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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The latest leaked charges against Al Gore are more the product of partisan politics than any new hard evidence.
Jun 24, 2000 | As we ought to have learned from costly experience with the failed Whitewater, travel office and FBI files investigations, illegal leaks and partisan rhetoric can make headlines but they can't make a case. Of course, that doesn't matter much to the Republicans who are so nakedly scheming to bully Attorney General Janet Reno into naming a special counsel to investigate Al Gore. He is the Democratic nominee for president and they will deploy any tactic to discredit him.
Until we learn what "new evidence," if any, exists to support Justice Department attorney Robert Conrad's preliminary recommendation for a special prosecutor, the current flap is nothing more than a tired rerun of an old flop. Without fresh proof of wrongdoing, there is no more reason today than there was two years ago to believe that Vice President Gore raised funds illegally during the 1996 campaign -- or that he lied about the controversy later.
In fact, as Roger Parloff pointed out in an exhaustive analysis published by American Lawyer last month, the case against Gore has grown weaker rather than stronger. The successful prosecutions of Democratic fundraisers, including the chief organizer of the famed Buddhist temple event, have turned up no testimony or documentation implicating Gore in the illegal contributions to the 1996 Democratic campaign.
Quite the reverse: Everything on the public record so far indicates that Gore thought he was attending a "community outreach event" at the temple, not a fundraiser. That key distinction was blurred in a screw-up by Democratic activists who canceled a separately scheduled fundraiser at the last minute and mistakenly merged the two events. So in the absence of proof to the contrary, the fair presumption remains that the vice president spoke truthfully when he said he knew of no effort to collect money from Buddhist nuns, let alone about any scheme to funnel contributions through them in defiance of federal law.
The second relevant question for the Justice investigators concerned whether Gore knowingly raised "hard money" as well as "soft money" when he called Democratic contributors from his office. Conceivably, his fundraising calls to party fat cats might have violated the Pendleton Act, a little-used 1883 statute designed to prevent shakedowns of federal employees by elected officials. As yet we have seen nothing new on that score, either. At worst Gore's conduct constituted, as FBI director Louis Freeh acknowledged in his own confidential memo urging the attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor, a "technical violation."
Now, unable to establish that Gore did in fact break the law, certain unnamed Justice officials have told reporters that they think the vice president lied about his knowledge and action. They are pumping insinuations of perjury into the highly receptive news media. But again, the evidence to support a perjury investigation of the vice president is thin and ambiguous, according to memos provided to Reno by senior officials at Justice.
