gullo ".The Justice Department, which has been paying the legal bills of some figures in the Monica Lewinsky inquiry, is now insisting that lawyers whose clients want reimbursement must alert the White House to testimony that might involve executive privilege. Legal and political experts worry the new policy could give presidents under investigation an early warning of potentially damaging testimony that they could then block by invoking privilege. ``Could this be sort of a tip- off? The answer is yes,'' said Peter Shane, a University of Pittsburgh Law School professor and former Justice Department lawyer. The department says the policy change it made this summer ensures there is no violation of the legal doctrine that presidents deserve to keep confidential the advice they get from their staff. Federal employees who need lawyers for work-related investigations can have the government provide one -- who would know the privilege doctrine -- or hire their own. Justice changed the policy to make sure outside lawyers learn the doctrine and abide by it.As part of the changes, Justice added the new requirement regarding executive privilege. Brandenburg said the department isn't concerned the policy could be abused. ``The proper handling of privileged information is of vital historic importance to the government and is more important than its effect on the person who is president,'' he said. ``Without any mechanism, the government might never know about a claim that could be of great importance to the presidency.'' But others fear the change could drive a witness who otherwise might not tell the White House of damaging testimony to disclose it, even before prosecutors know about it. ``It strikes me that the president is not entitled to know in advance how a witness will testify. It's giving a broader reach'' to the privilege, said Mark Rozell, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.."

New York Post 11/15/98 Brian Blomquist ".A lawyer working for Sexgate investigator Kenneth Starr said yesterday Richard Nixon would have survived Watergate if his aides had been as blindly loyal as President Clinton's "devotees" and "apologists." The adviser to Starr accused Clinton's aides and allies of lying to demonize Starr. "If Richard Nixon had such loyal devotees, I guess he would have probably served all eight years," Ronald Rotunda told The Post..Rotunda particularly lit into White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, who's been fingered as Clinton's "dirt devil." "The Clinton apologists are so confident that we will not leak that they feel confident in baldly lying to the press," Rotunda said. "It's been unfortunate that, given the rules of engagement given to us by the district judge, we can be vilified and lied about by Clinton aides like Blumenthal in their confidence that the truth will never come out. "You remember last February, Blumenthal came out of the grand-jury room and announced how he was mortified and felt dirty because he'd been asked ^by investigators_ who in the press he had been contacting," Rotunda said. "We now know ... that ^Blumenthal_ was never asked that question and that the next time he showed up in the grand-jury room, the grand-jury forelady said, "How could you say this to the press? It was just a lie.' "Everybody in this office knew since last February that Sid Blumenthal was lying," Rotunda said, "but that never leaked. Moreover, Sid Blumenthal knew he was lying. "But he was confident enough in engaging in a bald-faced lie last February because he was confident it wouldn't leak." Rotunda, who's paid by the Office of the Independent Counsel to advise Starr and his prosecutors on constitutional matters and legal ethics, said he looks forward to Starr getting his chance to respond to his critics Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, which is holding impeachment hearings based on Starr's report.."

Washington Times 11/14/98 Frank Murray ".Two of four evidence boxes sent to Congress by the independent counsel went astray for two hours yesterday in the hands of a Democratic House Judiciary Committee aide and arrived already opened at the secured Ford Office Building. "Where did they go ? We don't know. We don't know if a copy was made, if a copy was given to the White House, or if non- congressional staff personnel were allowed to look at them," a Republican committee aide said. Democratic staff members said it was an innocent mistake by investigative counsel Stephen F. Reich, who picked up the two boxes for Democrats at 12:10 p.m. by arrangement with deputy independent counsel Robert J. Bittman, supposedly without realizing they contained material to be handled under tight security.."

Freeper Plummz reports 11/17/98 FoxNews ".Fox News Channel just reported that Dick Gephardt has released a satement threatening a Democrat boycott of the impeachment hearings if it examines matters beyond Lewinsky! Dick Morris just speculated that Dickie G. is acting on Hillary orders, citing Hillary's involvement in the activities of Friday's Hubbel indictment.."

The New York Times 12/5/98 David Stout ".The Justice Department is investigating whether the C.I.A. may have obstructed justice by giving a U.S. electronics corporation information about a congressional inquiry involving that company, government officials said Friday. The Justice Department investigation involves Hughes Electronics Corp., the officials said. The company has been under congressional scrutiny regarding the transfer of sensitive U.S. space technology to China. "We are cooperating fully with the Justice Department," a C.I.A. spokesman, Bill Harlow, said Friday evening. He declined to comment further. .The Senate Intelligence Committee asked the Justice Department to begin an investigation after committee staff members became uneasy about the nature of information the C.I.A. shared with Hughes, said those officials who confirmed the outline of the Justice inquiry. Congressional investigators have been looking into Hughes in part because it and another aerospace company shared extensive data with Chinese engineers after two failed rocket launchings in 1996. The congressional investigators were sensitive to possible national-security implications involved in the accident post-mortems. When separate suspicions later arose that Chinese interests may have tried to use campaign donations to meddle in the 1996 U.S. elections, dealings with Chinese business interests became ever more sensitive. While not playing down the significance of the Justice Department inquiry, one government official cautioned Friday night against premature conclusions. "It may look worse than it is," the official said. Another official characterized the relaying of information by the C.I.A. to Hughes as unsurprising, if unfortunate, in view of the extensive routine business contacts between the spy agency and a major contractor.."

Freeper go star go 12/10/98 reports on FoxNews Carl Cameron ".The Whitehouse is going through the donor list of wavering Republicans and getting these donors to apply pressure on the Republican members. This is illegal. The Whitehouse is forbidden by law from lobying for or against legislation."

Drudge 12/10/98 ".The White House is expressing growing confidence that it can defeat proposed articles of impeachment on the House floor and is quietly exploring with Republican leaders a deal under which President Clinton would accept a punitive censure to escape impeachment, the NEW YORK TIMES is set to report in fresh Friday editions.. Clinton himself spoke to a "handful" House members this week to try to answer their concerns, a White House official told the paper on Thursday night. The official would not provide the members' names..."Presidential aides have contacted 45 potentially persuadable members of Congress in the past few days to offer further evidence or explanation in the president's defense and to urge them to vote against impeachment," . Three undecided House members, Lazio [R-NY], Forbes [R-NY] and Fox [R-PA] are scheduled to travel with the president on his trip to the Middle East on Saturday, giving Clinton more personal time to make the case.."

George mag 12/98 Richard Blow by Freeper vitolins ".When more than 400 of the country's greatest historians took out a full page ad in the New York Times against impeaching the president just days before the elections, it raised eyebrows in the world of academia and beyond. Turns out that the pro-Clinton manifesto had a little help from a friend in high places. Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, who has a controversial reputation for planting favorable Clinton stories in the press, helped the historians create the ad. Blumenthal, who fancies himself the White House's resident intellectual, was the historian's "connection at the White House," says an informed source. Though Blumenthal's secret role has been confirmed by others, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, one of the ad's initiators, denies that Blumenthal had anything to do with it, saying that "we kept it separate" from the White House, and "this was not a partisan effort." Blumenthal did not return phone calls for comment.."

LandMark Legal Foundation 2/16/99 Freeper hope ".Landmark Legal Foundation filed a formal application to stop Attorney General Janet Reno's investigation of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Reno's investigation appears to violate the congressional and judicial oversight provisions of the independent counsel statute."

Government Reform & Oversight Committee 2/11/99 The Honorable Dan Burton to Janet Reno ".Yesterday's article in the New York Times, "U.S. Inquiry on Starr is Seen," is only the latest in a long line of what appear to be politically motivated leaks emanating from your Department. While Department of Justice leaks aimed at Judge Starr are not new, the fact that such sensitive information would be leaked to the press in the closing days of the Senate impeachment trial raises the specter of political interference.. Indeed, Department spokesmen have commented on numerous occasions when questioned about investigations pertaining to Democrats that department policy is to "neither contirm nor deny an investigation." It certainly appears that when it is politically expedient, this policy is not followed. Both the substance and the timing of the material emanating from the Department of Justice -- particularly in light of the Senate impeachment vote this week -- suggest that someone in the department, possibly a senior official with access to this sensitive information, is attempting to influence the outcome of the Senate trial. As I stated in my letter of December 7, 1998, "it appears that many in the senior ranks of the Justice Department may be attempting to aid the Administration by prematurely releasing information.".. As many have noted in observing your inappropriate insistence on overseeing of the politically tainted campaign finance investigation, this is the most partisan Justice Department since Watergate. These attacks on the Independent Counsel are pernicious. They represent a politicization of the Department of Justice... In addition, given that most of these allegations have already been dismissed by Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, the motivation behind pursuing these allegations is even more suspect. While we are all well aware that Presidential allies such as James Carville have declared war on Independent Counsel Starr, we would hope that the generals of that war would not be working at the Department of Justice."

Augusta Chronicle 2/23/99 Editorial "...It was clear during the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton that as far as the culturally left-wing Big Media is concerned, Republicans can only shed the ugly ``partisan'' label by agreeing with Democrats; it's never the other way around. ...There's no doubt Democrats and their Big Media echo chambers would have pointed to the obvious conflict of interest of having the president's hand-picked attorney general call for an investigation of the man who's investigating the administration. After all, if independent counsel means anything, it means being independent of, and separate from, the administration...."

Washington Post 2/20/99 Howard Kurtz "...The differing approaches reflect the struggle of a number of news organizations, including The Washington Post, to deal with a delicate, long-ago allegation that could have affected the president's impeachment trial had it been carried in the mainstream press. What made this period extraordinary was that millions of people knew, largely through the Internet, the general outlines of Broaddrick's allegation. Several NBC sources said Myers and her Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, were frustrated by their inability to get the story on the air. They and other advocates believe that each time they came up with further corroboration, NBC management raises the evidentiary bar a little higher. They also feel badly about winning Broaddrick's trust, combing through her records and disrupting her life, only to keep holding the story, these sources said. Myers, who has pursued Broaddrick for a year, would say only that the story "remains a work in progress. We learn something new every day." An NBC executive said that "there are some serious aspects of it that are still unable to be confirmed."..."

NewsMax 2/24/99 Joseph Sobran "…Of course, a darker and simpler explanation is that Mr. Clinton likes to play the churchgoing family man for the cameras while he delegates the nasty work to others. It wasn't the president who told Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Hitchens that Monica Lewinsky had been stalking him. It was, the Hitchenses have said in an affidavit, Mr. Clinton's hatchet-man Sidney Blumenthal. The Republicans have made several strategic mistakes in their pursuit of Bill Clinton. One was to overlook the tactics of the White House trash-team, allowing it to smear, with impunity, the special prosecutor and the House inquiry. Those tactics revealed the same character that got Mr. Clinton into trouble in the first place, and they warranted impeachment all by themselves. Obstruction of justice has been the name of the game. The Republicans have also pretended that the Democrats in the House and the Senate were dealing with them in good faith, when in truth the Democrats were shamelessly acting as the president's accessories after the fact. It was obvious early on that no "bipartisan" cooperation was forthcoming; the Democrats redefined partisanship, while accusing the Republicans of it…."

WorldnetDaily 3/2/99 Charles Smith "…On Feb. 23, 1999, U.S. Federal Judge Payne issued an order for the Commerce Dept. to release documents on the Chinese Army unit, COSTIND (the Chinese Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense). The Court order was in response to a suit filed by Softwar, following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) denial by the Commerce Dept. The Commerce Department claimed that records detailing meetings between COSTIND Army officers and Commerce officials did not exist. Much like Mrs. Clinton's claim that "Whitewater" billing records did not exist, the Commerce claims turned out to be false. The Commerce Dept. has already returned a vast array of documented evidence on COSTIND. Some of the phantom records are on the internet, complete with signatures of the Clinton officials involved. Federal Judge Payne viewed the pile of real documents presented by this reporter, along with the words "Dear Ron" plastered all over them, and exploded. The Judge found the lame defense presented by the Clinton administration to be an insult…."

Pittsburg Tribune Review (See Newsmax.com) 11/4/94 Christopher Ruddy "…Houston said that in mid-October he made a complaint about the Ferguson case to FBI agents in the office of Kenneth Starr, who is the independent counsel investigating alleged illegal dealings of the Clintons. Along with his complaint, he turned over his notes and other pertinent documents. Several days later longtime Clinton critic Larry Nichols showed up at Houston's office with the very documents Houston had turned over to Starr's office. Nichols said that he had found these documents stuffed into his mailbox. Houston doesn't for a moment think Starr had anything to do with this. "It was kind of a message'' from someone in Starr's office, he said. "We're stuffing it back, screw you.'' Debbie Gershman, a spokesperson for the independent counsel Starr, confirmed that Houston had met with the FBI, but was baffled as to how any of his papers would have been relinquished by her office. She refused to confirm that the Ferguson matter is under investigation…"

10/2/98 OIC Supplemental Documents Freeper Dukeman Betty Currie first appeared before the grand jury on January 27, 1998. For three days prior to that date, she was out of the White House, meeting in seclusion with OIC attorneys and FBI agents at the Residence Inn Hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. Now, put yourself in [Clinton’s] shoes (I know, scary, but work with me here!). This crazy Lewinsky chic was taped blabbing about your "ministering" to her in the Oval Office. The media is going nuts. And now your secretary's disappeared for three days! How do you get your secretary back on the reservation? The grand jury questioning of Cheryl Mills at 2896 to 2897 gives a hint of what went on: "Q: Okay. If I can direct your attention to January 24th, did you have occasion to page Ms. Currie? A: I'm sure I did. I mean, I page Ms. Currie frequently, so I don't know that it would have surprised me if I paged her. Q: Okay. Do you recall approximately that time period when Ms. Currie was absent for a period of time from the White House? A: I didn't realize she was absent from the White House at that time period. Q: Okay. When did you learn that she had been absent from the White House? A: I think there was a period of time where the news media were characterizing her as being absent from the White House. At least it was my understanding that she had been requested to provide information to your office. Q: Okay. Do you know whether or not she had met with agents of the Office of the Independent Counsel approximately January 24th or not? A: I don't know if I knew then or shortly thereafter. Q: Okay. Do you recall paging her on or about January 24th? A: No. Q: Do you recall a page-- did Ms. Currie have a pager which allows for a message to be inserted and sent? To you knowledge? A: Yes. Yes. Q: All right. And would you often include a message when you paged Ms. Currie? A: Oh, yes. Q: All right. Do you recall sending a messae to Ms. Currie on the 24th stating, "Checking on you. Thinking about you. Page me if you need me. C.D. Mills. XOXOXO." A: Yes. .......... Q: Okay. If the pager reflected-- you're ahead of me. If the pager reflected a 9:18 p.m. call, would that sound as though that's what happended on that date? A: Yes. I mean, our pager system is usually pretty accurate in that regard. Q: Okay. Why did you page her on that occasion? A: I don't recall. I don't know if that was before or after I had already had discussions with her regarding a lawyer and I knew that you all were seeking to speak to her. But if it is in that timeframe, that's like what I would have been paging her about…. Q: Okay. Did you know who her lawyers were at that time, on the 24th? A: Yes. I'm certain-- I assisted in helping her get her lawyer. .......... Q: All right. Have you ever spoken to Jesse Jackson about Betty Currie? A: No. Q: Are you aware of Jesse Jackson's effort to contact Ms. Currie that same day on the 24th? A: I was not aware of it at the time. Q: Did you subsequently become aware of that? A: Yes. Q: When did you become aware of that? A: Recently…."

Reuters 3/11/99 "…A top U.S. Justice Department official Thursday dismissed accusations that his department turned up the heat on Kenneth Starr when Starr's investigation began to close in on President Clinton. "That's a bunch of crap — c-r-a-p,'' Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder said in responding to the accusations by Robert Bittman, one of the special prosecutor's former top deputies who was in charge of the investigation of Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Holder's unusually blunt comment escalated a war of words with Bittman as the Justice Department considers moving forward with an investigation into alleged misconduct by Starr's prosecutors — an investigation that could lead to Starr's dismissal…."

Washington Post 3/12/99 Robert Suro "…Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr asked the Justice Department yesterday to consider criminal charges against his spokesman for allegedly leaking a report damaging to President Clinton and then lying about it to investigators, officials said. The spokesman, Charles G. Bakaly III, abruptly resigned yesterday and his attorney said in a statement that Bakaly would cooperate with the Justice Department inquiry "in every way." Bakaly maintains his innocence, officials said. The Justice Department announced last night that it had not received the investigative materials that formed the basis for the referral from Starr and no decisions had been reached as to how to proceed. The potential criminal investigation of a top member of Starr's staff comes as Starr himself is battling Justice over how it will conduct a separate disciplinary inquiry into the independent counsel's alleged misconduct in the investigation that led to Clinton's impeachment…."

Daily Oklahoman 3/14/99 Editorial "… Worse, The Times says Bill Clinton's national security advisor, Sandy Berger, and his staff downplayed reports from Energy Department investigators assessing damage from the thefts. It seems top officials did not want anything to surface that might have hurt Clinton's 1996 re-election bid. The Times also says the administration kept Congress in the dark, with a top official ordering one of Energy's intelligence officers not to divulge what he knew about the breach to a House committee…. Clinton relaxed export controls so U.S. firms could sell supercomputers to China, which intelligence experts believe are now being used at the Chinese equivalent of Los Alamos. The administration reacted with lethargy to reports of spying -- preferring, as Vice President Al Gore did this week, to blame the Reagan administration, on whose watch the original thefts apparently occurred…."

WorldNetDaily 3/25/99 Stephan Archer "…Landmark Legal Foundation, a public-interest law firm, received 8,379 pages of documents from the Internal Revenue Service yesterday in answer to the law firm's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the agency, but an early analysis of the documents indicates that large portions of the documents had been blacked out. "Our preliminary examination of the 8,379 pages shows us that -- as best as we can tell -- all pertinent information has been blacked out," said Mark R. Levin, Landmark's president. The "pertinent information" that Levin is referring to are the names of those individuals and groups who, during the Clinton administration, may have encouraged the IRS to audit nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations, or 501 (c) (3)s, critical of White House policies. Levin and his group are trying to determine whether the audits of these types of organizations were politically motivated…."

AP 3/26/99 Phillip Brasher "…An Interior Department lawyer alleges he was ordered by a superior to dispose of some Indian trust records involved in a class-action lawsuit against the government. In an affidavit made public Thursday, Ralph Williams said he declined to get rid of the material because he thought it would be illegal. He said the instructions came from the department's deputy solicitor, Ed Cohen. Interior officials denied any wrongdoing. The department is being sued for its management of 300,000 Indian accounts worth $500 million. Last month, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt for the government's two-year delay in turning over checks and other documents related to five account holders who filed the lawsuit. It was not clear if Williams handled any of those documents. Lamberth released the affidavit Thursday, along with an order protecting Williams from retaliation by the department…."

Media Research Center 4/8/99 L Brent Bozell III Freeper Rodger Schultz "...the FBI taped a "San Gabriel Valley businessman" advising Chung to say nothing about his funding by the Chinese chief of military intelligence, to be the Asian-American Susan McDougal: "The businessman advised Chung to go to jail if necessary, assuring Chung that friends in high places would support him. The businessman even suggested that Chung could expect to be pardoned by the President."..."

AP 5/18/99 "... A woman who worked for President Clinton friend and restaurant owner Yah Lin ``Charlie'' Trie said Tuesday she was told by her boss to get rid of documents sought by a Senate committee investigating questionable campaign fund-raising. Testifying at Trie's trial on obstruction of justice charges, Maria ``Dia'' Mapili said she spoke to Trie by telephone after a U.S. marshal served a subpoena for records from one of Trie's companies in 1997. ``I read part of the subpoena to him. He told me to get rid of the documents,'' she testified. ``I throw out some documents. At some point I stopped. I was nervous and scared. I hid some documents in a credenza and under his bed.'' But she acknowledged under cross-examination that she may have been confused about the conversation, and it may have happened months earlier or later...."

NewsMax.com 6/12/99 Carl from Oyster Bay "...How big is the Asian connection behind the Clinton witness tampering operation? Big enough to shield Charlie Trie, Pauline Kanchanalak and dozens more with damaging infomation who fled across the Pacific when House and Senate committees began looking into illegal payments to the 1996 Clinton campaign. Big enough to button up key Whitewater witness Webster Hubbell with a six figure payment that got him to "roll over one more time." And evidently, China's role in protecting Bill Clinton from damaging testimony extends even to witnesses in the Paula Jones case, revealing the tip of what could be an astounding Sexgate-Chinagate link. Inside Cover can now confirm that onetime beauty queen Sally Perdue had been relocated to Beijing at the time she was being sought by Paula Jones investigators Rick and Beverly Lambert...."

NewsMax.com 6/12/99 Carl from Oyster Bay "...On Friday Inside Cover checked with world renowned private investigator Rick Lambert, who, along with his wife Beverly, was responsible for unearthing Jane Does such as Juanita Broaddrick. In late 1997, just after hearings into the Clinton campaign's China connection began in Washington, the Lamberts were hired as the lead investigators for Paula Jones. "I can confirm that when we were looking for Sally Perdue, she was in China, to the best of my knowledge," Lambert told Inside Cover. The investigator wouldn't divulge his sources, but did reveal that he had reason to believe Perdue had gone from a teaching position in the U.S. to a "well paying" job in Beijing. Perdue lost her job as a college librarian just after she went public about her Clinton affair in 1992. Lambert described his astonishment at the news of Perdue's change of address. "This was around the same time that the Chinagate scandal was breaking in D.C. and after I got the information on where Sally was, I remember saying to Beverly, 'Well what a coincidence.' " Another source who spoke only on condition of anonymity told Inside Cover that Perdue was hired by CocaCola, the international soft drink mega-corp, and then sent to Beijing. Perdue is known to have relatives in the Atlanta area where Coke is headquartered. Coke has traditionally supported the Democratic Party over the years...."

The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...The breach of the design of the W-88 miniaturized nuclear warhead--which happened in the 1980s and was discovered in 1995--is enormously significant to America's national security. According to Paul Redmond, the CIA's former counterintelligence chief who caught Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, it is "far more damaging to the national security than Aldrich Ames," and "as bad as the Rosenbergs." The Rosenbergs were executed for compromising atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. The idea Sandy Berger of the White House National Security Council--who was fully briefed about the W-88 technology breach in April 1996--did not immediately communicate this information to the president is preposterous. Mr. Berger now claims he did not tell the president until early 1998, or perhaps July 1997, depending on which of his two stories you want to believe. I don't believe either one because neither makes sense. Mr. Berger is a political operative, a longtime Clinton friend and confidant--not to mention, a pretty smart guy. He attended all the major 1996 Clinton campaign strategy meetings. When he learned China had stolen the W-88--the crown jewel of the U.S. nuclear arsenal--is it plausible he did not immediately tell the president ? No, not unless you want to assume a level of incompetence at the White House that even this administration's harshest critics do not believe for a minute...."

The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...The president had to have known about the W-88 breach no later than April 1996, well before the 1996 election. The president deliberately withheld this vital national security information from key members of Congress for obvious political reasons. He withheld it for almost three years--a coverup that is nothing less than a scandal of gigantic proportions. If it were not for the Cox committee--formed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, not by Mr. Clinton--Congress and the American people would still be in the dark..."

The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...The Clinton administration coverup was recently exposed in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former director of intelligence, who had first briefed Mr. Berger in April 1996, testified he was prepared to brief members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as late as July 1998, but was denied permission to do so by Acting Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler, a political appointee. Miss Moler reportedly ordered Mr. Trulock not to conduct the briefing because she said the information would be used to hurt Mr. Clinton's China policy. When Miss Moler refuted this testimony and claimed she did not recall gagging Mr. Trulock in this way, I asked both officials if they would voluntarily submit to a polygraph test. Both agreed at the hearing, but when pressed several weeks later, only Mr. Trulock was readily willing to cooperate and go through with taking the test. As a result, it is obvious to me Mr. Trulock was telling the truth and Miss Moler was not, confirming rather conclusively that there was indeed a politically inspired coverup...."

AP FoxNews 7/30/99 "..."I'm absolutely furious," said Burton, R-Ind., after the Justice Department prevented the State Department's inspector general from discussing her office's 1996 investigation of former top consular officer William Parish. The inspector general, Jacquelyn L. Williams-Bridgers, told the House Government Reform Committee on Thursday that any comment on the case could violate rules on grand jury secrecy since the investigation was conducted with the FBI as part of the inquiry into campaign finance abuses for which a grand jury was impaneled.... testimony from Bonnie R. Cohen, under secretary of state for management, who told the lawmakers that Parish was aggressively investigated in 1996 and the inquiry "did not reveal criminal wrongdoing." Cohen said the federal government "aggressively pursued leads" in the case and found no need to take action against Parish. She said he "performed in an excellent manner" on visa duties in Washington, where he was transferred during the investigation. Parish retired last year...."

***Media Research Center CyberAlert*** 8/2/99 Vol Four 134 "...6) Fox's Carl Cameron revealed how a Justice official stymied the Buddhist temple probe by shutting down the local prosecutor...."

Insight Magazine Vol 15 No 31 8/23/99 Rep Curt Weldon R-PA "...I read with interest Sam Cohen's recent critique of the Cox Committee's report of technology transfer to China released by the Hosue Select Committee on u.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns With the People's Republic of China (see Check Your Facts: Cox Report Bombs,"Insight Magazine, 8/9/99). I expected a more thorough analysis by the self-described "father of the neutron bomb." He should have checked his facts. Let me take one of his most egregious errors and turn it on its head. Cohen delivered a scathing rebuke of the Cox report for publishing a diagram that details the workings and components of the W-87 warhead. Why, Cohen wonders, would the United States publish a detailed, classified design of one of its most advanced warheads in an unclassified congressional report? The diagram in question -- which Cohen says would be a useful blueprint for India and Pakistan -- was actually reprinted from the July 31, 1995 issue of U.S. News and World Report. In fact, the Cox report cites the source of the diagram in captions below and beside the graphic. So this diagram, which "any competent nuclear scientists could use to work back to the actual design" was actually made public four years ago -- on every newstand in the world. How did such classified material find its way in to print and become available to any rogue government with a few dollars to spare the cover price? The answer is shocking. it highlights the utter incompetence and complete lack of concern about national security that have come to permeate the Clinton-Gore Administration...."

Insight Magazine Vol 15 No 31 8/23/99 Rep Curt Weldon R-PA "...The events surrounding the leak of this classified document were related to me by personal sources and independently confirmed by Carl Cameron of Fox News -- one of the few dedicated network reporters who continues to pursue the China story. According to those sources, the leak occurred during an interview that Hazel O'Leary -- then Secretary of Energy -- was conducting with a reporter from U.S. News. According to my sources, O'Leary opened up a ledger of classified documents sitting on her desk and proceeded to show the reporter a diagram of the W-87 warhead in order to prove a point. She then handed the classified diagram of the nuclear warhead to the reporter. Her staff attempted to protest, pointing out that the document was classified. O'Leary hesitated a moment, took the document back from the reporter, crossed out the word "classified" and promptly gave it back to the U.S. News staffer. When the document was published soon after, the Department of Energy and the intelligence community was aghast at the leak. In fact, the Department of Energy launched an investigation to determine the source of the leak and punish the individual responsible. Needless to say, the investigation was quietly put to an end when it was determined that O'Leary was the culprit. As Cohen noted, if he or other lower-level government employees publicly had revealed such details about the workings of the W-87, he would have been severely punished. So would a Member of Congress. But when the culprit is a Clinton-Gore Cabinet official, the incident conveniently is covered up. Like most revelations involving the mishandling of classified information by the Clinton-Gore Administration, the issue was ignored by much of the mainstream press. But that does not make the security violation any less egregious or worthy of punishment...."

Washington Times 8/4/99 Paul Craig Roberts "...In July 27, the chairman of the Texas Department of Public Safety, James B. Francis Jr., told the Dallas Morning News that evidence in possession of the Texas Rangers calls into question the federal government's account of the deadly federal assault and subsequent fire that claimed the lives of scores of men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Mr. Francis wants to turn the evidence over to federal district court Judge Walter Smith. The U.S. Department of Justice is trying to block the Texas Rangers from releasing the evidence. Mr. Francis says that the Rangers have "some evidence that the world needs to see, in my opinion. The government does not want this evidence out, and yet, that's not right." Mr. Francis added: "It is a complete stonewall."...The Texas Rangers should not trust Judge Smith with the evidence. Judge Smith presided over the trial of the Waco survivors. He has been strongly denounced by the jury foreman and jury members for misleading the jury in order to sentence the survivors. The jury foreman has repeatedly criticized Judge Smith for sentencing the survivors for offenses for which the jury did not convict. Judge Smith deceived the jury to oblige the Justice Department. By handing down long sentences that the jury did not intend, Judge Smith prevented the verdict from casting doubt on the government's explanation of what happened at Waco and prevented the survivors from being available to the media to tell their stories.....Lawyers and investigators involved in the wrongful death suits tell me that they have powerful evidence that the federal government is guilty of criminal assault, criminal negligence, and reckless endangerment...."

Washington Times 8/4/99 Paul Craig Roberts "...But some important evidence appears to have leaked from government officials sickened by the federal massacre and cover-up. There is a belief within the government itself that if the federal government gets away with its Waco cover-up, the casualty will be the rule of law. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark is a lawyer for many of the wrongful death suits. He described to me some of the key evidence: the FLIR tape (Forward Looking Infra Red), which shows federal automatic fire into the compound on the day of the fire. Mr. Clark also has Dr. Edward F. Allard's "Thermal Imaging Report" and the "Sun Reflection Geometry Report" prepared by Maurice Cox of the National Reconnaissance Office. These reports make clear that the images on the FLIR tape are images of federal gunfire. Mr. Hardy says he has an FBI report that acknowledges federal gunshots during the fire originating from an FBI position designated as Sierra One. Mr. Hardy also has an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms memo reporting that three ATF agents went on a friendly shooting excursion with David Koresh nine days before the initial ATF assault on the compound. ...Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark says the evidence of wrongful death is overwhelming --even without the powerful evidence in his possession. "The first civil right," Mr. Clark says, "is to be free from unlawful and excessive force by your own police. That is the difference between a free society and a police state." "At Waco a police force exceeding 700 men with armored vehicles began a systematic aggressive attack in a situation rife with flammable materials and high winds. It is indisputable that this is reckless endangerment." "How could it happen that a flimsy building full of men, women and children could be assaulted by the U.S. government in that way?"This question demands an answer..."

Roll Call, www.rollcall.com 8/2/99 Morton Kondracke "...It smells. Despite abundant evidence that Democratic fundraisers channeled Chinese government money into the U.S. election campaign in 1996, no one is going to jail. One by one, Attorney General Janet Reno's Justice Department has cut generous plea bargains with the money launderers and hasn't come near prosecuting any Democratic Party or White House officials. And if there is any connection between Chinese money and cozy Clinton policy toward China, it's unlikely to be discovered as Justice lets the fundraisers off and removes their incentive to talk. Today, one of the major figures in Chinagate, John Huang, is scheduled to be sentenced to a fine and community service after pleading guilty to minor charges having nothing to do with the $1.6 million he raised that the Democratic Party was forced to return. Instead, the Justice Department charged him with making two illegal donations worth $7,500 in two California campaigns in 1993 and 1994..... In spite of all the tantalizing investigative leads Huang represents -- and in spite of his utter refusal to cooperate in Congressional Chinagate investigations -- Justice is closing out its probe of Huang with a slap on the wrist and a promise to bring no further charges against him. Later this month, Justice is scheduled to close the books, too, on President Clinton's friend, Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, who raised more than $1.3 million -- mainly from Asia -- that had to be returned. He, too, has refused to cooperate with Congress, yet was permitted to plead guilty to one felony count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. The charge carries a maximum sentence of up to six years in prison and fines of $350,000, but prosecutors recommended that Trie get a penalty of three years' probation. The third major Chinagate fundraiser, Johnny Chung, was sentenced in December 1998 to probation and community service. But at least Chung did cooperate with Congress...What's disturbing is that Thompson and other Republican leaders haven't kept energetically digging into the finance scandal, leaving the work to a few journalists, right-wing activists and Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who's easily dismissed for hyper-partisanship..... Burton is pursuing some interesting avenues, such as a report by Carl Cameron of Fox News that a former crack federal prosecutor in California, Steven Mansfield, was ordered to halt a probe he started in 1996 into Vice President Al Gore's infamous fundraiser at a Buddhist temple. Cameron reported that Mansfield, who successfully prosecuted former Rep. Jay Kim (R-Calif.), was ordered to desist in a letter from Lee Radek, head of the public integrity section of the Justice Department, on grounds that it was a matter for an independent counsel to investigate. However, no independent counsel was ever appointed -- with Radek reportedly one of those most vociferously urging Reno not to take that step. Burton also has been chasing down evidence, also reported by Cameron, that in 1997 the Justice Department ordered the immediate return to Washington of an FBI agent and prosecutor sent to Little Rock, Ark., to stop documents from being shredded by Trie's secretary. ....The former chief counsel in Thompson's 1997 campaign finance probe, Michael Madigan, said the plea bargains have "all the earmarks of something being swept under the rug." Indeed, they do...."

The O'Reilly Factor 8/4/99 Freeper truthkeeper "...Bill O'Reilly said at the end of his show tonight that a MAJOR story was "just breaking:" Dan Burton's House Oversight & Reform Committee had issued a subpoena to Janet Reno regarding campaign finance. No details in yet, but I noticed there's a thread saying they'll be getting Mark Middleton's testimony, too...."

AP 8/5/99 "...Attorney General Janet Reno today denied that the Justice Department has kept open campaign finance investigations involving Democrats to block Republicans in Congress from conducting their own. A House committee investigating alleged fund-raising abuses in the 1996 presidential election is barred from questioning anyone who is a target of an active Justice Department investigation...."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 8/16/99 Joyce Howard Price "…A senior Democratic aide to the House Committee on Government Reform denies Democrats tried to influence former fund-raiser Johnny Chung to plead the Fifth Amendment in his testimony before that panel in 1997…. Mr. O'Reilly said yesterday the "Democratic response" to Chung's charges "goes on to say that, 'Yes, we did send him the information, but they asked us to send it.' " But if that were the case, Mr. O'Reilly said, why didn't the Democrats alert Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican and the committee's chairman, that they had done this? Mr. Burton doesn't buy the Democrats' explanation. In a tape also shown yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," he said, "If Mr. Chung's allegations are true, this is one of the most outrageous and partisan actions by a member of Congress and staff that I have ever seen. "To think that a member would encourage a witness to obstruct the investigation is unfathomable. We need to get to the bottom of this," the chairman said. In the Fox interview, Chung described the material sent to his attorney's office this way: "It said how you can plead, how you can take the Fifth in the United States Congress." ….And while committee Democrats insist they were not trying to keep Chung from testifying, Chung tells a different story in the interview, Mr. O'Reilly said. "Chung's saying flat-out: The Democrats, Henry Waxman, did not want me to talk," the Fox show's host added. Mr. Waxman of California is the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee. Chung visited the White House 57 times and gave $366,000 to Democrats between 1994 and 1996. Twenty of those visits came after a White House national security official described him as a "hustler" trying to turn high-level government contacts into business opportunities…..Chung's cooperation with both the Burton committee and the Justice Department's campaign-finance task force was monitored by Chinese intelligence officials…."

Judicial Watch 8/16/99 Larry Klayman "…Following appearances before Judicial Watch and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Johnny Chung is slated to give an interview this evening on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor (8:00 p.m. Eastern) in which he will finger Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman in an apparent scheme to obstruct justice. Following The O'Reilly Factor, Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman will appear on Hannity and Colmes (9:00 pm Eastern) with video of John Huang and Johnny Chung's sworn deposition testimony showing additional occurrences of obstruction of justice, this time by President Clinton and his Justice Department. "Based on all of the available evidence, it appears there is a widespread conspiracy orchestrated by the Clinton Administration to prevent justice in the Chinagate scandals," said Klayman…."

Washington Times 8/19/99 Jerry Seper Audry Hudson "…

Washington Times 8/19/99 Jerry Seper Audry Hudson "…Investigators are trying to determine if the panel's Democratic lawyers were responsible for the 122 would-be witnesses who claimed their Fifth Amendment privilege or fled the country. A major focus of that inquiry is the Sept. 29, 1997, deposition of Manlin Foung, sister of former Democratic fund-raiser Charles Yah Lin Trie. The deposition, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, shows that Democratic lawyer Kenneth Ballen warned Mrs. Foung that if she cooperated in the campaign finance probe, she would be brought to Washington to face television cameras in "a large room with . . . over 44 congressmen sitting there…."

Washington Times 8/19/99 Jerry Seper Audry Hudson "…Mr. Waxman retreated from a planned interview yesterday with The Washington Times, opting instead to submit his response in writing. He focused on the committee's chairman, Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, saying the investigation was an attempt to "shift blame for his failure to conduct an effective investigation to others."….The one-page statement made no reference or defense of his staff's methods of investigation or whether they had intimidated witnesses. He did, however, take note of Mr. Burton's staff, saying its investigation was plagued by turmoil and turnover…..Mr. Ballen was out of town and unavailable for comment. But the committee's chief Democratic lawyer, Philip Schiliro, defended Mr. Ballen's line of questioning, saying Mrs. Foung had no idea what she was getting into, and Democrats used the occasion to explain to her the hearing process. He said he "completely disagrees" with suggestions that Mr. Ballen intended to intimidate the witness, adding that Democrats believed she had little information to share with investigators….."

Washington Times 8/19/99 Jerry Seper Audry Hudson "…Mr. Waxman's staff sidestepped questions on whether the congressman's statement was lacking in issuing any defense of their activities. In the Foung deposition, Mr. Ballen also told the witness that Republicans believed her brother was part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving the diversion of foreign money to the 1996 campaign. He said Democrats did not believe the deposition was necessary. "We apologize for the inconvenience it has caused you, in advance," he said….."Ms. Foung, are you now terrified to testify, or are you still willing to testify here today?" Mr. Bennett asked after Mr. Ballen's opening remarks….."

The Washington Times 8/19/99 "…. Given the extent of the scandal, which included efforts by some of Chung's Chinese friends to divert missile technology from a U.S. corporation desperately eager to do business with China and headed by the Democratic Party's largest individual contributor, Democratic officials have become obsessed with blocking various investigations. Chung has accused Attorney General Janet Reno, who has stubbornly refused to seek the appointment of an independent counsel, of "sitting on the information" he has given her. Chung also has asserted that the Democratic minority on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee sent his attorney an unsolicited package of materials explaining "how you take the Fifth in the United States Congress" after Chung was subpoenaed to testify. Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chairman Dan Burton, citing a letter addressed to him from Miss Reno but delivered to ranking Democrat Henry Waxman within minutes of a telephone conversation between Miss Reno and Mr. Burton, convincingly argues that Miss Reno had been working in concert with the committee's Democratic minority to thwart its investigation. Mr. Burton also accuses Miss Reno of keeping case after case open to prevent his committee from interrogating witnesses. …"

The Washington Times 8/19/99 "…. Jerry Seper of The Washington Times reported this week that Democratic obstructionist actions included telling White House Deputy Counsel Bruce Lindsey to make himself unavailable for a deposition to which the Government Reform and Oversight Committee had subpoenaed him. Mr. Waxman told Mr. Burton that he had advised Mr. Lindsey to be "not available for this deposition." During the deposition of another White House official, the minority counsel raised 49 objections, and in another deposition Democrats sought to prevent a witness from answering questions from the majority counsel despite the witness' willingness to do so. In another deposition, Mr. Waxman attempted to prevent questions about convicted felon Webster Hubbell, the former associate attorney general who received $200,000 in consulting fees from Lippo Group, the Indonesia-based conglomerate that was the source of nearly $500,000 in illegal contributions from the Wiriadinata family…..Contrary to what Mr. Schiliro asserts, Democrats have had every incentive to block the campaign-finance probe, a fact that became particularly evident after China's involvement was confirmed. The cover-up began in October 1996, when the scandal erupted. And it has accelerated ever since. In hindsight, is it any wonder why Democratic Sen. John Glenn reacted so fiercely to Sen. Fred Thompson's July 1997 charge implicating China at the beginning of congressional investigations? The reality is that Chung, a convicted felon, is more credible than the Democratic Party and President Clinton…."

Washington Times 8/18/99 Jerry Seper "…Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee sought for two years to delay and obstruct the panel's campaign-finance investigation, even telling a top White House aide to make himself unavailable for a deposition to which he had been subpoenaed, according to congressional records.
The documents, reviewed in the wake of accusations this week by former Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung that he was coached on how to plead the Fifth Amendment before a 1997 appearance before the committee, outline a suspected plan by Democrats to block the committee's ongoing probe. Republicans have begun an investigation to determine what role Democrats played in trying to protect the White House against accusations of campaign-finance abuses….."The Democratic minority counsel has acted as defense attorneys for a whole list of would-be witnesses, trying to scare them into not testifying," said the committee's spokesman, Mark Corallo. "They didn't have to come right out and blatantly tell the witnesses not to testify, but they certainly set a tone of fear and intimidation.
"They made no effort to find out the truth of whether campaign-finance abuses during the 1996 election compromised our national-security system," he said…..But Republicans said yesterday that committee records, including depositions of key witnesses and numerous letters written concerning the panel's inquiry, document GOP concerns that committee Democrats and their attorneys sought to delay the depositions, intimidate would-be witnesses and obstruct the investigation. They said the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, wrote in an April 3, 1998, letter to committee Chairman Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, that he was "disappointed" the deposition of White House Deputy Counsel Bruce Lindsey -- a key figure in the campaign-finance probe -- had been scheduled during the spring recess. Mr. Waxman told the chairman that he had advised Mr. Lindsey to "not be available for this deposition" -- a suggestion roundly criticized by Republicans as an example of what they said were delaying tactics utilized by Democrats throughout the probe….."

Washington Times 8/18/99 Jerry Seper "…The committee records, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times, show that: … - During the deposition of one White House official, minority counsel raised objections on 49 occasions, and that during another deposition, the Democrats sought to prevent a witness from answering questions by the majority counsel despite the witnesses' willingness to do so. -At some depositions, objections were raised directly by Mr. Waxman and Rep. Tom Lantos, California Democrat, both of whom challenged with some regularity the validity of questions asked by the majority counsel. During the deposition of one White House aide, Republicans said Mr. Waxman tried to prevent questions concerning former Justice Department official Webster L. Hubbell, a longtime friend of President and Mrs. Clinton. -Democrats sought to block committee efforts to subpoena records from state Democratic Party organizations, through which suspected illegal campaign funds had been funneled. Mr. Waxman argued there was no evidence of wrongdoing. Investigators later discovered that illegal donations had been routed to the state organizations….."

Judicial Watch 8/18/99 Larry Klayman "…Today, Judicial Watch will file a complaint before the House Ethics Committee, alleging, based on information disclosed by Johnny Chung, and expanded upon by The Washington Times, that Democrats, led by Congressman Henry Waxman of California, have obstructed Congressional investigations into Chinagate. Based on recent reports, Congressman Waxman also may be linked to a scheme to use the Internal Revenue Service to audit, harass and harm critics of the Clinton Adminisration. Judicial Watch will also ask the House Ethics Committee to look into this as well. Judicial Watch takes a particular interest in Congressman Waxman because of its California office in San Marino. If Judicial Watch is to represent the interests of Californians and Westerners, as well as all Americans, it cannot turn a blind eye to the conduct of Congressman Waxman and his friends…."

Judicial Watch 8/18/99 Tom Fitton Letter to Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, US House of Representatives "… Re: Complaint Against Congressman Henry Waxman and Involved Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee. Dear Committee: On behalf of the American people and in the public interest, we hereby file a complaint against Congressman Henry Waxman of the 29th District of California. Judicial Watch is a public interest group dedicated to fighting government corruption.

In recent days there have been press reports on the Fox News Channel and in the Washington Times that Congressman Waxman and Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee have attempted to impede the free flow of testimony of a material witness, Johnny Chung, in the campaign finance/Chinagate scandals. Attached hereto as Exhibit 1, and incorporated by reference are the transcripts, a video clip, and press reports of these allegations.

Furthermore, recent press reports have suggested that Congressman Waxman may be one of the individuals, including, but not limited to, officials of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Administration, who have engaged in a scheme to use the Internal Revenue Service to audit, harass and harm critics of the Clinton Administration. Attached hereto as Exhibit 2, and incorporated by reference are press reports of these allegations.

If true, these reports on the campaign finance/Chinagate and IRS scandals would mean that Congressman Waxman has violated laws and rules that include, but are not limited to: 18 U.S.C.§§ 1505, 1502; House Rule XXIV, Code of Official Conduct, no.1; and The Code of Ethics for Government Employment, nos. 1, 2, 9 & 10. We therefore demand a full investigation on behalf of the American people.

In light of the fact that Chairman Dan Burton of the Government Reform Committee has continuously complained about Democrat obstruction of his investigation into the campaign finance/Chinagate scandals, and given his remarks yesterday evening on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News (enclosed as part of Exhibit 1), it is clear that he should certify that he believes this information is submitted in good faith and warrants the review and consideration of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

Judicial Watch, Inc., certifies that it has provided an exact copy of this complaint and all attachments to Congressman Waxman and Chairman Burton.

Sincerely, JUDICIAL WATCH, INC. Larry Klayman…"

Investors Business Daily 8/19/99 "…The Washington Times is reporting that Democrats stalled a congressional investigation into White House fund- raising practices. We're not surprised. That's what happens when politicians forget principle and focus on holding on to power. Once the Democratic Party was a bastion of idealism. It was guided by principle. Its members held tight to deep convictions. Now, with Republicans in control of Congress, Democratic leaders have all but forgotten their party's ideological foundation. They will do whatever's necessary to stay in the White House, the only tie to power they still have. Their desperation caused them to ignore campaign finance laws to re-elect President Clinton. As one lie begets another, they later found they needed to block probes into the alleged violations if they were to keep the presidency and have any hope of regaining Congress.

Wednesday's Washington Times reveals that Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee delayed - even obstructed - the panel's Chinagate probe to protect the White House. Congressional documents report that the Democrats went so far as to tell a White House aide to skip a deposition he had been subpoenaed for….. Congressional Democrats aren't alone in their zeal to foil probes into the campaign practices of their party and president. The Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno has been a graveyard for potential investigations. Despite pressure from Congress and the FBI, Reno refused to appoint an independent counsel to look into charges the Chinese military had funneled money into the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton- Gore 1996 re-election campaign. She said she saw no evidence that required an independent-counsel probe.

Yet her hand-picked investigator, who called for a special prosecutor, said Reno misinterpreted the independent- counsel law in a way that protected Clinton and Vice President Al Gore…..The same mind-set was at work in the Senate, where Democrat John Glenn of Ohio blocked Republican Fred Thompson's investigation of influence-buying by China. Principle demanded that Glenn cooperate with the probe to root out corruption. But Glenn and the Democrats put party interest above national interest. …..Attaining power for the sake of power, and doing whatever's necessary to cling to it, leads to ignoring the law and, more importantly, what's right…."

Washington Times 8/23/99 Jerry Seper and Audrey Hudson "Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee used an unsigned affidavit to challenge the credibility of a witness who diverted cash from fund-raiser John Huang to the Democratic National Committee…. The unsigned affidavit -- which has since has been disavowed --came from the father of Los Angeles businessman David Wang, who testified under a grant of immunity that Huang reimbursed him $10,000 in contributions he was asked to make to the DNC. In the affidavit, Mr. Wang's father, James, disputed his son's sworn testimony of an August 1996 meeting with Huang in Los Angeles at which the illegal diversion of cash to the DNC was discussed. The affidavit said that contrary to his son's claims, James Wang did not attend the Aug. 16, 1996, meeting with Huang. Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, used the one-page statement during a rancorous October 1997 hearing to challenge the credibility of David Wang. "Two of my staff members have recently spoken to your father, and he has denied being at any such meeting with John Huang," Mr. Waxman said in introducing the affidavit. "I don't think you have been candid from day to day, from Day One maybe. Each time, we get a different version of what happened." The purported statement by James Wang, obtained without his attorneys present, was written by Democratic staff attorneys Kenneth Ballen and Christopher Lu, who submitted a separate affidavit to the committee recounting their conversation with James Wang. In that statement, dated Oct. 9, 1997, Mr. Ballen and Mr. Lu said James Wang was "neither present at any meeting nor aware of any conversations in which John Huang asked David Wang to make a campaign contribution." But James Wang did not sign the affidavit. Instead, he called his attorney, Michael A. Carvin, who obtained a separate, handwritten statement in which the elder Wang said he "was present at the meeting with my son and John Huang. . . . At that meeting, John Huang asked for a donation to the presidential campaign."…..The committee's Republican staff believes Democrats actively sought to delay, impede and obstruct the committee's campaign finance probe, and have suggested that hearings might be called to investigate the matter. They noted that an astounding 121 witnesses claimed their Fifth Amendment privilege to avoid testifying or fled the country. The sheer number of witnesses refusing to cooperate is "unprecedented" in comparison with other recent congressional investigations, said Dick Leon, deputy counsel for House Republicans during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, and a professor of congressional investigations at Georgetown University…..Mr. Waxman also has denied any impropriety, saying his staff made efforts with witnesses only to clarify the law and congressional procedures….. Mr. Waxman, however, has been viewed as a major obstructionist in the campaign finance probe. The Republicans' former chief counsel, Richard D. Bennett, a former U.S. attorney, once said during a hearing that while the investigation was moving "in the right direction . . . there has been more of an effort to fight [the investigation] than to get the facts." Mr. Bennett said he was forced to assign a lawyer whose daily task was to respond to Mr. Waxman's complaints…."

Judicial Watch 8/26/99 Larry Klayman "….Confirming most American’s fears, Notra Trulock confirmed yesterday on Fox News’ "Hannity and Colmes" that the Clinton Energy Department has covered up the espionage investigation at Los Alamos to protect high level Clinton Administration appointees, including National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. He also confirmed that the so-called Rudman Report, chaired by Republican Warren Rudman, is a "whitewash." Judicial Watch is suing Berger for alleged involvement in the illegal transfer of missile and satellite technology to the Chinese and has filed an ethics complaint against Congressman Henry Waxman for having obstructed congressional investigations of Chinagate. Judicial Watch tested Chairman Dan Burton’s commitment to ending this kind of obstruction by asking him to personally certify the ethics complaint against Waxman and other Democrats, as required under House Rules. Burton has thus far failed to act, indicating that he and many of the leaders of the Republican party continue to use Chinagate solely for political purposes, instead of working to obtain justice for the treasonous acts which have been committed. Even Congressman Christopher Cox, author of the bi-partisan Cox Report, has boasted how the Chinagate scandal will be used to influence the 2000 elections. "It is time for the Republicans to stop playing political games. Conservatives and others concerned about the wholesale breach of national security will not be fooled. There is truly a bipartisan coverup underway, and the country's interests are being sold out by both political parties," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "What we have here is a national disgrace that is doing grave damage to the country," added Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman…."

AP 9/14/99 Shannon McCaffrey ".... The FBI, scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing on clemency granted to 16 Puerto Rican militants, backed out at the last minute under pressure from the White House, a Republican senator asserted today. Sen. Paul Coverdell of Georgia accused the White House of ``trying to build a fortress around their decision'' to grant clemency to the Puerto Rico nationalists. ``I think it's pretty clear that the White House is behind this,'' Coverdell said. ``You've got to wonder what would cause the White House to bypass a chance to explain themselves.'' ....The FBI did not return a phone call seeking comment. But a Justice Department letter to Coverdell signed by acting Assistant General Jon P. Jennings explained that because the power to grant clemency is the president's exclusively, there are constitutional questions about whether it would be appropriate for FBI officials to testify. ...."

CNN 9/14/99 ".....Citing the president's right to the "confidential advice" of his senior staff, the White House is refusing to cooperate with a Senate inquiry into President Bill Clinton's decision to grant clemency to 16 convicted Puerto Rican nationalists. "The Constitution of the United States vests exclusive power to grant clemency in the president," wrote Cheryl Mills, deputy counsel to the president, in a letter to Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Georgia). Coverdell, who is chairing hearings on the issue, had asked for the testimony of Beth Nolan, the White House counsel; Maria Echaveste, deputy chief of staff; and Jeffrey Farrow, co-chairman of the Interagency Group on Puerto Rico. "The senior staff of the White House serves the president by providing confidential advice on a wide range of policy issues," Mills wrote. "Both Congress and this administration have adhered to the long-established precedent that, consistent with principles of separation of powers, the president's senior advisers traditionally do not testify before Congress on such issues." ....."

Washington Post 9/17/99 Charles Babington Juliet Eilperin "….President Clinton refused yesterday to provide witnesses or key documents to members of Congress investigating his decision to grant clemency to Puerto Rican nationalists, raising tensions between the White House and a Republican-led Congress that is showing a renewed appetite for probing the executive branch. The White House's invoking of "executive privilege" infuriated GOP leaders, who have accused the administration of withholding information on a variety of issues since Clinton took office. Yesterday's sharp exchanges, and the new round of investigations by several congressional committees, show that the climate of accusations surrounding Clinton did not evaporate with his impeachment acquittal, but instead will dog him through the final days of his presidency. Targets of the new congressional probes are the administration's role in Russian banking improprieties, the 1993 siege at Waco and last month's decision to free a dozen members or sympathizers of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN. ….."

Fox News Wire 9/22/99 Reuters "....Four FBI agents said Wednesday the Justice Department impeded their investigation of campaign fund-raising violations and blocked efforts to search the office of a key suspect, allowing him to destroy crucial documents. ...."There was extensive control of this investigation by the Department of Justice,'' FBI Special Agent Roberta Parker told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. "I've been in the field 18 years, I've never seen that in any other situation.''..... "Time and again we saw things that indicated to us there was not a very aggressive criminal investigation going on here,'' Thompson said of his 1997 probe. "We're talking about a pattern here, a pattern of in some cases incompetency and in some cases inexplicable decision-making,'' he added. "But no one can exclude the possibility of corruption.'' The agents testified they were delayed for four months in their effort to search the Little Rock, Arkansas, office and residence of President Clinton's friend Yah Lin "Charlie'' Trie because lead prosecutor Laura Ingersoll rejected their requests for search warrants. The rejections occurred even though agents were routinely turning up evidence in the trash of Trie's business manager that she was destroying documents that had been subpoenaed by the department's campaign finance task force and the Senate committee, they testified...... Parker said 27 pages of her notes on the events surrounding the search warrant requests were missing after she gave them to her superiors at the FBI in response to congressional requests. The FBI is investigating the disappearance of the notes...."

New York Post 9/23/99 Marilyn Rauber "....The Justice Department refused to probe allegations that President Clinton did favors for fat cats and barred the FBI from searching his pal Charlie Trie's house, FBI agents testified yesterday. The bitter split between the department and the FBI burst wide open at a Senate hearing, where one FBI agent said 27 pages of her journal - all detailing the Trie dispute - vanished after she turned it over to Justice's funny-money task force. Four FBI agents helping probe 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign financial hanky-panky, claimed Justice stymied the FBI - and did nothing when they warned records tied to Clinton's legal defense fund and documents subpoenaed by a Senate panel were being destroyed....... "

SUSAN ROTH ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE 9/23/99 "...In the latest evidence of friction between the two federal law-enforcement agencies, Little Rock Special Agent Daniel Wehr said the chief of the Justice epartment's campaign-finance task force told him, "we would not pursue an investigation of any matter related to the solicitation or payment of funds for access to the president." "The reason I was told was, that's the way the American political process works," Wehr told members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. "I was scandalized by that."...... In the Trie case, Wehr and two other agents said a Justice Department prosecutor initially refused to allow a search of the Little Rock homes of Trie and his assistant, Maria Mapili, in the wake of evidence that the pair were destroying documents relevant to investigations by a federal grand jury, the Senate and the House.....He was facing more campaign fund-raising accusations in Washington, but prosecutors agreed to drop those charges in exchange for Trie's plea and cooperation in the grand jury's investigation. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of causing a false statement to be made to the Federal Election Commission and a misdemeanor count of making campaign contributions in the name of another...... Parker said she flew to Little Rock on July 2 to help with the searches, believing that they had been approved by the Justice Department. But when Parker arrived in Arkansas, she learned that Laura Ingersoll, the chief of the department's campaign-finance task force, would not allow the searches.

Ingersoll said there was no probable cause to conduct them, and the FBI was not allowed to take any steps in the investigation without her approval. Later in July, after FBI agents found more evidence of destroyed documents in Trie's trash, Parker said, "I continued to believe we had probable cause and evidence of obstruction of the Senate subpoena for documents. But she [Ingersoll] said we were not going to do that. I don't know the reason why."......Parker said she submitted three spiral-bound notebooks to the department, fulfilling a request in connection with the investigation. She recently received most of the 600 pages back, but the section from June 24, 1997, to July 17, 1997, was missing. "That is beyond comprehension," Thompson declared. "The Justice Department is forever tainted in the eyes of the public and historians. This could have all been avoided if they had done an aggressive investigation or if the attorney general had appointed an independent counsel."...."

Washington Times 9/23/99 Jerry Seper "....FBI agents assigned to the campaign-finance task force told a Senate committee yesterday Justice Department officials blocked their efforts to pursue key investigative targets -- including information that Charles Yah Lin Trie was bringing in "duffel bags full of cash" to the Democratic Party. The agents, during nearly four hours of testimony before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, described Justice Department lawyers assigned to oversee the probe as nonaggressive prosecutors who sought to impede or delay the investigation with "ludicrous" restrictions. ..... "I am well aware of such matters as 'prosecutive discretion,' but I am convinced the team at [the Justice Department] leading this investigation is, at best, simply not up to the task," wrote Ivian C. Smith in the Aug. 4, 1997, missive. ...."

Fox News, AP 9/22/99 Larry Margasak "....In a rare public airing of friction between the FBI and its parent Justice Department, bureau agents testified Wednesday that prosecutors impeded their campaign fund-raising inquiry. The former lead prosecutor countered by criticizing the agents' work. The testimony before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee spotlighted the bitter internal disagreements in the investigation of donations to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign. ...... Disputing Reno's oft-quoted assertions of a vigorous investigation, FBI agent Daniel Wehr told the committee that the initial lead attorney in the inquiry, Laura Ingersoll, told the agents they should "not pursue any matter related to solicitation of funds for access to the president. The reason given was, 'That's the way the American political process works.' I was scandalized by that.'' Wehr, agents Roberta Parker and Kevin Sheridan are still assigned to the investigation and worked on the case of presidential friend Yah Lin "Charlie'' Trie, a major Democratic donor who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations. Besides the three agents, the committee heard from Ivian C. Smith, the retired agent who headed the Little Rock, Ark., FBI office. The four contended that Ms. Ingersoll - who eventually was replaced as lead attorney - prevented the FBI from executing search warrants to stop destruction of evidence and micromanaged the case beyond all reason...... Explaining her rejection of the search warrant request in the summer of 1997, Ms. Ingersoll said, "Nothing we saw indicated to us'' that there was "anything incriminating'' in the documents. She said the FBI's proposed search warrant affidavit lacked any description of how the records were relevant..... Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate committee and leader of its campaign finance inquiry in 1997, appeared upset by Ms. Ingersoll's answers. "We're not talking about trying to electrocute someone,'' Thompson said. "We're talking about getting ... to an independent magistrate. It does not have to be a smoking gun.'' FBI agent Parker, also an attorney, testified that Ms. Ingersoll told the agents the department "would not take into consideration'' evidence involving President Clinton's legal defense fund and obstruction of the Senate's investigation. Smith, the retired FBI supervisor, told the committee he was "quite astounded at the type of documents being destroyed.'' The committee released a memo by Smith, dated Aug. 4, 1997, to Freeh that bitterly complained about the prosecutors. He expressed "a lack of confidence'' in department attorneys, adding, "I am convinced the team at DOJ leading this investigation is, at best, simply not up to the task.'' "The impression left is the emphasis on how not to prosecute matters, not how to aggressively conduct investigations leading to prosecutions.'' ...... Agent Parker testified that there were 27 pages missing from her spiral notebook recounting the agents' disagreements with the prosecutors. She said she had turned over the notes to FBI superiors because Congress sought information about the disagreements, adding that the pages must have been ripped out...."

Judicial Watch 9/23/99 Joe Giganti "...During yesterday's hearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee ("The Thompson Committee"), FBI agents testified how Laura Ingersoll and the rest of Attorney General Reno's handpicked Chinagate investigative lawyers have obstructed and ruined their efforts to fully probe violations of the campaign finance laws and breaches of national security by the Clinton Administration. Reasonable people must ask why Republicans have just now, on the eve of the 2000 elections, taken a perceived interest in what Judicial Watch, Robert Novak, William Safire and others have known for years. Indeed, over one year ago, Judicial Watch, in its Interim Impeachment Report to Congress, revealed that FBI agents assigned to investigate the illegal sale of seats on trade missions were ready to quit because they had been blocked by the Clinton Justice Department from doing their job...."

Scripps Howard News Service 9/22/99 James Brosnan "....Ivian Smith, testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said he was so distressed that in August 1997 he wrote a memorandum to FBI Director Louis Freeh detailing the agents' complaints. A month later, Attorney General Janet Reno replaced the head of the campaign task force, career Justice prosecutor Laura Ingersoll, with Charles LaBella....."

Washington Times 9/24/99 Jerry Seper "….Attorney General Janet Reno Thursday defended Justice Department lawyers accused by FBI agents during Senate testimony of blocking the department's campaign finance investigation but promised to look into the agents' concerns. "With respect to one of the issues that I understood was of concern, a search-warrant issue, I'll have to look at the statements made by the agents to understand exactly what their concern was," Miss Reno said during her weekly press briefing. "But I would again reiterate, any prosecutor and any detective who work together on a case will oftentimes have disagreements . . . sometimes fierce disagreement. It's just a matter of trying to work through these issues between people who feel very strongly about their positions," she said. On Wednesday, four FBI agents assigned to the campaign finance task force told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that Laura Ingersoll, the department's public integrity section lawyer named to head the probe, blocked their efforts to pursue investigative leads -- including a search warrant to stop what they said was a destruction of evidence by Democratic fund-raiser Charles Yah Lin Trie….."

Freeper AuntB 9/23/99 FoxNews reports "…On O'rielly earlier tonight with a reporter from the Wash. Times, I believe, told about the senate hearing with Thompson today on Cspan 2 (don't get it!!!!). 4 FBI Agents testified they were told to stay away from any investigations with the White house and Chinese money. They had notes destroyed by the Justice Dept. as well as evidence ( YES, EVIDENCE) that Clinton was the endgame of the campaign money. As O'rielly pointed out, not one major media outlet has covered it and there were 17 members of this committee, eleven will not attend... 6 Repubs(Roth, etc.),5 democrats (Toricelli,etc.) O'rielly point blank asked, what is it, a conspiracy, WHAT IS GOING ON! WHAT IS THE MEDIA DOING???? I Think it was his best show….."

WorldNetDaily 10/13/99 David Bresnahan "....Here we go again. More cover-ups underway in high places. Attorney General Janet Reno is about to facilitate a major cover-up of wrong-doing -- again. Former International Brotherhood of Teamsters political director William Hamilton is about to be given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card by Janet Reno, according to well-informed sources. Hamilton has been indicted on six counts of conspiracy, embezzlement, fraud and perjury. The charges are the result of Hamilton's handiwork as he tried to line his own pockets while facilitating illegal campaign fund raising for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. Hamilton is alleged to have made a deal with Laura Hartigan, the Clinton-Gore Campaign finance director, along with Democratic National Committee finance director Richard Sullivan and Clinton-Gore finance chairman Terry McAuliffe and a host of others....."

Newsweek 11/8/99 "….A new CIA report says ex-CIA director John Deutch may have tampered with evidence in an inquiry into his misuse of classified files, sources say. Deutch lost his security clearance in August for transferring CIA files to an unsecured home computer. As the Feds investigated, Deutch tried to erase them. The report also says Deutch had mishandled secret files at the Pentagon in the early '90s. Congressmen, angered that Justice hasn't prosecuted, are now livid. "It's very troubling," says Senate intelligence chair Richard Shelby…..".

SunSpot/AP 10/28/99 "….Congress might delve into the details of the difficult relationship between independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and the Justice Department, Sen. Arlen Specter said yesterday. Specter's statement followed an Associated Press article that said Attorney General Janet Reno had informed Starr four days before his impeachment testimony that the department would review allegations against his office's conduct of the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Unknown to Starr, word of Reno's plans had leaked to the news media before the Sunday afternoon meeting between the prosecutor and the attorney general……"

Associated Press 10/27/99 Pete Yost "….The allegations, which included the treatment of Monica Lewinsky, had been around for months, and the two sides even had discussed them before. But no action had been taken. Now four days before Starr's pivotal testimony, Reno had opted to review the allegations, but withhold a full-scale investigation…… He told Reno he had ``profound concern'' that if news about the review reached the public, it could be used as a political weapon to discredit his investigation. ``If this leaks, I'll be the second-maddest person in Washington, D.C.,'' Reno replied, seeking to assure the prosecutor. Unknown to Starr, Reno's plans already had leaked. While the independent counsel sat with Reno on Nov. 15, 1998, his office was frantically paging him, attempting to alert him to phone calls coming from reporters already inquiring about the Justice review……``The timing'' of the review ``raises more starkly than anything in our relationship to date -- the specter of politically motivated interference,'' Starr deputy Robert Bittman wrote the office of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder on Dec. 2, 1998. ``You decline to apprise us of even the nature of the allegations against us.'' ``The Justice Department -- which could not investigate the president owing to the obvious conflict of interest -- proposes at this most delicate juncture to investigate the investigator,'' Bittman wrote, adding a complaint about the leak……"

FOX News 11/17/99 Larry Margasak AP "…The IRS admits a secretary taped over, with music, a recording sought as evidence by a group searching for examples of politically motivated audits of tax-exempt groups. The Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that sued the tax agency, contends it has information from "a senior-grade federal government employee'' that an Internal Revenue Service official spoke of concealment and document shredding at a 1997 meeting recorded by the secretary. An IRS document in Landmark's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also revealed that the tax agency, which can punish taxpayers for poor record-keeping, can't find some of its own files related to audits of tax-exempt organizations……"

FOX News 11/17/99 Larry Margasak AP "…"My office could not locate 114 of the 1,586 potentially responsive case files. These are files missing ... during the time period 1992-1994,'' Harold N. Toppall, an IRS manager in the exempt organizations division, stated in the court case. The lawsuit is searching for evidence that conservative, tax-exempt groups were victims of politically motivated audits after members of Congress and the White House made inquiries to the IRS. ….."

FOX News 11/17/99 Larry Margasak AP "…Citing its government source, Landmark said, "Ms. Hallihan is also reported to have said that she was aware that intake notes relating to tips from congressmen or staffers had been or were being shredded by IRS employees.'' IRS officials declined to address the allegations or allow Ms. Hallihan to be interviewed. "It is inappropriate for the IRS to comment on this particular case while the litigation is pending. We are confident the issues being raised will all be taken up and addressed during the court's consideration of the case,'' agency spokesman Steve Pyrek said…..U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. has granted Landmark the right to question Ms. Hallihan, despite IRS efforts to obtain a protective order to stop such a deposition. The deposition has been delayed while Landmark tries to obtain the disputed tape recording….."

Elko Daily Free Press 11/15/99 Chris Fotheringham "…Setting up a showdown between the Justice Department and the Clinton administration, U.S. Forest Service representatives refused to answer key questions regarding Jarbidge's South Canyon Road dispute during a congressional field hearing held Saturday in Elko. "The policy of the federal government is to prohibit its employees from discussing the merits of these cases," Regional Forester Jack Blackwell told Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, and Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., who called for the congressional investigation. …."Well, the fact is the forest service policy is different than the law," Hage responded during the tense exchange. "And if you don't answer the questions of Congress, that's a serious matter. We will have to subpoena the information if you are unwilling to abide by what your chief has personally told us. I'm very sorry about that." …."

Washington Times 11/21/99 Audrey Hudson "….A House panel will subpoena government documents this week to get to the bottom of a dispute over a road in a Nevada national forest that has pitted locals against the federal government. Forest Service chief Michael P. Dombeck had promised the chairwoman of the Resources subcommittee full cooperation at a field hearing a week ago in Elko, Nev. However, local forest officials refused to answer questions, forcing the subpoena, a subcommittee spokesman said. The subpoena calls for all government maps or documents that might show whether the federal government or the county owns the road in question. "These agencies should be responsible to Congress, and I think it's a serious matter when an agency stonewalls a congressional hearing," said Chairwoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage, Idaho Republican. ….By eliminating the road - claiming a need to protect the habitat of a trout subspecies - the Forest Service has made it nearly impossible to enter the forest and wrongfully bypassed Congress and created a de facto wilderness area, the subcommittee spokesman said….."

Associated Press via Fox Newswire 12/6/99 Matt Kelley "…..The Treasury Department shredded potential evidence in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over American Indian trust funds, then covered it up for more than three months, a court-appointed investigator concluded. Government lawyers in the case misled the federal judge overseeing the case, investigator Alan Balaran said in a report released Monday. In a strongly worded opinion released with the report, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth also accused government lawyers of making false statements to him. "This is a system clearly out of control,'' Balaran wrote. He said the shredding and cover-up were "part of a greater pattern of obfuscation'' by the government in the lawsuit over the mishandling of accounts for more than 300,000 Indians now worth about $500 million…… After ordering the shredding halted Jan. 28, Treasury Department lawyers waited more than 14 weeks before notifying the Justice Department and Lamberth in May, the department also has acknowledged. In his Monday order, Lamberth wrote that he was "deeply disturbed'' by the delay and by the fact that the government's assurances that records were being preserved "turned out to be just as false as those false representations that led to the court's February contempt findings.'' ……. "

Washington Post 12/7/99 Bill Miller "…..Besides condemning the conduct of Treasury attorneys, special master Alan L. Balaran said the actions were "part of a general pattern of obfuscation" carried out by government officials involved in the litigation. In this instance, Balaran said, the Treasury attorneys kept the destruction a secret even from the Justice Department, which is managing the case. "This is a system clearly out of control," Balaran wrote. …."

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 12/12/99 "….. It turns out that Bill Clinton's Treasury and Interior departments are far more than the churlish ``disobedients'' a federal judge held them up to be in August. Plain and simple, court records suggest they've been involved in what looks, smells and tastes like the facilitation of obstruction of justice. But the paramount questions now are what examples will be made of Bruce Babbitt, Robert Rubin and their charges, and who else might be involved in what, by any account, is a high-level cover-up. It was on Aug. 10 that U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered the government (i.e., taxpayers) to pay $625,000 for Messrs. Babbitt and Rubin's ``contumacious misdeeds.'' They refused to produce trust fund records, canceled checks and other documents regarding the Native American Rights Fund. ……It was in February that Judge Lamberth held Babbitt and Rubin in contempt of court. He said he found ``clear and convincing evidence'' that they disobeyed his order to turn over the records. Ten months later, something else has become clear and convincing - while the administration of justice was being nose-thumbed, their minions were firing up the shredders. ……"

CNSNews.com 12/7/99 Susan Jones "….Three years ago, Native Americans filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of mismanaging Indian trust funds, and according to a report released Monday, that mismanagement continues up to the present moment. The report, written by Alan Balaran, a court-appointed investigator, shows that Treasury Department officials shredded 162 boxes of documents that may have been relevant to the lawsuit Native Americans have filed against the government. According to Balaran's report, not only did the Treasury Department destroy potentially relevant documents - it covered up its actions for more than three months, then lied to a federal court about it. "This is a system clearly out of control," Balaran said. He called the document shredding and subsequent delay in reporting it "part of a general pattern of obfuscation" by the government. The Indians' class-action lawsuit accuses the federal government of mismanaging Indian trust funds for decades. Money for the trust fund comes from land settlements, royalties from mineral rights, and other uses of Indian land. The Native Americans are seeking millions of dollars in damages. US District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the release of Balaran's report on Monday, despite a request from the Justice Department to delay the report's release. (The Justice Department is managing the case.) …."

WSJ 12/9/99 ".....The federal government now admits that for decades it grossly mishandled 300,000 trust fund accounts it manages on behalf of American Indians. But it took the Clinton Administration to add to that incompetence the destruction of 162 boxes of evidence, lying to a federal court and two Clinton Cabinet officers being held in contempt of court. This week, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth released the 121-page report of Alan Balaran, a special master tasked with looking into how the Interior and Treasury Departments have withheld evidence from Judge Lamberth on the Indian trust funds. An outside audit found that the government couldn't account for $2.4 billion in transactions involving the funds. Mr. Balaran's devastating conclusion is that Treasury attorneys have engaged in "a general pattern of obfuscation" and that "this is a system clearly out of control." ..... Judge Lamberth notes that the Balaban report found that the destruction of 162 boxes of possibly relevant evidence was approved "on the very same day" Treasury and Justice officials appeared before him "repeatedly assuring the court that all necessary steps were being taken to preserve all relevant documents." Mr. Balaban found that at the behest of Treasury, 400 boxes of materials were collected for shredding at a government site in Hyattsville, Md., in November 1998. A total of 162 boxes were destroyed until a brave Treasury official noticed they included records relevant to the Indians' lawsuit. But government lawyers decided not to inform Judge Lamberth of the shredding for more than three months. Mr. Balaran suggested that--like President Clinton--the lawyers may have to face disciplinary hearings from local bar associations: "At minimum, those attorneys who were aware of the Hyattsville document destruction from its inception and yet chose to take no action to ensure timely notification are guilty, in my view, of violating the rules of professional conduct." The President's bad example in covering up wrongdoing under oath seems to be contagious inside his own government. ....."

Associated Press 12/16/99 Larry Margasak "…..The FBI never asked President Clinton about the fund-raising activities of John Huang or other key figures involved in illegal contributions to the Democratic Party, a Republican House committee chairman said today. With Huang testifying for the second day about his role in the illegal fund-raising, House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., asked: "How could they not ask the president about John Huang? Did they forget? Did they think it wasn't important? Did someone tell them not to?" The committee planned to release interviews with Clinton and Vice President Al Gore that were part of the Justice Department's campaign fund-raising investigation……. Burton said that in two interviews - one in 1997 and another in 1998 - FBI agents from the Justice Department's campaign finance investigation "never asked the president a single question" about Huang, controversial fund-raiser Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie or Riady. And, Burton said, they didn't ask Vice President Al Gore in three interviews "a single question about" Huang, a Buddhist temple in California where Gore held a controversial 1996 fund raiser or the woman who organized the event, Maria Hsia. …… The committee's senior Democrat, Henry Waxman of California, said Burton was "challenging the integrity of the FBI." ….."

New York Times 2/2/2000 James Risen "....The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, said today that he had taken "decisive action" last year after receiving the results of an investigation by the C.I.A.'s inspector general into evidence that a former agency director, John M. Deutch, had mishandled classified documents. Mr. Tenet suspended Mr. Deutch's security clearances indefinitely last August, after receiving the results of the inspector general's investigation. In a statement today, responding to an article in The New York Times about the inspector general's report, Mr. Tenet also denied that senior C.I.A. officials had impeded an internal investigation into evidence that Mr. Deutch had placed classified documents on unclassified computers in his home. ...... According to the inspector general's report, which remains classified, senior C.I.A. officials took actions that had the effect of delaying an initial investigation into evidence that Mr. Deutch had placed classified material on unclassified computers, potential violations of C.I.A. rules and United States law......"

NY Times 2/1/2000 James Risen "….. Top officials of the Central Intelligence Agency impeded an internal investigation into evidence that the agency's former director, John M. Deutch, mishandled large volumes of secret material, a classified report by the agency's inspector general concludes. ….. The report did not accuse Mr. Tenet or his aides of violating any laws in their handling of the incident. But at the inspector general's recommendation, the C.I.A. has set up a special panel to examine whether Mr. Tenet and other top officials handled the case appropriately. …… The investigation of Mr. Deutch began in December 1996, just as he was leaving office. According to the inspector general's report, C.I.A. computer security specialists discovered he had placed large volumes of classified material on personal computers in his home, including information about some of the government's most sensitive covert operations. This was a potential violation of both agency rules and federal law, but the report says an inquiry by security officials was effectively shelved after a few months. The C.I.A. did not tell the Justice Department about the case for more than a year. The inspector general did so in early 1998, after an agency employee complained to the inspector general's office that the inquiry had not been properly handled, according to officials knowledgeable about the investigation. Mr. Tenet learned of the possible security breach almost immediately but did not move to reprimand Mr. Deutch until the inspector general had notified the Justice Department of a possible violation and completed his report on how the case had been handled inside the C.I.A. After reviewing the case, the Justice Department decided last April not to prosecute Mr. Deutch, who lost his security clearances. He issued a statement in August apologizing for his actions……"

NY Times 2/1/2000 James Risen "….. As the C.I.A. case unfolded in late 1996 and early 1997, the report says, it was closely watched by Mr. Tenet, Michael O'Neill, the agency's general counsel at the time, and Nora Slatkin, its executive director. Frustrated by limits the report says were imposed on them, C.I.A. security officers concluded that senior officials were protecting Mr. Deutch and "washed their hands" of the case. One security officer told the inspector general that the "investigation had been one in name only."... Their delay in telling the Justice Department about the case allowed a one-year time limit on appointing an independent counsel to lapse. "Application of the independent counsel statute was not adequately considered" by C.I.A. officials handling the case, the report says….. The report specifically cites Mr. O'Neill and Ms. Slatkin for impeding the inquiry. It also criticizes Mr. Snider's predecessor as inspector general, Frederick Hitz, for failing to "ensure the timely and definitive resolution" of the case. ….."

NY Times 2/1/2000 James Risen "….. On Dec. 17, a C.I.A. computer security official went to Mr. Deutch's home and found a large number of classified documents stored on his computers. He also found that Mr. Deutch had been accessing the Internet with the same computers, through unsecured services. He had Internet access through America Online, Citibank's personal banking Web site and a Defense Department service. The security official told his superiors what he had found. Almost immediately, Mr. O'Neill and Ms. Slatkin were informed that classified material had been found on the computers. Mr. Tenet was soon told about the discovery by Ms. Slatkin. On Dec. 20, 1996, Mr. Deutch began to delete files from his computers, including more than 1,000 that had been stored on one portable memory card. That day, Mr. Deutch called a C.I.A. computer specialist to ask for help because he was having trouble deleting the files, according to the report. ….."

USAJournal.com 1/23/2000 "….A U.S. defense analyst says the Pentagon may have doctored a surveillance photograph showing a Russian ship firing a blinding laser weapon at U.S. and Canadian military personnel in 1997 as an attempt to provide political cover for a Clinton administration friendly to Moscow. The incident, which occurred off the coast of Washington state in April 1997, involved a joint U.S/Canadian intelligence team sent to observe the activities of a suspicious Russian trawler suspected of spying on U.S. nuclear submarines as they sailed into and out of Puget Sound. The analyst, J. Michael Waller, editor of the American Foreign Policy Council's Russian Reform Monitor, said "at issue is a Navy intelligence photo of a Russian spy ship believed to have fired a laser at a Canadian military helicopter, wounding members of its Canadian-U.S. crew over the waters" off Washington. Writing in this week's issue of Insight Magazine, Waller said a newly-released DoD photo of the incident "differs markedly from the original taken by the wounded U.S. Navy intelligence officer aboard the helicopter. "Details that Navy imagery analysts interpreted as a laser beam had been removed from the official photo," Waller said….."

Associated Press 1/27/2000 Kelly Kissel "….The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday ordered its professional conduct committee to investigate a complaint that President Clinton lied and obstructed justice in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Lawyer L. Lynn Hogue had complained to the court that it appeared the committee and its director, James Neal, had done nothing with his complaint in more than a year……. "Neal and the committee offer no explanation except to indicate that confidentiality controls the information at this stage of the process," the court wrote. The court ordered the committee to begin its review or give notice to Hogue that the review is under way. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright cited Clinton for contempt last April, saying he gave "intentionally false" testimony in Mrs. Jones' lawsuit. If the committee finds evidence supporting the complaint, it has several options - the most serious being a disbarment proceeding in circuit court. …."

Southeastern Legal Foundation 1/17/2000 "….The Southeastern Legal Foundation today released results of a nationwide poll revealing that 58 percent of American voters surveyed believe that President Bill Clinton should lose his attorney's license to practice law for lying under oath and obstructing justice in a civil case, for which he was held in contempt by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright in the Paula Jones civil case. 34.4 percent said that Clinton should not be disbarred….The poll of 1,000 American voters was conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, Inc. from January 9-12. 39.2 percent of those polled were self-identified Democrats, 33.4 percent were self-identified Republicans, and 20.7 percent were self-identified independents. The poll had a +/- 3.1% margin of error, with a 95 percent confidence interval….."

New York Times 2/12/00 Neil Lewis "…..After nearly a year of unexplained delays, the committee of lawyers in Arkansas that had been asked to investigate whether to discipline President Clinton by removing or suspending his law license has begun to move forward, Arkansas lawyers said today. The panel, the Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct, asked Mr. Clinton and his lawyers this week to respond within 30 days to complaints filed by a federal judge and a conservative legal group asking it to consider some kind of punishment for what they asserted was his dishonesty about his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky. The committee imposes sanctions on as many as 100 people a year who are licensed to practice law in Arkansas, as Mr. Clinton is. Only in cases in which a lawyer has stolen money from a client does the seven-member committee typically recommend disbarment, the most severe sanction. Lesser punishments may include suspension of a license for up to two years or a public reprimand. ….."

New York Times 2/12/00 James Risen "…..John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence, recommended a top C.I.A. official for a high-paying job at Citibank even as she was monitoring an internal investigation into evidence that Mr. Deutch had mishandled classified information, according to agency records and interviews with officials. Mr. Deutch resigned as director in December 1996 and was almost immediately elected to the Citibank board. That same month, C.I.A. computer security officials uncovered evidence that he had placed large amounts of classified information on nonsecure computers at his home. Nora Slatkin, the former executive director of the C.I.A., notified the agency that she was considering a position at Citibank while she was still monitoring the Deutch case inside the agency, records of the agency show. A classified review by the agency's inspector general of the handling of that case found that actions by Ms. Slatkin "had the effect of delaying a prompt and thorough investigation of this matter." Ms. Slatkin resigned from the agency in September 1997 and joined Citibank as a vice president in October 1997…..On June 27, 1997, she officially notified the agency that she was withdrawing from consideration of any matters involving Citibank because she was thinking about taking a job with the bank, according to agency records. Yet in July 1997, she reviewed a secret report from C.I.A. security officials on their findings in the Deutch investigation, according to the classified report from the agency's inspector general. …."

Judicial Watch "….PLAINTIFFS' MOTION TO COMPEL AND REQUEST FOR EVIDENTIARY HEARING….. Recently, a new material witness, who is being represented by Judicial Watch, Inc., has come forward to provide corroborating testimony supporting the testimony of Sheryl L. Hall. Ms. Hall first revealed the existence of Project X, and the suppression of evidence of a massive obstruction of justice in the Clinton White House concerning unproduced e-mails relating to Filegate, Chinagate, Monica Lewinsky, and other Clinton scandals. The Declaration of this new witness is being filed under seal, to avoid the potential for witness intimidation and further obstruction of justice - particularly since, as this Declaration sets forth, various individuals with information about this cover-up have been threatened by persons in the Clinton White House in an attempt to silence them. …… Plaintiffs respectfully request that this Court issue an order preventing defendants from disseminating the name of this individual, and his/her sworn Declaration to anyone beyond outside counsel, until such time as this individual has had the opportunity to appear before the Court to personally explain the risks which he/she face, in order that this Court may fashion an appropriate mechanism to avoid further obstruction of justice and to protect the safety of these individuals……"

INSIGHT Magazine 2/18/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….In December 1998 and January 1999 this magazine reported on the existence of the previously unknown White House e-mails accidentally turned up by a subcontractor (see "Trove of 'Lost' E-Mails at White House," Dec. 28, 1998, and "Former Aide Fights White House on Abuse," Jan. 3). When informed of the discovery of the e-mails, including missives from Monica Lewinsky and many others, White House officials flew into a panic and quickly put a clamp on the revelation by effectively classifying the information. So secret was the existence of this smoking howitzer that the White House dubbed all work on it "Project X." …… A White House official told us in 1998 that, yes, it appeared that some of the Project X e-mails were duplicates but that others were new and/or unknown. The refrain "We'll get back to you" was played out with finesse, as were assurances Congress would look into the discovery. …… But hold on: news alert! has learned that despite Insight's clear exposé, neither the Congress, the Justice Department Campaign Task Force nor the various independent counsels ever sought to obtain the telltale e-mails. Moreover, notwithstanding a companion story reported here in 1998 involving certain long-distance telephone records, the same investigating bodies also let those documents slip through their fingers when only a few were reviewed by the campaign task force. Whistle-blowers ask what's going on! Unlike the e-mails, to which the White House could delay access for months by claiming they were insignificant or already turned over to investigators, the discovery of the long-distance telephone records cannot be obfuscated. And here's why: In response to all those subpoenas over the years by all those investigating bodies, the White House always maintained that it had no telephone records in its possession and that it could not obtain them from the telephone companies because they routinely destroy such records every 90 days or so. There was just nothing to turn over in response to subpoenas.

INSIGHT Magazine 2/18/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….That is, until news alert! learned of a secret depository of monthly long-distance telephone records that date back to January 1992 and forward to at least December 1998. These records, which list dates, times, durations, numbers called and how much each call cost, also include in many instances the number to which the bill should be charged. In other words, priceless White House records exist to inform investigators working on any number of probes, including campaign-finance corruption, Travelgate, Filegate and all the other gates through which the Clinton/Gore team has run…….. Another curious item concerning those e-mails: news alert! has been told that the system in which the e-mails were stored was designed as a secret component to the White House Office Data Base, or WHODB, by which all incoming and outgoing e-mails were to be collected "off-campus" to avoid scrutiny by federal investigators. Multiple sources who worked with Insight on exposing the existence of WHODB, dubbed Big Brother, confirmed to news alert! that such a subsystem was designed for this very purpose. ......"

CNSNews.com 2/17/00 Lawrence Morahan "…..US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright again has refused to hand over critical diplomatic correspondence in the case of Pan Am 103, fanning the suspicion that a secret deal has been made granting Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi immunity from prosecution in the case. Appearing before the House International Relations Committee on Wednesday, Albright said she would not release a controversial letter UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sent to Gadhafi. Relatives of the terror victims believe the letter contains an assurance by the UN that Gadhafi would be granted immunity from prosecution in return for handing over two Libyan agents suspected of planting the bomb that claimed a total of 270 lives, including 189 Americans, on December 21, 1988. Responding to an earlier Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by a Washington public policy group, the State Department said the annex of a letter by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan could not be released "in the interest of national defense or foreign relations." ……"

The Washington Times 2/16/00 Jerry Seper "…..The independent counsel's office and two congressional committees yesterday opened investigations into accusations by a former White House aide that the administration hid thousands of e-mail messages concerning "Filegate," Monica Lewinsky, and Chinese and other campaign finance abuses. President Clinton, responding to a report in The Washington Times on the accusations of Sheryl L. Hall, former White House manager of computer operations, denied any wrongdoing, saying he believed the administration had "complied with every request." ……. According to lawyers and others close to the matter, investigators have centered on accusations that the e-mail messages were not delivered under subpoena to a federal grand jury and three congressional committees as required by law. Investigators want to know whether White House officials obstructed justice and concealed the documents, the sources said. "The White House assured us they had given us everything, and we assumed that was true," said a senior Senate investigator involved in the probe of suspected Chinese involvement in the 1996 election. "But maybe it wasn't. We are looking into it again and will try to determine if we need to proceed in a new direction." ………. Keith Ausbrook, senior legal adviser to independent counsel Robert W. Ray, declined comment on what actions - if any - his office has taken on the Hall accusations. But lawyers familiar with the Ray probe, although not assigned to the independent counsel's office, said Mrs. Hall already had been contacted by investigators. ……"

Conservative News Service 2/15/00 Susan Jones "….A woman who once managed computer operations for the White House says Clinton administration officials hid thousands of e-mails that were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury and three congressional committees. ….. And what's more, said Hall, White House officials threatened the contract workers who discovered the computer glitch: "When the contractors told the White House about the problem, they were threatened, warned not to discuss it. They were told the documents were classified. In fact, a White House official told one of the contractors they had a jail cell with his name on it if he discussed the matter," Hall said. Hall said the decision to hide the e-mails from the grand jury and three congressional committees was part of a "continuing campaign by the White House to delay and impede" various investigations. The electronic messages in question are dated from August 1996 to November 1998. As many as 4,000 of them have something to do with Monica Lewinsky, the woman with whom President Clinton had a sexual affair he later lied about. In addition to the Lewinsky messages, Hall said hundreds of other e-mails included references to secret FBI files on former Reagan and Bush administration officials; information on the selection of corporate executives for overseas trade trips; and messages concerning campaign finance activities in the 1996 election…….. Hall left the White House after criticizing the way First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was using the White House Office Database system - for unspecified "political activities." The Washington Times reports those "political activities" apparently involved illegal fundraising. ……"

Insight Mag 2/15/00 Paul Rodriguez "…..With new news about "lost" emails found at the White House, including hundreds involving Monica Lewinsky, it's good to remember that when Insight first broke this story in December 1998 (and followed up in January 1999), several congressional committees, the FBI and even Ken Starr's team were shocked -- they never knew such extensive emails existed nor did they know about separate extensive logs of long-distance calls also maintained secretly at the White House. Part of the shock centered on subpoenas that had asked for such materials only to be told by the White House that such records didn't exist or only in limited numbers; White House lawyers repeatedly told requesters that anything they had was turned over…….."

Insight Mag 2/15/00 Paul Rodriguez "…..The campaign finance task force plus Starr's team never had access to such vast quanities of emails and, in particular, virtually nothing involving critically important telephone logs that the White House repeatedly said never existed -- but they did and these went back to 1992. Curiously, though, despite a follow up by Insight, the FBI, the Starr team nor the congressional panels ever sought access to the "now-found" records literally sitting at the Old Executive Office Building. (Something about leading a horse to water but not being able to force it to drink springs to mind.) ……Fast forward to February 15 and a front-page Washington Times article detailing the existence of the so-called lost emails -- the White House says it's an old story first reported by Insight and, therefore, no big deal. Joe Lockhart tells reporters that regardless of conspiracy theories surrounding the now-found emails (he never mentioned the telephone records), every subpoena ever issued for such electronic files has been turned over to requesters……Insight made a few quick calls and determined Lockhart may not be far off the mark -- but it's not because everybody was satisfied by "document" productions. Turns out that the FBI, the congressional panels, Starr et al never followed up on their own requests to "refresh" outstanding subpoenas for the "missing" data!!! This despite knowledge by all of the original Insight stories……"

Matt Drudge's link to the Washington Times 2/15/00 Jerry Seper Andrew Cain "…..In addition to the Lewinsky messages, she said hundreds of other e-mails included references to the White House's receiving secret FBI files on former Reagan and Bush administration officials; information on the selection of corporate executives for overseas trade trips; and messages concerning campaign finance activities in the 1996 election. She said the glitch was first discovered in May 1998, when the contractors traced a programming error on one of four White House servers back to August 1996. The error involved e-mails to and from 464 White House computer users and the problem was not fixed until November 1998……. Mrs. Hall, who was assigned to the White House in October 1992 from the Naval Sea Systems Command, said the missing e-mails were discovered when the contractor, Northrop Grumman Corp., found that one of the four White House Lotus Notes e-mail servers handling the mail for about 500 computer users had been mislabeled and that a White House search of electronic messages under the subpoenas was incomplete…… Mrs. Hall said White House project directors, Mark Lindsay and Laura Crabtree, were told by Northrop Grumman of the glitch but chose not to make the problem public. "There's no doubt they knew the search had not been complete, and the missing records included those involving Miss Lewinsky and other matters of concern," she said. "They could have retrieved the documents, and they should have done it forthrightly." ……. In her pending lawsuit against Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Hall said the first lady oversaw the political misuse of the White House Office Database (WHODB). ……"

Drudge 2/15/00 UPI "…..President Clinton on Tuesday rejected a charge by a former White House staffer that thousands of e-mail documents requested by a federal grand jury and congressional committees were "classified" to keep them from being turned over to investigators. Clinton told reporters "I believe we have complied with every request." He said the White House had provided thousands of documents in response to requests. The charge was made by Sheryl Hall, former chief of computer operations at the White House, who is suing after being demoted. ….."

Los Angeles Times 2/26/00 Eric Lichtblau Ronald Ostrow "…..Four years ago, a senior Justice Department official quietly acknowledged to the department that he had revealed secrets about a New York City anti-terrorism operation to the authors of an upcoming book. ...... Despite an in-house call that the official should be disciplined, he escaped formal punishment. But now, amid stepped-up concerns about how the government protects its secrets, the case of Richard Scruggs is drawing new scrutiny because of some troubling questions. First, did the Justice Department go easy on Scruggs, a friend of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno from her days as a prosecutor in Florida? And perhaps just as worrisome, did Justice Department officials mislead U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth--head of one of the nation's most powerful and secretive courts--by not disclosing their findings to him? ……… "This was more than an ordinary leak," said John L. Martin, who headed the Justice Department espionage investigations unit at the time. "This was a horribly egregious offense, and it goes to the very heart and essence of how you operate in combating terrorism and how you handle secret information." ...... Such issues have taken on newfound resonance in recent months because of the cases of two other federal employees who allegedly compromised government secrets: Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist charged with downloading massive amounts of classified data onto an unsecured computer, and former CIA Director John M. Deutch, who used several unprotected home computers to write confidential memos to President Clinton and for other highly classified work. ……"

Los Angeles Times 2/26/00 Eric Lichtblau Ronald Ostrow "…..At the center of the Scruggs case is a book called "Main Justice," published in 1996. Written by journalists Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, it details the inner workings of the Justice Department. The book, along with a shortened adaptation published in the Washington Post Magazine a few months earlier, focused in part on the increased use of secret wiretaps by federal authorities. These wiretaps were authorized by the secret court headed by Lamberth. Meeting in secret, it has the power to permit federal prosecutors and FBI agents to sidestep normal constitutional protections when they undertake wiretaps, surveillance and searches against suspected terrorists or agents of a hostile foreign government. ......At the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act Court, headed by Judge Lamberth since 1995, the judges were equally concerned. Lamberth recalled in an interview that he was shocked when he first saw in the McGee-Duffy book what were purported to be details on the secret workings of his court. It marked "an apparent breach. . . . It was obvious that someone from inside the Justice Department or the FBI had to be giving out classified information. I didn't understand that." Troubled, Lamberth said that he contacted the Justice Department to find out what had happened. He never heard anything back, he said, and "as far as I know, they were never able to determine the source." If Justice Department officials did in fact determine the possible source without taking proper action--or without telling the court--"that would be troubling," he said. "Just philosophically, I think when you identify someone who has been improperly leaking protected material, you've got to deal with it." ……"

Judicial Watch 2/19/00 ".....THIRD DECLARATION OF SHERYL L. HALL In my Second Declaration, dated December 7, 1999 (attached), I testified in paragraph 7 that "...[White House Associate Counsel Michelle] Peterson told me in her office that 'our strategy' for the Filegate lawsuit was to 'stall' because 'we had just a couple of more years to go.' Given the context of Ms. Peterson's remarks, I took this to mean that the Clinton White House's strategy was to stall the Filegate case until Bill and Hillary Clinton's term of office was completed. Ms. Peterson's comment was similar to others I heard from other individuals in the Clinton White House, including Laura Crabtree, who I understand was deposed in the Filegate case." .........

.......In the course of my duties and responsibilities as a computer specialist with a civil service rank of GS-15 at the Clinton White House, I learned that beginning in August, 1996, incoming e-mails to the Executive Office of the President (EOP) were not records managed by White House EOP computer staff and systems. By "records managed" I mean they were not transferred to the computer systems in the Clinton White House, known as the Automated Records Management System ("ARMS"), that allowed their text to be searched in response to subpoenas and other inquiries. This problem was not noticed, allegedly, for nearly two years. The number of e-mails that were not records managed was over 100,000. These e-mails (which originated from outside the Clinton White House network) were to the individual e-mail addresses of much of the West Wing staff, including the President himself, and much of the top staff of the President and Mrs. Clinton -- nearly 500 people. This problem was uncovered in May, 1998 by Northrop-Grumman contractors assigned to the Clinton White House who managed the e-mail computer systems and performed searches of Clinton White House e-mails in response to subpoenas.

.........Because of this problem, when a search of e-mails was done in the Clinton White House in response to a subpoena from an independent counsel, a congressional committee, or from Plaintiffs during the time period of August, 1996 through at least November, 1998, those 100,000 e-mails would not have been searched. Despite Clinton White House officials learning of the problem (including its impact on searches in response to subpoenas) initially in May, 1998, the problem was not fixed until at least November, 1998. As a result, six additional months of incoming e-mails were not "records managed" so that they could be searched in response to subpoenas..

....... But the "problem," White House staff and contractors were told, was not to be referred to directly in any e-mails or written communications. The e-mail problem was thereafter referred to as "Project X." White House officials, on orders from the highest levels of the Clinton White House, such as Mark Lindsay, Director of the Clinton White House Office of Administration, and Laura Crabtree, then the Branch Chief of Customer Service Computer Support for the Clinton White House, said that "Project X" was to be classified. But the computer system on which the e-mails at issue came into the Clinton White House was "open" and was not classified. In fact, e-mails "records managed" before and after the two year gap were not classified. Classified e-mails existed on a system run by the National Security Council, a wholly separate system than the one at issue here. The Clinton White House simply did not want the existence of these "lost" e-mails publically known - as they did not want to search them in response to subpoenas and they did not want to have to explain to the American public why the e-mails had not been searched in the first place. They thus "classified" the e-mails improperly to keep them isolated and secret from investigators.

.......A number of employees for Northrop-Grumman who were contracted to help run The White House computer systems were aware of Project X (as they had uncovered the initial problem) and the serious implications of keeping it secret from the American public, law enforcement, and the U.S. Congress. One of these contractors was told by Laura Crabtree that he would be fired if he told Daniel Barry, a Clinton White House Office of Administration computer specialist, about Project X. At that point, Barry was unaware of Project X even though he was about to testify in two days to Congress concerning White House e-mails and Monica Lewinsky. As a result of Crabtree's threat, Barry did not have this relevant information about these 100,000 e-mails when he testified to Congress.

All five Northrop-Grumman contract employees assigned to work on Project X were threatened with loss of their jobs if they told others, including their management at Northrop-Grumman, about the true nature of Project X. In fact, one contractor told me he feared for his life as a result of his knowledge about Project X. Another contractor for Northrop-Grumman was told by Mark Lindsay that Lindsay had "a jail cell" with that contractor's "name on it" if he divulged any information about Project X.

.......I will provide the names of these individual Northrop-Grumman contractors to the Court, under seal, as revealing these names publically at this time could put them in jeopardy. Additionally, others in the Clinton White House will come forward and testify if subpoenaed, but are hesitant to volunteer information at this time because of fear for their physical safety and jobs.

.........In September, 1998 this e-mail problem was mentioned for the first time at a Clinton White House Office of Administration staff meeting by Kathleen Gallant, who was the Information Systems and Technology Division Director of the Clinton White House's Office of Administration. At that meeting it was announced that Project X was being renamed as the "Mail2 Reconstruction Project." "Mail2" referred to the computer e-mail server on which the 100,000 e-mails had resided. The name "Mail2 Reconstruction Project" was misnamed though, in that the e-mails were never "reconstructed." Currently, the Clinton White House refuses to properly "records manage" these 100,000 e-mails so they can be properly searched. The e-mails in question can be printed out quite easily though, and exist on tapes. But I have also learned that at least 6 months of these tapes have been overwritten and likely lost because of "supposed" human error. Project X was known by individuals at the highest levels at the Clinton White House, including but not limited to former White House Counsel Charles Ruff.

.......Regarding another matter, it might be helpful to this Court for me to place in context my testimony in paragraph 7 of my first declaration in this case (attached), dated September 14, 1999, which was: Craig Livingstone, the former Director of the Office of Personnel Security, was also among the small group of White House staffers who acted as Mrs. Clinton's agents. I and other White House staffers understood that Craig Livingstone was brought to the White House by Mrs. Clinton and that Livingstone spoke for Mrs. Clinton. Consequently, to oppose a request or instruction from Craig Livingstone was to oppose Hillary Clinton.

.........Sometime in 1995, I entered Craig Livingstone's Office of Personnel Security to oversee some work related to that office's computer systems. In the safe and elsewhere in that office I noticed many, many files strewn about haphazardly and in piles on the floor. Given the fact that this was the security office for The White House, I was quite take aback by and concerned about the disarray of the office and the overly large numbers of files. Shortly thereafter, I shared my concerns with Jim McDonald, my then-supervisor at the Clinton White House. McDonald told me he also had concerns about the state of disarray of Livingstone's files and stated that he would brief our superior Patsy Thomasson on our joint concerns about Livingstone's activities with so many files. McDonald later told me he did talk to Thomasson about this issue and that Thomasson wanted to speak to both us of about Livingstone in a meeting. It was at that meeting, in Thomasson's office, that Thomasson warned me "not to go there" in terms of Livingstone and his files, as Livingstone spoke for Hillary Clinton, that she hired him, and that to oppose him was to oppose Hillary Clinton. ......"

Washington Times 2/15/00 Jerry Seper Andrew Cain "…..The White House hid thousands of e-mails containing information on Filegate, Chinagate, campaign finance abuses and Monica Lewinsky, all of which were under subpoena by a federal grand jury and three congressional committees, a former White House computer manager says. Sheryl L. Hall, chief of White House computer operations who has since moved to a similar position at the Treasury Department, said administration officials covered up the fact that electronic messages from August 1996 to November 1998 had not been surrendered, as required by law, deciding instead to label them as "classified" documents. She said the cover-up was part of a bid to delay the investigations into 2001. "Contractors working at the White House discovered the glitch showing that 100,000 White House e-mails involving nearly 500 computer users had not been located during the document search," said Mrs. Hall. "When the contractors told the White House about the problem, they were threatened, warned not to discuss it. They were told the documents were classified. "In fact, a White House official told one of the contractors they had a jail cell with his name on it if he discussed the matter," she said. ….At least 4,000 of the e-mails involved or related to Miss Lewinsky, the former White House intern with whom President Clinton has admitted having a sexual relationship, she said. ….."

Washington Weekly 3/6/00 Marvin Lee "….. The Chinagate scandal as it has been known so far has included the relaxation of export controls, the circumvention of export control laws, and the relaxation of national security background checks and control measures with the result that the People's Republic of China has been able to dramatically enhance its nuclear strategic arsenal, its military communications infrastructure and its weapons design. All of this has either been related to or unrelated to the fact that the People's Republic of China has supported financially Bill Clinton and Al Gore for more than a decade. They might not have won the 1992 election had it not been for the crucial financial support they received from Chinese agents. The scope of the quid pro quo between China and the Clinton administration widened last week with the public admission before Congress by Clinton friend and campaign contributor Charlie Trie that he had shipped equipment for the production of biological warfare agents to a facility in the PRC suspected of biowarfare production. The shipment took place only months after Clinton took office in 1993. The equipment is of the same type that the UN inspection team sought and destroyed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The FBI has known about this since last year when it conducted secret interviews with Charlie Trie. The FBI has not pursued this breach of national security because it is under strict orders from the top of the Campaign Finance Task Force not to go anywhere that leads into the White House……"

Washington Weekly 2/28/00 Marvin Lee "……. Former White House employee Sheryl Hall has revealed that the White House hid 100,000 emails, some of them "incriminating," from Congressional investigators and prosecutors. The emails, all sent to the White House from the outside, contained information relating to Filegate, concerning the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the sale of Clinton Commerce Department trade mission seats in exchange for campaign contributions, and Vice President Al Gore's involvement in campaign fundraising controversies. Sheryl Hall has testified that she was told that "if the contents of the e-mails became known, then there would be different outcomes to these scandals, as the e-mails were incriminating and could cause people to go to jail." …….In her sworn declaration, Sheryl Hall says that "others in the Clinton White House will come forward and testify if subpoenaed, but are hesitant to volunteer information at this time because of fear for their physical safety and jobs." It appears that one of them has now come forward. Late Friday Judicial Watch filed under seal a declaration by another "material witness" and asked the court to prevent dissemination of the identity of the new witness to "protect the safety" of the individual…….. The White House email has in the past been sought under subpoena by a federal grand jury, by the Senate Judiciary Committee, by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and by the House Government Reform Committee. The messages also were sought by Judicial Watch in separate pending suits. Withholding of the email under a subpoena could amount to obstruction of justice. In addition, White House employees knowing about "Project X" and testifying in response to subpoenas, could be guilty of perjury. According to the Washington Times, the independent counsel's office and two congressional committees have opened investigations into the accusations by Sheryl Hall. ….."

TheWashington Times 2/28/00 George Archibald "…..The Justice Department, defending housing Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo against efforts to force his testimony in a bid-rigging case, told a federal judge that bids are missing for government housing auctions worth $5.2 billion. The claim in court affidavits 10 days ago is now disputed by Mr. Cuomo's spokesman at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said disputed bids were seized more than two years ago by investigators for Susan M. Gaffney, the agency's inspector general, as part of an ongoing criminal probe of multibillion-dollar contract fraud and bid-rigging in HUD's auctions of defaulted federally subsidized housing properties. The criminal investigation has not resulted in any prosecutions to date. The IG has declined to comment, saying the probe is still under way. But left in the middle of administration finger pointing is a frustrated and angry HUD contractor, Bethesda, Md.-based Ervin & Associates, which has sued HUD for multibillion-dollar fraud in defaulted housing sales. It has asked District of Columbia Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to sort out whether a cover-up is under way - now assisted by criminal investigators appointed by President Clinton……"Susan Gaffney is asleep at the switch or they're being told to kill this thing," said HUD contractor whistleblower John Ervin, who has used a four-year federal lawsuit and the Freedom of Information Act to extract evidence of HUD mismanagement and wrongdoing. "They aren't stupid. There's a cover-up going on." ….."

Freeper Uncle Bill 3/10/00 "…..Interesting, Hotshot, showed up here, right off the bat.
More Lies From The White House How the tapes were found and delayed
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- On the afternoon of Oct. 1, Michael X. Imbroscio, 29, a lawyer in the White House counsel's office, was keystroking his way through a restricted computer database when, he says, he stumbled into an electronic cache of videotapes that he had been told did not exist…….
For months, according to interviews with central participants, administration aides had assured Senate investigators and Justice Department prosecutors that there were no videotapes of President Clinton mingling with donors at White House coffees. But here, flashing before Imbroscio's eyes was confirmation of a taped record of Clinton at a coffee with Roger Tamraz, the big Democratic contributor and international oil financier whom a national security official had warned was a shady operator……… Within days, the existence of snippets of video from 44 White House coffees escalated into a full-blown public relations disaster for two government institutions that had already suffered bad news on the campaign finance front: the White House and the Justice Department. The discovery of the tapes exposed the vulnerabilities of both institutions and set off rounds of allegations and recriminations that embarrassed Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno. ……

……On Oct. 1, Imbroscio typed into the computer database the date of the Tamraz coffee on a "photo op" index. He learned that at least a few tapes may have been recorded, and notified Breuer. Breuer said he had told Imbroscio to determine whether the tapes actually existed.
The next day, Oct. 2, Imbroscio went back to the computer, and for the first time tried the word "coffee," and came up with 49 hits.
"I was stunned," Imbroscio said.
Imbroscio then informed the White House counsel, Charles F.C. Ruff, that the tapes existed. Ruff met later that afternoon with Reno at the Justice Department for a weekly meeting but, he has acknowledged, did not tell her that tapes were found.
The timing was crucial because the next day was the deadline for Reno to decide whether there was evidence on which to base an independent counsel investigation of Clinton over the coffees……

Copyright 1997 Lexington Herald-Leader. All Rights Reserved

…… Back on August 17th, President Clinton testified about his involvement with Monica S Lewinsky. Making sure no other eyes or ears were privy to the volatile testimony was the White House Communications Office, a military branch that manages secure communications for the President, which set up an exceptional closed-circuit TV under a shroud of secrecy………. The Dallas Morning News reported that video technicians from the Communications Office, claiming to be from a Virginia cable company, visited the federal courthouse in early August. One lone fiber optic cable, specially installed the week prior, connected the White House Map Room with the federal courthouse 12 blocks away……."

Washington Post 10/3/97 Susan Schmidt Robert Suro "…….."The [FBI] wanted to investigate the president and the vice president," said one well-placed Justice Department attorney who, like all others interviewed for this article, declined to be identified by name. ". . . We thought if the evidence was there for an independent counsel, we would get to it in the normal, ordinary course of the investigation." From the outset, the task force studiously avoided seeking out new information on an issue many may have assumed it was examining most closely: whether the White House or the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign was involved in fund-raising abuses. If agents came upon evidence of a crime by a covered person, they were instructed to flag it immediately so the attorney general could decide whether to seek the appointment of an independent counsel. But the agents were not to go looking for such evidence, the Justice lawyers insisted. "You can't ask someone whether a covered person committed a crime," said one Justice Department lawyer involved in the investigation……….

Washington Post 10/3/97 Susan Schmidt Robert Suro "……...Eventually, the conflict between the lawyers and the FBI agents became so great that even routine matters had to be referred to their most senior bosses, who themselves sometimes disagreed over how to proceed………. It was not until eight months after the task force began its work that the FBI began to interview more senior officials…….For Director Louis J. Freeh, the July publication of a potential witness list by the Senate committee holding hearings on campaign fund-raising was an alarm bell. The list included some of the most senior officials in the Clinton-Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee, officials that FBI agents inside the task force had felt constrained from talking to……..The possibility that these officials would be questioned in public before the FBI had talked to them was unacceptable, Freeh concluded. He ordered that everyone on the list be interviewed by the FBI, most for the first time.

Washington Post 10/3/97 Susan Schmidt Robert Suro "…….."You don't tell the FBI that in this particular investigation - unlike any other - you don't seek a full explanation of what happened. You follow the facts and let them lead where they may," said one experienced Justice Department prosecutor familiar with the Independent Counsel Act. "If they said we're not going to look into this because it might lead to a covered person . . . it is prima facie evidence of proof of conflict of interest. If they were restraining the agents, if they curtailed the manner in which questions could be asked, that should have been the moment when they appointed an independent counsel."……Terry Eastland, a Reagan-era Justice Department official who has written a book on the independent counsel law, said the limitations agents felt were placed on them reflected a "very rigid analysis. . . . If you feel that constrained that you can't interview anybody . . . you've already bumped up against the statute, and you ought to hand it off" to an independent counsel……."

National Post 3/11/00 "…….To this day, however, the full report has never seen the light of day. Ms. Reno has repeatedly rejected any outside investigation of White House campaign finance wrongdoing -- in defiance of the opinion of both Mr. LaBella and Louis Freeh, the FBI director. And she has kept a tight lid on the LaBella memo. In September, 1998, Ms. Reno did allow a small group of congressmen to review a version. But 64 of the memo's 94 pages had been blacked out in advance, and each copy was collected following their review in order to prevent public dissemination. Recently, however, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the redacted LaBella report. And yesterday, the newspaper published details of its contents. ….."

FoxNews 3/10/00 "……A House committee issued subpoenas Friday to the Justice Department to recover memos concerning its probe of alleged campaign-finance violations by the Clinton administration, FOXNews.com has learned………In a letter to Reno, Burton also accused the Justice Department of leaking the information to the Times - a charge department officials strongly denied. ……. "The leak of the LaBella memo comes on the heels of new information about the White House not producing several hundreds of thousands of e-mails to Congress, the Justice Department and several independent counsels who have investigated the Clinton Administration," Burton said in a written statement. "I'd like to know why to this day, Janet Reno hasn't asked the White House for these documents?" his statement said. "She says she's been conducting an aggressive investigation of the campaign finance scandal. The evidence would suggest the opposite." ………. ….."

LA Times 3/10/00 William Rempel Alan Miller "….According to an edited version of the 94-page document, former task force supervisor Charles G. LaBella also faulted Reno's top advisors for using "intellectually dishonest" double standards: endorsing independent counsels to investigate Cabinet-level administration officials while opposing them for similar or stronger cases involving senior White House figures………. LaBella's accusations are particularly troubling for the Clinton administration because the career prosecutor was hand-picked in September 1997 to bolster public confidence in the Justice Department-controlled investigations of political fund-raising abuses. ……LaBella said it would be "inappropriate to comment" on his report while it remained confidential. However, the former task force chief said that he stands by its conclusions. "It was the right advice then and it's the right advice today," he said. "I still believe it's the only way to avoid even unwarranted appearances of a political fix." He said that Reno could yet refer the matter to an outside special prosecutor under existing Justice guidelines, a move that he recommends. ….. LaBella was joined on what he called an "interim report" by James V. DeSarno Jr., an assistant FBI director who supervised agents assigned to the task force. ……… "

LA Times 3/10/00 William Rempel Alan Miller "….Another former task force prosecutor, Steve Clark of San Diego, complained in a scathing internal memo in December 1997 that his efforts to investigate possible corruption by both major parties was frustrated by "behind-the-scenes maneuvering, personal animosity, distortions of fact and contortions of law" by high-level Justice officials. …….Top Justice lawyers took strong exception to the LaBella report. Its frank language privately outraged some of Reno's closest advisors. Lee J. Radek, chief of the Public Integrity Section, responded with a blistering letter to Reno. He called LaBella's legal arguments "flawed," challenged the grounds for implicating the first lady and ridiculed the underlying elements of LaBella's case for an independent counsel. He said that, given one legal standard LaBella sought to apply, "every member of Congress would be under criminal investigation."

LA Times 3/10/00 William Rempel Alan Miller "….Radek, a 29-year Justice Department veteran and staunch foe of independent counsel referrals for Gore, Ickes and the Clintons, also said that he was furious over LaBella's suggestion that the motivations of some Reno aides were "colored by bad faith, a deliberate twisting of the law and an effort to protect the White House." LaBella, who was a senior field prosecutor in San Diego, replaced one of Radek's staff attorneys who was dumped after a series of investigative embarrassments and accusations of mismanagement put the task force under heavy political fire. Radek said in an interview that he and LaBella had "an honest disagreement" about the application of the independent counsel act but that "the attorney general's standing order was to leave no stone unturned." ……"

LA Times 3/10/00 William Rempel Alan Miller "….Although half of the report reviewed by The Times was excised to protect grand jury secrecy and ongoing investigations, some of the deleted material was pieced together from other documents. Most of that missing information relates directly to the task force cases against Clinton, Gore, Ickes and Mrs. Clinton. …….. Both Ickes and Mrs. Clinton met with the defense fund trustee to discuss Trie's donations, and the first lady and president agreed that the money should be returned. According to the report, none of the three--the president, Mrs. Clinton or Ickes--informed the DNC, where Trie was a major fund-raiser, that he was bringing in foreign donations to the Democrats, which was illegal. The report said that each had, at least arguably, a fiduciary responsibility to alert Democratic officials and said that Mrs. Clinton's "potential criminal involvement" grew out of this failure. Trie continued to raise large sums for the Democrats. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations last May. ……"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/9/00 Jerry Seper "…..Officials at Northrop Grumman Corp. have confirmed that thousands of White House e-mails containing information on "Filegate," campaign finance abuses, "Chinagate" and Monica Lewinsky were never turned over to a federal grand jury or three congressional committees despite pending subpoenas. House investigators said yesterday the confirmation came after extensive interviews with Northrop Grumman employees, who discovered a glitch in the White House computer system in 1998 showing that more than 100,000 White House e-mails involving 500 computer users had never been surrendered……. "There is an appearance that White House lawyers have made a conscious decision to do nothing to solve the problem posed by so many documents being improperly managed," Mr. Burton wrote. "I can only conclude you are personally content with what is, in effect, a purposeful effort to keep the documents from Congress, the Department of Justice and various independent counsels," he wrote………In a separate letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, Mr. Burton questioned why no effort had been made to investigate the e-mail accusations - which first surfaced last month - and demanded an explanation on what the Justice Department intends to do about the matter……..

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/9/00 Jerry Seper "…..James Wilson, the House committee's chief counsel, said investigators determined that hundreds of thousands of e-mails sent to the White House were never reviewed and never made available under subpoena. "There is great concern about what these documents might contain and, of course, why they were never turned over since the White House knew they existed," he said, noting that hundreds could contain pertinent information about several ongoing investigations……The White House e-mails had been sought under subpoena by a federal grand jury, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Government Reform Committee. They also were sought by Judicial Watch in separate pending suits involving Filegate and Chinagate….."

Washington Post 3/9/00 Vernon Loeb "……A senior FBI official is under investigation by the General Accounting Office for possibly withholding documents from Congress last year in the Wen Ho Lee case, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday. In a flurry of activity on the Lee case, Grassley disclosed the GAO probe and faulted the FBI for failing to inform Congress throughout much of 1999 that its agents had concluded Lee was not the prime suspect in an espionage probe at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The investigation involved leaked W-88 warhead secrets to China. Grassley's comments came as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), released his own report on the Lee case. In contrast to Grassley, Specter played down the FBI's role and focused instead on the Justice Department's failure to approve a secret search warrant for Lee's office. Grassley, who sharply criticized the Specter report, did not name the FBI official under investigation. But Senate sources said he was referring to Neil Gallagher, head of the FBI's National Security Division……….. "I am interested in the Office of Special Investigations resuming its investigation of withheld documents in the Wen Ho Lee case and the role that a key official might have played in it," Grassley said. FBI spokesman John E. Collingwood responded that Gallagher personally granted Congress "unprecedented access" last fall to the "raw file" in the Lee case and is eager to be interviewed by GAO investigators to resolve the matter…….."

New York Times 3/11/00 Howell Raines "…..The documents are further evidence of Ms. Reno's politicized handling of the campaign fund-raising issue and of her dedication to protecting Democratic Party interests from start to finish. Given her record, it is unlikely that these revelations will now shame her into appointing another strong prosecutor to reinvigorate her department's languishing campaign finance investigation. But she owes the public an explanation of her behavior, and Congress will need to explore ways to force action from attorneys general who protect their cronies while ignoring the recommendations of professional investigators. …….. The document does not accuse any of these Democrats of illegal activities. What it does say is that the department's failure to appoint an independent counsel, and its insistence on using its own lawyers, was "a recipe for disaster" guaranteeing that the public would never learn the truth. In many respects the La Bella memo echoed the views of Louis J. Freeh, the F.B.I. director, who also told Ms. Reno that under the independent counsel law she was legally obliged to appoint an outside investigator who would not be troubled, as Ms. Reno inevitably would be, by the conflicts of interest inherent in investigating her boss and the vice president……."

New York Times 3/11/00 Howell Raines "…..The second damaging document, disclosed in today's New York Times, is a letter from a senior Justice Department official ordering a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Stephen Mansfield, to stop his investigation of the now-famous fund-raising luncheon that Mr. Gore attended in April 1996 at a Buddhist retreat in California. With presumably unintended irony, the official, Lee J. Radek, informed Mr. Mansfield that he should cease and desist because the matter could have "independent counsel ramifications" -- even though Ms. Reno never had any real appetite for such a counsel. Mr. Mansfield halted his investigation, and in the following months several figures involved in the temple fund-raising scheme fled the country. The department's own internal inquiry exonerated Mr. Gore. So far the only person nailed in the affair has been Maria Hsia, a California immigration consultant and fund-raiser for Mr. Gore who was convicted by a federal jury in Washington last week……."

Associated Press 3/9/00 "……Missing pages from the notebook of an FBI agent investigating donations to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign were not missing at all, according to an agency report obtained by a newspaper. Last fall, during a hearing by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, FBI agent Roberta Parker testified that pages were missing from her red spiral notebook after it was returned to her from the Justice Department. …….. The notebook was sent to an FBI lab to try to determine who might have removed the pages. Before starting a fingerprint analysis, the lab conducted an "indentation analysis," a technique used to determine whether the pages actually were missing. In a Nov. 1 report, an FBI examiner concluded no pages had been removed, The Washington Post reported Thursday. ……. "

Associated Press 3/8/00 "……A Republican committee chairman said Wednesday he will issue a subpoena covering hundreds of thousands of e-mails sent to the White House, some of which may relate to the campaign fund-raising scandal. In a letter, Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana said White House officials have known of the e-mails for some time but failed to determine if any of them related to congressional investigations. ……… Burton said his Government Reform Committee interviewed ''a number of individuals who work on the White House e-mail system'' and ''what they told us was ... profoundly disturbing. ….."

conservativenews.org 3/9/00 Susan Jones "……According to a report in Thursday's Washington Times, officials at Northrop Grumman Corporation have confirmed that the subpoenaed e-mails were never turned over. ……. The contract employees also confirmed that White House officials told them they'd go to jail if they discussed their discovery with anyone. …….The House Government Reform Committee reportedly plans to issue more subpoenas today for the withheld e-mails - many of which have been relabeled as "classified" in an apparent attempt to keep them away from investigators. The House Government Reform Committee launched an investigation into the e-mails last month, when the former chief of White House computer operations told the Washington Times that administration officials covered up the fact that that e-mails from August 1996 to November 1998 had not been surrendered, as required by law. ......"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/10/00 Jerry Seper "….Five Northrop Grumman employees were so intimidated by White House threats of jail that one was nearly fired when she refused to tell her own bosses about the administration's failure to turn over thousands of e-mail messages under subpoena. Newly obtained information shows the White House threatened to have the five employees jailed after they found - and reported - a glitch in the White House computer system that prevented the discovery of more than 100,000 White House messages involving campaign finance abuses, Monica Lewinsky, "Chinagate" and "Filegate." The threat came from Laura Crabtree, White House customer-support branch chief, during a June 15, 1998, meeting in her office after the discovery by Northrop Grumman of the computer glitch, according to lawyers and others familiar with the growing scandal. She told the employees the matter was "extremely sensitive," warned them not to tell anyone about it without explicit authorization and said the consequences would be a "jail cell."......"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/10/00 Jerry Seper "….One of the Northrop Grumman employees, all of whom worked on a technical-support contract for the Executive Office of the President, was given 30 minutes to change her mind or be fired for insubordination when she refused - as ordered by the White House - to tell her immediate supervisors about the e-mail problem. That employee ultimately told the company's program manager she would "rather be insubordinate than go to jail." During the June 1998 White House meeting, Mrs. Crabtree asked each of the five employees individually if they understood there were consequences if they spoke out about the e-mail problem, according to the sources…….."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/10/00 Jerry Seper "….The employees confirmed in interviews Tuesday by government reform panel lawyers a series of accusations made last month by Sheryl L. Hall, chief of White House computer operations……… The Northrop Grumman employees discovered that because one of the e-mail servers was named "Mail2" instead of "MAIL2" and because some components of the system were case-sensitive, the incoming messages to the users of "Mail2" were not collected between September 1996 and November 1998. The effort to fix the problem initially was dubbed "Project X," but later changed to the "Mail2 Reconstruction Project."……"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/10/00 Jerry Seper "….The Northrop Grumman employees brought the mistake to the attention of Mrs. Crabtree and Mark Lindsay, head of the Office of Management and Administration. Mr. Lindsay, who participated in the June 1998 meeting in Mrs. Crabtree's office by speakerphone, and Mrs. Crabtree, who now works at the Labor Department, have been unavailable for comment. ......... On Wednesday, the House Committee on Government Reform asked White House Counsel Beth Nolan for a meeting to discuss the matter. The committee issued subpoenas Thursday for a number of related documents and reports. Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican and panel chairman, told Miss Nolan in a letter this week it appeared the White House had " made a conscious decision to do nothing to solve the problem posed by so many documents being improperly managed." He also asked Attorney General Janet Reno why no effort had been made to investigate the e-mail accusations….."

Insight Magazine 3/10/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….The explosive affidavit by Betty Lambuth, filed under seal in late February before District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, not only confirms details of a story that was first reported by Insight magazine in December 1998 and January 1999, but goes on to detail threats by White House lawyers to punish any employee who revealed the existence of the secret e-mails even to White House staff in charge of computer-system operations. …….. It is Hall's latest affidavit delivered to Judge Lamberth on March 10, however, that contains the rocket sure to send sparks through Congress and the White House concerning a secret operation to destroy confidential computer records. ……. Although the senior staff of the House Government Reform Committee knew of the so-called lost e-mails and the White House's attempts to conceal the discovery of the priceless data from many investigators, the materials were neither sought nor subpoenaed by the committee. That is, until early March 2000 when the Washington Times picked up the original Insight stories from two years ago (see "news alert!" March 13) and, separately, Dan Burton confirmed that at least five government contract employees had been threatened with loss of jobs and/or jail time if ever they revealed the information. …….. Besides the Burton committee, the FBI Campaign Task Force and the Office of Independent Counsel Ray (who succeeded Ken Starr) now are on the trail of the e-mails and long-distance telephone records. Although agents from the Campaign Task Force actually had meetings with White House lawyers shortly after the original Insight stories broke, they reportedly failed to follow up. "I promise you, we'll get these records now," a high-level federal law-enforcement official said, March 10. ...... The latest revelations, plus new ones not yet revealed to the court or Congress, have rattled the White House and angered members of Congress in both political parties. Burton is expected to conduct hearings shortly on the entire matter and, as Insight sources say, work already has begun to depose current and former contract employees who worked at the White House and claim to have been threatened by senior Clinton staff and lawyers. ......The Justice Department Campaign Finance Task Force, along with Independent Counsel Ray, also are preparing new batches of subpoenas, Insight has learned, based on the latest revelations and, in particular, a review of notes from meetings with White House lawyers who said such records did not exist when, in fact, they did. ……"

Judicial Watch 3/10/00 Sheryl Hall "…..FOURTH DECLARATION OF SHERYL L. HALL……. * When I served as a Computer Specialist in the Clinton-Gore White House, I provided government oversight to contractor staff for the development of procedures for archiving data from the hard drives of departing Clinton-Gore White House staffers. These procedures, which continue to this day, include the archiving of a departing employee's entire hard drive onto a computer archival cartridge tape. The computer archival cartridge tape records all of the data from the ex-staffer's hard drive and is capable of being searched in response to subpoenas and document requests. Once a hard drive's contents are archived onto a cartridge tape, the hard drive itself is reformatted so that it can be reallocated for future use. When the hard drive is reformatted, all of the data previously on that hard drive is lost. There are at least 500 computer archival cartridge tapes containing data from the hard drives of Clinton-Gore White House staffers, including William Kennedy, Linda Tripp, Jane Sherburne, Lisa Wetzl, Betsy Pond, and Deborah Gorham.
* I have had several conversations with a career staff member of the Clinton-Gore White House's Office of Administration ("OA"). This OA staff member told me that he/she was contacted by the Clinton-Gore White House OA Counsel's Office last week to inquire about why the computer hard drives of departing Clinton-Gore White House staffers were being archived.

* This OA staffer has told me that, based upon his/her discussions with Clinton-Gore White House OA counsel and other staffers, the Clinton-Gore White House plans to destroy these archival cartridge tapes of the computer hard drives of departed Clinton White House staffers. According to this OA staffer, the Clinton White House is planning to erase, or "degauss," the cartridge tapes using a magnetic device. Furthermore, the Clinton White House plans to stop archiving the hard drives of departing Clinton White House staffers. Instead it will simply reformat the hard drives of a departing Clinton White House staffer and destroy the data on the drives. So, for instance, if Sidney Blumenthal left the Clinton White House or even transferred to another White House agency at some future date, the contents of his current computer hard drive would simply be erased and reformatted under this planned procedure.

* As with the Project X e-mail, the archived hard drive data described above has not been searched in response to subpoenas and document requests.

* Based on conversations with this OA staffer, I understand that the destruction of this hard drive data is imminent and could begin any day.

* Furthermore, the e-mail tapes of Project X are susceptible to easy destruction using the same degaussing technique described above. …….."

ABCnews.com 3/10/00 Josh Gerstein "…..In a pair of hearings today, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth heard arguments from lawyers involved in the dispute. Attorneys representing Republican appointees whose FBI files were improperly requested by the White House several years ago have asked the judge to allow them to investigate the e-mail problem and the possibility that other White House computer records were lost. A lawyer representing the government asked that the White House have more time respond to the allegations. Lamberth did not rule today on whether the White House had engaged in any wrongdoing, but he did seek firm assurances that all computer records that still exist will be preserved. At a hearing this morning, the judge, who has clashed repeatedly with the Clinton Administration, said he wanted the names of White House officials who could be held responsible if data tapes or servers were erased. Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan returned to court this afternoon with the names of two White House officials who had agreed to safeguard the records. Lamberth made clear that he would take harsh action if any records were destroyed. "The White House has had enough experience with me to know what the consequences of that would be," Lamberth said. The judge said he has the "names of the people that will be hung and they know I will hang them." …."

ABCnews.com 3/10/00 Josh Gerstein "…..At every opportunity during the two hearings, Klayman sought to broaden the discussion to include the fact that the e-mails may have contained information sought by Independent Counsel Ken Starr or congressional committees. After the morning hearing, Klayman suggested that Clinton would have been successfully removed from office if the allegedly missing computer records were turned over at the appropriate time. For his part, Gilligan argued that the court should simply consider the e-mail problem in the narrow context of the Filegate dispute. He did his best to ignore the near certainty that a substantial number of e-mails arriving at the White House in 1998 would have had references to Monica Lewinsky and other matters that were under investigation by a federal grand jury…"

ABCnews.com 3/10/00 Josh Gerstein "…..In a new declaration, Hall said that the White House also failed to search back-up tapes made from the hard drives of desktop computers of departing staffers. She said she'd been told by a current staffer that the White House is planning to "degauss" or erase the information on those back up tapes. During today's proceedings, Gilligan asked the judge to force Judicial Watch to name those providing that information, but the judge declined to do so……"

Rep. Curt Weldon's Website 3/10/00 "…..Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) charged Attorney General Janet Reno with attempting to cover-up a myriad of campaign fundraising illegalities in the wake of the public disclosure of the LaBella memo in today's L.A. Times. As a member of the Cox Committee investigating Chinese espionage and the transfer of sophisticated military technologies from the U.S. to the People's Republic of China, Weldon has repeatedly called upon the Justice Department to release the memo. ……."This shows the Clinton-Gore-Reno stonewalling for what it was - a nakedly political attempt by the Clinton-Gore Administration to squelch all evidence of its illegal activity," said Weldon. "The months-long spin-doctoring of the Reno whitewashers was nothing more than a lame attempt to explain away a cover-up." ……

……"I have long-believed that the LaBella memorandum contained damning information on the illegal campaign fundraising efforts by the Clinton-Gore Administration," stated Weldon, who says there is a link between illegal campaign contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign and the DNC and the transfer of sensitive technologies to China. "During our investigation, the Cox Committee - which was afforded unprecedented access to a wide range of classified intelligence documents - requested a copy of the LaBella memo but was refused by Janet Reno and the Justice Department. Now we know why."

…….Today's L.A. Times revealed that the internal Justice Department Campaign Finance Task Force - set up to investigate illegal campaign financing activities during the 1996 election - was stifled, in the words of one task force prosecutor, by "behind-the-scenes maneuvering, personal animosity, distortions of fact and contortions of law" by high-level Justice officials. Another task force attorney stated "They didn't want us to succeed. It made them look bad."

.........Ultimately, Janet Reno rejected recommendations by both Charles Labella, the head of the task force, and FBI Director Louis Freeh to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the illegal campaign fundraising. According to the task force, issues that warranted the appointment of a special counsel included:
* evidence that Vice President Gore may have provided false testimony to investigators;
* the likely knowledge within the White House of efforts to inject foreign funds into the reelection effort;
* and a potential quid pro quo with Charlie Trie in exchange for obtaining more than $460,000 in illegal campaign donations
"This is just the tip of the iceberg," predicted Weldon. "There are countless pages that were redacted from the memo that I believe will offer even more damaging evidence of wrong-doing by the Clinton-Gore Administration."

…….."Charles LaBella wasn't some politically motivated investigator," stated Weldon. "He was handpicked by Janet Reno to head this task force in an effort restore integrity to this investigation. Apparently, LaBella restored more integrity to the task force than either Janet Reno or the White House could handle." ……"

Committee on Goverment Reform 3/10/00 "……Chairman Dan Burton (R-IN) today issued a subpoena to the Justice Department for the 1997 memos by FBI Director Louis Freeh and former head of the Campaign Fundraising Task Force Chuck La Bella. Burton said:

……."The leak of the La Bella memo comes on the heels of new information about the White House not producing hundreds of thousands of e-mails to Congress, the Justice Department and the several independent counsels who have investigated the Clinton Administration.

…….."I'd like to know why to this day, Janet Reno hasn't asked the White House for these documents? She says she's been conducting an aggressive investigation of the campaign finance scandal. The evidence would suggest the opposite. "It's not surprising that Janet Reno has taken no steps to get this information. She didn't even let her investigators ask Al Gore or President Clinton about John Huang, James Riady, Maria Hsia, Charlie Trie or the Buddhist Temple fundraiser.

………"The leak of the La Bella memo speaks volumes about Janet Reno's mishandling of the campaign fundraising investigation, and her disregard for Congressional oversight of the Justice Department. "I expect immediate compliance with the Committee's subpoena. There is no reason why Congress should not get substantially unredacted versions of those documents."

Committee on Government Reform 3/10/00 letter to Janet Reno "…..The Justice Department has apparently disclosed to the Los Angeles Times the memorandum by Charles La Bella regarding the appointment of an Independent Counsel for the campaign fundraising investigation. As you know, I subpoenaed this memorandum, as well as the similar memorandum by FBI Director Louis Freeh, in July 1998. You refused to comply with my subpoena, and the Committee voted to hold you in contempt. However, you have still refused to provide the memorandum to the Committee, despite that contempt vote and several requests since that time. While you failed to comply with a lawful Congressional subpoena, either you or someone in the Justice Department has seen fit to provide the La Bella memorandum to the media. The leak of the La Bella memorandum speaks volumes about your mismanagement of the Justice Department, your mishandling of the campaign fundraising investigation, and your disregard for Congressional oversight of the Justice Department. I am sending with this letter a subpoena for the Freeh and La Bella memoranda, and I expect that the Department will now comply with the subpoena.

The Committee initially subpoenaed the Freeh memorandum in December 1997, and then it subpoenaed both the Freeh and La Bella memoranda in July 1998. You refused to comply with the subpoenas, claiming that disclosure of the memoranda to the Committee would harm the Justice Department's campaign fundraising investigation, as well as the internal deliberation process at the Justice Department. In a letter dated July 28, 1998, you stated:

In another letter dated August 4, 1998, you stated that:

Leaving aside the fact that your senior staff have leaked a list of the status of every campaign fundraising case and other information that has had a negative impact on your cases, providing the La Bella memo to the press is an extraordinary turn of events.

In the same August 4 letter quoted above, you also claimed that disclosure of the memos would create a "chilling effect" on Department employees' ability to render advice to you:

You used these arguments against the Committee forcefully and repeatedly during the contempt debate. I was told countless times that compliance with my subpoenas would harm your investigation. I was told that all of the Members of the Committee could not even review the memos in private, because they might leak the contents of the memos. But, the Justice Department's current release of the La Bella memo leads me to reach one of four possible conclusions:

* The arguments that you made in July 1998 were false and misleading.
* The arguments that you made in July 1998 were true, but you no longer are concerned about protecting the Department's investigation, or the frank and candid advice of your subordinates.
* All of the investigations discussed in the La Bella memo are closed, and the memo can be released publicly, but rather than comply with the Committee's lawful subpoena, you decided to release the memo to the press.
* You still believe that disclosure of the memo would cause significant harm to the campaign fundraising investigation, but you do not have enough control over your senior political advisers to prevent them from leaking the memo to the press.

The release of the La Bella memo shows that something is seriously wrong at the Justice Department; whether it is incompetence, politicization, or a serious disregard for the rule of law has yet to be determined. Since the Department has released the La Bella memo to the press, I expect that you will now comply with this Committee's subpoena for the Freeh and La Bella memos, and provide them to the Committee by Tuesday, March 14. I also expect that the memos will be redacted only to remove information covered by Rule 6(e).

It is clear, based on the brief portions of the La Bella memo that I have reviewed or that have been reported by the Los Angeles Times, why you did not want to release the memo to the Committee. First, the La Bella memo condemned you for misleading the American people by providing an erroneous explanation of when an Independent Counsel could be appointed. It also claimed that you had erected a higher legal threshold for investigating White House officials and others covered by the Independent Counsel Act than other individuals. Mr. La Bella concluded that the "contortions that the Department has gone through to avoid investigating these allegations are apparent." As an example of these contortions, Mr. La Bella referred to one senior official, whose name was redacted from the report: "[i]f these allegations involved anyone other than [redacted], an appropriate investigation would have commenced months ago without hesitation."

As described by Mr. La Bella in his memo, the Task Force's investigation was created to fail. Since he wrote his memo, this Committee has discovered countless examples of how that investigation has failed. While many of these cases will be detailed in a report that this Committee will issue later this year, I can briefly recount some of them here:

* Your investigators failed to ask President Clinton a single question about James Riady, Charlie Trie, John Huang, or any other aspect of his involvement in raising foreign money for the 1996 election. As a close friend of Riady, Trie, and Huang, if Bill Clinton were an ordinary citizen, rather than President of the United States, he would have been questioned extensively by the FBI, and likely called before the grand jury. Instead, your Task Force gave him a free pass.a

* Your investigators failed to ask Vice President Gore a single question about his relationship with Maria Hsia, or his role in the infamous Buddhist Temple fundraiser. Likewise, if Al Gore were not Vice President, and were some other private citizen with a ten-year fundraising relationship with Maria Hsia, your investigators would have questioned him extensively.

* You have failed to pursue documents held by the White House and other agencies. For example, it has been widely reported in the press that the White House has failed to produce to Congress or several Independent Counsels thousands of e-mails covered by subpoenas. While there are almost certainly Justice Department subpoenas outstanding for those e-mails, as of March 8, the Justice Department had not contacted any of the Northrop Grumman employees responsible for the White House e-mail system. In contrast, when you were confronted with embarrassing new information in the Waco tragedy, you immediately dispatched United States Marshals to seize evidence from the FBI. When you learned of significant new evidence being held by the White House in the campaign fundraising matter, you did nothing. While this disparate treatment could simply be attributed to incompetence, the La Bella memo suggests that there might be more serious reasons for the Department's failure. You seem to be proceeding on the premise of what you don't know won't hurt your political colleagues and your political party.

* The La Bella memo apparently points out that the First Lady has potential criminal involvement in the campaign fundraising scandal, based on her failure to warn the DNC about the illegal campaign fundraising activities of Charlie Trie. In April 1996, Mrs. Clinton was warned that Trie was raising huge amounts of money for the Presidential Legal Expense Trust. By May 1996, her closest advisers were told that the money raised by Trie was foreign money, and had been given through straw donors. However, Mrs. Clinton did nothing to warn the DNC about Trie's illegal fundraising. In the time period between April and November 1996, while Mrs. Clinton sat on this information, Trie raised hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of illegal contributions for the DNC. Your task force has apparently failed to follow up on these serious allegations.

The La Bella memo's conclusions about your handling of the campaign fundraising investigation are alarming. Moreover, Mr. La Bella's predictions about the failure of the investigation have come true. Many low-level figures, like John Huang and Charlie Trie, have pled guilty, and gotten light sentences without giving up any serious evidence. In the process, they have maintained implausible stories that exculpate them and their superiors. For example, John Huang sat before this Committee and testified that the Buddhist Temple event with the Vice President was not a fundraiser, even though it raised funds, and even though individuals who contributed to attend were seated at the front. I fail to understand how you can hear testimony like that, and then tell a sentencing judge that Mr. Huang is cooperating with your investigation. Similarly, Charlie Trie appeared before this Committee and claimed that the money given to him by Ng Lap Seng to contribute to the DNC was actually Trie's own money, even though he did not pay taxes on it, or list it on his financial disclosure forms. Yet again, Mr. Trie received credit for cooperating with the Justice Department. Failure to obtain true cooperation from these witnesses has meant that the Department has not been able to pursue White House and DNC officials who may have had a role in the fundraising scandal. The La Bella memo raises a serious question as to whether this failure is intentional.

By ignoring the advice given to you by Director Freeh and Mr. La Bella, you crippled the campaign fundraising investigation. By withholding the memos from this Committee, you tried to keep the Committee from learning how you had mishandled the investigation. At this point, it is unlikely the harm can be undone, and that a real campaign fundraising investigation will ever be conducted by the Department. However, the Congress has a right to know what has happened, and therefore, I expect that you will immediately comply with the Committee's subpoena……"

Judicial Watch 2/2000 "….. THIRD DECLARATION OF SHERYL L. HALL ……. This problem was not noticed, allegedly, for nearly two years. The number of e-mails that were not records managed was over 100,000. These e-mails (which originated from outside the Clinton White House network) were to the individual e-mail addresses of much of the West Wing staff, including the President himself, and much of the top staff of the President and Mrs. Clinton -- nearly 500 people. This problem was uncovered in May, 1998 by Northrop-Grumman contractors assigned to the Clinton White House who managed the e-mail computer systems and performed searches of Clinton White House e-mails in response to subpoenas. ……….. "

--------Because of this problem, when a search of e-mails was done in the Clinton White House in response to a subpoena from an independent counsel, a congressional committee, or from Plaintiffs during the time period of August, 1996 through at least November, 1998, those 100,000 e-mails would not have been searched. Despite Clinton White House officials learning of the problem (including its impact on searches in response to subpoenas) initially in May, 1998, the problem was not fixed until at least November, 1998. As a result, six additional months of incoming e-mails were not "records managed" so that they could be searched in response to subpoenas……... I was also told by this contractor that if the contents of the e-mails became known, then there would be different outcomes to these scandals, as the e-mails were incriminating and could cause people to go to jail……

…….. But the computer system on which the e-mails at issue came into the Clinton White House was "open" and was not classified. In fact, e-mails "records managed" before and after the two year gap were not classified. Classified e-mails existed on a system run by the National Security Council, a wholly separate system than the one at issue here. The Clinton White House simply did not want the existence of these "lost" e-mails publically known - as they did not want to search them in response to subpoenas and they did not want to have to explain to the American public why the e-mails had not been searched in the first place. They thus "classified" the e-mails improperly to keep them isolated and secret from investigators…….

…… A number of employees for Northrop-Grumman who were contracted to help run The White House computer systems were aware of Project X (as they had uncovered the initial problem) and the serious implications of keeping it secret from the American public, law enforcement, and the U.S. Congress. One of these contractors was told by Laura Crabtree that he would be fired if he told Daniel Barry, a Clinton White House Office of Administration computer specialist, about Project X……. All five Northrop-Grumman contract employees assigned to work on Project X were threatened with loss of their jobs if they told others, including their management at Northrop-Grumman, about the true nature of Project X. In fact, one contractor told me he feared for his life as a result of his knowledge about Project X……..Another contractor for Northrop-Grumman was told by Mark Lindsay that Lindsay had "a jail cell" with that contractor's "name on it" if he divulged any information about Project X. ……. I will provide the names of these individual Northrop-Grumman contractors to the Court, under seal, as revealing these names publically at this time could put them in jeopardy…….

…….. White House, including but not limited to former White House Counsel Charles Ruff. …….. And based on my experience of working at the Clinton White House for seven years, I believe Mrs. Clinton was aware of Project X, given the fact that she ran the Clinton White House, including the Clinton White House Counsel's office, and overseeing the hiring and firing of Clinton White House personnel. In fact, I had been told the First Lady's office regularly vetted the results of e-mail searches in response to subpoenas……. Public statements responding to recent press reports on this issue by President Clinton, Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, and Clinton White House spokesman Jim Kennedy are false. There was no "good faith" response, nor full compliance, by the Clinton White House in terms of e-mail searches to subpoenas from Congress, Independent Counsels, the Justice Department and Plaintiffs in this case.

Hman Events via World Net Daily 2/28/00 Scott Park "…..Hall was a civil service employee. In 1992, she moved to the White House from the Department of the Navy to help modernize an outdated computer system. After she questioned whether the vast new White House computer database, or WHODB, that the Clintons were creating was necessary, White House staff ostracized her. When Hall told administration officials that the project rang warning bells for her, because it could have inappropriate political applications, her duties were stripped. "They call it 'The Tripp Treatment,'" she said. "I got 'The Tripp Treatment' and this was long before anyone outside the White House had heard of Linda Tripp." Despite the fact that she had no work to do, Hall still reported to the White House and continued to speak regularly with her former subordinates and with the Northrop-Grumman contractors who maintained the White House computers. Northrop-Grumman had assigned a five-member team to oversee Lotus, a computer program used for e-mails at the White House. ……. In the days before White House computer expert Daniel Barry was to testify before Congress about subpoenaed e-mails and Monica Lewinsky, the Northrop-Grumman contractor with knowledge about the missing e-mails was warned to keep Barry in the dark, Hall said. "Another contractor with Northrop-Grumman was told by Mark Lindsay, director of the White House Office of Administration, that Lindsay had 'a jail cell' with that contractor's 'name on it' if he divulged any information on Project X," Hall stated. "One of these contractors was told by administration official Laura Crabtree that he would be fired if he told Daniel Barry, a Clinton White House Office of Administration computer specialist, about Project X. At that point, Barry was unaware of Project X, even though he was about to testify in two days to Congress concerning White House e-mails and Monica Lewinsky. As a result of Crabtree's threat, Barry did not have this relevant information about these 100,000 e-mails when he testified to Congress," said Hall. ……."Prior to 1996 this [computer system] wasn't a classified environment," said Hall. "What logic did they have to classify this if not to suppress it?" ......... Hall said that Congress could easily search the missing materials by seizing the tapes now and printing them. If Congress wants to hold anyone accountable, it had better act quickly, said Hall, noting that one six-month stretch of tapes had been overwritten because of "human error." Congress has yet to give any sign it is pursuing the missing e-mails. "You know that [White House political operatives] are thugs, but you'd expect the Hill to do something about it," said Hall. ……"

New York Post 3/12/00 Brian Blomquist Kenneth Lovett "…..The former head of the federal funny-money task force said his bombshell memo should be released to the public, but Attorney General Janet Reno is still keeping it secret. "It's just a call for her. As far as I know, there's no grand-jury or investigative reason why it can't be disclosed. It's just a matter of policy, of whether she wants to do it or not," said Chuck LaBella, who now works for a private investigative firm in San Diego. LaBella's memo called for an independent counsel to probe the fund-raising abuses of the 1996 election -- a move Reno has rejected…… Reno has refused to release the LaBella memo, despite a 1998 congressional subpoena of it in 1998. Yesterday, Reno received a second subpoena demanding the memo. ……"

The Washington Weekly 3/13/00 Marvin Lee "……In the court of federal judge Royce Lamberth the White House last Friday asked for the names of whistleblowers who have come forward in recent weeks to allege that the White House threatened employees and contractors not to reveal that about 100,000 e- mails had not been indexed for searching in response to subpoenas. Judge Lamberth denied the request. Several whistleblowers have asked for court protection because they fear for their safety. According to witness Sheryl Hall, some of the emails cannot be restored because they were backed up on tapes that have now been erased. Judge Lamberth last Friday threatened the White House not to erase any more tapes: "The White House has had enough experience with me to know what the consequences of that would be," he said. Lamberth said he has the "names of the people that will be hung and they know I will hang them."…..The White House has expressed its displeasure with Judge Lamberth. ….."

Committee on Goverment Reform Website 3/17/00 Rep Dan Burton "……Chairman Dan Burton (R-IN) today announced that the Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on the missing White House E-mails and the mismanagement of subpoenaed records. The hearing will take place on Thursday, March 23, 2000, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2154 of the Rayburn Building. The Committee will hear testimony from the Northrop Grumman employees who discovered the problem and the White House officials involved…….. When the contractors informed their White House supervisors of the problem, they were reportedly ordered to remain silent about it or there would be "jail cells with their names on them." Since the problem was discovered in 1998 the White House has not solved the problem. It has been a few weeks since the story was first reported in the Washington Times. To date, the Committee's investigation has produced no indication that the Justice Department has looked into the matter……."

CNSNews.com 3/17/00 Dorothea Cooke "…..Cable news giant CNN has decided against airing a taped interview with a former White House employee who said thousands of White House e-mails -- containing information on "Filegate," campaign finance abuses, "Chinagate," and Monica Lewinsky -- were never turned over to a federal grand jury or three congressional committees, despite pending subpoenas. CNN said Sheryl Hall's story "lacks independent, corroborating evidence," but the network said it will continue to follow the story as it develops. ….."After thoroughly investigating her allegations and not finding any other corroborating sources, we made an editorial decision not to broadcast the story," CNN President Tom Johnson told CNSNews.com. "We took the issue seriously enough to do the interview with Ms. Hall, in which she herself acknowledges that she did not have any direct information."

NewsMax.com 3/16/00 Carl Limbacher "…… After closing out Filegate with no indictments on Thursday, the Office of the Independent Counsel admitted that it did not pursue the central issue in the FBI files scandal -- the White House's illegal acquisition of over a thousand confidential background files on Republicans who worked for past administrations. The Office did not investigate alleged violations of the Privacy Act of 1974," Independent Counsel Robert Ray said in a press release issued Thursday afternoon, "because such offenses are excluded from the jurisdiction of an independent counsel." ………… "I'm sure that Mr. Ray feels that he's on firm legal ground," Landmark Legal Foundation's Mark Levin told NewsMax.com, "but I'm not aware that he's affirmatively barred from looking into the Privacy Act. Obviously he was free to seek the Attorney General's permission and if she rejects it, the court's permission to examine Privacy Act violations." "I don't think any examination of Filegate could be complete without that," Levin concluded. ….."

Newsweek 3/27/00 "……. A still-secret memo by FBI Director Louis Freeh could provide fresh ammunition for Republicans hoping to wound Vice President Al Gore over campaign-finance practices during the 1996 presidential race. In the November 24, 1997, memo addressed to Attorney General Janet Reno, portions of which were read to NEWSWEEK, Freeh criticized Justice Department lawyers for making "factual assumptions" favorable to the Clinton White House "without investigating whether those assumptions were accurate." Among the issues Freeh argued needed to be investigated by an independent counsel: Gore's fund-raising calls from the White House, the use of a White House computer database for political purposes and whether Clinton and Gore illegally raised money on federal property during White House "coffees." …."

This Week Freeper Kristinn 3/19/00 "….. As transcribed from today's "This Week" on ABC News.
George Will:
"With regard to this, your focus, with senior White House officials--just out of curiousity, what did they do with the files in those months that they sat there ?"
Robert Ray:
"In most instances we were able, uh, to reconstruct, uh, the list that the White House actually used, uh, in order to request files from the FBI. And in instances where those files, and there were many of them, came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and went to the White House, most of those files, once those, uh, who were responsible for reviewing them realized that they were with regard to people who no longer required access to the White House, they, simply went into the vault at the, at the White House and that's where they remain." ….."

NY Times 3/20/00 Marc Lacey "…….Representative Dan Burton said today that he would subpoena President Clinton's chief counsel to appear before a Congressional committee this week to explain a computer glitch that might have kept e-mail messages received by hundreds of White House officials out of the hands of Congressional and other investigators……But Ms. Nolan said it would cost as much as $3 million and take as long as two years to fix the problem, which she said was caused by unintentional human error. She added that she did not know the number of unrecorded e-mail messages sent from outside the White House or the relevance of their contents. Ms. Nolan also disclosed a previously unknown glitch on the computer server in the office of Vice President Al Gore. ….."

CNSNews.com 3/17/00 Ben Anderson "……Five employees of a White House computer systems contractor are set to testify next week before a congressional panel investigating allegations that they were threatened by Clinton administration officials, in a White House scandal reminiscent of the missing Nixon Watergate tapes.......... Five employees of White House computer systems contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. will testify before the House Government Reform Committee regarding their 1998 discovery of that "computer glitch," which sent the subpoenaed e-mails into virtual limbo. CNSNews.com has learned that those scheduled to testify before the committee have "solid" corroborating testimony..........The latest development comes just as the Office of Independent Counsel announced its conclusions Thursday afternoon that no prosecutions are warranted in the FBI files matter (commonly known as Filegate), nor in the matter concerning whether former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum testified falsely before the House Government Reform Committee…….. Bob Koch, Northrop Grumman director of corporate communications, reiterated the company's official statement on the controversy, referring all other questions to the White House. ......Koch told CNSNews.com, "The company is under contract to provide technical support to the White House. In the course of these activities, Northrop Grumman employees at the White House discovered a technical flaw in the automated records management system. They immediately reported this to the White House. Northrop Grumman continues to fulfill our contractual requirements to the White House."......"

AP 3/17/00 Larry Margasak "……Blaming ''entirely unintentional'' computer breakdowns, the White House acknowledged Friday night that thousands of incoming e-mails on campaign fund raising and other matters could not be searched in response to House subpoenas. Reconstructing the incoming e-mails from 1996-1999 would involve a costly and time-consuming undertaking: up to $3 million and up to two years, White House counsel Beth Nolan wrote Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee. The Republican-controlled committee sought information on campaign fund-raising irregularities, the 1993 siege at the Waco, Texas, Branch Davidian compound and the presidential grant of clemency to 16 Puerto Rican separatists……… While researching the computer failures, an additional problem was discovered that could result in missing e-mails in Vice President Al Gore's office, Nolan said. The scope of that problem was unknown. ''These configuration errors were the sole result of human mistakes and entirely unintentional,'' the letter said……… The mostly technical letter did not address statements by a former White House contractor, who said in court papers that she was warned not to reveal the e-mail problem that concealed the messages from the Justice Department and Burton's committee. ……"

New York Times 3/14/00 Marc Lacey "…..The Clinton administration and some of its Republican critics are quarreling over misdirected White House e-mail messages that were not produced when they were subpoenaed in 1998……Did the e-mail contain incriminating messages with implications for central figures in those scandals, or were they just idle thoughts or random observations from outsiders irrelevant to the matters at hand? That remains unclear. But computer specialists who helped set up the White House computer system say administration officials were slow to fix the problem. They believe that many of the e-mail messages still exist, caught up in an electronic limbo. Because of that, the computer error has surfaced as the latest dispute between the administration and its fiercest critics, who have been playing cat and mouse for years over White House records. …… A Justice Department lawyer, James Gilligan, who appeared in court last week on behalf of the White House, said in documents that the administration had not retaliated against any workers or covered anything up. He filed papers that called the e-mail matter, which was first reported in The Washington Times, "another distraction" and another example of Judicial Watch's "chasing the morning headlines." ……"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/14/00 Jerry Seper "…… A top Justice Department official ordered federal prosecutors just before the 1996 presidential election to stop an investigation into suspected illegal fund raising by Vice President Al Gore at a California Buddhist temple. Lee J. Radek, head of the department's Office of Public Integrity, said in a secret Nov. 1, 1996, cease-and-desist order that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles "should take no steps to investigate these matters at this time." Justice Department actions in the case, including the timing of the Radek letter, are now the focus of congressional investigators, The Washington Times has learned…….."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/14/00 Jerry Seper "…… A House investigator, who also asked that he not be named, noted that the Radek letter went out 10 days after accusations first surfaced about questionable campaign donations by Asian-Americans to the Democratic National Committee, including hundreds of thousands of dollars from John Huang, who helped arrange the temple event. He said that had the Los Angeles probe leaked so close to election, the media "would have had a field day." Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen A. Mansfield immediately shut down the probe after the Radek letter and, according to federal authorities, turned over evidence in the case to officials at Justice in Washington. The letter said that since outside counsel might be named, the inquiry would have to stop. ….."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/14/00 Jerry Seper "…… Mr. Gore later was cleared of any wrongdoing by Attorney General Janet Reno, who had been lobbied by Mr. Radek not to seek outside counsel because the facts did not support a successful prosecution. After the Los Angeles probe was terminated, several key figures involved in the temple fund-raising scheme fled the country. The existence of the Radek letter was first reported by the New York Times...."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/14/00 Jerry Seper "…… Last year, Mr. Radek was criticized by four FBI agents assigned to the campaign finance task force, who told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee he sought to impede or delay the task force probe - even blocking efforts to obtain a search warrant to stop what they said was the destruction of evidence by Democratic fund-raiser Charles Yah Lin Trie. Agents Ivian C. Smith, Daniel Wehr, Roberta Parker and Kevin Sheridan told the panel they were stopped from executing the warrant at Trie's Little Rock, Ark., office after they discovered that financial, business and travel records were being destroyed.......,Mr. Smith, former agent in charge of the Little Rock office, later told FBI Director Louis J. Freeh in a letter that "the team at [the Justice Department] leading this investigation is, at best, simply not up to the task."......"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/14/00 Jerry Seper "…… Mr. Radek and Laura Ingersoll, a department lawyer named to direct the task force, argued against the warrant, saying the [Trie] checks were "not responsive" to an existing grand jury subpoena, only to one issued in March 1997 by the Senate committee. The warrant was approved in October 1997, four months after the agents first requested it. By then, Miss Ingersoll had been replaced by Charles G. LaBella……….. "

CNSNews.com 3/14/00 "…..Just before the 1996 presidential election, a top Justice Department official ordered federal prosecutors to stop an investigation of Al Gore's possibly illegal fund-raising at a Buddhist temple. Tuesday's Washington Times reports that Lee Radek -- head of the Justice Department's Office of Public Integrity - wrote a secret cease-and-desist order on Nov. 1, 1996, telling federal prosecutors in Los Angeles that they "should take no steps to investigate these matters at this time." Congressional investigators are now looking into how the Justice Department handled the investigation, as well as the timing of Radek's letter. Attorney General Janet Reno later cleared Gore of any wrongdoing, after Radek urged her not to seek outside counsel because the facts, he said, did not support a successful prosecution……"

NewsMax.com 3/21/00 Carl Limbacher "…….. Yesterday, Judicial Watch filed a complaint, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain documentation from the Office of Independent Counsel concerning his so-called "investigation" of the Filegate scandal. In recent days, Robert Ray, the Democrat successor and former deputy to Ken Starr, leaked and then forwarded a report on Filegate, before his office even bothered to interview key witnesses, such as Linda Tripp, who testified to Judicial Watch and the Court to having observed FBI files being loaded onto Clinton-Gore White House computers, at the direction of Hillary Clinton. Further, Ray issued the Filegate Report, despite recent revelations from White House whistleblowers that as much as 1,000,000 e-mail [and 457 hard drive cartridges] -- containing incriminating information about Filegate and other Clinton-Gore scandals -- were suppressed by the Clinton-Gore White House. Further, officials in the Clinton-Gore White House threatened the whistleblowers and others not to reveal this, or they would be sent to jail. Such actions constitute obstruction of justice. Yesterday, Ray appeared on ABC's "This Week" and, under questioning from Sam Donaldson, effectively admitted that he did not interview key witnesses, or meet with the whistleblowers (much more conduct a full investigation), before leaking and then issuing his Filegate Report. ……"

foxnews.com 3/16/00 Michael Park "…… Republicans in the House of Representatives are mulling over whether or not to cite Attorney General Janet Reno for contempt of Congress for stalling on handing over internal memoranda about a fund-raising scandal involving Vice President Al Gore, Congressional sources said. Mark Corallo, communications director for the House Government Reform Committee, said the committee is considering the sanction because Reno missed a Tuesday deadline for turning over Department of Justice papers about whether Gore did anything illegal or unethical when he gathered money for the 1996 presidential election. "What Janet Reno has done is a non-investigation," Corallo said. "She says she's following every lead, yet it's clearly not true. It's hard to look at the conduct of the Department of Justice throughout the campaign finance investigation and not have serious questions about their several mistakes and complete mishandling and the double standard employed when it comes to Democratic abuses." ……."

Hardball/CNBC Freeper truthkeeper 3/24/00 "……Ooooh...hot stuff, folks. Tonya Crabtree-Callahan (sorry, I forgot her real first name) is in some hot water. I just saw Dan Burton on "Hardball" (unfortunately, I only caught the last few minutes), and it looks like we just might have a referral here...cross fingers, please. He also talked about a perjury charge against Crabtree: "I believe she lied and I warned her not to perjure herself." He must have some good, solid evidence, I'll bet...other than just the testimony of the five Northrup employees……" Freeper ironman adds "….I saw it and let me correct your title. He said he may make a criminal refferal to the Justice Dept. ……"

New York Times 3/25/00 Marc Lacey "…..Nobody knows for sure what is in the affected correspondence. "There's certainly no one saying, 'The jig is up. We've been caught,' " Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who is handling a civil case in Federal District Court here that touches on the e-mail controversy, said with a laugh today. ......... "

Congressman Barr's Press Release 3/24/00 "…….In a statement today, U.S. Representative Bob Barr (GA-7) denounced efforts by the Department of Justice to obstruct probes of missing White House e-mails by opening a "sham investigation." Barr's remarks followed a hearing yesterday on the matter before the House Government Reform Committee, on which he serves. ……
……."Once again, the Department of Justice is hiding the truth from the American people by belatedly opening a sham investigation at the precise moment when outside investigators are starting to uncover the truth about misconduct in the Clinton White House. The Administration now promising an inquiry is the same Administration that obstructed several investigations by refusing to turn over potentially tens of thousands of e-mails uncovered in 1998, and threatening outside contractors with jail time if they did not cooperate," said Barr. ……
……."This investigation will not uncover a single new fact. Instead, it will be used as a shield to block successful work by Judicial Watch and the Government Reform Committee to uncover the truth about White House efforts to obstruct justice. It is truly saddening to again see our once-great Department of Justice being politically manipulated," Barr concluded. ……"

Schippers Interview with Judicial Watch 3/25/00 "……..This is an excerpt from last week's (3/18/00)interview by Larry Klayman and Tom Fitton with Dave Schippers, lead counsel in the Impeachment of Clinton……..

Klayman: Well, they caved in a few other ways. We have Jim Nicholson on later and we know Jim actually wanted to get something done. He is a very fine person. He is the head of the RNC........
Fitton: Dave, what's your take on the recent activities by the independent counsel? Are you happy, disappointed? Do you think he has done an adequate investigation based on what you know?
Schippers: Based on what I know I feel that they did a full investigation as much as they could. ...I don't know what is under seal. I don't know what they are coming up with under Filegate. I know what Judicial Watch came up with on Filegate and that was one of the reasons that we were.....that was high on our list of investigations after we got the inquiry started. However, as you know, when the November 3, 1998 elections came, everything changed and we were stopped dead in our tracks. I am disappointed that we weren't able to get into Filegate and I'll tell you why. Because I am convinced and this is purely opinion...I am convinced that one of the reasons we weren't able to get our trial in the Senate was because some of the material in Filegate was used to, shall we say, coerce some of the members. ……..

Klayman: You know there is another thing here, Dave, and are admirers of an FBI and an age gone by. I don't think...you may disagree with me on this, you don't have to..you are not the kind of person that is going to say yes if you feel the answer is now, but the FBI is different today than it was many years ago, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Olympic Bombing, Oklahome City, falsifying evidence, this thing and that thing but I don't understand how Starr and Ray's office could have had the FBI assigned to investigate allegations of its own criminal conduct in Filegate. I mean, you can't expect any agency to indict itself and I think that may be part of the problem if not the major problem with this Filegate investigation. Do you have any comments on that?
Schippers: Larry, I am going to have to disagree in one sense. I, when we were out there, we ran into brick walls over at the Justice Department, as did everybody in congress. We came up with a method to force them to do it. We couldn't get anybody in the congress to go along with us. But the only agency that was really cooperative, the only agency that really gave us everything we tried to get and never lied, never in any way acted contrary to the investigation, was the FBI. I mean, the people...now may there are other things that I don't know about and that is possible but I have to say that we got full total cooperation from the bureau out there and it was the only agency that we did get cooperation from. .........,

Schippers: No you're absolutely right. There is no question that we assumed that stuff was being withheld. We didn't know how much. We had no idea how much. That, Larry, is why we, and when I say we, I am talking about my staff and I with the cooperation of the members of the committee, they were with us all the way, especially Hyde...we came up with a method to force them to cooperate, force them to turn things over. We had something that Burton didn't have. It was a new concept and unfortunately...we were ready to go with it....and after the election everybody backed off. But we all know as we sit here. First of all we couldn't get anything out of the justice department. I mean, we would ask the FBI for some information. They would compile it for us, overnight if we required it or as quickly as possible. Now I am not even talking about during the impeachment. I am talking about when we were doing the oversight...that everybody though we weren't doing....during out oversight investigation, we got into the Immigration and Naturalization Service very heavily and we asked for information. The bureau would compile it, the Justice Department would sit on it. It was a terrible situation.

Fitton: Well, the Justice Department, we know is essentially run by Hillary Clinton so you are talking to the White House when you are talking to the Justice Department. Along those lines, you wanted to get into another major scandal, probably more important than Monica Lewinsky in the long run certainly which is Chinagate.
Schippers: Absolutely! That was the first call I made. On October 8th, the House of Representatives voted the inquiry. On the afternoon of October 8th and the morning of October 9th, I called either Triplett or Timperlake.
Klayman: The authors of "Year of the Rat" at that time.
Schippers: Right and I said I have read your book. Will you help me put this thing together? Both of them said we'll work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, Dave because we couldn't get it done in the Senate but if you have got the power to do it, we'll do it and the first move we made was to begin on that and of course, that too, went down the tube. The election is what killed everything. The election cowed the Republican leadership in both houses. I used the word "cowed". That is the only word to use. They were so poll driver that they just couldn't understand that the American people, once they knew what was going on, would change overnight.
Klayman: Dave I think we can safely say that the cows turned into sheep.
Schippers: Yeah.

Schippers: Absolutely. Let me tell you something. I will tell anybody who will listen that I think we reaped the whirlwind of Filegate in the Senate and in the attitude of some of the leaders and some of the people in the Senate. People that we thought we could rely upon just sat on their hands and I don't know what was in those files but I could guess. ……….

Judicial Watch 3/25/00 "……On Saturday's edition of The Judicial Watch Report, hosts Larry Klayman and Tom Fitton were joined by special guest John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. Also, Tom and Larry opened up the phone lines for nearly two hours on the Judicial Watch Report's "Open Lines and Open Minds" edition. "Judge Lamberth has not let the [Clinton-Gore] Justice Department get away with making excuses," said Fund on the Judicial Watch Report. "...In court, he has allowed [Judicial Watch] to make arguments saying the Justice Department is using these investigations as a shield to prevent any information coming out before the November elections. They've known for at least a year or so , from you, that there was this e-mail problem. They never initiated a criminal investigation, they never issued even a preliminary investigation. Now they do it the day before this information is going to show up in court before Judge Lamberth. It looks very suspicious. And I think that the Judge is going to hold them to account next week at the hearing saying, 'why should we believe you know when your track record is this bad."......"

Insight Magazine 3/25/00 Larry Klayman "……A U.S. District Court judge will decide the fate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and their underlings in what may be the worst case of obstruction of justice in U.S. history………… After seven years of investigations and 57 Judicial Watch lawsuits, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and their minions and spinners have led the elite media to believe that they have escaped responsibility for their crimes. In fact, recent events have underscored their legal vulnerabilities………. Whatever might be said about a dormant and apparently compromised independent counsel or a politically impotent Congress, it now has been left to the courts to take charge and commence proceedings to uncover and prosecute what, including Watergate, may be the largest incidence of obstruction of justice in U.S. history…………. "

Insight Magazine 3/25/00 Larry Klayman "……After the story broke, Judicial Watch made Hall available to Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana and his staff on the House Committee on Government Reform. Simultaneously, Judicial Watch filed a motion in its $90 million Filegate class-action lawsuit asking that Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington take immediate action to hold an evidentiary hearing that would place on the record the underlying facts concerning this mammoth and blatant obstruction. Having received information that the White House already had destroyed smoking-gun records, Judicial Watch asked Lamberth to charge U.S. marshals immediately to enter the White House and seize the e-mails to preserve them………..Thus far, only congressional investigators have met with employees of Northrop Grumman who oversaw e-mail and telephone records. These witnesses have confirmed the accounts of Hall and other White House whistle-blowers that the e-mails contain information on Filegate, campaign-finance abuses, Chinagate and Lewinsky, and that the documents never were reviewed for subpoenaed materials as required by law. A hearing last week before the House Government Reform Committee appears to have revealed further obstruction. As Insight went to press, the country was awaiting Lamberth's decision on whether to hold the evidentiary hearing. Typically, the Reno Justice Department filed a last-minute brief arguing that, because its campaign-finance task force now had decided to "investigate" the missing e-mails, Judge Lamberth should delay the hearing. It was a ruse……."

Insight Magazine 3/25/00 Larry Klayman "…… Unlike Congress, which for arcane political reasons has been unwilling to hold accountable the perpetrators of the Clinton-Gore obstructions, Lamberth has both the authority and power to do so. Previous decisions by Lamberth concerning the Hillary Clinton health-care task force, Chinagate, the looting of an American Indian trust fund and other litigation are to be admired. But the nature of Lamberth's prior rulings has not allowed him to hold any high-level Clinton-Gore official individually accountable. To his credit, the judge has expressed frustration at this. But White House aide Ira Magaziner was not made to pay for lying to the court in the health-care task-force case; neither were Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt nor Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin required to cough up monies for their contempt-of-court citations in the Indian trust-fund case…….."

Insight Magazine 3/25/00 Larry Klayman "…… Now, however, Lamberth has an opportunity to hold individuals accountable for what everyone concerned with these cases knows has been a massive criminal cover-up. Like Judge John Sirica during Watergate, Lamberth has the power to change the course of history and to restore the rule of law. He has said that he knows who the responsible White House parties are and that if records are destroyed or hidden he will hang the perpetrators. No one doubts that he means it……."

Insight Magazine 3/25/00 Larry Klayman "……In short, Lamberth and his court have the Clinton-Gore administration in their sights if not on the scaffold. And this is not mere theater. Like some bizarre troupe of Houdinis monopolizing the stage of media attention, the president, the first lady, the vice president and their spinners and shakers think they have wowed the hicks and replaced the judicial system with media vaudeville. Standing between them and a graceful exit is Judge Lamberth.........."

NewsMax.com 3/24/00 Carl Limbacher "…….Can Janet Reno's Justice Department really be trusted to conduct an honest criminal investigation of the White House's missing e-mail scandal, when it's civil division continues to represent the White House in a lawsuit over the same scandal? Friday's news reports don't make the massive conflict of interest particularly clear, but the New York Times did note 16 paragraphs into its front page story on the newly announced criminal probe: "The Justice Department review was disclosed today in legal documents filed by the department's civil division, which is defending the White House in the lawsuit over the e-mail." With a conflict this stark, smoke alarms should be going off in every newsroom across America. ........."

WASHINGTON POST, Sunday, May 10, 1998; Page W04 Those Evil Weeds By Al Kamen * * * . and Don't Delete the E-Mails …….……Some folks think that Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry has retired the spinmeister-of-the-century trophy. But not so fast. National Archives director John Carlin and his troops are making a se-rious run for the award. U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman in October declared that a Carlin regulation advis-ing government agencies that they may wipe out electronic mail and other computerized records without regard to their content was "null and void." Last month, the judge found that the Archives had continued to use the regulation and had "flagrantly violated" the court order by telling agencies they could "continue to rely upon" Carlin's voided regulation even "when [Carlin] knew there was no such authorization."Sounds like bad news? Au contraire! ……"

Here's the Archives press release, issued the day after Friedman's most recent ruling:

"Archivist of the United States John Carlin today welcomed encouragement from a U.S. District Court for efforts of a special work group appointed by Carlin to help the federal government manage, preserve and provide access to electronic records of continuing value."

The release acknowledged that Friedman ordered Carlin to stop saying that the voided regulation "authorizes the disposition of electronic records." But it noted that the judge said nice things about the working group, and Carlin said, "We will certainly comply with this order." Wonder what the spin would've been if Friedman had cited Carlin for contempt (as he had threatened to do)? Maybe that would've been declared a clear-cut victory. ……."

PROFS Case: Results of Legal Ruling……..
* To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
* Subject: PROFS Case: Results of Legal Ruling
* From: Eddie Becker <ebecker@cni.org>
* Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 14:09:41 -0500
* Approved-By: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
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THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/27/00 "……Al Gore cannot have it both ways. The vice president, who once asserted he played an indispensable role in the creation of the Internet, now wants the public to believe that he and his staff were unaware for years that the computer system in his office was enmeshed in so much chaos that it could not even keep track of its e-mails. Despite evidence to the contrary, moreover, the administration is making the utterly implausible claim that it did not learn about Mr. Gore's computer problems, which date at least to 1994, until this month……….. In an equally implausible assertion, White House Counsel Beth Nolan insists that her predecessor, Charles F.C. Ruff, was somehow led to believe, ever so conveniently, that technicians had solved a separate White House computer glitch. That problem prevented the legally required archiving of an estimated 100,000 incoming e-mail messages sent to nearly 500 White House computers……."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/27/00 "……And why was it "sensitive"? Because the discovery that 100,000 e-mails had been missing was made in June 1998, precisely the time when the independent counsel and Congress were investigating the Lewinsky scandal and other matters. Needless to say, the emergence of potentially incriminating e-mails would have affected several criminal investigations, particularly given that thousands of the e-mails are said to involve Miss Lewinsky, campaign finance, Filegate and accusations involving the selling of seats on trade missions for political contributions. Yet, the White House never informed any investigating body that the computer glitch created a major problem in complying with their subpoenas……… The White House has offered no rational explanation why it believed the 100,000 missing e-mails had been retrieved and examined for their relevance to the various subpoenas. Instead, in a statement Miss Nolan simply asserts, "While the counsel's office knew in June 1998 that a configuration error had existed, it believed that the problem was fixed and did not, until recently, understand the scope and possible effect on e-mail records searches of this error." ……"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/27/00 "……Why did Mr. Ruff and others believe things that were patently untrue? Who led them to think or believe such falsities? Or did they merely assume them to be true? Given that neither Mr. Ruff nor any other White House official ever informed investigators of the computer-generated problem the White House had in complying with their subpoenas, did Mr. Ruff and others then not have the responsibility to learn beyond a doubt that the problem had in fact been solved? Clearly, they could easily have learned otherwise. At best, it was a case of willfully ignorant misfeasance. At worst, it was obstruction of justice………"

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/27/00 "……Miss Nolan's statement regarding the computer problems affecting the Office of the Vice President is even less believable. She claims that the problem was discovered only this month. However, a September 1998 memo has surfaced contradicting that claim. Written by White House computer technician Daniel Barry, the memo did, in fact, identify the problem in Mr. Gore's office. The only e-mails entering the archiving system's "records bucket" in Mr. Gore's office, Mr. Barry reported 18 months ago, were those that had crossed over into the White House's main computer system……"

The Washington Weekly 3/26/00 Congressman Dan Burton to Janet Reno "……On March 8, 2000, I wrote to you about the Justice Department's apparent failure to make any effort to obtain a large category of documents potentially relevant to the campaign fundraising investigation. In that letter, I pointed out that the Justice Department had not contacted any of the contractors responsible for the White House e-mail system, and had apparently not pushed the White House to produce this information to the Justice Department.

…….However, as the Committee has investigated this matter, I have learned that not only has the Justice Department failed to push for any of this information, it is actually playing a key role in keeping the information from coming to light. Currently, the Justice Department is representing the Executive Office of the President ("EOP") in civil suits brought in the "Filegate" case. In recent pleadings, plaintiffs have alleged suppression of evidence and threatening of witnesses concerning mismanaged White House e-mail records that may touch on Filegate matters affecting their case. …..

…….Rather than responding to the Plaintiffs' allegations with concern, or even withdrawing from the case, the Justice Department lawyers have responded like seasoned defense counsel:
they disparaged the plaintiffs' claims;
they said that this was old news;
and they claimed that it would be impossible to produce the e-mails.

……..In its March 6, 2000, memorandum to the court, the Justice Department first characterized the plaintiffs' allegations as "offensive." Then, it stated that the "technical failure [to produce the e-mails] is a long-standing matter of public record that has been confirmed by the White House itself." Finally, the Justice Department stated that the "EOP has advised both plaintiffs and this Court on innumerable occasions that it has not produced any backed-up or archived e-mail in response to plaintiffs' many discovery requests. Time and again, EOP has forthrightly objected that it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in a non-word searchable format."

……..While the Justice Department's zeal in defending its client, the White House, is understandable, it is also troubling. The Justice Department is supposed to be conducting a thorough criminal investigation of allegations of illegal fundraising in the 1996 elections, including allegations about White House involvement in the scandal.

…….Just last week, you stated that "the investigation continues, and we will continue to pursue every lead." Yet, the Justice Department's filing in the Filegate case makes it clear that you are not making any effort to follow this lead. In fact, the Justice Department is disparaging these claims, and is assisting the White House in its efforts to keep these records from being produced to the Justice Department or any other investigative body.

……These facts lead me to ask a number of questions:
* When did the Justice Department learn of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
* When was the Campaign Financing Task Force informed of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
* Is it the opinion of the Campaign Financing Task Force that allegations that White House e-mails were not produced to the Task Force are "offensive," as the Justice Department suggested in its recent legal brief?
* Is it the Campaign Financing Task Force's position that "it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in non-word searchable format," as suggested in the Justice Department's brief?

……….When FBI Director Freeh and Charles La Bella concluded that you were not able to conduct the campaign fundraising investigation, they were obviously right. This conclusion was reinforced when it was learned that your prosecutors had failed to question either the President or the Vice President about any aspect of the foreign money scandal during five separate interviews. It is inconceivable that the Justice Department can on one hand help the White House avoid production of the missing e-mails, and on the other hand, aggressively pursue the e-mails in the campaign fundraising investigation……"

Washington Weekly 3/27/00 Marvin Lee "……The White House last week moved into regular scandal mode over the revelation that incriminating emails were withheld from investigators: the Justice Department began "an investigation," and the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times sent up trial balloon defenses of innocent mistakes, bureaucratic snafus and incompetence. The explosive truth hidden behind this deceptive posturing is the fact that Sheryl Hall has testified that she was told that "if the contents of the e-mails became known, then there would be different outcomes to these scandals [Filegate, Lewinsky, Ron Brown's trade missions, and Al Gore's involvement in Chinagate], as the e-mails were incriminating and could cause people to go to jail."……… So an immediate release of the emails could have serious legal repercussions for White House employees. Such a release was exactly what Judge Lamberth had considered ordering Thursday of last week in the Filegate suit prosecuted by Judicial Watch. What was the White House to do? It sent its lawyer James Gilligan into Judge Lamberth's courtroom to do a bait-and-switch. He asked Lamberth to shut down Judicial Watch's civil suit against the White House, because the Campaign Financing Task Force of Gilligan's own Justice Department would take over. "To continue the civil cases would compromise the integrity of the criminal investigation," Gilligan ridiculously claimed. The Campaign Financing Task Force has become known for its zeal in avoiding asking questions that lead to the White House………."

Washington Weekly 3/27/00 Marvin Lee "……The funny thing is that the Justice Department is itself part of the scandal. As part of its defense of the White House in the Filegate civil suit, the Justice Department has for weeks sought to prevent the release of the incriminating emails. Now it wants Lamberth to believe that it will aggressively push for their release. The Washington Post and the New York Times bought the White House ploy hook, line and sinker, but Chairman Dan Burton did not: "When FBI Director Freeh and Charles La Bella concluded that you were not able to conduct the campaign fundraising investigation, they were obviously right," he wrote to Janet Reno last week......."

Nando Times 3/26/00 Pete Yost AP "……Missing e-mail. The Buddhist temple. No controlling legal authority. These fund-raising images haunt Vice President Al Gore, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year. Federal prosecutors and Republicans threaten, for very different reasons, to extend the impact of the 1996 fund-raising missteps well into the fall presidential campaign. The Justice Department opened an investigation last week into whether e-mails from Gore's office and other parts of the White House were hidden from criminal and congressional investigators who had subpoenaed them. Republicans, from presidential rival George W. Bush to House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton, are keeping the issue alive with hearings, advertisements and campaign stump attacks. They are motivated by polling that shows the vice president is vulnerable on the issue. "It's sort of a low-grade toothache - it's not going to kill you, but it's irritating, and it doesn't go away," Brookings Institution senior fellow Stephen Hess said of the fund-raising problems. ……"

The Washington Times 3/25/00 Jerry Seper "…….A federal judge yesterday ordered the Justice Department's campaign finance task force to tell him in person why he should delay a pending 4-year-old "Filegate" lawsuit while the department investigates missing White House e-mail. ……. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who questioned the administration's "track record" in conducting investigations of various White House scandals, ordered Justice Department officials to meet with him behind closed doors Thursday to discuss a pending government motion in the matter. ……… Mr. Klayman also questioned why the independent counsel's office would be investigating Filegate, since Mr. Ray announced March 16 that he had found no evidence to show that White House officials were involved in a scheme to illegally obtain 900 secret FBI files of former Reagan and Bush administration officials. ......... Judge Lamberth said prior investigations turned out to be "bogus" and told Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan, who represents the Executive Office of the President, that he faces "an uphill battle" to convince him the delay is necessary…….. Judge Lamberth scheduled a public hearing, probably for Friday, saying it was important to establish a public record in the case. He also said he would not grant "an open-ended, indefinite stay" in the Filegate suit. ........."

USGAO 9/10/96 "…….Information Management: Technical Review of the White House Data Base (Testimony, 09/10/96, GAO/T-AIMD-96-168). Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the White House database, focusing on its users and operational components. GAO noted that: (1) users are generally satisfied with the database as a tool for maintaining information important to the Presidency; (2) fewer than 100 White House staff use the database, and the 25 heaviest users represent three White House offices and systems administrators; (3) the Social Office uses the database to develop invitation lists and plan state dinners and other events, the Personal Correspondence Office uses the database to help compose Presidential letters, and the Outreach Office uses the database for generating lists of holiday card recipients; (4) these users believe that the database is critical in performing their tasks, but the database's design is limited because it does not employ certain relational database capabilities; (5) because of additional processing steps, system performance will degrade if demand increases; (6) systems administrators have made compromises to minimize performance impacts that affect data integrity and audit trails; (7) the White House has taken actions to ensure a controlled environment by providing personalized user training, requiring signed ethics documents and passwords, providing anti-hacker defense systems, and limiting user access; and (8) to ensure data integrity and operational effectiveness, the White House needs to document systems security policies and procedures, limit report printing, and establish an audit trail for systems administrators to monitor database operations. ……"

Reuters 3/24/00 By Randall Mikkelsen "……The Justice Department's probe of missing White House e-mails threatens to cloud President Clinton's remaining time in office, but may hurt Vice President Al Gore (news - web sites) even more in his race to succeed Clinton. …….. ``This could be a real problem for Gore,'' said Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and visiting fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. ……. ``Even the slightest association, or hint of a taint of a cover-up, links Gore to practices that people are looking forward to getting rid of,'' Renshon said. Gore was also stung on Friday by news the State Department launched a criminal probe of the financial dealings of his campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, although Gore defended Coelho, saying he would ``continue to do a terrific job.'' ……"

3/23/00 PREPARED TESTIMONY OF BETTY LAMBUTH BEFORE THE HOUSE GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE "………I want to tell you the truth about the e-mail scandal, which we termed Project X, and how I and my colleagues were threatened by Clinton-Gore White House officials with loss of our jobs, arrest, and jail if we told anyone about the e-mail problem……… In May 1998, I learned that one of the computer e-mail servers, which housed incoming e-mail to much of the top Clinton White House staff, approximately 500 individuals, was not being records managed by the Automated Records Management System ("ARMS"), which would have allowed their text to be searched in response to subpoenas and other inquiries. The apparent cause of this e-mail problem occurred in August, 1996. As the Clinton White House received approximately 20,000 incoming e-mail per day, this meant that, as of May, 1998, a significant number of e-mail were not records managed and not being searched in response to subpoenas and document requests.

……..I informed as soon as possible my Clinton White House supervisor, Laura Crabtree, of the e-mail server problem, who quickly understood the technical and legal severity of the problem. I understand Crabtree then went to the Clinton White House OA office and spoke with its counsel, Mark Lindsay. Crabtree also informed Paulette Cichonne, another official at the Clinton OA, of the problem.Threats of Arrest, Jail and Loss of My Job After consulting with Lindsay and Cichonne, Crabtree, acting on their instruction, said that I was forbidden to say anything to anyone concerning the e-mail server problem. Crabtree specifically stated that I and my staff was not to inform Steve Hawkins, my Northrop- Grumman manager at the Clinton White House. Crabtree told me that if I did talk about the e-mail problem, I would lose my job, be arrested, and jailed.

…….I then sought a meeting with Mark Lindsay and Paulette Cichonne about the e-mail problem. At that meeting, Mark Lindsay reiterated Crabtree's comments and told me directly that I nor any of my staff were not permitted to discuss anything concerning the email problem with anyone, including Steve Hawkins. Lindsay said that if I or any of my team who knew about the e-mail problem told anyone else about it we would lose our jobs, be arrested and put in jail.

………I conveyed Lindsay's threats to my staff at the Clinton White House who knew of the e-mail problem. The members of my contractor staff were worried about the threats as well. In fact, to maintain the Clinton White House's ordered secrecy about the e-mail problem, my staff and I held meetings to discuss the issue outside the office in a park close to the New Executive Office Building and in a nearby Starbucks. Also to ensure secrecy, the e-mail problem was called Project X.

……..I was initially instructed to work up technical plans and cost estimates to fix the e-mail problem. But within days, I quickly came to the conclusion that the Clinton White House had no intention of fixing the problem, despite their knowledge that the e-mail in issue contained many e-mails from and to Monica Lewinsky, who was then involved in an ongoing criminal investigation. My conclusion was based on the fact that nothing was done to fix the problem and the e-mails continued to be left out of any searches in response to subpoenas and other document requests……..

………A contractor for Northrop-Grumman whom I supervised, and who examined this group of e-mail, told me the e-mail contained information relating to Filegate, concerning the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the sale of Clinton Commerce Department trade mission seats in exchange for campaign contributions, and Vice President Al Gore's involvement in campaign fundraising controversies.

………I delivered a sample of e-mails relating to Monica Lewinsky to Mark Lindsay in the Old Executive Office Building. .........,, The Clinton White House considered but did not call Daniel A. Barry, an e-mail computer specialist for the Clinton White House, back from vacation to inform him about Project X. So when Barry did return from vacation, he was unaware of Project X even though he was about to testify to Congress concerning White House e-mails and Monica Lewinsky. As a result, Barry did not have this relevant information about these 100,000 e-mails when he testified to Congress.

…………Steve Hawkins somehow found out that a major issue (the e-mail problem) was being kept secret from him. He pressured me and another female member of my staff to divulge the information about the secret project on which we had been working. He told us that unless we told him, we would be removed from our positions at the Clinton White House. He also told my other female staffer that she would not have any job at all if she didn't tell him about the secret project. Lindsay and others on the Clinton White House staff who knew why I wasn't telling Hawkins about the email problem never intervened with Hawkins to protect my job. For fear of going to jail, per Lindsay's and others' threats, I did not tell Hawkins about the e-mail problem. This led Hawkins to request that CEXEC remove me from my assignment at the Clinton White House. This was done and I left the Clinton White House in July, 1998. (I still remain employed with CEXEC.) ……."

United Press International 3/23/00 Michael Kirkland "…..Government lawyers were expected to file a motion later Thursday in federal court formally announcing the action. The inquiry by the department's campaign finance task force -- one step below a full-bore investigation -- could still turn into a major headache for the White House, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, though it is not expected to lead to criminal charges. ........."

Associated Press 3/23/00 Kalpana Srinivasan "…….The Justice Department has launched a criminal inquiry into White House computer breakdowns that made it impossible to search thousands of incoming e-mails in response to congressional subpoenas. ………. The existence of the criminal probe was revealed in papers filed by the White House counsel with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in connection with a civil case there involving the conservative-oriented legal organization Judicial Watch. White House lawyers asked the court to stay its consideration of the e-mail issues, which had also been under the scrutiny of Justice's civil division, until the criminal inquiry is finished. ……"

Judicial Watch 3/21/00 Congressman Dan Burton to Janet Reno "……. On March 8, 2000, I wrote to you about the Justice Department's apparent failure to make any effort to obtain a large category of documents potentially relevant to the campaign fundraising investigation. In that letter, I pointed out that the Justice Department had not contacted any of the contractors responsible for the White House e-mail system, and had apparently not pushed the White House to produce this information to the Justice Department.

……However, as the Committee has investigated this matter, I have learned that not only has the Justice Department failed to push for any of this information, it is actually playing a key role in keeping the information from coming to light. Currently, the Justice Department is representing the Executive Office of the President ("EOP") in civil suits brought in the "Filegate" case. In recent pleadings, plaintiffs have alleged suppression of evidence and threatening of witnesses concerning mismanaged White House e-mail records that may touch on Filegate matters affecting their case. Rather than responding to the Plaintiffs' allegations with concern, or even withdrawing from the case, the Justice Department lawyers have responded like seasoned defense counsel: they disparaged the plaintiffs' claims; they said that this was old news; and they claimed that it would be impossible to produce the e-mails.

…….In its March 6, 2000, memorandum to the court, the Justice Department first characterized the plaintiffs' allegations as "offensive." Then, it stated that the "technical failure [to produce the e-mails] is a long-standing matter of public record that has been confirmed by the White House itself." Finally, the Justice Department stated that the "EOP has advised both plaintiffs and this Court on innumerable occasions that it has not produced any backed-up or archived e-mail in response to plaintiffs' many discovery requests. Time and again, EOP has forthrightly objected that it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in a non-word searchable format."

………While the Justice Department's zeal in defending its client, the White House, is understandable, it is also troubling. The Justice Department is supposed to be conducting a thorough criminal investigation of allegations of illegal fundraising in the 1996 elections, including allegations about White House involvement in the scandal.

……..Just last week, you stated that "the investigation continues, and we will continue to pursue every lead." Yet, the Justice Department's filing in the Filegate case makes it clear that you are not making any effort to follow this lead. In fact, the Justice Department is disparaging these claims, and is assisting the White House in its efforts to keep these records from being produced to the Justice Department or any other investigative body. These facts lead me to ask a number of questions:

When did the Justice Department learn of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
When was the Campaign Financing Task Force informed of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
Is it the opinion of the Campaign Financing Task Force that allegations that White House e-mails were not produced to the Task Force are "offensive," as the Justice Department suggested in its recent legal brief?
Is it the Campaign Financing Task Force's position that "it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in non-word searchable format," as suggested in the Justice Department's brief?

……..When FBI Director Freeh and Charles La Bella concluded that you were not able to conduct the campaign fundraising investigation, they were obviously right. This conclusion was reinforced when it was learned that your prosecutors had failed to question either the President or the Vice President about any aspect of the foreign money scandal during five separate interviews. It is inconceivable that the Justice Department can on one hand help the White House avoid production of the missing e-mails, and on the other hand, aggressively pursue the e-mails in the campaign fundraising investigation. ……"

Washington Post 3/24/00 John Harris Lorraine Adams "….. In a separate computer problem whose dimensions were revealed for the first time yesterday, the White House counsel disclosed that a vast quantity of e-mail from and to Vice President Gore and his staff was never properly recorded - and therefore was never reviewed to determine if it was relevant to investigations of Democratic fund-raising abuses in 1996. Gore's operation is not the focus of the Justice criminal probe. But White House counsel Beth Nolan's revelation of serious technical flaws in the vice president's computers has clear political implications - because it is sure to spur Republican demands for a more intensive investigation of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's role in the 1996 campaign. Although Gore and his staff produced e-mails that they had saved on their own computers for the fund-raising investigations, the additional e-mails - if they are ever recovered - could provide a trove of new information. The problems with Gore's computer are more severe than those that affected President Clinton's staff. The computer serving the Executive Office of the President (EOP) missed only those e-mails coming from outside computers; two separate glitches caused problems from August 1996 to November 1998 and from November 1998 to May 1999. By contrast, Nolan said, the computer serving the Office of the Vice President did not keep a proper record for some top officials, including Gore, of any e-mails - either internally generated or from outsiders - from 1994 onward. Only this month has the problem been identified, Nolan said, and only now are technicians beginning to correct the glitches……"

NewsMax 3/24/00 "…….. Callahan testified that shortly after the problem was discovered, she was alarmed when, Lambuth, a manager on the project no longer employed at the White House, came to her with an e-mail exchange between former intern Monica Lewinsky and another woman, Ashley Raines. "I was very concerned why all of a sudden we had a specific e-mail being brought to my attention when we hadn't even determined the size and scope of the problem," Callahan said. According to Lambuth the e-mail had been found by Haas, the Northrup Grumman systems administrator who later filed the lawsuit. At the time, the team was trying to diagnose the problem, Callahan said. "Whether e-mails were lost or not was a technical conclusion that had not been reached yet. What I asked be done was to conduct an investigation to determine the nature of the problem," Lindsay added. As a result, it was decided a meeting should be held to walk through the White House standard operating procedures. "There were already people in the hallway starting to discuss this," said Callahan. "And Mr. Lindsay said we needed to be careful because it was sensitive." "I did say that this was a matter that needed to be kept in bounds with those people who needed the information to repair the system," Lindsay said, adding that he didn't want to hear of any "water cooler talk" while the White House was under investigation for several matters, including alleged campaign finance improprieties and the Monica Lewinsky affair. The problem, he said, was just one of many with the e-mail system and initially was not given priority because of the Y2K compliance testing. But Grumman Northrup staffers said the threats were specific and so chilling several sought legal advice from attorneys. ….."

NewsMax 3/24/00 "…….. The matter was not first made public until last month, when Haas accused White House staff of a cover-up in a lawsuit filed by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. As part of that lawsuit and a subsequent investigation by Burton's committee, Haas charged he'd been threatened with jail if he revealed the existence of the problem. "I was told there would be a jail cell with my name on it," he said. "I was told by a couple of different people that we were not to talk to anyone," said Lambuth. "We were not to talk to our spouses other than those of us who already knew about this particular project. They did tell me that if any of us did talk about this that my staff would be fired, would be arrested and would go to jail," she said. According to Steven Hawkins, the Northrup Grumman program manager, some of his staffers felt so threatened by their initial meeting with Callahan and Lindsay that they requested legal counsel. ……"

NewsMax 3/24/00 "…….. The missing e-mails concerned very sensitive subjects, Lambuth, who was taken off the project in July 1998, said. She has sworn in an affidavit to Burton's committee that some of the e-mails contained information regarding various matters under investigation either by Congress or the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation background files controversy, Lewinsky, trade mission information and campaign finance matters. ………. Betty Lambuth, said a fellow employee told her some of the e-mails deal with ``Vice President Al Gore's involvement in campaign fund-raising controversies'' and ``the sale of Clinton Commerce Department trade mission seats in exchange for campaign contributions.'' ……….

NewsMax 3/24/00 "…….. The Justice Department entered the picture today when it announced that it has launched a criminal investigation to discover if missing White House e-mails were deliberately hidden from investigators looking into the campaign fund-raising and Monica Lewinsky scandals - and whether anyone was threatened to keep the e-mails from being discovered. Robert Conrad, head of the Justice Department's campaign financing task force asked for a halt in civil litigation over thousands of e-mails under subpoena from the White House in documents filed in federal court yesterday morning. He referred to a lawsuit that has been filed by Judicial Watch on behalf of former Republican appointees who believe the White House mishandled their FBI files. The missing e-mails, they believe, are just more of the same administration mischief. Conrad insisted a "direct overlap" exists between the civil lawsuit and his criminal inquiry, and warned that if the lawsuit were to proceed it would interfere with and could compromise -- the task force investigation. ... Later, Conrad amended his filing to add a new paragraph stating that he had been in touch with the office of Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray, who has said that he also is concerned about the missing e-mails. Conrad said Ray shares his concern that if the civil litigation proceeds, his inquiry could also be damaged. ........."

Wall Street Journal 3/24/00 David Cloud "…….The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether the White House withheld e-mail subpoenaed during various investigations of the Clinton administration and whether employees who knew about the problem were pressured to keep silent. …… Robert Conrad, head of the Justice Department's campaign fund-raising task force, said in court papers that the task force is investigating "whether subpoenas ... were fully complied with, and whether persons were threatened with retaliation in order to prevent the existence of the affected e-mails from becoming known to the Task Force." ………..Ms. Nolan, the White House counsel, said her office didn't know about the alleged threats until recently and that the White House had started its own review……… "

Associated Press 3/24/00 Larry Margasak "…… In testimony Thursday to the House Government Reform Committee, a White House aide acknowledged that he asked that employees keep quiet about the difficulties, but said he never threatened anyone. "I did say ... that this was a matter that I believed that needed to be kept in bounds with those people who needed the information to perform repairs to the system," Mark Lindsay testified. Lindsay said he didn't want people "talking around at the water cooler." ……. Charles Ruff, who was the White House counsel in 1998, and John Podesta, deputy chief of staff at the time, were told about the breakdowns in internal memos that year. "This memorandum is to advise you of an anomaly in the system in the Mail2 server, which primarily supports the day-to-day e-mail traffic of the White House Office ... ." Podesta was informed by another presidential aide on June 19, 1998. Podesta is now the president's chief of staff. ………. "

Associated Press 3/24/00 Larry Margasak "…… In prepared remarks, Beth Nolan, the current White House counsel, told the House committee that after Ruff and Podesta were told of the problem, they thought it had not affected law enforcement and committee's subpoenas. "Thus, as Mr. Ruff understood the technical problem at the time, he did not think that the error had an effect on previous searches or that it might affect future searches of e-mail records," Nolan said. "As a result, Mr. Ruff had no reason to believe there was any need to notify investigative bodies of this error." Another internal White House memo on Sept. 4, 1998, showed that computer officials were aware of problems "regarding OVP (Office of the Vice President) e-mail and records management." The memo laid out the problem in technical terms, but there was no indication it was discussed with Gore's staff. …….."

Associated Press 3/24/00 Larry Margasak "…… The Justice Department asked a federal judge for more time to answer that demand, contending any response now could jeopardize the criminal investigation. The delay was called a "ploy" by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal organization that filed the $90 million class action suit. "This is not the first time the Clinton-Gore Justice Department used its campaign finance task force as an excuse to try to take evidence away from the court," Klayman said, adding he would oppose the delay and seek court sanctions if the deadline is not met. ….."

The Wall Street Journal 3/24/00 "…….. One of the enduring memories of the Clinton years will be all those missing pieces of evidence. From lost Rose Law Firm billing records to suddenly uncovered videotapes of Oval Office fundraisers, this White House has turned stalling and practiced incompetence into a dark art. Now comes the news that the Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into hundreds of thousands of e-mails that the White House never turned over to Congress because of a computer breakdown. ….."

The Wall Street Journal 3/24/00 "…….. This investigation is going to be handled by the Justice Department's campaign finance task force. The task force says it will look into whether employees working on the White House computers were threatened with retaliation. The latter was the subject of hearings Thursday by Rep. Dan Burton's House Government Oversight committee. Let's back up a second. Before Thursday's announcement of a "criminal" probe by DoJ, a civil suit over the missing emails was up and running from the pesky but valuable group Judicial Watch. The feds made two requests Thursday about this lawsuit. First, lawyers from the White House asked the court to put off its consideration of the suit pending DoJ's criminal inquiry. And the Justice Department task force's lead lawyer, Robert Conrad, asserted that continuing the civil action "would interfere with and potentially compromise the task force's own investigation of the pending allegations." And he said they'd let the civil folks and the court know when they were done. Ah, er, uh, hmmmmm. Does anyone other than maybe their mothers believe any of this? ……"

The Wall Street Journal 3/24/00 "…….. The Justice Department's sudden interest in this comes some three months after most of these e-mail revelations were made in Judge Royce Lamberth's court. The judge is hearing a Privacy Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch on behalf of the 900 people whose FBI files turned up in the Clinton White House. This is the lawsuit that Justice's Mr. Conrad says would compromise his investigation. We'd give a lot to be able to believe that. If so, it would mean that in the post-Independent Counsel world, a functioning Justice Department could be depended on to account for the government's underlying institutional integrity. But we can't forget this same administration's desperate moves, just before the 1996 elections, to keep Democratic fundraiser John Huang from testifying before Judge Lamberth. So much has disappeared down their black hole. When DoJ proves something like Thursday's announcement is real, we'll applaud. We'll withhold the applause for now. ….."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/24/00 Jerry Seper "…….A Justice Department investigation began Thursday into accusations that the White House hid e-mail messages subpoenaed by the campaign finance task force - including those sent to Vice President Al Gore - after threatening White House contract workers to keep the documents secret. Task force chief Robert J. Conrad Jr., according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, wants to know whether subpoenas issued by his office for the e-mail messages were "fully complied with." He also wants to know whether Northrop Grumman Corp. employees working on the White House computer system were "threatened with retaliation" to keep the messages from being turned over. Mr. Conrad said the task force has learned that the White House's e-mail management system had "for some period of time" failed to collect incoming electronic messages sent to several officials, some of which may have included "communications related to various criminal investigations." ……… "

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/24/00 Jerry Seper "…….The Justice Department disclosed its investigation in a court filing asking U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth to delay a request by a public-interest law firm for the release of the missing documents and interviews of 20 persons in a pending $90 million lawsuit in the Filegate case. ……. Mr. Conrad told the court there would be "a direct overlap between the allegations that the plaintiffs want to pursue in this case and the matters that the task force is investigating." The e-mail documents had been sought under subpoena by Judicial Watch……….Judicial Watch President Larry Klayman Thursday called the Justice Department's request for a delay a "ploy," saying the White House was using the department's campaign finance task force to stop the suit. "This is just another tactic to delay Judicial Watch until after the 2000 presidential elections, particularly as they relate to Mr. Gore and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton," he said. "The fact that they would try this ploy must mean there are incriminating e-mails they don't want to give up."………. "The best campaign finance reform starts with having an administration that will adhere to the law and an attorney general who will enforce the law," he [Bush] said. "I look forward to seeing where these e-mails are and what was in these e-mails."……"

CBS News 3/23/00 "……The investigation, to be handled through Justice's campaign finance task force, focuses on whether the subpoenas issued to the White House went unanswered because of the breakdowns. The task force will also probe allegations that White House officials threatened contract employees with retaliation if they revealed the problem. The task force, a House committee and plaintiffs in a civil suit brought by the conservative legal organization Judicial Watch had sought e-mails on campaign fund-raising irregularities and other matters……….. The existence of the criminal probe was revealed in papers filed by the White House counsel with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in connection with a Judicial Watch case against the FBI on the "Filegate" controversy………. The papers filed by the White House sought a delay in the administration's response on the e-mails, which were sent between 1996-1999, so that the case wouldn't interfere with the criminal investigation…….. According to Judicial Watch, "the e-mails contain incriminating information on virtually every Clinton-Gore scandal, including Filegate, Chinagate...illegal political fundraising [and] the Monica Lewinsky scandal." Burton, a harsh critic of the Clinton White House, recently wrote Attorney General Janet Reno to complain about, "the Justice Department's apparent failure to make any effort to obtain a large category of documents potentially relevant to the campaign fundraising investigation." …….. The news of the Justice Department probes comes only two weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported that a 1998 Department probe into Clinton Gore fundraising practices by Charles LaBella may have been suppressed by Reno. ……."

Fox News.com 3/23/00 John Martin "………Three computer specialists told a Congressional panel Thursday that Clinton administration officials threatened to jail them if they told anyone - including their spouses - about thousands of White House e-mails lost at the same time investigators were searching for evidence of administration corruption. Two White House officials later denied any such threats, but said they couldn't recall whether they had asked the computer staffers to keep quiet about the missing messages. The witnesses, Northrop Grumman employees contracted to operate the White House computer system, said the effort to fix the e-mail flaw was so secret they gave it a code name - Project X - and had to retreat to a nearby park or coffee shop to discuss it among themselves. One of them, systems administrator Robert Haas, testified that he was told that if he spoke publicly, "There would be a jail cell with my name on it." ….."

Fox News.com 3/23/00 John Martin "………Barry said he noticed two messages sent to Lewinsky by her friend, Ashley Raines, the White House Director of Office and Policy Development Operations, but he couldn't find corresponding e-mails from Lewinsky. He reported the incident to a supervisor, but wasn't sure whether the glitch was an anomaly or systematic of a bigger problem with the e-mail server. Nearly six months passed before another specialist, Yiman Salim, noticed a similar glitch and determined the problem was widespread, she told the panel. After reporting it to her boss, Salim and four other Northrop Grumman workers were called in June 1998 to the office of Laura Crabtree, a branch chief for customer service computer support in the White House. Mark Lindsay, counsel for the White House Office of Administration, joined the meeting by speakerphone. Three of those employees - Haas, Betty Lambuth and Sandra Golas - testified that Lindsay told them to fix the e-mail flaw but warned that they could be fired or arrested if they discussed it with anyone, including their Northrop Grumman manager, Steve Hawkins. Haas said he flippantly asked what would happen if he told his wife. "Miss Crabtree responded that there would be a jail cell with my name on it," he told the panel. ……… Asked during the hearing by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., if he thought Crabtree's response was designed to be equally flippant, Haas replied: "I did not take it that way, sir." ……"

Fox News.com 3/23/00 John Martin "………Haas was dispatched to try to retrieve some of the "lost" messages, including some that might have been sent by Lewinsky. He said he found several from Lewinsky, including a few sent to Betty Currie, the president's secretary. But he said he didn't read the messages and disputed Lambuth's recollection that he also found missing messages regarding fund-raising activities, campaign contributions or other potentially incriminating topics. "I have never, ever intimated in any way shape or form that I knew any contents of any e-mails other than the two Monica Lewinsky documents," he said. Weeks after the meeting, Hawkins, the project manager, sensed something was wrong and called Golas to his office, he told the panel. He asked Golas what she was working on. She got upset and said she couldn't answer. When Hawkins told her such a response was grounds for dismissal, Golas told him she would rather be fired than jailed, Hawkins recalled. The others were also "extremely nervous," Hawkins said. Lambuth also refused to discuss the issue and was soon removed from the project, Hawkins said, though he insisted her refusal to talk was just one reason for her dismissal. Hawkins then approached Lindsay and Crabtree, he said. He was worried that his employees were involved in a project outside the scope of their contract and one with political ramifications. They responded by telling him not to intrude. "Everything was fine until you stepped in," Crabtree said, according to Hawkins. Both Crabtree and Hawkins denied such an exchange. Crabtree said she couldn't recall any such meeting; Lindsay said he did meet with Hawkins but if their discussion grew heated it was only because Hawkins said the contractors would require more money to fix the e-mail flaw. ...... Hawkins' account was blunt. "They did try to cover up the fact that they had a computer glitch," he told the committee. ........."

Fox News.com 3/23/00 John Martin "………The mistake was fully corrected by November 1998. But Nolan has said that reconstructing backup tapes to retrieve and review the lost messages could take up to two years and cost as much as $3 million. She was subpoenaed to testify before the committee, but her appearance was canceled. The White House issued a statement Thursday in which it declined to address workers' claims, but said it will complete an initial review of the e-mail matter next week. Among the documents presented at the hearing was a five-page "Talking Points" memo, dated March 7, 2000, ostensibly instructing White House employees on how to respond to inquiries on the issue. Its author or recipients are unclear, but the memo says the White House officials delayed addressing the problem because they were more concerned with ensuring Y2K compliance and because the administrative office "did not have the funds to do it." Another internal White House memo on Sept. 4, 1998 showed that computer officials were aware of problems "regarding OVP (Office of the Vice President) e-mail and records management." The memo laid out the problem in technical terms. ……… That the issue has already languished so long clearly frustrated some Republican members of the committee, which taped the hearing and planned to broadcast it on the Internet. "This has been known to you for over two years," an exasperated Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., told Lindsay. ……… Rep. Steven C. LaTourette, R-Ohio, said that Lindsay told him the e-mail reconstruction process would take at least 211 days - a span that LaTourette noted ensures the e-mails will remain unknown until after the November election. ……."

Fox News.com 3/23/00 John Martin "………One of the workers, Spriggs, wasn't confident that the messages could ever be retrieved. "You're saying today before this committee that you still aren't able to produce these e-mails?" Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., asked him. "As of today," Spriggs replied, "we cannot." …."

CNN 3/23/00 Amy Paulson "…….White House officials acknowledged Thursday they asked contract staffers not to discuss computer problems that caused thousands of e-mail messages to escape the reach of a congressional subpoena, but rejected claims that those staffers had been threatened. ......... All of the contract employees who testified before the panel on Thursday said the problem was technical in nature, but the White House nonetheless wanted to keep it secret. "It's not something that I did. It's not something that I condone and it's not something that I would ever permit if it came to my knowledge," said Lindsay, an assistant to the president and director of White House management and administration, of the claimed threats. …….."

New York Times 3/24/00 David Johnston Marc Lacey "…….. The Justice Department's filing in Federal District Court here, which declared the department's intentions of carrying out the investigation, said nothing about the e-mail messages. But in the court papers the department contends a criminal investigation is justified because of the possibility that some of the e-mail messages may have been relevant to the investigations and may have been deliberately concealed……….. The papers also refer to earlier documents filed in a civil suit in which employees of Northrup Grumman, the company hired to maintain the system, say that had been been pressured to remain silent about the missing messages………. White House officials have denied there was any attempt to avoid compliance with subpoenas and said that the problem was an inadvertent computer glitch caused by malfunctioning systems that failed to properly store all electronic messages written to presidential aides from outside the White House. "No one attempted to hide responsive information from this committee or any other investigative body," Beth Nolan, the White House counsel, said a prepared statement she had been scheduled to deliver today at a hearing on the e-mail controversy before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. Her appearance was postponed until next week. ……. The White House also denied threatening anyone in connection with the e-mail messages but acknowledged an effort to keep the problem of the missing communication from becoming public. ……."

New York Times 3/24/00 David Johnston Marc Lacey "……..s "As a result of these allegations," Mr. Conrad said, "the Task Force has begun an investigation into whether subpoenas issued" to the executive office of the president by the Task Force "were fully complied with and whether persons were threatened with retaliation in order to prevent the existence of the affected e-mails from becoming known to the Task Force." Mr. Conrad did not indicate whether prosecutors had reached any conclusions about the e-mail issue. Other law-enforcement officials said today that investigators had not determined the content of the missing e-mail or established whether anyone tried to intentionally suppress it. ………. Top White House officials learned of the computer problem almost immediately. On June 18, 1998, Virginia M. Apuzzo, assistant to the president for management and administration, wrote a memorandum describing the glitch to John D. Podesta, who was White House deputy chief of staff at the time but has since become chief of staff. Charles Ruff, who was White House counsel at the time, was also notified. "They basically had two choices," said Mr. Dan Burton."They could face up to the problem -- tell the Justice Department and Congress what happened -- and get it fixed. Or they could throw a blanket over the whole problem, ignore it and hope nobody found out." ………. The White House says it did not cover up the problem but believed that it had been resolved without affecting the administration's response to subpoenas. ….."

Drudge Report 3/23/00 "…….Lawmakers late Thursday questioned if impeachment proceedings would somehow have to be reopened after the Justice Department disclosed it has launched a criminal investigation on whether White House officials illegally suppressed large numbers of e-mails that could have shed light on a range of controversies, including the Lewinsky saga. "New evidence could reopen the entire matter," Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde confided to an associate. "I am very troubled by these reports." ……."

AP 3/25/00 Larry Margasak "…….Top White House officials were notified in 1998 of computer problems but didn't tell Congress or the Justice Department of the glitches that prevented thousands of e-mails from being searched in response to subpoenas, according to documents and congressional testimony. …….. Charles Ruff, who was the White House counsel in 1998, and John Podesta, deputy chief of staff at the time, were told about the breakdowns in internal memos that year. ''This memorandum is to advise you of an anomaly in the system in the Mail2 server, which primarily supports the day-to-day e-mail traffic of the White House Office ... .'' Podesta was informed by another presidential aide on June 19, 1998. Podesta is now the president's chief of staff. ……."

Drudge 3/25/00 "…….Judge Royce C. Lamberth has ordered an in camera hearing next Thursday at 10 am to explore new developments in the White House e-mail debacle, including revelations that a false affidavit has been filed by an Executive Branch employee and a ZIP drive may exist containing the missing e-mails. …….. A false affidavit was submitted to the court by the Justice Department and the White House saying there was no e-mail problem 18 months ago. But documents produced during a congressional hearing on Thursday show Daniel Barry, a White House computer specialist, was on notice of the White House e-mail problem before he signed a declaration setting forth that there was no e-mail problem. During a court session on Friday, Judge Lamberth was asked to seize a ZIP drive that may exist containing information on more than 100,000 missing White House e-mails . ……..Contractor Robert Haas has told investigators that he created the ZIP which contained e-mails about various Clinton scandals, including Filegate, Chinagate, campaign finance , Travelgate and Lewinsky. ……. According to case intelligence, the ZIP is said to contain a sampling of the e-mails, which could be typed out or printed in a matter of minutes. ……. The Justice Department and the White House did not advise either Lamberth's court, which is hearing a civil action brought by Judicial Watch, or the Congress. ...A submission to Congress last week by the White House made not mention of the ZIP drive. Judicial Watch has asked the judge to take the ZIP drive into custody and have its contents printed out. ……"

AP 3/23/00 John Martin "…….Testimony at the House hearing said th e e-mails under investigation had information on the vice president and campaign finance issues Two White House officials later denied any such threats, but said they couldn't recall whether they had asked the computer staffers to keep quiet about the missing messages. ……… The lost mail occurred at a time when members of Congress, the Justice Department and the Office of the Independent Counsel had issued subpoenas demanding all relevant White House documents related to campaign fund-raising, the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, and President Clinton's relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. ………. Barry said he noticed two messages sent to Lewinsky by her friend, Ashley Raines, the White House Director of Office and Policy Development Operations, but he couldn't find corresponding e-mails from Lewinsky. He reported the incident to a supervisor, but wasn't sure whether the glitch was an anomaly or systemic of a bigger problem with the e-mail server. Nearly six months passed before another specialist, Yiman Salim, noticed a similar glitch and determined the problem was widespread, she told the panel. After reporting it to her boss, Salim and four other Northrop Grumman workers were called in June 1998 to the office of Laura Crabtree, a branch chief for customer service computer support in the White House. Mark Lindsay, counsel for the White House Office of Administration, joined the meeting by speakerphone. …….. Under questioning from Waxman, none of the witnesses said they believed anyone in the administration intentionally misdirected the e-mails and none said they were asked to destroy any evidence. Most of the workers said that they initially believed the administration wanted to keep the project under wraps until officials determined the scope of the problem. Lambuth was one who soon changed her mind. "There was definitely a stalling, a delay," she testified. "Every time I asked what was going to happen on this, where we were going, I could get no answers." ……."

AP 3/23/00 John Martin "…….Among the documents presented at the hearing was a five-page "Talking Points" memo, dated March 7, 2000, ostensibly instructing White House employees on how to respond to inquiries on the issue. Its author or recipients are unclear, but the memo says the White House officials delayed addressing the problem because they were more concerned with ensuring Y2K compliance and because the administrative office "did not have the funds to do it." Another internal White House memo on Sept. 4, 1998 showed that computer officials were aware of problems "regarding OVP (Office of the Vice President) e-mail and records management." The memo laid out the problem in technical terms. ……That the issue has already languished so long clearly frustrated some Republican members of the committee, which taped the hearing and planned to broadcast it on the Internet. "This has been known to you for over two years," an exasperated Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., told Lindsay. ……."

Freeper Elle Bee 3/25/00 "…..Royce ripped the DOJ a new one Judge Lambreth spoke glowingly about Klayman & Judicial Watch Larry stroked Lambreth pretty well himself leaving the courtroom were lot of very nervous very tense looking DOJ flying monkeys who are not very happy just now If the judge's demeanor is an indicator (and Lambreth is a Jem in the DC District Court ~ he's regarded as for real)this just might be one for the good guys …….." and later "……No, a court room friendly just called The good guys are happy the DOJ looke geeked Sickly was the term he used ….."

Associated Press Online 3/25/00 Larry Margasak "……WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge ordered Justice Department prosecutors Friday to appear in private next week to make their case for delaying a hearing on missing White House e-mails. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth's order was in response to Justice Department lawyers' argument that Lamberth's hearing in a civil case should not occur while a criminal investigation of the e-mails is under way. ………. The White House had been scheduled to respond Friday to allegations that e-mails related to the files were withheld from the plaintiffs, who sought a full hearing on the matter with witness testimony. Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan told Lamberth the criminal investigation now under way should take precedence over the civil case. The criminal probe, announced Thursday, will focus on the missing e-mails and allegations by some contract employees that they were threatened with arrest if they discussed the problem publicly. Lamberth said he would not grant "an open-ended, indefinite stay" in the civil case but asked prosecutors to meet in a closed session Thursday to make their arguments.. …"

Media Research Center 3/22/00 Tim Graham "……. Newsweek reported that a still-secret memo by FBI Director Louis Freeh argued Justice Department lawyers went soft on Al Gore. U.S. News & World Report arrived late with a report on former Justice investigator Charles LaBella, and was the only magazine to give a report on independent counsel Robert Ray's investigations of the White House. Newsweek reported that a still-secret memo by FBI Director Louis Freeh argued Justice Department lawyers went soft on Al Gore. An unbylined "Periscope" item related: "In the November 24, 1997, memo addressed to Attorney General Janet Reno, portions of which were read to Newsweek, Freeh criticized Justice Department lawyers for making 'factual assumptions' favorable to the Clinton White House 'without investigating whether those assumptions were accurate.' Among the issues Freeh argued needed to be investigated by an independent counsel: Gore's fund-raising calls from the White House, the use of a White House computer database for political purposes and whether Clinton and Gore illegally raised money on federal property during White House 'coffees.'" The report added: "Release of the memo could seal Freeh's fate if Gore wins in November. Although the director's term won't expire until 2003, a Gore ally says Freeh won't be welcome in a new Democratic administration."……"

http://www.federal.com/ 3/18/00 Marvin Lee "……In the court of federal judge Royce Lamberth the White House last Friday asked for the names of whistleblowers who have come forward in recent weeks to allege that the White House threatened employees and contractors not to reveal that about 100,000 e-mails had not been indexed for searching in response to subpoenas. Judge Lamberth denied the request. Several whistleblowers have asked for court protection because they fear for their safety. ….."

The Washington Weekly 3/20/00 Marvin Lee "…… Late Friday, after the main news cycle, the White House sent a response to Chairman Dan Burton revealing that a second email error had affected email sent to the White House between November 1998 and May 1999. The error caused those emails not to be searched in response to congressional and judicial subpoenas. The first email error, discovered by Judicial Watch, had affected more than 100,000 emails being sent to the White House between August 1996 and November 1998. The White House also acknowledged a third email error that could result in missing e-mails in Vice President Al Gore's office. ……"

Washington Weekly 3/19/00 Rep. Bob Barr The Honorable Robert Ray Independent Counsel "….
Dear Mr. Ray: I am writing to you about a matter which has, since it was uncovered in June 1996, commonly been referred to as the "Filegate scandal"; involving the illegal acquisition of over 900 FBI files by the Clinton-Gore White House, and the misuse of other government files protected by The Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a et. seq., in order to gather information to smear political adversaries and critics. As you may know, I have been subjected to these tactics, in order to prevent me from carrying out my duties as a U.S. Congressman during the impeachment proceedings against President William Jefferson Clinton. As a result, I have brought litigation to redress the harm caused to me and to the Congress, and to obtain the files which The Clinton-Gore White House, and its Justice Department, have been keeping on me. I am therefore a putative plaintiff in the widening Filegate scandal, and an actual plaintiff in my own lawsuit. See Attachment 1.

………I am concerned about recent reports published in the New York Times, and elsewhere, that you have met with certain members of media, such as William Safire, and disclosed to them that your investigation of this scandal has failed to yield the evidence required for criminal prosecution, and will therefore be closed. While I do not believe it proper or correct for the Office of the Independent Counsel ("OIC") to be leaking details of its investigation to the media -- particularly before the subject report on Filegate is made available to the public and Congress -- I am even more disturbed by evidence that the OIC has failed to conduct an adequate investigation. This evidence comes largely from a civil lawsuit prosecuted by Judicial Watch, Inc., on behalf of the class of aggrieved persons, many of whom are Republicans, and includes but is not limited to, a number of perceived defects in your investigation.

……..First, sworn deposition testimony shows that key material witnesses, such as Linda Tripp, Thomas "Mac" McLarty and Terry Good have neither been substantively questioned informally nor called before the grand jury, despite Mr. Starr's representations in his letter of December l1, 1998, to the House Judiciary Committee.

……….Linda Tripp, who testified at deposition to Judicial Watch that she witnessed the misuse of FBI files on Republicans, and overheard conversations between Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy and Marsha Scott, a close confidante of Bill and Hillary Clinton, that confirmed the contents of these files were shared with the Democratic National Committee at the direction of Mrs. Clinton, was never even interviewed by your office about Filegate. The same is true for Mr. McLarty, the President's closest friend and The White House Chief of Staff during the period of Filegate. Terry Good, who, as Director of The White House Office of Records Management, delivered up Privacy Act protected files on Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky to The White House Counsel's Office -- some of which material was leaked to the media -- and as someone who stored the overflow of Republican FBI files in his office, should also have been questioned, but was not. Hillary Clinton -- who evidence shows was the mastermind of Filegate -- was questioned informally by Ken Starr for only nine minutes. James Carville was never questioned at all, by Ken Starr's own admission. These are just a few of the many examples of material witnesses who have not been substantively interviewed or called before the grand jury by the OIC.

……..Second, it defies imagination how the OIC could rely on the FBI to investigate its own improper acts in Filegate, rather than using some other, independent law enforcement or investigatory body. By the admission of its current Director, Louis Freeh, the FBI engaged in egregious violations of privacy without justification when it turned over the subject FBI files to The Clinton-Gore White House. It is therefore not difficult to figure out that the agency should not have been charged with investigating itself. This is akin to asking the fox to investigate his own henhouse massacre. Indeed, past experiences concerning Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, and the Olympic bombing, confirm that the agency cannot properly or objectively investigate its own misconduct.

……..Indeed, the FBI's conduct in this matter is also troubling. I am aware that two agents of the FBI visited the home of former FBI Special Agent Dennis Sculimbrene shortly after it was disclosed he had recorded a conversation with former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum linking Hillary Clinton to the hiring of Craig Livingstone, the former bar bouncer who was encharged, along with Anthony Marceca, with reviewing the subject FBI files. During this visit, former Special Agent Sculimbrene was harassed and intimidated in an attempt to silence or discredit him. Incidentally, Mr. Livingstone's sidekick, Mr. Marceca, invoked the Fifth Amendment nearly 2,000 times when he testified to Judicial Watch -- hardly the conduct of someone who had engaged in an "innocent bureaucratic snafu." For Mr. Marceca's "efforts," his testimony shows that he was rewarded with salary step increases, and never even criticized by the Clinton-Gore Administration for his misconduct.

……..Third, when Judicial Watch deposed William Kennedy, the Associate White House Counsel who not only supervised Livingstone and Marceca, but also reviewed the subject FBI files himself (having by the admission of his former wife, Gail Leslie Kennedy, taken them home and loaded them onto a computer on the kitchen table), he was asked whether he stored the files of Republicans in his office. In response, he literally choked -- as revealed by the videotape of his testimony.

……..Fourth, recent revelations -- based on the sworn testimony of two Clinton-Gore White House whistleblowers -- show that The White House has suppressed over 100,000 and perhaps as many as 1,000,000 e-mails, in addition to about 500 hard drive cartridges, which contain incriminating evidence concerning Filegate, Travelgate, Chinagate, Lewinsky and other Clinton scandals. I understand from Judicial Watch you have refused to meet personally with these witnesses, much like your predecessor, Ken Starr, who never met with Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and other key persons who had evidence about key aspects of the Clinton-Gore scandals. Notwithstanding this, how can you meet with William Safire of the New York Times, and leak information about the results of the OIC's investigations -- thereby creating a false impression that you have thoroughly investigated Filegate and other matters -- when your office has not reviewed crucial evidence and met with key, material witnesses?

…….Finally, I am aware, from published reports in The Washington Post, that Attorney General Janet Reno had offered to drop her ethics investigation of alleged improprieties in your office, if the OIC closed its investigations. Ms. Reno's offer was based on her professed claim that the Justice Department would no longer have jurisdiction to pursue an ethics investigation if your investigation(s) were closed. See Attachment 2. The timing of your revelations to close the OIC's investigations is therefore quite troubling.

………For all of these reasons -- and this simply scratches the surface -- I am deeply concerned that you and your office have failed to duly execute your duties as Independent Counsel. In addition, as I am personally involved in the Filegate scandal -- it has been reported that The White House obtained my FBI and other government files (See Attachment 3) -- I demand a full explanation, before deciding what further action is necessary. I understand that in addition to me, neither you nor your office have been in contact with other aggrieved parties, prior to your leaking the results of your apparent findings to William Safire, and now forwarding your report on Filegate to the three-judge panel.

……..As a private, aggrieved citizen, and a member of the House Judiciary Committee and Government Reform Committee, I will not rest until justice is done. Clearly, your leaked findings on Filegate and some of the other Clinton-Gore scandals are suspect. ….."

Human Events via WND 3/20/00 "……. We now know at least one of the things Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has been trying to cover up by refusing to comply with an 18-month-old subpoena from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee demanding that she release a memo written to her in July 1998 by federal prosecutor Charles LaBella. ……..In a redacted portion of the memo that was leaked last week to the Los Angeles Times, LaBella said Gore "may have provided false testimony" about his fundraising activities. Specifically, the vice president claimed he did not recall internal White House conversations and memos in which he was specifically informed that he was raising "hard," rather than "soft," money…... Raising such money from a White House office -- as Gore did via his telephone -- is unambiguously felonious....The vice president's convenient lack of recollection stood in stark contrast to testimony from then-White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, who swore that he remembered watching Gore "attentively listening" to the conversations in question and "walking through the papers." ……"

Human Events via WND 3/20/00 "……. In sworn testimony on Dec. 9, 1997, before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, under cross examination from a well-prepared Rep. John Shadegg, R.-Ariz., Reno admitted that the words and phrases Gore had used at his press conference to describe his White House fundraising solicitations described the solicitation of "hard money." She also admitted that soliciting "hard money" in the business quarters of the White House is illegal. So how could she justify not calling for an independent counsel? Read below as Shadegg ties Reno in knots. Then look at some of the evidence she was sitting on. Meanwhile, remember, there are other elements of the LaBella memo that have yet to see the light of day.

Shadegg: Your report also concludes that some of the money was in fact -- raised by the vice president -- was in fact used by the DNC as hard money. That's on page 8. You would agree with that?
Reno: That's correct.

Shadegg: Okay. Your report also concludes that, at least for the purposes of the report, you will assume that the statute makes it illegal for the vice president from the White House to raise hard money contributions.
Reno: That's correct. .……

Shadegg: Okay. Would you agree with me, Madame Attorney General, that the best evidence of whether or not the vice president was soliciting hard money campaign contributions would be his own words?
Reno: It would be a variety of information.

Shadegg: Certainly it would be fairly good evidence, would it not? His own description of what he was doing?
Reno: Yes. But again, we wanted to make sure that we did not rely on the vice president predominantly, that we looked at all the evidence.

Shadegg: Well, your report pretty well concludes that, number one, yes, he made the calls, yes, some of the money was used as hard money, but he didn't know of the DNC policy to use it as hard money, so he didn't know he was raising hard money. And you just agreed with me that if he was raising hard money that that would appear to be a violation of the law -- at least your report assumed that -- and that it was likely, absent the issue of aggravating circumstances, that you would have called for an independent investigation, right?
Reno: Depending on the circumstances and the aggravating circumstances…….

Shadegg: Right. ... Now the last quote I want to bring you from his press conference is that it says -- point blank -- he says, "My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority" -- the phrase that became famous from that press conference -- "or case that says there was any violation of law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our reelection campaign." ... I think this is pretty clear evidence that at the time he did it, he thought it was hard money.
Reno: Based on the interview of over 200 witnesses, based on the analysis of documents, we disagree…….

-- Nov. 24, 1998 LaBella memo: "Confronted with notes and memos indicating that a November 1995 meeting Gore attended in the Map Room of the White House included discussions about raising hard money, the vice president said he did not recall such conversations or the memos. Previously undisclosed documents show that former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta told FBI agents that he remembered Gore 'attentively listening' to discussions about the hard money aspects of the media fund and 'walking through the papers' as the November 1995 meeting progressed. These documents also indicate that the task force obtained photographs from that meeting showing Gore looking at papers that he said he did not recall reviewing." -- Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2000 ….."

House Committee on Goverment Reform 3/21/00 Letter Burton to Reno "….. On March 8, 2000, I wrote to you about the Justice Department's apparent failure to make any effort to obtain a large category of documents potentially relevant to the campaign fundraising investigation. In that letter, I pointed out that the Justice Department had not contacted any of the contractors responsible for the White House e-mail system, and had apparently not pushed the White House to produce this information to the Justice Department.

……..However, as the Committee has investigated this matter, I have learned that not only has the Justice Department failed to push for any of this information, it is actually playing a key role in keeping the information from coming to light. Currently, the Justice Department is representing the Executive Office of the President ("EOP") in civil suits brought in the "Filegate" case. In recent pleadings, plaintiffs have alleged suppression of evidence and threatening of witnesses concerning mismanaged White House e-mail records that may touch on Filegate matters affecting their case. Rather than responding to the Plaintiffs' allegations with concern, or even withdrawing from the case, the Justice Department lawyers have responded like seasoned defense counsel: they disparaged the plaintiffs' claims; they said that this was old news; and they claimed that it would be impossible to produce the e-mails. In its March 6, 2000, memorandum to the court, the Justice Department first characterized the plaintiffs' allegations as "offensive." Then, it stated that the "technical failure [to produce the e-mails] is a long-standing matter of public record that has been confirmed by the White House itself." Finally, the Justice Department stated that the "EOP has advised both plaintiffs and this Court on innumerable occasions that it has not produced any backed-up or archived e-mail in response to plaintiffs' many discovery requests. Time and again, EOP has forthrightly objected that it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in a non-word searchable format."

………While the Justice Department's zeal in defending its client, the White House, is understandable, it is also troubling. The Justice Department is supposed to be conducting a thorough criminal investigation of allegations of illegal fundraising in the 1996 elections, including allegations about White House involvement in the scandal. Just last week, you stated that "the investigation continues, and we will continue to pursue every lead." Yet, the Justice Department's filing in the Filegate case makes it clear that you are not making any effort to follow this lead. In fact, the Justice Department is disparaging these claims, and is assisting the White House in its efforts to keep these records from being produced to the Justice Department or any other investigative body. These facts lead me to ask a number of questions:

When did the Justice Department learn of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
When was the Campaign Financing Task Force informed of the problem with the White House e-mail system?
Is it the opinion of the Campaign Financing Task Force that allegations that White House e-mails were not produced to the Task Force are "offensive," as the Justice Department suggested in its recent legal brief?
Is it the Campaign Financing Task Force's position that "it is unduly burdensome to perform broad-based searches of archived and backed-up e-mail, especially e-mail stored in non-word searchable format," as suggested in the Justice Department's brief?

……..When FBI Director Freeh and Charles La Bella concluded that you were not able to conduct the campaign fundraising investigation, they were obviously right. This conclusion was reinforced when it was learned that your prosecutors had failed to question either the President or the Vice President about any aspect of the foreign money scandal during five separate interviews. It is inconceivable that the Justice Department can on one hand help the White House avoid production of the missing e-mails, and on the other hand, aggressively pursue the e-mails in the campaign fundraising investigation……."

NewsMax 3/24/00 "…….Can Janet Reno's Justice Department really be trusted to conduct an honest criminal investigation of the White House's missing e-mail scandal, when it's civil division continues to represent the White House in a lawsuit over the same scandal? Friday's news reports don't make the massive conflict of interest particularly clear, but the New York Times did note 16 paragraphs into its front page story on the newly announced criminal probe: "The Justice Department review was disclosed today in legal documents filed by the department's civil division, which is defending the White House in the lawsuit over the e-mail." With a conflict this stark, smoke alarms should be going off in every newsroom across America. ……The Times also reported that Justice's civil division has asked presiding Judge Royce Lambeth to halt Judicial Watch's suit pending the outcome of the Justice Department's criminal probe. Not surprisingly, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, who announced the "see no evil" conclusions of his own Filegate probe only last week, concurrs with Justice's efforts to block Klayman & Co. ……"

StarTribune/NYT 3/25/00 "……- White House officials learned almost two years ago of a major computer problem that resulted in the mishandling of the administration's electronic mail. Now, as they defend themselves against accusations that they illegally concealed the situation from investigators, presidential aides are arguing that they lacked the computer knowledge to really understand how important the problem was. "As you know, this matter involves complex technical issues," said White House counsel Beth Nolan, in a statement to congressional investigators that she is scheduled to deliver next week. "Of course, my staff and I are lawyers with laypersons' understanding of the technical complexities of electronic messaging and archiving."…….. But a Justice Department lawyer, James Gilligan, who sought to delay Klayman's lawsuit while his office investigates, argued that it was unlikely anything incriminating would turn up on the messages……..The committee's chief investigative counsel, Jim Wilson, was not buying the White House defense. "It may be a difficult problem, but the onus was on them to come to an understanding of what the problem was, and they didn't," he said……"

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "….. How odd, White House computer technician Daniel "Tony" Barry recalled thinking to himself. In January 1998, he was told to scour the database for e-mails concerning a former intern named Monica S. Lewinsky. While searching for documents that had been subpoenaed, Barry came across a particular batch of correspondence that seemed to qualify--an apparent exchange of missives between Lewinsky and her friend Ashley Raines, a White House employee. The curious thing was that the White House computer archive had saved only one side of what plainly was a back-and-forth conversation. For some reason, only the e-mails coming from the White House--not those entering the White House system from outside--were archived. …….. Now, the latest in a seemingly endless string of controversies over the administration's disclosure of evidence promises to shadow the balance of President Clinton's term and the presidential campaign of Vice President Gore. Indeed, with the e-mails now front-page headlines, the White House moved yesterday to hire a new contractor to restore the missing documents. Officials said they had no idea how long the process would take or whether anything could be done before the election. ......"

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "…..On Gore's computer system, White House lawyers say they discovered last week, neither internal e-mails nor those coming from outside were properly recorded for Gore and some aides from 1994 onward. That means, potentially, that large numbers of e-mails produced by Gore or senior aides were never reviewed to see if they contained material relevant to congressional and Justice Department inquiries into campaign fund-raising...."

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "….. Six months later, in June 1998, Northrop Grumman Corp. employee Yiman Salim, assigned to a team managing the White House computers, was the first to discover that the hiccup was a symptom of a major programming error. Incoming e-mail messages were not being scanned by the system because upper-case rather than lower-case letters were used in part of the computer code: MAIL2 instead of Mail2. John D. Podesta, then deputy chief of staff, was quickly informed of a "technical anomaly" in the system. He asked for a briefing "on this thing," according to handwritten notes. A senior official said that Podesta "does think he had a brief meeting on it" with a lawyer from the office that handles White House records. Podesta told the lawyer "be sure that the counsel's office knows about this." ……."

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "….. But the error persisted. Documents released by Burton's committee depict Barry's growing anxiety about the matter. "I am growing increasingly concerned about the seeming lack of movement on the Mail2 problem," Barry wrote in a September 1998 memo. "Do you know where the holdup is. We have known about this problem for four months now and not a single record has been passed to ARMS." Two weeks later, Barry again wrote that he had heard nothing. "I need to know, for my own sanity, exactly what my role in this project should be." The problem was corrected--in November 1998. But the technicians discovered another glitch: incoming e-mail of White House employees whose first names begin with the letter D were dropped from the archiving. That glitch was eventually fixed. ……."

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "….. However knowledgeable the White House was about other computer problems, officials say it was not until late last week that they realized even more serious complications with e-mail from the vice president's office. For Gore, a computer-savvy politician who has boasted of his involvement in the early stages of the Internet and is an avid user of e-mail, the matter has perhaps the most ominous political implications. That is because the missing e-mails involving Gore and some 20-plus members of his staff include not only incoming missives--as is the case with the Clinton office--but messages written by Gore and his staff too. Some of those e-mails were kept on White House computer workstations and in paper files turned over to congressional and Justice Department investigators. But there is no way of knowing how much material potentially relevant to the investigation of the 1996 campaign fund-raising abuses is stored on the 550 backup tapes in the custody of the White House security office. The problem has its roots in the Gore staff's conclusion, early in the administration, that its computers were inadequate and that they should set up their own separate system. ……"

Washington Post 3/25/00 John Harris Ruth Marcus "….. Again, however, some of the documents show that at the very least technicians at the White House knew of the problem. A September 1998 memo from Barry said that, while the archiving system contained a "records bucket" for the vice president's office, only mail that had crossed over into the main White House system was being retrieved. At best, the e-mail issue depicts a White House in which some officials (those in charge of administering the archiving system) were aware of a problem and failed to fully explain its scope to others (the lawyers responsible for responding to subpoenas.) "You have technical people doing their jobs and talking to their technical people, the lawyers doing their jobs and not conscious there's a technical issue and I think that's what happened," a White House official said. But to those skeptical of the administration and its motives, the handling of the matter shows senior officials with little interest in getting to the bottom of the matter. "They never told anybody, 'Hey, we've got this problem,' because all they were interested in back then was keeping information from coming out," said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Burton's committee. "They sat on it. They did nothing." ….."

WorldNetDaily 3/24/00 Johnny Chung "…..Headlines around the country are now announcing the Justice Department's criminal investigation into a convenient White House computer breakdown that has made it impossible to review thousands of e-mail messages, some of which pertain to President Clinton's 1996 campaign finance scandal. As a key participant in the scandal, my name surely appears in several of those messages. And I'm not merely speculating -- I was told specifically by White House and Democratic National Committee staff members that e-mails had been sent on my behalf. I was the Chairman and CEO of Automatic Intelligence Systems Inc., and as such, I promoted my company to the Clinton administration's first chief of staff. My company provided a fax service -- clients sent AISI a document they wanted to send to, say, a thousand people. My company would take the document with the list of recipients and do the faxing. I tried to secure business with the White House, and was successful on a temporary basis. During those negotiations, a young man working in the chief of staff's office told me he had e-mailed all my requests and proposals to his superiors. But they are nowhere to be found……….

WorldNetDaily 3/24/00 Johnny Chung "…..Having spent so much time there, I got to know some of the staff. One in particular, an intern named Gina Ratliffe, was very gracious to my guests. I believed she could be an asset to my company because of her diplomacy with my foreign associates, so I decided to hire her. Gina continued as an unpaid intern for the first lady, but also worked for AISI. A few days after the luncheon, I called Gina and told her I was going to send flowers to Williams and other key staff as thanks for their assistance in granting my wish list. I asked Gina to make sure the flowers reached the right people. Gina told me she e-mailed the recipients of the bouquets so they knew who the flowers were from. Those e-mails have not been found by investigators and neither have those related to scheduling my visit with President Clinton in the Oval Office. During congressional investigations into my involvement with the Clintons, confusion arose about who officially set up my March 1995 Oval Office meeting with the president. DNC staff told me they had e-mailed the White House requesting the meeting, but those e-mails are also nowhere to be found. ……"

CBSNEWS.COM 3/24/00 "……Top White House officials were notified in 1998 of computer problems but didn't tell Congress or the Justice Department of the glitches that prevented thousands of e-mails from being searched in response to subpoenas, according to documents and congressional testimony. …….. In testimony Thursday to the House Government Reform Committee, a White House aide acknowledged that he asked that employees keep quiet about the difficulties, but said he never threatened anyone. "I did say ... that this was a matter that I believed that needed to be kept in bounds with those people who needed the information to perform repairs to the system," Mark Lindsay testified. Lindsay said he didn't want people "talking around at the water cooler." ………. Charles Ruff, who was the White House counsel in 1998, and John Podesta, deputy chief of staff at the time, were told about the breakdowns in internal memos that year. "This memorandum is to advise you of an anomaly in the system in the Mail2 server, which primarily supports the day-to-day e-mail traffic of the White House Office ... ." Podesta was informed by another presidential aide on June 19, 1998. Podesta is now the president's chief of staff. ………"Thus, as Mr. Ruff understood the technical problem at the time, he did not think that the error had an effect on previous searches or that it might affect future searches of e-mail records," Nolan said. "As a result, Mr. Ruff had no reason to believe there was any need to notify investigative bodies of this error." ……"

CBSNEWS.COM 3/24/00 "……Another internal White House memo on Sept. 4, 1998, showed that computer officials were aware of problems "regarding OVP (Office of the Vice President) e-mail and records management." The memo laid out the problem in technical terms, but there was no indication it was discussed with Gore's staff. Nolan told the committee, however, "It appears that much, if not all" of Gore's e-mails were not captured by the White House archive system. But she said officials were reviewing backup tapes from the vice presidential e-mail system to see if any of them can be reconstructed. ......"

CBSNEWS.COM 3/24/00 "……Some private sector contract employees, who were hired by the White House to work on the e-mail system, contended they were threatened by White House officials with termination and even prison if they told anyone about the breakdown. Those allegations will be reviewed in the criminal probe, the Justice Department said. ......... The department revealed the investigation in papers filed in a civil lawsuit brought by individuals who contend the White House improperly obtained and misused their FBI background files. The plaintiffs sought e-mails related to those files. The Justice Department asked a federal judge for more time to answer that demand, contending any response now could jeopardize the criminal investigation. The delay was called a "ploy" by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal organization that filed the $90 million class action suit. "This is not the first time the Clinton-Gore Justice Department used its campaign finance task force as an excuse to try to take evidence away from the court," Klayman said, adding he would oppose the delay and seek court sanctions if the deadline is not met. ......"

AP Wire via ABC News 3/24/00 "……A federal judge ordered Justice Department prosecutors Friday to appear in private next week to make their case for delaying a hearing on missing White House e-mails. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth's order was in response to Justice Department lawyers' argument that Lamberth's hearing in a civil case should not occur while a criminal investigation of the e-mails is under way. ………Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan told Lamberth the criminal investigation now under way should take precedence over the civil case. The criminal probe, announced Thursday, will focus on the missing e-mails and allegations by some contract employees that they were threatened with arrest if they discussed the problem publicly. Lamberth said he would not grant "an open-ended, indefinite stay" in the civil case but asked prosecutors to meet in a closed session Thursday to make their arguments. Judicial Watch's Larry Klayman argued that "even a stay of one day would be inappropriate," because the Justice Department is hiding the e-mails "to get past the next election." "The allegation that our strategy is to delay is false," Gilligan responded. …."

CNN 3/24/00 Amy Paulson "……In the wake of the announcement of a criminal probe by the Justice Department, White House officials said Thursday that a second, separate computer problem affecting the Office of the Vice President may have resulted in thousands of e-mail messages escaping the investigative reach of Congress, the Justice Department and the Office of the Independent Counsel. That separate glitch may still be unresolved, and may have first occurred earlier than the problem with incoming White House e-mail that struck between August 1996 and June 1998, according to the White House officials. Although the contents of those e-mail messages are not known, they could include correspondence regarding the vice president's fund-raising activities, which have been the subject of an investigation by both Congress and a Justice Department task force. ……… White House officials Mark Lindsay and Laura Callahan also said Thursday they asked contract staffers not to discuss the computer problems, but rejected claims that those staffers had been threatened. Earlier in the day, three Northrop Grumman contract employees, charged with operating the e-mail system, said both Lindsay and Callahan had threatened to have them jailed if the problem was disclosed. ….."

CNN 3/24/00 Amy Paulson "……All of the contract employees who testified before the panel on Thursday said the problem was technical in nature, but the White House nonetheless wanted to keep it a secret…….Lindsay, along with Callahan -- a career civil servant who at the time the problem surfaced served as the White House webmaster -- testified before the panel that they were simply following standard White House operating procedures when they instructed the Northrop Grumman team to remain quiet on the issue while the problem was diagnosed and repaired. ……… When asked why some on the team -- including Robert Haas, a systems administrator who said he was told there would be a "jail cell with his name on it" if he disclosed the problem -- recalled having been threatened during a meeting on the issue, Callahan said: "He may be either having a bad recollection or having an overactive imagination with regard to having the threat being made to him." ……… Callahan said she became alarmed when, shortly after the problem was discovered, Northrop Grumman employee Betty Lambuth, a manager on the project who no longer works at the White House, came to her with an e-mail exchange between Lewinsky and another woman, Ashley Raines. "I was very concerned why all of a sudden we had a specific e-mail being brought to my attention when we hadn't even determined the size and scope of the problem," Callahan said. Lambuth said that the e-mail had been found by Haas. At the time, the team was in a "diagnostic mode," Callahan said. "Whether e-mails were lost or not was a technical conclusion that had not been reached yet. What I asked be done was to conduct an investigation to determine the nature of the problem," Lindsay added. As a result, it was decided a team meeting should be held to walk through the White House standard operating procedures. "There were already people in the hallway starting to discuss this," said Callahan. "And Mr. Lindsay said we needed to be careful because it was sensitive." ……"

CNN 3/24/00 Amy Paulson "……As part of that lawsuit and a subsequent investigation by Burton's committee, Lambuth claimed she had been threatened with jail if she revealed the existence of the problem. "I was told by a couple of different people that we were not to talk to anyone," she said. "We were not to talk to our spouses other than those of us who already knew about this particular project. They did tell me that if any of us did talk about this that my staff would be fired, would be arrested and would go to jail," she said. Some of them felt so threatened by their initial meeting with Callahan and Lindsay that they requested legal counsel, according to Steven Hawkins, the Northrop Grumman program manager. The technical problem was to be kept so secret that it came to be known as "Project X," and the team, led by Lambuth, held a series of furtive technical meetings at a nearby Starbucks coffee house and Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, to keep the issue confidential. ......... "

CNN 3/24/00 Amy Paulson "……"We should do our best to clarify the facts," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), the ranking Democrat on the committee. "We have already learned that no one in the Clinton Administration suggested that e-mails be excluded from the ARMS system. "It's pretty clear that if we didn't find out about this problem independently we were never going to be told by the White House," Burton said. ………"

CNSNews.com 3/24/00 Jim Burns "……Federal Judge Royce Lamberth has delayed ruling on a request by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, on an evidentiary hearing against the Clinton Administration over the burgeoning e-mail scandal involving the White House. ……. White House lawyer James Gilligan said that the Justice Department wanted a stay in the matter because the case would interfere with an on-going criminal investigation regarding the same matter. Judge Lamberth responded that he had difficulty with an open-ended stay and also told Gilligan, "You have an uphill battle with me up front on that." Gilligan responded that the Department of Justice civil division desires to complete the inquiry on the criminal investigation within 60-to-90 days, and he also said the plaintiff, meaning Judicial Watch representing the two employees, is not in a position to complain. Gilligan contends that the executive office of the President has not withheld any e-mail and the White House is continuing to look into the matter……"

CNSNews.com 3/24/00 Jim Burns "……Larry Klayman, head of Judicial Watch, then argued that the case has been pending before the court for three-and-a-half years and is ripe for certification as well as for trial. Klayman also said the Reno Department of Justice has not indicted much less talked to any one in the White House about the overall campaign finance scandal. He also said the Justice Department did nothing to notify the White House about the e-mail problem, which was mentioned in the internal DOJ report by investigator Charles LaBella. In his report he recommended an independent counsel be established to investigate possible campaign fundraising improprieties within the White House. Reno reportedly sat on the report for nearly two years. ………. Klayman told Judge Lamberth that he believes the entire matter smacks of a cover-up and said, "What we have here is perjury." He said the Justice Department will have to be investigated for submitting false affidavits in connection with the campaign finance investigation……."

CNSNews.com 3/24/00 Jim Burns "……Judge Lamberth decided to have a closed presentation by counsel on Thursday morning, March 30th, and is taking all matters under advisement. He is expected to make a ruling on an evidentiary hearing by the end of next week. After the hearing on Friday ended, Gilligan refused comment to reporters. The only thing Gilligan did say was, "The only person I want to talk to now is my wife." …….."

CNSNews.com 3/24/00 Jim Burns "……However, Klayman did hold a post-hearing news conference, where he stated, "We did negotiate and, in fact, as we pointed out to the court, we made it very clear over a year and a half ago exactly what the parameters of document searches were. "In fact, we put the Reno Justice Department on notice that there was a problem with the e-mail. But as we found out in Congressional proceedings yesterday (Thursday), the Reno Justice Department didn't contact the White House, didn't secure the e-mail, in fact, sat on this for one and a half years, and it obviously explodes now because two very fine people, both Sheryl Hall and Betty Lambuth, were inside the White House, knew about this cover-up of e-mail and were threatened to keep their mouths shut or do time in prison," Klayman said. ………. "To ask this judge," Klayman added, "to trust it (the Justice Department) to say 'we'll conduct our own investigation, back off,' is simply ridiculous. You have to be someone living on another planet to accept that under the circumstances of the last seven years where we see one cover-up after another, missing documents showing up in the White House living quarters, documents that, in fact, are never produced by e-mail and disc drive...You tell me who's honest?…….."

CNSNews.com 3/24/00 Jim Burns "……"This Clinton Administration is corrupt, it has not done its job, and to ask the court to delay its proceedings is just another word for obstruction," Klayman said……….. Asked by CNSNews.com if he felt confident that he would get an evidentiary hearing, Klayman said, "We're very confident of that. Judge Lamberth, I can't speak for him, but he's the finest judge in this country...This judge plays it straight. He does what he thinks is right. I don't know of any other judge in the United States who has the courage to do what this judge has done and must now do.……"

National Review online 3/24/00 Steven Hayes "……..Even with a magnanimous suspension of disbelief about the cause of the missing e-mails, serious questions remain. According to court records and documents produced by the White House, senior White House officials - includng then White House Counsel Charles Ruff and current chief of staff John Podesta - were alerted to the computer problems in 1998 and failed to disclose them. What's more, two contract employees offered detailed testimony about White House efforts to keep this crucial information from outside ears……….. Betty Lambuth, the manager of the Northrop Grumman team that first found the glitch, told lawmakers that she and her employees "were threatened . . . with loss of our jobs, arrest and jail if we told anyone." "I quickly came to the conclusion that the Clinton White House had no intention of fixing the problem," she continued. "My conclusion was based on the fact that nothing was done to fix the problem and the e-mails continued to be left out of any searches in response to subpoenas and other document requests." ……….Lambuth's colleague, Richard Haas, also claims that he was told by White House computer director Laura Crabtree, "there would be a jail cell with my name on it" if he disclosed the team's findings to anyone, including his wife….."

House Government Reform Committee 3/15/00 "……. According to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee this morning, the deadline for subpoenaed production of the now infamous LaBella memo which called for Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate possible Clinton/Gore criminal activity in their 1996 fundraising activity, has passed and attorney general Janet Reno has thumbed her nose once again. ……… When she previously refused to produce the memo, a contempt citation was voted in the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee whereupon she promptly fainted in church and the committee backed off. Will we see another such stunt or shall we now expect the committee to vote another contempt citation which should go to the full house for a vote? ……"

Washington Times 3/15/00 "…….The revelation of the 18-and-a-half-minute gap in White House secretary Rosemary Woods' transcription of a potentially incriminating Nixon tape sent shock waves through official Washington and the television networks. So far, however, mostly silence has greeted recent revelations of another "gap." Jerry Seper of The Washington Times has reported that the Clinton-Gore White House has failed to release thousands of potentially incriminating e-mail messages sought under subpoena by a federal grand jury and assorted congressional committees. Not only has the White House failed to surrender the e-mail documents as required by law. But five Northrop Grumman employees, who worked on a technical-support contract maintaining White House computers, have told House investigators that White House political appointees threatened to send them to a "jail cell" if they told anyone, including their bosses and spouses, about their discovery of more than 100,000 e-mail messages that had been temporarily lost in the White House computer system because of a computer glitch. Once the problem was discovered, the evidence suggests, the White House deliberately attempted to conceal those messages from the authorities entitled by law to review them......."

Judicial Watch 3/15/00 "……Today Chairman Dan Burton of the House Government Reform Committee sent a letter to the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth, the judge presiding in Judicial Watch's $90 million class-action lawsuit, asking that he take additional steps to ensure that over 100,000 e-mails and about 500 hard drive cartridges are secured, to avoid destruction. Based on past experience with the Clinton-Gore White House, Chairman Burton, like Judicial Watch, has valid concerns that the evidence be preserved pending Court review and review by congressional authorities……."

Committee on Goverment Reform 3/19/00 "…..Question's the Committee expects Beth Nolan to answer are:
1) Nolan's letter to the Committee state's "e-mails on the server of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) have nt been fully managed by ARMS.". The Committee is interested in a full explanation of this problem and the Committee wants to know when the White House notified The Department of Justice, Congress, and the Offices of the Independent counsel of the Problem.
2) The Committee is concerned that the preliminary cost to rectify the problem and to include the relevant data in the ARMS system is $1.8 to $3.0 million dollars. The Committee has been told by individuals associated with the ARMS system that the cost has been increased by delay. Further, Beth Nolan notes that "It may take approximately one to two years" to rectify the problem. If this is true, given the discovery of the problem on June 12, 1998, the Problems with the e-mail should have already been put behind us or have only 3 months left to wait…..
3) The committee is concerned that White House Councel's letter is somewhat unclear as to when she learned of these problems. the Committee is curious as to when you were informed and what steps you took to pass the information to the Justice Department, the Independent Counsels, and to Congress.. The Committee wants to know what the White House Counsel's office did to solve the problem.
4) The Committee is concerned that White House Councel's letter states most clearly that "[b]ackup tapes...are not searchable, absent reconstruction and transfer to ARMS." It appears that one search was performed in 1998. The search did not require a transfer to ARMS, and material responsive to an Independent Counsel document request was discovered. While the Committee does not intend to underestimate the potential complexity of the problem, the committee is concerned that on of the purposes of the Letter from White House Counsel Beth Nolan was to present a simplistic and self-serving explanation of this problem for Media consumption. The Committee is suprised that White House counsel failed to provide this information in her letter……
5) The White House Counsel Beth Nolan letter indicates that an individual- who the Committee intends to have testify at the March 23rd Hearing- identified a problem with e-mail management in January of February of 1998. The White House Counsel letter indicates that it was not until June of 1998 that the problem was next noticed. The Committee is interested in the steps taken by the White House Counsel's office to investigate this problem durning the intervening four to five months, where the "Ultimate" problem would have been less costly to fix, and the universe of information would be much smaller, if there had been no such delay by the White House Counsel's office. The Committee will expect White House Counsel Beth Nolan to explain how the White House Counsel's office dealt with the problem from it's initial discovery.
6)The Committee notes that Beth Nolan's letter states that Mr. Ruff provided a timely notification that some pre-1994 e-mails were unavailable for document review. When did the White House provide a similar notification of the "Mail2" and "d" user problems to the Justice Department, the Independent Counsels, and Congress?
7) The Committee Notes that White House Counsel Beth Nolan's letters indicates that no-one has estimated the number of e-mails that have not been reviewed is inconsistent with other information that has been previously provided to the Committee. The Committee is interested in Beth Nolan's response to this area of concern, particulary given the presumption that the White House Counsel's office would ask for an approximation of the size of the problem in anticipation of making plans to solve the problem.
8) The Committee also notes that White House Counsel Beth Nolan's letter also dismiss concerns regarding Waco-related e-mails by explaining that the Waco tragedy took place before the time period implicated by the problem. Again, this simplistic approach is troubling. in 1997 there were allegations regarding gunfire that created a degree of consternation. It is not unreasonable to suspect that individuals might have provided commentary on these allegations durning the period that e-mails were not being properly managed. Similarly, the fact that other issues occurred at a particular time does not impact whether White House employees have created information responsive to document requests.
9) The Committee also notes that Beth Nolan's letter explains that the e-mails may have been reviewed by manual searches conducted by individual computer users. The Committee notes that White House Counsel Beth Nolan Omits to explain, however, how searches could be conducted by people who have left the White House. It is the Committee's understanding that there was considerable turnover within the White House. Again, the Committee expects an in-depth Explanation by White House Counsel Beth Nolan on what appears to be incomplete and simplistic explanations provided in her letter.
The Committee Letter also notes that Chairman Dan Burton would prefer to receive correspondence from the White House earlier then 7:30pm on a Friday Night. Chairman Burton has read the relevant parts of lanny Davis's book describing White House media strategy, and he has a fair understanding of the Timing.. The Committee looks forward to Beth Nolan's appearance at the Committee's hearing on Thursday, March 23, 2000……."

newsmax.com 3/28/00 "……Rep. Dan Burton says Attorney General Janet Reno is caught in a conflict of interest and cannot investigate herself in the White House e-mail scandal. The Indiana Republican, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, sent Reno an eight-page letter Monday, calling on her to extricate herself and her Justice Department from what he regards as a hopeless predicament. Reno is "incapable of conducting a legitimate investigation," he said, because a "large chunk" of the investigation would necessarily have to be targeted at the role her own department played in the scandal. Burton urged her to name an independent outside counsel with "no current ties to the Justice Department," who would be seen by the American people as "fair and impartial," to do the job properly. …….. "You cannot use the Campaign Financing Task Force, supervised by yourself, to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced to Congress, independent counsels and your own Campaign Financing Task Force." ……"

3/29/00 CNN "……House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton on Monday called on Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special counsel to investigate the ongoing White House electronic mail controversy. Pointing out that the Justice Department is both investigating the issue and defending its conduct in the matter, Burton (R-Indiana) wrote in a letter to the attorney general: "Ms. Reno, you cannot use the Campaign Financing Task Force, supervised by yourself, to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced to Congress, Independent Counsels, and your own Campaign Financing Task Force." ….."

Drudge Report 3/27/00 Letter Dan Burton to Janet Reno "……The Campaign Financing Task Force has announced an investigation of possible obstruction of justice involving documents not produced to this Committee, various Independent Counsels, and the Justice Department. In a Declaration to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, filed on March 22, 2000, Robert J. Conrad, Jr., the Chief of the Justice Department Campaign Financing Task Force, stated that: "continued inquiry into this matter by the Civil Division . . . would interfere with and potentially compromise the Task Force's investigation of the pending allegations." Thus, the Task Force, which is supervised by you, has declared that the Civil Division, which is supervised by you, might "interfere with and potentially compromise" a major investigation. First, you rejected an Independent Counsel in favor of running your own investigation of the President, Vice President, and your political party. Now you have decided to use the same Campaign Financing Task Force, supervised by yourself, to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced to Congress, Independent Counsels, and your own Campaign Financing Task Force.

Under normal circumstances, I would welcome a Justice Department investigation of possible criminal conduct. However, because you and your staff are in charge, the proposed investigation is fatally flawed. When Director Louis Freeh and then-Task Force Chief Charles La Bella recommended an Independent Counsel in 1998, the words they used effectively predicted the current e-mail scandal. They believed that an investigation led by the Attorney General would not be able to take steps necessary to secure evidence, vigorously investigate Democrat political leaders and their party, and promote confidence in the rule of law. Now, two years later, the e-mail scandal has proven their point. This part of the campaign finance scandal, however, points directly at the Justice Department - for what the Justice Department did do (represent the White House in keeping the e-mails from investigators) and for what the Justice Department did not do (force production of the e-mails for its own investigation).

There is growing consensus that you were, and are, unable to supervise investigations involving the President, the Vice President, and your political party. For this reason, I call on you to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the obstruction of justice charges against the White House. The individual chosen should be completely independent, should have no current ties to the Justice Department, and should be seen by the American people to be fair and impartial. With all due respect to Mr. Conrad, he is under your supervision, and he will be subject to the same constraints that have made your foreign money investigation a tragic misadventure. Simply put, you cannot be in charge of investigating yourself and the Civil Division, which is now headed by your former Chief of Staff.

I will address the following points in turn: (1) the perception that you are not able to do your job; (2) allegations that you are predisposed to provide unfair advantages to your political colleagues in matters involving the campaign finance scandal; and (3) the apparent conflict of interest within the Justice Department in the e-mail obstruction of justice matter.

I. The Perception that You Are Not Able to Do Your Job

I will refrain from using this letter as a vehicle for restating my views of your conduct in the campaign financing investigation. They are well known. Rather, I ask that you consider what the media is telling the citizens of this country. I realize that you believe that you should be free from the pressure of the media, and I share your view that an Attorney General should not be driven solely by the dictates of public opinion. Nevertheless, the perception that you have created is devastating to the cause of justice, harmful to the institution you preside over, and damaging to the thousands of good men and women who serve this country in the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The following selection of assessments speak to your fitness to preside over the e-mail investigation and should give you a taste of what will be said if you elect to run this investigation:

The general election campaign has gotten off to an unusually fast start, and it has done so under a cloud of suspicion created by Attorney General Janet Reno's incompetent and politically biased response to the campaign finance abuses of the 1996 campaign.

The [release of the La Bella memorandum and other] documents are further evidence of Ms. Reno's politicized handling of the campaign fund-raising issue and of her dedication to protecting Democratic Party interests from start to finish.

[O]ccasional glimpses the public has had of the Justice Department investigation have inspired less than total confidence.

She [Attorney General Reno] has sought to protect the White House at every turn, especially after meeting with the President on her reappointment at the outset of his second term. She has named special counsels for trivial cases against Cabinet members, but refused them on serious charges against the President and Vice President despite the La Bella and Freeh recommendations.

Today few doubt any longer that Ms. Reno is an adjunct to the Clinton-Gore political operation. . . . The Justice task force's investigation into the ties between China and the 1996 Clinton campaign contributions has been a catalog of lapses.

The inability of Attorney General Janet Reno and her politicized Justice Department to investigate the Clinton Administration shows that the country needs to polish the independent counsel mechanism, not junk it. [I]n an unforgivable dereliction of duty, Attorney General Janet Reno failed to pursue the clear violation of the letter and spirit of the campaign laws.

If Ms. Reno decides in the end to appoint an independent counsel, the [Government Reform] committee's contempt vote will be rendered meaningless. If, on the other hand, she refuses, she risks the unthinkable. At that point, it would be better for her to resign than to continue to ignore a Congress that finds her unbelievable.

She comes not to expose political corruption, but to bury it.

Every decision she has made and comment she has offered has minimized the offenses and excused the conduct of the White House and the Democratic Party. The person who is supposed to be the nation's chief prosecutor, ever alert for signs of infraction, sounds instead like a technicality-hunting defense lawyer.

"Even if it looks like a duck," a Justice Department source said recently, explaining the task force approach, "we can't make it quack."

These are harsh, yet consistent, assessments of your role in the campaign finance investigation. In many respects, they are your legacy. It is important, however, that the institution you run not be further injured. Doubtless, at your next news conference you will tell us that you 'call them as you see them' and that you don't do 'what ifs.' But this is a serious matter, and it calls for a real investigation, not platitudes. You were in charge when the Justice Department's Civil Division began to help the White House craft its efforts to hide these e-mails. You were in charge when your lawyers went to bat for the White House instead of against it. The e-mail investigation is, in part, of you, and it would be absurd for you to cling to the fiction that you can investigate yourself.

Thus, I call upon you to appoint a Special Counsel.

II. The Perception that You Are Predisposed to Provide Unfair Advantages to Your Political Colleagues in Matters Involving the Campaign Finance Scandal

Charles La Bella, the former head of your campaign financing task force made the following observations to you:

[The] Task Force has commenced criminal investigations of non-covered persons based only on a wisp of information.

If these allegations involved anyone other than [redacted], an appropriate investigation would have commenced months ago without hesitation.

The contortions that the Department has gone through to avoid investigating these allegations are apparent.

[There is] no acceptable explanation as to why one is the subject of a full criminal inquiry and the other is and remains in investigative limbo.

The Department's treatment of the Common Cause allegations has been marked by gamesmanship rather than an evenhanded analysis of the issues. That is to say, since a decision to investigate would inevitably lead to a triggering of the ICA [Independent Counsel Act], those who are hostile to the triggering of the Act had to find a theory upon which we could avoid conducting an investigation.

The Task Force never conducted an inquiry or investigation of the entire campaign finance landscape in order to determine if there exists specific information from a credible source that a covered person . . . has violated a federal criminal law.

These observations go to a central theme: you have presided over an investigation that has given an unfair advantage to the President, the Vice President, high government officials, and members of the Democrat Party. How else can one explain the following:

* The Justice Department failed to ask the President a single question about foreign money or James Riady's promise of one million dollars.

* The Justice Department failed to ask the Vice President a single question about the Buddhist temple fund-raiser. Furthermore, one week before the 1996 election, the Justice Department pulled prosecutors off the Buddhist Temple fund-raiser case.

* The Justice Department failed to investigate, or delayed an investigation of, the subject of the above-mentioned quote ("if these allegations involved anyone other than [redacted], an appropriate investigation would have commenced months ago without hesitation"). My suspicion, from the context of the quote, is that the individual referred to is Harold Ickes, but the fact that you delayed the investigation is perhaps more important than the identity of the individual.

* The Justice Department failed to pursue evidence, ranging from search warrants related to Charlie Trie's documents to the White House e-mails that are the subject of the current controversy. Recently this Committee subpoenaed the actual document requests made to the White House by the Justice Department. I am concerned that we will soon learn that there are many other areas that the Justice Department neglected to pursue.

* When the Justice Department failed to recommend a fine for Charlie Trie, the judge in the case had to take it upon himself to reject the Department's recommendation and stiffen the penalty.

These examples do not stand alone. There are many more.

One other matter cannot be ignored when discussing the predisposition to go easy on your political colleagues and the Democrat Party. When Mr. La Bella wrote his memorandum recommending the appointment of an Independent Counsel, he pointed out that you consistently used an erroneous interpretation of the Independent Counsel statute. He said: "[t]he reference to specific and credible evidence is just wrong." He was referring to your many pronouncements that appointment of an Independent Counsel required specific and credible evidence, as opposed to the language of the statute, which actually required specific information from a credible source. La Bella pointed out that "the threshold has been raised from consideration of the specificity of the information and credibility of the source to a determination that there is specific and credible evidence of a federal violation. Evidence suggests something which furnishes proof, information need not be as directed. While the distinction may appear to be subtle, it is significant." Again, your misapplication of the statute is important when we consider Mr. Conrad's request to have you take charge of the e-mail investigation.

In the e-mail investigation, it would be inappropriate to allow lax enforcement or manipulation of the law in order to benefit political colleagues and a political party.

Thus, I call upon you to appoint a Special Counsel.

III. The Conflict of Interest Within the Justice Department in the E-mail Obstruction of Justice Matter

After all that has happened since you took control of the campaign finance investigation, I believe that you are not able to investigate the possibility of White House obstruction of justice. In fact, there are serious and legitimate concerns that your own lawyers may be part of possible obstruction of justice.

On Friday, March 24, 2000, I received an affidavit from Laura Callahan. She had testified at a hearing before my Committee on March 23, 2000, and, in an effort to correct her testimony from the previous day, she submitted an affidavit. In the affidavit, she stated "I wish to clarify that I did discuss email issues with Department of Justice attorneys in connection with currently pending civil litigation." Her contacts with the Justice Department took place in 1998 and resulted in the submission of an affidavit to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in 1998.

One of the lawyers who assisted in the preparation of the 1998 affidavit was James Gilligan, who recently denigrated the existence and importance of the e-mails in a filing in District Court in the civil case Cara Leslie Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, No.96-2123/97-1288 (RCL). Furthermore, Justice Department lawyers assisted Daniel A. Barry in his submission of an affidavit to the same District Court on July 9, 1999. At that time, the problem was widely known within the White House, and Mr. Barry was clearly frustrated by his supervisors' failure to move towards a solution to the Mail2 e-mail problem. Notwithstanding his knowledge of the problem, Mr. Barry failed to refer to the matter in his affidavit.

Although we do not know what Mr. Gilligan knew regarding the extent of the problem, it seems unlikely that he was oblivious to the fact that there was a universe of information that had never been reviewed for responsiveness to subpoenas and document requests. In his zealous representation of your client, the White House, he contributed to the failure to produce information to your own Campaign Finance Task Force, to my Committee, and to various Independent Counsels. Although I risk stating the obvious, I do not see how you could represent both sides in the same case. It is well-nigh impossible to tell your client to produce information when you are counseling the same client how to avoid producing the same information. Indeed, Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan made representations in open court on March 24, 2000, that the Justice Department was "on the horns of a dilemma" and that the Department was faced with either impeding the criminal investigation, or failing to defend vigorously their client, the White House.

From my perspective, I do not see how you can tolerate the representation that the e-mails are not consequential, as indeed has been made by Mr. Gilligan. I can only imagine how you would react if, in a tax fraud case (or a criminal assault case, or a civil rights case, or a voting rights case, or any other type of legitimate federal investigation and prosecution), the individual under investigation took the position that production of a large quantity of documents freed him from complying with specific requests. This, in effect, is the position of the White House in the current controversy. The "I have complied with some of your request so please go away" theory of investigation may be the standard you have set for your campaign finance inquiries, but it is not acceptable to the Committee of which I am Chairman.

In the case of the White House electing not to inform this Committee that it was not going to undertake a search for documents responsive to subpoenas, an obstruction of justice investigation will ultimately have nothing to do with the content of the e-mails. The issue is relatively simple: either White House lawyers made a good faith attempt to do what they were required to do by law, or they did not. It is my belief that your Justice Department cannot be relied upon to get to the bottom of this matter because of the conflict within the Justice Department and because of your own demonstrated lack of enthusiasm when it comes to investigating the White House, the President, the Vice President, and your political party.

For the reasons cited above, I request that you appoint a Special Counsel to determine whether either or both the White House and the Department of Justice conspired to obstruct justice by either failing to search for information responsive to this Committee's subpoenas, or by failing to represent that the White House had not searched for information responsive to this Committee's subpoenas. I also request that this Special Counsel investigate whether untruthful certifications were made to the Committee regarding productions of subpoenaed documents……."

Reuters 3/29/00 "......The White House possesses a previously undisclosed computer disk with e-mails from former intern Monica Lewinsky to two grand jury witnesses while her affair with President Bill Clinton was under investigation, the Washington Times reported on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth was told on Monday of the existence of the disk by Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan, and will decide when and if it will be released, and to whom, the paper reported. ...... ``EOP has not yet reviewed the contents of the disk, but has been advised by counsel for Northrop Grumman that it contains copies of e-mails from Monica Lewinsky to Betty Currie and Ashley Raines,'' the paper quoted him as saying. ..... The disk was compiled after a manual search of the Lewinsky e-mail file by Robert Haas, a contract employee of Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC - news) Corp, which ran the computer system. The Times said Haas denied the disk existed while testifying under oath before the House Government Reform Committee last week. ....... Haas gave the disk to the firm's corporate counsel who passed it on March 17 to Charles Easley, EOP security chief. ......"

Reuters 3/29/00 "......Rep. Dan Burton, head of the Government Reform Committee and a frequent critic of the White House and Clinton, this week asked Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to investigate obstruction of justice allegations centering on missing White House e-mails. The Lewinsky e-mails disclosed in the Washington Times report are among thousands of messages sought under subpoena between 1996 and 1998 by a federal grand jury and three congressional committees, but never turned over ........ Haas, a systems administrator, was the Northrop contractor who was ordered in 1998 to search for all messages involving Lewinsky when the White House was told that thousands of e-mails had not been submitted. ......"

insightmag.com 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "…… The head of the Justice Department/FBI Campaign Task Force, along with the department's lead attorney, James Gilligan, are being charged with playing a game of hide & seek with U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth on the matter of "lost" White House emails, Insight has learned. Moreover, high level federal law enforcement sources have told Insight that neither the Campaign Task Force nor the Justice Department have been completely above board on a separate matter that has yet to garner much press attention concerning "lost" White House telephone logs detailing virtually every long distance call made from the Executive Office of the President between January 1992 through at least December 1998. …… But Insight can now reveal for the first time that the statements made to Lamberth raise troubling ethical and legal issues for the Task Force and Justice Department because, since at least February 1999, senior agents of the FBI personally met with White House lawyers and officials and confidential witnesseses to discuss the emails, along with separate so-called lost telephone logs that long had been under subpoena by congressional panels, grand juries, and others. ……… In other words, the implications of statements made before the judge that the investigative bodies are just now looking into these matters has been drawn into question, based on over a dozen interviews with confidential sources in and out of government in recent days. ………

insightmag.com 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "…… For example, Insight has recently confirmed that senior Justice Department officials and high-level FBI officials were briefed on the existence of the emails and telephone records back in early 1999 -- but they did not pursue or reveal the information to others further down the chains of command. ……"It's a lie what they are telling the judge," a high-level federal government source intimiately familiar with the 1999 meetings and related conversations tells Insight in an exclusive interview. "They've known about these things for a long time and even got some of the information. It's just that they didn't follow up on it," this source charges. ……Indeed, recalls a former White House contractor interviewed by the FBI: "One of the agents from the Task Force told me he didn't care about the emails because they just dealt with Monica and nobody cared about that but the politicians. I kept trying to tell him there was much more there but he didn't care." …….. Said a second federal worker interviewed by another team of FBI agents also from the Task Force: "They only wanted certain long-distance records and not the rest of the logs somebody I knew had because one of the agents said it wasn't his area. ……"We blew it and we're just trying to cover our asses on this," the federal law enforcement official bluntly confessed to Insight. …………

insightmag.com 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "…… When asked about the statements made before Judge Lamberth that no information could be released to the court or to Judicial Watch because it could compromise new probes, the official had this to say: "Listen, when Insight first broke these stories there was a lot of scrambling and worry because nobody knew about these files and they had egg on their faces. ……… "This is a mess," admitted one of the Justice Department sources who asked like the others not to be further identified. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't and in this case, we're damned either way because too many people knew about these [emails and telephone logs] but did nothing about it other than file reports." A cover up? "Call it what you want, you figure it out," the Justice source snapped. …… "What's interesting to me is that Ray is playing along," said an FBI agent familiar with Starr's earlier investigations and the matter of the emails and long-distance telephone records that have yet to be turned over. "Ray and the staff have known about these for quite some time but now are pretending they just found out. That's not true," the FBI agent tells Insight……… "

CNSNews.com 3/29/00 Susan Jones "……The Monica Lewinsky scandal is back in the headlines today, with a Washington Times report that says the White House has in its possession a computer disk containing e-mails Lewinsky wrote to White House employees while her affair with President Clinton was under investigation. The Lewinsky e-mails disclosed in the Washington Times report are among thousands of messages subpoenaed between 1996 and 1998 by a federal grand jury and three congressional committees -- but never turned over…….. The Lewinsky e-mails are contained on a "zip disk," described as a sophisticated floppylike disk with expanded storage space. The disk was compiled after a manual search of the Lewinsky e-mail file by a Northrop Grumman contract employee named Robert Haas. (Haas worked at the White House under a computer contract.) …….. Making this story all the more complicated - Haas denied the disk's existence under oath last week, when he testified before the House Government Reform Committee. He most likely will be called back before the committee to explain……. The Washington Times reports that Robert Haas gave the disk containing the Lewinsky e-mails to Northrop Grumman's corporate counsel, who passed it on March 17 to Charles Easley, the security chief for the Executive Office of the President [EOP]…….."EOP has not yet reviewed the contents of the disk, but has been advised by counsel for Northrop Grumman that it contains copies of e-mails from Monica Lewinsky to Betty Currie and Ashley Raines," said Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan, who represents the Executive Office of the President. Gilligan said the White House has "no knowledge or information whatsoever" on exactly what the Lewinsky e-mails say……."

Reuters 3/29/00 "….The White House possesses a previously undisclosed computer disk with e-mails from former intern Monica Lewinsky to two grand jury witnesses while her affair with President Clinton was under investigation, the Washington Times reported on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth was told on Monday of the existence of the disk by Justice Department lawyer James Gilligan, and will decide when and if it will be released, and to whom, the paper reported. The paper quoted Gilligan, who represents the Executive Office of the President (EOP), as saying the White House had no information or knowledge about the specific contents of the e-mails. ……."

newsmax.com 3/29/00 "……The White House has a computer disc that might have changed the outcome of President Clinton's impeachment process. In a blockbuster story in today's Washington Times, it was revealed that the White House has a computer disc it failed to surrender under subpoenas that contains e-mail messages Monica Lewinsky sent to two key witnesses appearing before a grand jury probing her relationship with President Clinton. ……. The White House admits that thousands of e-mails were not turned over under subpoena during a two-year period ending in 1998, but claimed the problem was due to a computer glitch. …."

CNN 3/29/00 Bob Franken and Ted Barrett/CNN "……The White House was given a computer disk two weeks ago containing e-mails written by former intern Monica Lewinsky that were thought to be part of a cache of missing White House e-mails sought by various investigators, according to a letter White House lawyer James Gilligan wrote to a federal judge Monday. The letter is the first acknowledgment by the White House of the existence of the Lewinsky e-mails since the matter was first made public at a congressional hearing last week. …….. The White House says it does not know the specific contents of the e-mails but that they were likely duplicates of those handed over in response to subpoenas issued by congressional committees, the Justice Department and Independent Counsel Ken Starr. ……. Robert Haas, a Northrop Grumman employee who worked on the White House e-mail system, said during last week's hearing that while he was trying to repair the problem he did a perfunctory manual search and discovered that a few files included e-mail from Lewinsky. ……. In the letter to U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who is considering a government motion to suspend a civil suit in the matter so the Justice Department's investigation can proceed unfettered, Gilligan said the White House "has not reviewed the contents of the disk, but has been advised by counsel for Northrop Grumman that it contains copies of e-mails from Monica Lewinsky." ….."

NewsMax.com 3/28/00 "…..Rep. Dan Burton says Attorney General Janet Reno is caught in a conflict of interest and cannot investigate herself in the White House e-mail scandal. The Indiana Republican, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, sent Reno an eight-page letter Monday, calling on her to extricate herself and her Justice Department from what he regards as a hopeless predicament. Reno is "incapable of conducting a legitimate investigation," he said, because a "large chunk" of the investigation would necessarily have to be targeted at the role her own department played in the scandal. Burton urged her to name an independent outside counsel with "no current ties to the Justice Department," who would be seen by the American people as "fair and impartial," to do the job properly. ..."

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..A House committee may send criminal referrals for perjury to the Justice Department on some witnesses who testified last week about missing White House e-mail, WorldNetDaily has learned. Several of them made statements that grossly contradict the accounts of other witnesses and may have been designed to mislead committee investigators who are looking into possible obstruction of justice by the White House. "We are looking at the transcripts, we are going to review the tapes, and we may prepare criminal referrals for perjury on certain folks," said House Government Reform Committee spokesman Mark Corallo. ……"

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..A former White House official swore March 23 that she never made threats to computer contractors, who discovered in 1998 that the White House failed to archive more than two years of e-mail sent to White House officials, including top aides to the president and first lady…… But three of the Northrop Grumman contractors testified that the official, Laura Crabtree Callahan, threatened them with jail if they talked about the problem, which they called "Project X" because of all the secrecy surrounding it. They said she made the threats in a 1998 meeting in her office. ….Mark Lindsay, a high-ranking White House official, claimed in his testimony that he made no threats, either -- though he also said he could not recall the meeting with contractors. "Lindsay couldn't recall squat when it came to the meeting," Corallo said. Yet all five e-mail contractors recalled details of the meeting on the morning of June 15, 1998, specifically Lindsay and Callahan ordering them to keep other workers and even their Northrop Grumman bosses in the dark about the missing e-mail. They were also told not to talk to their spouses. What's more, they told House investigators in interviews before the hearing that they were instructed to write down as little as possible about Project X and not to e-mail anything about it. They were even banned from using networked White House computers. ….."

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..Those witnesses include a contractor, who may have held back information from the committee. Robert Haas, tasked in 1998 with finding some of the lost e-mail, denied under oath searching for any e-mail other than ones sent by Monica Lewinsky from the Pentagon. But two other White House computer workers said Haas told them he stumbled onto e-mail relevant to other investigations. "You've got Betty Lambuth and (Sheryl) Hall both saying that Haas told them that not only was there Monica stuff, but there was campaign finance and (Commerce Department) trade missions and all sorts of other stuff in there," Corallo said. ......, In pre-interviews with investigators, Haas said he could not recall all the names of the White House e-mail users whose files he checked. Investigators suspect he knows a lot more about what's in the unarchived e-mail server than he's letting on. Haas is still working as a contractor in the White House. ……"

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..Also, it turns out that Haas was less than forthcoming in answering questions from committee chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind. He asked Haas about a so-called "Zip" computer disk for massive storage of files. Haas swore he didn't have one, when in fact he did. But Burton used the word "drive" rather than "disk," allowing Haas to technically be safe in denying it. Whereas Haas may have split hairs to hold back information, Callahan issued categorical denials. In the June 1998 meeting, Lindsay joined in by speakerphone. When he hung up, Haas asked Callahan what would happen if he mentioned Project X to someone. She replied that there would be "a jail cell with your name on it," Haas recalled her saying. …… Contractors told investigators in earlier interviews that Callahan then asked each person in the room, one by one, if they understood the consequences of speaking out about the problem. ….."

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..Lambuth testified she remembered the threat. So did contractor Sandy Golas. Hall, a career worker and manager in the White House computer unit, swore in affidavits that she recalled hearing about the threat contemporaneously. Both Lambuth and Hall have left the White House. Golas is still there. Contractors John Spriggs and Yiman Salim testified they didn't remember the jail threat. But both testified Crabtree told them not to breathe a word about the e-mail stash to their bosses or their spouses. And the two conveyed in pre-interviews that they were intimidated. Both Spriggs and Salim have kept their White House jobs. ……"

3/28/00 Paul Sperry WND "…..Callahan had to do some quick backpedaling after her testimony. The day after, she sent an affidavit to the panel, stating: "I wish to clarify that I did discuss e-mail issues with the Department of Justice attorneys in connection with currently pending civil litigation." She had denied such contacts at the hearing. Callahan, who was very soft-spoken throughout her testimony, said that the contractors who said she threatened them with jail "might have an overactive imagination." But a computer contractor familiar with White House e-mail operations said Callahan, now working for the Labor Department, was acting out of character during the hearings. "She never talks like a chipmunk," the contractor said. "Hollering and yelling was her normal mode and here she comes across as Snow White who wouldn't intimidate anyone. That was not Laura Crabtree." …..The source said other contractors "laughed" about her "performance." ….."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/29/00 Jerry Seper "……The White House has in its possession a previously undisclosed computer disk with e-mails by former intern Monica Lewinsky to two grand jury witnesses while her affair with President Clinton was under investigation………U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, told Monday of the existence of the disk by Justice Department lawyer James J. Gilligan, will decide when and if it will be released and to whom. The "zip disk," a sophisticated floppylike disk with expanded storage space, was compiled after a manual search of the Lewinsky e-mail file by a Northrop Grumman Corp. contract employee who denied its existence under oath last week before the House Government Reform Committee. That employee, Robert Haas, gave the disk to the firm's corporate counsel, who passed it on March 17 to Charles C. Easley, security chief for the Executive Office of the President.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/29/00 Jerry Seper "……On the disk are e-mails Miss Lewinsky sent to Betty Currie, who is Mr. Clinton's personal secretary, and Ashley Raines, who worked in the White House Office of Policy Development Operations……… He said the White House has "no knowledge or information whatsoever" on the specific contents of the e-mails…….Task force chief Robert J. Conrad Jr. told Judge Lamberth last week the e-mail management system had "for some period of time" failed to collect incoming messages, possibly including some "communications related to various criminal investigations."

THE WASHINGTON TIMES 3/29/00 Jerry Seper "……When the White House was told in 1998 that thousands of e-mails had not been surrendered, a manual search was ordered of messages involving Miss Lewinsky. That assignment went to Mr. Haas, a systems administrator. According to an impeachment report by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, Miss Lewinsky confided to Miss Raines some of the most graphic details of her 19-month relationship with Mr. Clinton. The two exchanged a number of e-mail messages about the affair during the two-year period in which the White House has acknowledged that the messages were never turned over. Miss Raines told the grand jury Miss Lewinsky described her relationship with the president as they occurred. She said she understood the president and Miss Lewinsky engaged in kissing and oral sex, usually in the president's study, and testified that she heard Mr. Clinton's voice on a phone message Miss Lewinsky played for her. Ironically, Miss Raines' mother manages the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Ark., where then-Gov. Clinton was accused in a sexual misconduct lawsuit of exposing himself to and seeking oral sex from Arkansas state employee Paula Jones in May 1991.

washtimes.com 3/27/00 "……Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert has no doubt that Attorney General Janet Reno has been covering up wrongdoing by the Clinton administration "for years." Tony Snow of "Fox News Sunday" asked the Illinois Republican about missing White House e-mail messages that Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, wants to investigate. "Are you going to set him loose?" Mr. Snow asked. ….. Mr. Snow responded, "Are you saying Janet Reno, by wanting to investigate the e-mails, is trying to cover it up?" "I think she's done that for years," Mr. Hastert said. "That's a pattern. It's a modus operandi of this Justice Department, and, you know, the least we can do is to investigate with the whole e-mail situation." ….."

Associated Press 3/27/00 "…..Rep. Dan Burton asked the Justice Department on Monday to appoint a special outside counsel to investigate whether the White House engaged in obstruction by failing to surrender e-mails in the campaign fund-raising scandal. The Republican chairman of the House Government Reform Committee said the Justice Department has a conflict of interest because its civil division lawyers are representing the White House in a lawsuit involving the e-mails. The Justice Department cannot use its campaign fund-raising task force "to investigate yourself and the Justice Department lawyers who helped keep the e-mails from being produced," Burton wrote Attorney General Janet Reno. The department revealed the task force's probe last Thursday. ……"Who needs a special counsel when all they ever do is fail," said Larry Klayman, head of Judicial Watch. ….."

WorldNetDaily 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…..Sheryl L. Hall came back to work one Monday in the fall of 1996 and noticed something wasn't right. Someone had broken into her locked office over the weekend. A file drawer was ajar. Files had been rifled. Sensitive papers were missing. The cleaning crew? Street burglars? Not at this address. Hall officed in the New Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex. Security wasn't aware of any pattern of breaches there. Once the head of all White House computer operations, Hall was the only one with the key to her office, besides the security crew. She asked her superiors about it, but they didn't seem concerned. So she reported the break-in to the Secret Service. Not long after, someone entered her office again to snoop around -- this time during the week. Her office was unlocked at the time. ……."

WorldNetDaily 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…..The papers lifted from her office files relate to a computer project Hall was ordered to work on in 1994. She refused to help with the project after seeing that it involved keying in personal data about political donors. Officially named the White House Office Database, or WHODB, the project was also known among staffers as "Big Brother." Hall, a career civil servant, warned the political appointees building the database that it violated federal laws against using government resources for fund-raising. For that, she was cut out of the loop and branded as "disloyal," memos from top Clinton aides show. ...... "They were trying to move her out of the way," a Hall confidant said of the demotion. "It was intimidation." When Hall told her supervisors of the office break-in, they brushed it aside, the source says, suggesting to her that someone might have gone in her office to look for "a wipe-off board." "They didn't seem to mind that her office was broken into," the source said. ……Asked for a copy of Hall's complaint, a spokesman for the Secret Service's uniformed division says it will take awhile to search the unit's "central files," which are not computerized. ...... In another curious development, Hall's website was taken down without her consent about a month before she quit her White House job last year. One day it just disappeared into the ether. The site, whodb-purge.org, was carried by Erols.com and registered with Network Solutions. The Erols.com webmaster could not explain to Hall what happened to it or even date when it went off the server. Hall, who was told there was no back-up, decided not to rebuild the site, which documented her conflicts with Clinton appointees over the donor database. ….."

WorldNetDaily 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…..CNN and ABC News interviewed her about the missing White House e-mail, only to later kill their stories, as WorldNetDaily first reported. Correspondent Bob Franken interviewed Hall for CNN. The news organizations, which later confirmed WND's report, claimed her story lacked "corroborating evidence." But in testimony before Congress last week, six computer contractors -- including the team leader -- all repeated Hall's charge that they were ordered by the White House to keep quiet about the missing e-mail. ......It's not known if CNN's news division, which is run by President Clinton's some-time golfing partner Rick Kaplan, or ABC News, which employs former top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, will now air their interviews with Hall….."

Judicial Watch 4/3/00 "……..The April 10 issue of U.S. News & World Report reported this week that Clinton White House is "egging on" Democrats in the Senate to block any future appointment of Judge Royce Lamberth, the federal judge overseeing the Filegate and Chinagate civil litigation……… The Clinton White House, along with Hillary Clinton, is a defendant in the Filegate lawsuit. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, along with others, are defendants in the Chinagate litigation. All therefore have a significant political interest in undermining Judge Lamberth. Judge Lamberth has recently ruled that Bill Clinton committed the crime of violating the Privacy Act when he (with the help of Mrs. Clinton) released letters from the government files of Kathleen Willey in an effort which Clinton admitted was an effort to destroy her. "Simply put, it may be a crime for the Clinton White House to threaten a federal judge in a case in which it is a defendant," stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman. "Judicial Watch will investigate, as should Congress, who in the Clinton-Gore White House is trying to intimidate this judge."……."

WorldNet Daily 4/3/00 Larry Klayman "……Earlier this week, United States District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a landmark decision, finding for the first time in American history that a United States president had committed a crime. This crime was for violating the privacy rights of Kathleen Willey by obtaining and then releasing information from her Privacy Act-protected personnel file to admittedly destroy her reputation. Judge Lamberth previously made a similar finding with regard to the Clinton-Gore Defense Department over the release of information from Linda Tripp's Privacy Act-protected Pentagon file……….. In Judicial Watch's $90 million class-action Filegate lawsuit, Judge Lamberth has correctly ruled that a pattern of violating the privacy rights of American citizens by The Clinton-Gore White House would raise an adversarial evidentiary inference that the 900 FBI files at issue were obtained and misused for illegal purposes. Accordingly, the Judge's rulings with regard to Ms. Willey and Ms. Tripp are huge -- particularly since, with regard to Ms. Willey, Hillary Clinton is a defendant in the Filegate lawsuit, and she was admittedly involved in the illegal release of Ms. Willey's confidential communications………."

Insight Magazine 4/3/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….Giving perjured testimony is very difficult when there are high-tech records to prove the truth. But the Clinton White House apparently has yet to learn that lesson. Soon it will........... Nolan also told the panel, flanked by other White House counsel and aides, that she and the president's staff didn't know about the e-mail problem until early to mid-February of this year when press reports surfaced concerning a secret "Project X" to reconstruct upwards of 100,000 e-mails the White House claims it didn't know it had and should have turned over under subpoena to various congressional and federal investigators. But that flies in the face of facts first reported by Insight in December 1998 and January 1999. Indeed, Insight revealed then that Project X was a highly secret program to reconstruct tens of thousands of e-mails that a computer contractor had discovered in or around June of that year.......... The task of this project was to "reconstruct" the e-mails, allegedly to determine what they were and whether any contained material demanded under the various subpoenas the White House had received. There was much fear that some or all of the newly discovered e-mails would not be surrendered as required by law. Barry Toiv, then a White House spokesman, told Insight in December 1998 that indeed such a project existed and that while some of the e-mails reviewed were duplicates of others that had been turned over to investigators, some were not. He also said that it was too soon to tell much more than this, given that the project still was under way. Toiv assured Insight that if any e-mails were uncovered that were responsive - well, then, they'd be turned over to the authorities demanding them......."

Insight Magazine 4/3/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….Fast-forward to February 2000 when new press reports revived the old story……….. Yet when congressional investigators and agents from the Justice Department's campaign task force began asking questions about e-mails that the White House people claimed to know nothing about, suddenly the White House began to backpedal. They said they didn't really have all the facts and that the continuing news stories about the e-mails were a surprise. ......... Sources within the White House and federal agents who have kept in touch with Insight during the last two years have been dumbfounded by the way the president's communications shop has officially feigned ignorance - especially since the White House has been working on the reconstruction project the entire time. "They can't have it both ways," a reluctant but irritated White House official says.

Insight Magazine 4/3/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….Take, for example, Nolan's sworn testimony that Insight's story about the telephone records was wrong. In fact, such records do exist: Insight has obtained copies - and they detail an extraordinary month-by-month calling and charge pattern that goes back to 1992 by day, time, numbers called, how long the calls lasted, charges for the calls, master numbers to which charges were billed and (in the case of domestic long-distance calls) even some of the numbers from which the calls were made. Nolan and others have testified and/or told federal law-enforcement officials such records don't exist.......... Yet based on what Insight has seen, the investigators will find the telephone logs neatly bound for easy reading. Accessing the e-mails is easy, too: A computer programmer simply can enter a White House server and extract by name any and all e-mails being sought - even print them out, as was done for Insight. Moreover, the White House has testified about only one e-mail server. Insight has been told there could be as many as five of these computers, as well as a repository at an off-site location in Greenbelt, Md., where backup tapes and records have been stored for the better part of two years……"

Washington Post 4/18/00 George Larnder Jr "…… The White House has a huge trove of computerized records that have never been searched during the criminal and congressional investigations of the Clinton administration. The records appear to be covered by various subpoenas that called on the White House to turn over relevant records contained oncomputer disks, computer entries and tapes. The White House says much - though not all - of the material is likely to be duplicative of the hundreds of thousands of paper pages it has already produced in response to an avalanche of subpoenas. Officials say they have no intention of examining the electronic records - memos, speeches, drafts, schedules, notes and other items written on the computers of former staffers - because of the prohibitive costs involved. The documents are in addition to the missing e-mails that the White House is now attempting to reconstruct. ……… White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said that while "a subpoena can ask for the moon, that doesn't mean we have to produce it." He said the White House must make "a good-faith, reasonable search for material that may be responsive to a subpoena, but we don't think it reasonable, given the time and expense," to search all individual hard drives and back-up tapes that might be covered. ……….. Lyle assured the court that the 600 tapes had been secured in a special vault with highly secure locks. Also being kept there are 3,763 backup tapes containing F drive material and e-mails that were never produced in response to various subpoenas. …….. But Kennedy said the White House had always been candid with investigators about its determination not to conduct general searches of backup tapes or individual hard drives. …….. But despite Kennedy's assurance that "everyone [who issues subpoenas] understands" the situation, the chief counsel for the House Government Reform Committee, James Wilson, said he had no such understanding. He said he would not fault the White House for not examining the voluminous backup tapes, but he could find "no record of the White House ever telling us it wasn't going to search individual hard drives." ........."

WorldNetDaily and Insight Magazine 4/18/00 Paul Sperry "…….The White House's argument that it didn't know the "scope and nature" of the Project X e-mail fiasco until news broke in February is looking more and more threadbare. A White House memo obtained by WorldNetDaily shows senior officials there discussed a magazine article on the West Wing e-mail hole back in December 1998. In a Dec. 9, 1998, meeting, Northrop Grumman computer contractors gave the officials a heads-up about the story, which appeared on Insight magazine's website the day before. The report disclosed for the first time the Project X scandal. Devere Patton, projects manager for the White House Office of Administration, and Robert "Dale" Helms, head of White House procurements, were among those White House officials who saw a copy of the story, the White House memo says. ………"

WorldNetDaily and Insight Magazine 4/18/00 Paul Sperry "……."Northrop Grumman read a portion of, and then provided to the Government a hard copy of, an Insight article entitled 'Looking for Information in All the Wrong Place(sic),' which was referenced in the Drudge report," wrote Northrop Grumman project manager Joseph Vasta in the Dec. 11, 1998, memo. Vasta sent a copy of the memo to Daniel "Tony" Barry, the White House computer manager who is under investigation for allegedly filing a false affidavit about the e-mail situation to a federal court seeking the documents. ……."

WorldNetDaily and Insight Magazine 4/18/00 Paul Sperry "…….All along, Northrop Grumman technicians pressed White House officials for the OK to restore the e-mail. Judging from their highlighting of the Insight article, they seemed to have been worried about any suggestions they were part of a cover-up. And the memo from their project manager appears to be an attempt to set the record straight, as if to say "Don't blame us, we tried to produce the documents." In the Dec. 9, 1998, meeting with White House officials, "Northrop Grumman re-emphasized that no actions on its part has been or will be clandestine in any way," Vasta asserted in his memo recounting the meeting at which the article was passed out. ……."

Insight Magazine 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "….Judicial Watch is preparing to file a sworn affidavit from a former White House deputy counsel in the Office of Administration that accuses superiors, including John Podesta, the current White House chief of staff, with preparing false and misleading affidavits for submission in a court case. The declaration of Jane D. Weaver, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, will be filed April 14 before Judge Royce Lamberth's district court by Judicial Watch in its $90 million "Filegate" case against the Clinton White House. The explosive charges levied by Weaver, who left the White House job early in Bill Clinton's first term, alleges that in a separate case (Armstrong et al vs. Executive Office of the President) that members of the White House counsel's office routinely sought to force or insert incorrect information or otherwise provided misleading facts into sworn affidavits filed by EOP employees to the courts. ………"

WorldNetDaily.com 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…….Sheryl L. Hall came back to work one Monday in the fall of 1996 and noticed something wasn't right. Someone had broken into her locked office over the weekend. A file drawer was ajar. Files had been rifled. Sensitive papers were missing. The cleaning crew? Street burglars? Not at this address. Hall officed in the New Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex. Security wasn't aware of any pattern of breaches there. Once the head of all White House computer operations, Hall was the only one with the key to her office, besides the security crew. She asked her superiors about it, but they didn't seem concerned. So she reported the break-in to the Secret Service. Not long after, someone entered her office again to snoop around -- this time during the week. Her office was unlocked at the time……."

WorldNetDaily.com 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…….The papers lifted from her office files relate to a computer project Hall was ordered to work on in 1994. She refused to help with the project after seeing that it involved keying in personal data about political donors. Officially named the White House Office Database, or WHODB, the project was also known among staffers as "Big Brother." ......... Hall, a career civil servant, warned the political appointees building the database that it violated federal laws against using government resources for fund-raising. For that, she was cut out of the loop and branded as "disloyal," memos from top Clinton aides show. Then she was demoted from her post as chief of the Information Systems and Technology branch of the Executive Office of the President. ….."

WorldNetDaily.com 3/28/00 Paul Sperry "…….Asked for a copy of Hall's complaint, a spokesman for the Secret Service's uniformed division says it will take awhile to search the unit's "central files," which are not computerized. In another curious development, Hall's website was taken down without her consent about a month before she quit her White House job last year. One day it just disappeared into the ether. The site, whodb-purge.org, was carried by Erols.com and registered with Network Solutions. The Erols.com webmaster could not explain to Hall what happened to it or even date when it went off the server. Hall, who was told there was no back-up, decided not to rebuild the site, which documented her conflicts with Clinton appointees over the donor database. ……"

World Net Daily 4/11/00 Paul Speery "……A stash of unrecorded West Wing e-mail totals close to 1 million, not the 100,000 first reported, and includes messages from the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, WorldNetDaily has learned. The Justice Department's campaign-finance task force has yet to see the trove of e-mail. The unit, which is under Attorney General Janet Reno's direction, has so far charged 24 people in its three-year criminal probe -- all of them donors and, remarkably, none of them DNC or White House officials. The White House has told Congress it can't possibly know for at least another six months the content or the volume of the unarchived e-mail until it's loaded off of 3,400 emergency computer back-up tapes and searched by private contractors……….. But a former White House computer manager tells WorldNetDaily that the number of e-mails is at least 10 times the estimate of 100,000 bandied about in the press. The ex-official says they include a steady flow of messages coming into the West Wing from Democratic National Committee officials. Also, WorldNetDaily has reviewed a 1998 Northrop Grumman audit of the White House e-mail accounts affected by a snafu involving a critical White House Office e-mail server. The 75-page report shows that much of the omitted e-mail is addressed to prominent figures in several White House scandals. The officials include: Doris Matsui, Marsha Scott, Sidney Blumenthal, Cheryl Mills, Bruce Lindsey, Erskine Bowles, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Hernreich, John Podesta, Ira Magaziner, Ann Lewis, Charles Ruff, Lanny Breuer and Paul Begala -- as well as President Clinton. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is not in the report. As previously disclosed, Monica Lewinsky confidants Ashley Raines and Betty Currie also are among those who received e-mail never turned over to Congress and other investigative bodies. ……."

World Net Daily 4/11/00 Paul Speery "……Northrop Grumman computer contractor Robert Haas ran the audit on June 18, 1998, just a few days after he and other technicians discovered that the White House's automated archiving system wasn't scanning and storing Internet e-mail sent to the server used by the Executive Office of the President. In addition to the audit, Haas did sample searches of some of the unrecorded e-mail on the server. At the time, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had subpoenaed White House e-mail relevant to his investigation of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky case. Haas was secretly tasked with searching for any messages coming into the White House from Lewinsky, then at the Pentagon, to see how many were missed. He searched Currie's and Raines' accounts and found enough e-mail from Lewinsky to fill an "expandable folder" full of print-outs. Haas testified March 23 that he searched only for Lewinsky messages. But that's not what White House whistle-blower Sheryl Hall recalls. ……."He told me that if the searches had been redone, that different people (than he) would go to jail, and that there was a lot of stuff out there," Hall recalled in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. "And I said, 'Like what?' And he said Filegate information. Chinagate. Stuff on (Vice President Al) Gore." She added: "He mentioned that there was e-mail coming in from the DNC." ….. Hall says Haas was not vague about his charges. …….. "He was very specific with me, because it was much more than Lewinsky," she said. "And when I asked him, 'Why are you telling me this, Bob? There's nothing I can do. Everybody above me is political.' He said, 'I'm afraid. I'm afraid for my life. I want somebody else to know.'" ……How does she know Haas wasn't exaggerating? "He had a secret file," she said. "He had papers." ……"

World Net Daily 4/11/00 Paul Speery "……For instance, Bowles, Clinton's former chief of staff, got at least 161 Internet messages starting in May 1997. All were omitted………. Investigators have never seen at least 17 in-coming e-mails sent to top Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey, who is the White House's chief damage-control expert. ……. Marsha Scott, a close confidant of both the president and first lady, got at least 48 Internet messages that were never archived. Scott is the architect of the $1.7 million WHODB donor database. ….Nearly 1,000 in-coming e-mails are missing from the records of Bob Nash, Clinton's director of presidential personnel. ……Clinton himself got at least two in-coming e-mails that have yet to be searched. The first one is dated sometime in December 1997. ……"

World Net Daily 4/11/00 Paul Speery "……Another White House official in the thick of the fund-raising scandals is Doris Matsui. It turns out that investigators haven't seen at least 3,407 of her e-mails, the earliest from January 1997. .........* Virginia Apuzzo, former director of White House management and administration, corresponded in June 1998 with then-deputy White House chief of staff John Podesta about Project X. At least 53 of her in-coming e-mails are missing, while at least 157 of Podesta's are missing. * Sally Paxton (22 missing e-mails) was one of the White House lawyers who helped prepare a false affidavit about the status of White House e-mail archiving to a federal court. * John Dankowski (398 e-mails) is Clinton's former director of White House operations who's now working for a private subcontractor, SRA International Inc., that the White House has in effect hired ostensibly to find all the missing e-mail. * Terry Good (40 e-mails) is director of White House Records Management. * Karl Racine (27 e-mails) is one of the White House lawyers in charge of making sure records are searched to comply with subpoenas. * Dimitri Nionakis, another White House lawyer tasked with subpoena compliance, who has worked with Racine. At least 151 of his e-mails are missing through November 1998. ……"

World Net Daily 4/11/00 Joseph Farah "…… Is it possible for the press to follow two important national stories at the same time? I'm beginning to wonder. Last week, WorldNetDaily's Paul Sperry broke a story that should be having reverberations for the remainder of the Clinton administration and possibly for years to come after that. Yet, events largely orchestrated by the Clinton's own Justice Department involving six-year-old Elian Gonzalez have obscured virtually any serious interest in the latest cover-up in the White House. I'm talking about Sperry's revelations that some of the same White House officials who dragged their feet restoring missing West Wing e-mail are now working for a firm hired by the White House to "restore" the data for Congress. One was a special aide to President Clinton; another headed the White House technology office that was supposed to be finding ways to restore tapes of the unrecorded e-mail all along. But it gets worse. The next day Sperry reported that the entire e-mail search project is, according to the president of the "independent" company contracted for the job, actually being run by the White House. In other words, this is an "inside job." Once again, the White House is controlling the entire investigation of itself -- just as it has so many times throughout the series of scandals that have plagued the Clinton administration. ……"

Senate Whitewater Hearings Volume 12/13/95 Testimony of William Burton "…… Sworn Testimony of C. William Burton, Former Policy and Staff Director for The Chief of Staff to the President.
Mr. Chertoff: Mr. Burton, do you recognize the number 202-628-7087?
Mr. Burton: Yes sir.
Mr. Chertoff: How do you recognize the number?
Mr. Burton: Shortly before the hearing started, I was given some papers by one of the Committee staff members and the number is that so-called mystery number that has been in question in front of this panel, and that's where I saw the number for the first time.......
Mr. Chertoff: This is really a simply point. You don't need to struggle with it. It's just common sense. There are apparently numbers at the White House that allow people to bypass the switchboard, right?
Mr. Burton: Yes sir.
Mr. Chertoff: You know from your own experience because you knew you had one number?
Mr. Burton: Yes sir.
Mr. Chertoff: Now, somewhere in the White House someone has those numbers?
Mr. Burton: I assume that is the case, yes, sir……
Mr. Chertoff: Now, let me ask you about the night of the [July, 1993] 20th. You were in Mr. McLarty's office?
Mr. Burton: I was there most of the day. I was there shortly before the Larry King show started that the President was appearing live on that night.........................
Mr. Chertoff: You were up there when Mr. McLarty spoke to the President after the show?
Mr. Burton: Yes, sir.
Mr. Chertoff: Did you know that the President called the First Lady?
Mr. burton: I found out later that he had called the First Lady.
Mr. Chertoff: Then, at some time after 10 p.m you returned to the Chief of Staff's office?
Mr. Burton: Yes, sir. ……..
Mr. Chertoff: Now, we have received a letter from the White House indicating that you recall that at what would have been 11:41 Eastern time and what was 10:41 Little Rock time you had a conversation with the First Lady.
Mr. Burton: I recall having a conversation with the First Lady that night. I did not remember the time. The time you just described is not inconsistent with what I remember.
Mr. Chertoff: How did you come to have that conversation?
Mr. Burton: I was in Mr. McLarty's private office most of the evening, and at some point that night I received a call from the First Lady. I don't remember if I answered the phone or if Ms. Mathews answered the phone and transferred the call in to me. I don't remember who answered the phone. It was the First Lady, and we had a personal conversation about Mr. Foster's death. It lasted about 10 or 15 minutes to the best of my recollection.
Mr. Chertoff: Now, was the First Lady looking for you?
Mr. Burton: That's my recollection.
Mr. Chertoff: So you pick up the phone and the First Lady says what?
Mr. Burton: I do not remember the precise words used during the conversation. I do remember the call quite well and remember the general areas we discussed……
Mr. Chertoff: Did she say why -- and I will put this in context for you, because she made very few calls that evening, and as she described it in her affidavit, she called some of her closest friends and colleagues. She called Maggie Williams and Harry Thomasson, she spent 20 minutes on the phone with Susan Thomases and then immediately hung up and within a moment called the mystery number, had a 10 minute conversation, then called Carolyn Huber, a very old friend from Arkansas, and then called her brother. Now, in the midst of these calls to these very, very close people, there's a call to what you have now told us is to you for 10 minutes. Are you a very close friend of the First Lady?
Mr. Burton: I consider myself a friend of the First Lady. I don't know that you would go so far as to say a close personal friend. I used to work with the First Lady. I knew Governor Clinton in the mid-1970s……
Mr. Burton: That's right. This may help to put it in context. Mr. McLarty had taken me up to the residence when he was going to notify the President about the death of Mr. Foster, the suicide of Mr. Foster because I had talked to the Park Police and was the point person in the White House at that time who knew about that and who knew the details in the event the President wanted more details about the suicide.
Mr. McLarty later advised me that he had notified the First Lady. He said I told her you had talked to the Park Police. If my recollection serves me right, he may have mentioned she may call you to talk about that…..
Mr. Chertoff: Now, as of the time the First Lady called you, had you, in fact, been notified of that notification?
Mr. Burton: Yes, sir. I think I testified previously that I remember that notification because it was, I think, a particularly tender one, a particularly dear one we had to be concerned about.
Mrs. Foster had lost her husband maybe the year prior to her son's suicide and was an elderly woman living in Hope alone in the Foster home. I wanted to absolutely sure she didn't find out by radio or by television, and even -- I didn't even want her to find out by telephone.
So I called George Frazier, who is an older man, a town father figure living in Hope, who had Mrs. Foster earlier in the evening and he and his wife had gone to get the preacher, Reverend Roark in Hope and went to the Foster farm to notify her, I think, at approximately 11:30 or 11:40. I know by that point I had ascertained that Mr. Frazier and his wife had contacted the preacher and were going out there..........
Mr. Chertoff: I want to focus on this conversation. What did you tell her?
Mr. Burton: There's one thing I specifically remember about that, and I told her whatever it was I knew at the time. I happened to remember specifically talking to her about the placement of the gun in Mr. Foster's mouth. The reason I remember that is because it made me a little bit uncomfortable telling someone who was a close friend of Mr. Foster about that particular gruesome detail.
The reason I decided to tell her that was it was that fact that the Park Policeman, the major lieutenant, whichever one I had talked to had used to tell me, convince me it had in fact been a suicide, it was the fact he used to explain -- let me tell you how I know it was a suicide.......
Mr. Burton: I think what she was saying was that in a suicide, often, where you have somebody like Mr. Foster who doesn't, in his day-to-day life, appear to be somebody despondent, appear to be somebody who is distraught enough to kill himself, how, in fact, they can be depressed.
It was just more an explanation to me about it.
Mr. Chertoff: What I am having trouble with here, Mr. Burton, is you begin with her asking you or your volunteering the gruesome detail about the gun being placed in the mouth in order to make Mrs. Clinton aware of your conclusion that it is a suicide rather than a death by another cause; right? Then, immediately, she tells you that she has concluded, based upon her thinking about this, that this was caused by depression. Is this the way the conversation was?
Mr. Burton: A couple of corrections there. One was I was repeating to her the Park Police's conclusion that it had been a suicide.
Mr. Chertoff: You did this because-----
Mr. Burton: Which I accepted after hearing the details of the scene, I did accept that conclusion.
Mr. Chertoff: From there, she had concluded, based on her experiences talking to Mrs. Gore, that depression often causes suicide and he might have been depressed. I am trying to figure out how you move from telling her it is a suicide to her, as you've testified a moment ago, telling you how these things are caused by depression. It seems to me you just told her it is a suicide and now you are telling me she's come back to you and said she has been reflecting on this and has come up with a cause….."

Insight Magazine 4/12/00 Paul Rodriguez "……..New "old" memos to and from the FBI and the Justice Department are being sought by a House Judiciary subcommittee that only recently learned about them. And a hearing sure to create sparks is scheduled for April 13. The memos, according to Insight's sources, include previously unknown blockbusters from FBI Director Louis Freeh and former Campagin Task Force leader Charles La Bella, among several others inside the Justice Department. ……… Florida Republican Rep. Charles Canady, with the full backing of Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, wants to know why his panel should not issue subpoenas to obtain the "secret" documents that, so far, Attorney General Janet Reno has refused to turn over -- let alone even ackowledge exist. But exist they do and, according to federal law enforcement sources who have seen them, they are explosive and provide substantial backup to La Bella's assertions from over a year ago that Reno should have sought the appointment of an Independent Counsel to investigate the Clinton/Gore reelection committee's campaign fundraising tactics and those of the DNC, or Democratic National Committee….."

WorldNetDaily 4/13/00 Paul Sperry "…….Contradicting recent White House claims, a former White House computer contractor says that back-up tapes of White House e-mail are routinely stored at a site outside the White House complex. The White House has assured Congress that all the tapes are in the custody of the White House security office. It's not clear if there are two sets of the tapes, one stored in the White House complex and another stored at an offsite facility. Nor is it clear if the tapes stored offsite include files of unsearched White House e-mail under subpoena. ……… But the former White House computer contractor, who wished to go unnamed, told WorldNetDaily that White House officials routinely removed e-mail back-up tapes from the White House grounds, although he could not name the site where they were stored. "They took the tapes and put them in a vault somewhere," said the source, whose company, Planning Research Corp., handled the White House computer contract before Northrop Grumman took over operations completely in 1997. ……."

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "…..The former contractor, Planning Research Corp., had a lead role in designing, building and maintaining the e-mail and archiving systems in the White House before Northrop Grumman took over the contract in 1997. In 1996, the White House converted to a server-based system. That's when White House officials say the "glitch" occurred on a key e-mail server used by top West Wing officials, including President Clinton. But the contractor says it did not have "exclusive control over any servers" in the White House. "There were at least 50 government IT (information technology) employees who touched the servers -- people who had access rights," said Tim Long, vice president of strategic communications and market development for McClean, Va.-based Litton PRC Inc. Litton Industries took over PRC in 1996. So "we can't say it was us" that caused the problem, Long added. ……"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "…..The manager, who was in charge of 134 workers, met each morning with his programmers and White House officials to plan projects and read any error reports. "If there was that kind of report, it would have been something I would have heard about," said the manager, who wished to go unnamed. "That would have been a serious error. That would have gotten enough attention to where that certainly would have made it to my level." ………"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "…..Laura Crabtree Callahan, the ex-White House official who worked with PRC contractors on the 1996 project to convert e-mail users to IBM's Lotus Notes program, spared little criticism for the former contractor in testimony before the House Government Reform Committee last month. "We've had numerous problems with the e-mail system. It was very poorly constructed and very poorly designed by a contractor prior to Northrop Grumman," she said. "So as a result, anomalies were fairly common." But Long says that's unfair. In 1996, White House officials were pushing computer projects through at such a fast pace that it's not clear who was responsible for what. "It was grab this person, grab that person," he said. "A government clone (to one of the program managers) could have tapped one of our PRC programmers without us even knowing it." ……"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "….. White House Counsel Beth Nolan last month explained that, during the 1996 conversion to Lotus Notes, "some of the users were apparently mistakenly coded by computer technicians as being on 'MAIL2,' using all upper-case letters, instead of 'Mail2.' " She added: "The ARMS scanning process is case sensitive." But PRC officials, as well as former White House officials, are skeptical of the explanation. 1,578 bad keystrokes? For starters, ARMS was not likely case sensitive. "I don't remember anything like that," the program manager said. Long agreed: "It's very rare that any software would not look for either case." …….. And if it were case sensitive, why could the ARMS still read the Mail2 server's outgoing mail? ……"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "…..

Until 1996, PRC had held the White House computer contract for 22 years, spanning five presidents. Almost all of PRC's business is still with Uncle Sam. Which raises another question: If PRC made that big of a boo-boo, why would the Clinton administration continue to contract with the company? The White House had no comment. According to spokesman Mark Kitchens, the White House is issuing only general statements about Project X and won't answer specific questions. …… "I'm suspicious that this mistake ever happened the way they say," said a former White House official. "There would have certainly been value in having this server not be properly records-managed. Because when they found out about the problem, there was value in letting it continue for six months." ……"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "….. Callahan's Sept. 30, 1996, promotion to the White House from a lower-paying government job in Pittsburgh is marked by a curious confluence of events.
* The next month, PRC's contract was terminated, although many PRC technicians -- including Sandi Golas, Bob Haas and John Spriggs -- stayed on to help Northrop Grumman make the transition. (The three now work for Northrop Grumman in the White House. They testified, somewhat reluctantly, about the e-mail scandal in last month's House hearings.)
* Callahan replaced veteran White House computer manager Sheryl Hall, who says she was demoted for speaking out against the White House political appointees using government resources to build the first lady's WHODB donor database. Hall was heavily involved in the Lotus Notes e-mail project at the time. She has since become a whistle-blower and a plaintiff in Judicial Watch's Filegate suit against White House officials.
* At the end of September 1996, White House official Jim Wright, branch chief of IST's Data Center, came back to work after a two-week leave of absence for "stress," a former colleague says -- only to find out that Callahan had taken over his old Lotus Notes project. He was soon at odds with Callahan over her handling of the e-mail project, the colleague says.
* On Oct. 17, 1996, the new server-based Lotus Notes e-mail system first went on line -- with its now-famously flawed Mail2 server.
* At the same time -- just weeks away from the November 1996 presidential election -- news broke of Clinton-Gore fund-raiser John Huang's shady (now illegal) dealings. Secret meetings between Clinton and Huang's Beijing-tied boss, James Riady, were also revealed. ……"

Insight Magazine 4/13/00 Paul Rodriguez "……..Judicial Watch is preparing to file a sworn affidavit from a former White House deputy counsel in the Office of Administration that accuses superiors, including John Podesta, the current White House chief of staff, with preparing false and misleading affidavits for submission in a court case. ………. The explosive charges levied by Weaver, who left the White House job early in Bill Clinton's first term, alleges that in a separate case (Armstrong et al vs. Executive Office of the President) that members of the White House counsel's office routinely sought to force or insert incorrect information or otherwise provided misleading facts into sworn affidavits filed by EOP employees to the courts. ……. Moreover, Weaver reveals in her shocking declaration: "There was definite pressure on me from the Clinton White House and Counsel's Offfice to obtain misleading affidavits." ………. She goes on to provide specific examples and reviews one occassion where she "had to work past midnight on a particular Armstrong compliance issue because sataffers at OA ... refused to sign affidavits with language prepared by White House Counsel because they were false, or the declarations the White House wanted to be made concerned things which were unknowns (and thus could not be testified to), making the affidavits misleading." ….."

Judicial Watch 4/14/00 Jane Weaver "………DECLARATION OF JANE D. WEAVER ………. From approximately April 1992 through December 1993, I was an Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Administration (OA), Executive Office of the President (EOP). I have been a member of the bar since 1987. I have over twenty (20) years of service in the United States Air Force, where I am currently a Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve. I have personal knowledge of the matters attested to herein.

As OA Assistant General Counsel, my duties and responsibilities included handling litigation concerning the agency, and acting as a liaison with my colleagues in the Justice Department, the White House Counsel's and Records Office, and other EOP attorneys. During my tenure at OA, the overwhelming majority of my time was spent on matters relating to the litigation of Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President.

In the course of the Armstrong litigation, Judge Charles R. Richey issued several orders concerning the maintenance and archiving of electronic data, including personal computer files and e-mail by the White House and other EOP agencies, such as United States Trade Representative, Office of National Drug Control Policy, etc. I frequently worked with OA staff in 1993 on their affidavits, specifically those attempting to demonstrate EOP's compliance efforts with Judge Richey's orders.

After the beginning of the Clinton Administration, I noted a definite change in the way these affidavits were handled. To my recollection, I was frequently given specific language to include which I believe and was told came from the Clinton White House Counsel's Office. This proposed language for inclusion in EOP staff affidavits was sometimes false. I did not know if this was intentional or because White House staffers did not understand how the EOP computer systems worked. I certainly understood the purpose of the representations they desired to make, but several times I had to remind senior colleagues at the Justice Department that legal ethics and integrity required me to obtain truthful affidavits. Thus, I would wordsmith and present alternative drafts for approval by the Clinton White House Counsel's Office. Often, I understood that the lawyers there were dissatisfied and persisted in pushing for affidavits from EOP staff that were, at best, misleading.

I vividly remember one Clinton White House meeting (I believe it was in the West Wing), which included then-Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta, lawyers from the White House Counsel's Office, and the Department of Justice where the Armstrong case and related affidavits were discussed. Over my objections, it was decided by Podesta and others at the meeting to pursue a course of action I felt was misleading and legally inconsistent with prior sworn declarations to the court.

There was definite pressure on me from the Clinton White House and Counsel's Office to obtain misleading affidavits. For example, this pressure was applied concerning the "Fifth Declaration of James B. Wright," dated April 19, 1993 (attached). Wright was, at the time, Manager of the EOP's Data Center, which was administered by OA. In paragraph 12 of that declaration, it says "no finalized time mail data or e-mail messages were automatically deleted or lost before being backed up..." (emphasis in original). I remember Clinton White House Counsel originally proposing the statement without the word "automatically" in the declaration. As e-mail and other data could have been manually deleted, I remember Jim Wright, Jason Baron (a colleague from the Justice Department) and I insisted that the word "automatically" be inserted in order to make the declaration truthful. As I recall, this displeased the Clinton White House greatly. It was only because of our insisting on technically truthful and plainly forthright language that the word "automatically" and other clarifying phraseology were inserted into the declaration.

Because of the constant back and forth concerning the Armstrong affidavits, I frequently had to work past 9 p.m. Once, we had to work past midnight on a particular Armstrong compliance issue because staffers at OA, such as Jim Wright, refused to sign affidavits with language prepared by White House Counsel because they were false, or the declarations the White House wanted to be made concerned things which were unknowns (and thus could not be testified to), making the affidavits misleading. At one point at least, Wright told me that if White House staff wanted those statements in an affidavit so badly, then they would have to sign it themselves. As I recall, with the support of Bruce Overton (OA Counsel) and Jason Baron, I reiterated that sentiment to senior officials at the White House and the Justice Department and, at that time in the Spring of 1993, the language was dropped. I never allowed a knowingly false affidavit to be filed with Judge Richey's Court.

EOP staffers repeatedly told me they did not want to knowingly sign misleading affidavits and then have to defend them in depositions or in court, for obvious reasons. Initially, I was advised by lawyers in the Clinton White House Counsel's Office to tell EOP staffers not to worry about signing off on certain statements, as they would be defended, if need be…….

Recent news reports about lies to this Court from the Clinton White House about computer systems in the White House involving, among other things, e-mail and the Automated Records Management System (ARMS) caused me to come forward and alert the Court to my related personal experiences…….."

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….. Now Insight has discovered previously unknown DNC telephones inside the White House complex, billing records for which may shed additional light on fund-raising issues still under investigation. Installation of these phone lines could be a violation of federal laws that prohibit the mixing of political and government services on government property, say legal experts.

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….. Insight also has learned of the existence of more unknown backup "tapes" of virtually every White House employee's computer. In fact, there are nearly 900 archived external-storage devices containing these materials. And most never have been revealed to federal investigators and/or were not searched or inventoried by the White House as required under subpoena throughout the Clinton-Gore scandals. …….. These backup "tapes" include, for example, information copied by external drives and technicians from computers once used by Billy Dale (the former White House Travel Office di-rector), Leon Panetta (the former White House chief of staff), Craig Livingstone (the former White House security director) and Harold Ickes (the former White House deputy chief of staff). Some of the "tapes" are secreted within the White House complex, while others are stored at an off-site facility in Greenbelt, Md.

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….. As Insight reported April 12 on its Webwire (www.insightmag.com), a House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Rep. Charles Canady, a Florida Republican, now also is looking to obtain previously unknown memos from Freeh and LaBella related to their ignored calls for an independent counsel. After an April 13 meeting of his subcommittee, Canady struck a bargain with the Justice Department to delay issuing subpoenas pending further talks with Reno's senior aides, including Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. But the pot is boiling.

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "……..And in late 1998 Panetta's office confirmed to Insight not only the existence of the now-controversial e-mails but the long-distance telephone records as well. Now Insight has confirmed from one of its many interviews with federal investigators that Panetta also knew about one or two telephone lines installed at the White House for direct communications with the DNC. …….. Clinton has said that he did make calls on behalf of the DNC and, presumably, for his own reelection committee, but he claimed he didn't do it often and couldn't remember when or where. Gore has said that he, too, made such calls from the White House complex but that he used a telephone calling card provided by the DNC and therefore no laws were broken as there was "no controlling legal authority." Alas, no one could check these stories because the White House long maintained that there were no detailed telephone records. Then, two years ago, White House officials discovered that some calls placed by either Clinton or Gore improperly were billed to "White House" lines and reimbursement was sought for $24.20 from the DNC to offset taxpayer expense. Federal law-enforcement investigators began wondering how the White House could search telephone records it consistently has said it doesn't have, and about which it says there never were call-billing details. ……….. "

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….. As Insight followed up on all of this, it was told of at least two telephones installed at the White House in 1996 for use by the DNC and White House personnel, possibly the ones referred to by Panetta. Now Insight has found at least two previously unknown phone lines installed in 1997 at the Old Executive Office Building, or OEOB, for use by the DNC and White House staff. …….. The DNC phones installed in 1997 were put in by an official at the White House Office of Political Affairs. Charges for these telephones, located in offices on the first and second floors of the OEOB, were to be billed to the DNC according to memos and other sources secured by Insight. The phones not only were ordered by a White House official, they were installed by White House personnel on a rush basis. This had been done before, according to Insight sources, and that was confirmed by review of White House records. ……."

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "……..Insight just has discovered, for instance, that despite claims of the White House, and weeks of hearings concerning the WHODB by Indiana Rep. David McIntosh's House Government Reform subcommittee two years ago, there was a WHODB link set up for other outside offices not previously known, including the Treasury Department. Does that mean the IRS, or were these politicos watching ... who and what? This is interesting in a broader context because it was always McIntosh's opinion that WHODB was improperly used for political purposes, a charge the White House denied. Although a criminal referral was sent to the Justice Department, it still sits there without action more than a year after receipt from the subcommittee….."

Insightmag.com 4/14/00 Paul Rodriguez "…….. And, in a shocking revelation, Freeh also felt the need to seek an independent counsel because of information the Campaign Task Force obtained suggesting the clandestine use of private investigators by Clinton intimates to probe one or more persons who made illegal donations to several coffers, including the Presidential Legal Expense Trust. Monies allegedly paid to hire these P.I.s were drawn from a special fund used to help Clinton on a variety of matters. ……… "All hell will break loose when these memos are made public," says a second federal source, who is aware of the allegations that private investigators were used to probe at least one, and possibly three, high-profile campaign contributors to several of Clinton's fund-raising organizations. ………. And this source confirmed separate details that have been mentioned in the press that a former senior Justice Department official who reported directly to Reno strongly supported the call for her to appoint an independent counsel to probe Gore because of direct testimony that contradicted the vice president concerning what he said he did or knew about the allegedly illegal fund-raising schemes. ……"

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "……….The private contractor that previously handled e-mail operations for the White House hotly disputes White House claims it caused a computer "error" that led to a two-year hole in records of e-mail sent to West Wing officials. In fact, White House staffers may be to blame, company officials asserted in interviews with WorldNetDaily.com. ………. But the contractor says it did not have "exclusive control over any servers" in the White House. "There were at least 50 government IT (information technology) employees who touched the servers -- people who had access rights," said Tim Long, vice president of strategic communications and market development for McClean, Va.-based Litton PRC Inc. Litton Industries took over PRC in 1996. So "we can't say it was us" that caused the problem, Long added. ……… The PRC program manager said Callahan, who joined the White House on Sept. 30, 1996, was "very involved" in the Lotus Notes project. "In fact, she shared an office with my own people," he said. "So some of my people would have had daily contact with her." He claims Callahan could easily have tapped a programmer to jump on the server and key in code. Callahan did not return calls to her Labor Department office, where she now heads up IT for the agency. According to a 1999 internal White House memo obtained by WorldNetDaily, a PRC programmer designed the Lotus Notes program to aid in "migrating" White House users to the new system. ……….."

WorldNetDaily 4/4/00 Paul Sperry "……….Callahan's Sept. 30, 1996, promotion to the White House from a lower-paying government job in Pittsburgh is marked by a curious confluence of events.
* The next month, PRC's contract was terminated, although many PRC technicians -- including Sandi Golas, Bob Haas and John Spriggs -- stayed on to help Northrop Grumman make the transition. (The three now work for Northrop Grumman in the White House. They testified, somewhat reluctantly, about the e-mail scandal in last month's House hearings.)
* Callahan replaced veteran White House computer manager Sheryl Hall, who says she was demoted for speaking out against the White House political appointees using government resources to build the first lady's WHODB donor database. Hall was heavily involved in the Lotus Notes e-mail project at the time. She has since become a whistle-blower and a plaintiff in Judicial Watch's Filegate suit against White House officials.
* At the end of September 1996, White House official Jim Wright, branch chief of IST's Data Center, came back to work after a two-week leave of absence for "stress," a former colleague says -- only to find out that Callahan had taken over his old Lotus Notes project. He was soon at odds with Callahan over her handling of the e-mail project, the colleague says.
* On Oct. 17, 1996, the new server-based Lotus Notes e-mail system first went on line -- with its now-famously flawed Mail2 server.
* At the same time -- just weeks away from the November 1996 presidential election -- news broke of Clinton-Gore fund-raiser John Huang's shady (now illegal) dealings. Secret meetings between Clinton and Huang's Beijing-tied boss, James Riady, were also revealed. ……"

FoxNews 4/4/00 Martin Schram Jonathan Broder "………Charles Easley said that in recent weeks he has assumed responsibility for safekeeping a variety of materials Charles Easley, the top security officer, also said in a sworn affidavit that he had taken possession of printouts of e-mails to and from Monica Lewinsky and locked them in his office safe. This is the first time the location of these printouts has been revealed………….. The White House statements did not indicate whether there had previously been a policy to destroy old computer files. ……… In his District Court affidavit, Easley said that in recent weeks, he has assumed responsibility for safekeeping the following materials:
* 363 back-up computer tapes believed to contain e-mails sent to and from the vice president's office. These are in addition to some 280 tapes also believed to contain e-mails to or from Gore's office.
* a Zip Disk whose contents include e-mails to and from Lewinsky and which may include communications to and from other sources.
* Printouts of some e-mails to and from Lewinsky. ….."

FoxNews 4/4/00 Martin Schram Jonathan Broder "………He said that on March 23, he had begun printing out the contents of the disk, but stopped after printing out 15 e-mails and their attachments because, he said, the process was too time-consuming. Six days later, on March 29, Easley said he tried to continue printing out the documents. "However, when the Zip Disk was placed in the Zip Drive to copy it, its contents could not be read," he said. But Easley said he realized that all was not necessarily lost because the unreadable Zip Disk was a copy made by Richard Haas, a Northrup Grumman technician. He said Haas provided him with another copy of the Zip Disk, which Easley copied again and stored in Room SB-234 of the New Executive Office Building - "behind two doors secured by mechanical cypher locks." "This is in an environmentally controlled space, designed to protect the integrity of the data," he said. "The combination on the lock to the inner door to Room SB-234 has been changed, and a Sergeant & Greenleaf deadbolt, generally recognized in the security community as a high-security deadbolt, has been placed on the door," Easley said. "The deadbolt has been locked with a high-security padlock to which only I have the key, so that only I and only those I authorize are permitted entry to the area." ......"

Washington Times 4/5/00 John McCaslin "……. Sixteen congressmen, Republicans and Democrats alike, who sit on the House Committee on Government Reform, have received shiny little gold boxes, about the size of a ring box, in the mail. "Official White House E-Mail Shredder," it read on the outside. The congressmen, including ranking Democrat Henry A. Waxman of California, opened the boxes to find wrapped in cotton a standard "delete" key from a computer keyboard - compliments of 60,000 members of the Citizens' Investigative Commission outraged over the "missing" White House e-mail messages….."

AP 4/5/00 "…..The second fire in less than two months broke out Wednesday night at the National Archives' record center. Firefighters knocked down the fire with no injuries Wednesday. It followed a blaze at the facility on Feb. 29 that was determined to be the result of arson. Prince George's County Fire Department spokesman Mark Brady said the fire was reported at about 5 p.m. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were assisting in the investigation. Almost 4 million cubic feet of records are stored at the center outside Washington. ….."

WorldNetDaily 4/6/00 Paul Sperry "……The White House has allayed Congress' concerns about missing e-mail by turning over the e-mail search project to a third party -- an "independent" and "private" contractor. What the White House hasn't said is it's still calling the shots. In an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily, the president and chief executive of the general contractor for the e-mail restoration job says the White House matched him with a subcontractor that employs former White House officials. Also, the general contractor himself worked in the White House -- under an official that a House committee has recommended the Justice Department investigate for perjury in the mushrooming e-mail scandal. In fact, he lists him as his top reference. Tung Q. "Eric" Duong, head of lead contractor ECS Technology Inc., says he found out about subcontractor SRA International for the first time in a White House meeting "a couple of weeks ago." "I just only know SRA about couple weeks ago," Duong, who speaks slightly broken English, told WorldNetDaily yesterday. Duong (pronounced Young) is a U.S. citizen. ………As reported yesterday in WorldNetDaily, SRA employs at least two former senior White House officials who allegedly "dragged their feet" in restoring missing White House e-mail under subpoena by several investigative bodies, White House insiders say. Dorothy "Dotty" Cleal was associate director of the Office of Administration's Information Systems and Technology unit, which manages the White House computer systems, including e-mail archiving. Cleal left her post in January and hired on with SRA. The other ex-official working for SRA is John Dankowski, who was President Clinton's special assistant and director of White House operations. He left the White House in September. Sources say both officials "worked closely" with Mark Lindsay, Clinton's assistant and director of management and administration, as well as Lindsay's predecessor, Virginia "Ginny" Apuzzo. ….."

Judicial Watch 4/6/00 "……Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm and anti-government corruption watchdog, has moved for criminal contempt proceedings against The Clinton-Gore White House, its officials, and its counsel for having submitted a false affidavit to the Court. Despite having been placed on notice of the "e-mail problem" over one-and-one-half years ago, The Clinton-Gore White House and its counsel submitted a false affidavit from a White House official claiming that there was no e-mail problem and that all e-mail had been captured on the "ARMS" system. Further, recently produced documents confirm that the official who swore to the affidavit - with the obvious assistance of counsel - knew that there was an e-mail problem in advance. In addition to Judicial Watch's motion for criminal contempt, the House Government Reform Committee has asked Attorney General Janet Reno to commence a criminal investigation over this conduct………….. "During the Clinton-Gore Administration, it has become routine to submit false affidavits and testimony to various courts of law. When this occurs, it is incumbent upon the affected courts to police the integrity of their process by commencing appropriate proceedings to address the harm to the specific case and the U.S. legal system as a whole. Indeed, Judge Susan Webber-Wright recently found the President in civil contempt of court for submitting false testimony in the Jones case," stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman……"

ABC Raw News 4/6/00 Reuters "…….The Justice Department has decided not to bring federal charges against Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon for releasing information from the private file of defense worker Linda Tripp, Pentagon and Justice Department officials said on Thursday. ……. Pentagon Deputy Inspector General Donald Mancuso, who has been looking into the two-year-old case, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday he was told by the Justice Department that it would not press charges against Bacon or former Bacon assistant Clifford Bernath. Justice Department spokesman John Russell confirmed in response to questions that the decision had been sent in a recent letter to the Pentagon inspector general's office. He would not elaborate. ……. "

Insight Magazine 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "….. The head of the Justice Department/FBI Campaign Task Force, along with the department's lead attorney, James Gilligan, are being charged with playing a game of hide & seek with U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth on the matter of "lost" White House emails, Insight has learned. Moreover, high level federal law enforcement sources have told Insight that neither the Campaign Task Force nor the Justice Department have been completely above board on a separate matter that has yet to garner much press attention concerning "lost" White House telephone logs detailing virtually every long distance call made from the Executive Office of the President between January 1992 through at least December 1998. Robert J. Conrad Jr., the head of the Task Force, along with Gilligan, have effectively told Judge Lamberth as recently as March 24 that to release any information concerning the now-infamous White House emails would seriously impede new investigations launched by the two law enforcement groups into recent allegations in the press involving a cover up (and threats to contract employees who have known about the emails) going back at least two years. Gilligan also told the judge that the Justice Department and Independent Counsel Robert W. Ray want to delay any judicial intervention or review into the White House emails because of separate new probes they are conducting into the latest allegations. The requests to Lamberth by Conrad and Gilligan were in response to a civil suit brought by Judicial Watch in its $90 million "Filegate" case against the White House. ……"

Insight Magazine 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "….. But Insight can now reveal for the first time that the statements made to Lamberth raise troubling ethical and legal issues for the Task Force and Justice Department because, since at least February 1999, senior agents of the FBI personally met with White House lawyers and officials and confidential witnesseses to discuss the emails, along with separate so-called lost telephone logs that long had been under subpoena by congressional panels, grand juries, and others. In other words, the implications of statements made before the judge that the investigative bodies are just now looking into these matters has been drawn into question, based on over a dozen interviews with confidential sources in and out of government in recent days. ……"

Insight Magazine 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "….. One well-placed source familiar with the LaBella memo and others from him and other lead investigators, said it comes as no surprise to hear about the FBI agents' disinterest in the White House emails and stories from witnesses recounted by Insight such as this one: "They [the FBI agents] said that the emails were somebody else's problems but that a report had been filed and 'they' would get back to us. They never did call back." Another high-level federal law enforcement official who confirmed these damning charges, said he also knew that high-level officials at the Justice Department and the FBI were aware of both the emails now in the news plus the missing telephone records. "There was a lot of politics over this and most other areas of these investigations that in the end were killed to protect the higher ups," this law enforcement official shockingly claimed. "We blew it and we're just trying to cover our asses on this," the federal law enforcement official bluntly confessed to Insight. When asked about the statements made before Judge Lamberth that no information could be released to the court or to Judicial Watch because it could compromise new probes, the official had this to say: ……"

Insight Magazine 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "….. "This is a mess," admitted one of the Justice Department sources who asked like the others not to be further identified. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't and in this case, we're damned either way because too many people knew about these [emails and telephone logs] but did nothing about it other than file reports." A cover up? "Call it what you want, you figure it out," the Justice source snapped. ….."

Insight Magazine 3/28/00 Paul Rodriguez "….. Yes, Insight has confirmed that several agents did look into the issues of emails and telephone records but, according to Justice Department sources familiar with these matters, the agents and their superiors at both the Campaign Task Force and at Starr's office did not pursue the evidence whistle-blowers were trying to share at great peril to careers. Why? "That's the real scandal in all of this," a disgruntled former FBI agent tells Insight. "They've known all along about what's in those records or at least what the potential has been but they didn't care to followup until now when it explodes in their faces...Now they want to pretend they never knew about it and never looked into it and never interviewed witnesses who had access to the records. They're trying to hoodwink the judge," this former agent told Insight in a fury of anger. ……"

Washington Times 3/30/00 "…….The mysterious disk happens to contain e-mail messages that former intern Monica Lewinsky sent to two White House workers during and after the time she was carrying on with President Clinton. On March 17 the in-house counsel of Northrop Grumman, the firm that manages the White House's computer systems, turned the "zip disk" over to the Executive Office of the President, which, as of last Friday, had not yet reviewed its contents. The "zip disk's" mysterious appearance at the White House occurred one week after Justice Department investigators contacted the White House about the missing e-mails. That contact occurred three weeks after The Washington Times first reported that more than 100,000 e-mail messages sent between August 1996 and November 1998 were never properly archived by the White House - and, thus, were not found in the normal computer searches the White House conducted in efforts to comply with the various subpoenas. The "zip disk" also arrived at the White House six days before Robert Haas, the computer technician who compiled it and who turned it over to Northrop Grumman's corporate counsel, told Chairman Dan Burton of the House Government Reform Committee that he "never saved [any e-mail search responses or records] on a zip drive for anybody."……."

Washington Times 3/30/00 Jerry Seper "……. A top White House official lied to a federal court about missing White House e-mail messages, making "false and intentionally deceptive" statements in an affidavit prepared by the Justice Department, the chairman of a House committee said yesterday. Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, told U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth in a letter he intends to ask today for a criminal investigation of Daniel "Tony" Barry, computer specialist for the Executive Office of the President. Mr. Burton said Mr. Barry swore in an affidavit "under the penalty of perjury" that e-mails sent to the White House had been collected in an Automated Records Management System (ARMS), although thousands were missing and the White House knew it……….. "Mr. Barry was aware that a large number of e-mails had not been archived in the ARMS system," Mr. Burton said in the letter. "Consequently, tomorrow I will submit a criminal referral regarding this false statement, signed by him and made under the penalty of perjury, to the Justice Department."…… Mr. Burton advised the judge that House investigators had been told that Justice Department lawyers who helped Mr. Barry with the affidavit "were aware that the information was misleading."….. He also said he was concerned that lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office "were also involved in this deception."......"In short, it may well be that Justice Department and White House attorneys were involved in a conspiracy to commit a fraud upon your court," Mr. Burton said……"

The Daily Republican 10/20/97 William Heartston "…… Dan Burton(R) chair of the House Committee investigating campaign fund abuses in the 1996 election told television viewers on Sunday's Face The Nation 'We think some of those tapes may have been cut off intentionally...We're going to talk to the technicians, the people that took all of the videotapes, and try to get to the bottom of it.' An angry reaction from the Clinton White House aide Lanny Davis attempted to deflect mounting public concern over Burton's statement. Davis stopped short of denying that the tapes had not been altered. However, Davis said that the White House counsel's office did not alter the tapes. Davis also said that the White House Communications Agency that did the videotaping has no knowledge about editing of those videotapes. To make matters worse for the Clinton Administration, Sunday evening, Burton directly accused the White House of trying to mislead Congress by not turning over the videotapes until seven months after his committee had served the Clinton administration with subpoenaed for such documentation. …….."

ABC.NEWS 3/30/00Carter Yang "……. President Clinton spoke out today on new developments relating to former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with the president led to his impeachment, and Kathleen Willey who has accused the president of making unwanted sexual advances. ……. "We don't agree with the ruling," said Clinton, referring to a finding today by a federal judge that the president "committed a criminal violation of the Privacy Act" by publicly releasing letters written by Willey after she went public with allegations that Clinton groped her in the White House. "When the decision was made to release those letters," the president explained, "I didn't even have any conversations with anybody about the Privacy Act. I never thought about it - never thought about whether it applied or not. And [I] decided to do it reluctantly only because it was the only way I knew to refute allegations made against me that were untrue." The letters, written by Willey to Clinton after the time of the alleged incident, were released by the White House in an attempt to discredit her story. The president also questioned the motives of Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Republican appointee, who issued the ruling. "He does seem to somehow acquire a significant percentage of the cases involving the White House," said Clinton. "That's an interesting story." ….."

CNSNews.com 3/30/00 Bruce Sullivan "…….Frustrated with a White House counsel and a Justice Department lawyer's responses to his questions concerning missing White House e-mail, House Government and Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton, (R-IN), said on Thursday that he would issue subpoenas to several more Clinton Administration lawyers in order to find out which one assisted a White House computer specialist who filed an affidavit that Burton believes is false. "It is inconceivable that you come up here and not have any of the answers," Burton told White House counsel Beth Nolan and Justice Department lawyer Robert Raben. Burton was especially miffed with Raben, who repeatedly answered Burton's questions with a curt "I don't know." "Just what are you doing here?" snapped Burton to Raben. "Well, you subpoenaed me, sir," replied Raben……… Burton told Raben that he intends to subpoena perhaps half a dozen more Justice Department attorneys to appear before his committee……"

Associated Press Online 3/30/00 Pete Yost "……White House counsel Beth Nolan said Thursday there was a "disconnect" in the