Those lurid charges never made sense, but they generated sensational headlines across the country. Now we know that they were entirely groundless, thanks to a report in the May 23 Los Angeles Times that, again, has received little attention in the national media. According to Times reporters William C. Rempel and Alan Miller, who obtained internal Justice Department documents, the chief prosecutor in charge of probing the Clinton-Gore campaign-finance scandal found "not a scintilla of evidence -- or information -- that the president was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz."

The prosecutor who reached that conclusion is none other than Charles LaBella, who has since left Justice and whose criticism of some aspects of the campaign-finance probe has been widely publicized by Republicans in Congress. LaBella considered the investigation of Loral to be unwarranted, and he reportedly regarded Schwartz himself as "a victim of Justice Department overreaching."

Nevertheless, he had advised Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel to take over the case -- not because he thought there was a prosecutable crime, but simply so that she would not appear partisan in dismissing the case entirely. Although the law arguably required Reno to name an independent counsel even in such a weak case, she declined to do so. LaBella disagreed with that decision, but not because he thought there was any evidence of wrongdoing. (Whether Loral unlawfully gave sensitive technical information to the Chinese is a separate matter that remains under investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.)

All those exculpatory facts were known to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., the inveterate grandstanding phony, but they didn't dissuade him from attempting to resuscitate the same old slanders against Loral and the White House during a May 2 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Specter brazenly attempted to transform Reno's rejection of LaBella's bureaucratic recommendation into evidence of a top-level coverup.

"Specter ... omitted any reference to LaBella's debunking of the merits of the Schwartz investigation," the L.A. Times account noted, and thus "prompted misleading stories and headlines about LaBella's failed efforts to get an outside prosecutor to investigate Schwartz and the president." Misleading the press, of course, was exactly what Specter intended to do -- even at the cost of further injury to Schwarz's reputation.

Of course, if conservatives really believe their own "sellout to China" mythology, they should be demanding the impeachment of the president and vice president for high treason and have rejected the establishment of permanent trading benefits for Beijing. They probably don't believe a word of it -- but they obviously hope that we will.

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