THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1993
November
- November: Energy conglomerate Enron begins construction of a huge natural gas plant in India.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
After it becomes clear that the plant will not be viable without a pipeline through Afghanistan to supply Enron-owned gas from Uzbekistan, Enron abandons construction of the plant just before completion. (CCR) - November: Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a group formed to oppose and eventually replace Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
Iraq war
sends Clinton officials a detailed, four-phase war plan entitled "The End Game," along with an urgent plea for money to finance the plan. "The time is now," Chalabi writes. "Iraq is on the verge of spontaneous combustion. It only needs a trigger to set off a chain of events that will lead to the overthrow of Saddam. Chalabi, an Iraqi emigre who has lived in London for decades, is a wealthy Shi'ite who is currently on the run from the Jordanian authorities, who in 1992 convicted him of bank fraud. Despite his checkered credentials, the Clinton administration decides to give Chalabi's INC some seed money. (Seymour Hersh) - November: George W. Bush takes his fledgling gubernatorial campaign to San Antonio, where he is embarrassed by his inability to answer reporters' questions about his education reform proposals.
George W. Bush
His handler, Karl Rove, determines to season Bush by sending him on a circuit of small towns, where he speaks to civic organizations, does radio interviews with friendly hosts, speaks at community events, and generally gets more comfortable and more experienced with handling questioning. "It was a brilliant piece of political engineering," writes James Moore and Wayne Slater. "By summer [1994], Bush was a better candidate, well-prepared and well-positioned to face Ann Richards in the fall. The race for governor was to be the showroom where Karl Rove displayed his product, the man he was grooming to be the next president of the United States." (James Moore and Wayne Slater) - November: Clinton hires a personal lawyer, David Kendall, to deal with the Whitewater allegations.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
By May of 1994, he is forced to add another lawyer, Robert Bennett, whose primary duty is to either get the Paula Jones case settled out of court or persuade the Supreme Court that a sitting president should not be a defendant in a civil suit. While Bennett will be successful in postponing the decision until after the 1996 elections, the Supreme Court will ultimately rule against Clinton. (Marvin Kalb) - November: Senator Lauch Faircloth, a rigidly conservative protege of Jesse Helms, writes to Attorney General Janet Reno demanding that US attorney Paula Casey be recused from hearing the David Hale fraud case, and demands the appointment of a special prosecutor.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
Faircloth is joined by other Republicans, and on January 3, 1994, Senator Bob Dole publicly accuses Reno of a politically motivated delay. He insists, of course, that a special prosecutor would be in the president's best interests. Dole issues his demands over the same weekend that Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelly, dies; the distraught Clinton is outraged that Dole would assault him at such an untimely moment. The Republican attacks continue unabated, not even pausing for Kelly's funeral. (Dole will later apologize.) Some in the White House agree with Dole, though they distrust his motives, but the White House lawyers, led by Bernard Nussbaum, disagree. Other Democrats feel that the best way to avert an increasingly nasty pressure campaign (joined by many mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post) is to simply appoint an independent counsel and be done. The papers are full of wild speculation over the various manufactured scandals plaguing the Clinton presidency: Whitewater, the raft of sexual misconduct and adultery allegations, Troopergate (see below), the Foster suicide. Clinton's top advisors are deeply divided. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons) - November: Republican representative Ken Calvert, a conservative with a reputation for staunch advocacy of Christian family values, is found by Corona, California police in his car receiving oral sex from a paid prostitute, recovering heroin addict Lore Lindberg.
Republican corruption
The police, recognizing Calvert, refuse to arrest the congressman even though he attempts to elude arrest by driving away, and the incident remains quiet until the 1994 election, when one opponent, Mark Takano, sick of Calvert's sanctimony, reveals the incident and calls Calvert "a flagrant womanizer." Calvert says the sex was consensual and unpaid, even though he picked her up in the notorious Sixth Street drag strip (he later says Lindberg forced herself into his car and there was no sex at all), and tells voters he has "put the incident behind me." Calvert wins re-election largely by attacking the ancestry of his main opponent, Democrat Joseph Khoury, lambasting Khoury's Arab heritage and implying that Khoury is a traitor to his country. Soon after his re-election, Calvert will be charged with evading $16,000 of back taxes. In 1996, his ex-wife will sue him for failing to pay alimony; he will countersue, and the back-and-forth cases degenerate into a mudslinging contest largely carried out in the tabloids. As of 2007, Calvert is still in Congress. (Hilton and Testa) - November 5: UNSCOM reports that Iraq has finally acknowledged its responsibility to cooperate fully with weapons inspections under UN Resolutions 687 and 715.
Gulf War
Although Iraqi interference continues to a lesser degree, UN inspectors are given much wider latitude to conduct operations. (UN/Electric Venom) - November 8: As part of the kickoff for his campaign to be governor of Texas, George W. Bush
George W. Bush
cruises around the state in a King Air plane dubbed Accountability One. After flying in to Houston, he tells an audience, "I believe everybody should be held responsible for their own personal behavior. All public policy should revolve around the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do." (David Corn) - November 9: At the periodic "Sperling Breakfast" for journalists and politicians, GOP political consultant Ed Rollins brags about spending $500,000 to suppress the black vote in New Jersey and thus elect Republican Christine Todd Whitman to the governor's office in November 1993.
Election fraud
He says GOP operatives had made payments to Democratic precinct workers in black areas on condition they sit on their hands on election day. And he says the Whitman campaign had contributed to church charities in return for black ministers keeping mum on the virtues of Democratic incumbent James Florio. Many media outlets choose not to report Rollins's claim; one reporter, the Christian Science Monitor's Linda Feldman, says she did not report on the vote suppression comments because she had only 15 minutes to file and did not have time to clarify various questions raised by the statement. The Columbia Journalism Review comments, "This was a bit like filing a review of Our American Cousin while delaying a report on that little disruption involving Mr. Lincoln." It is later reported that Rollins had made similar statements about vote suppression three days prior to the breakfast -- in conversations with GOP political consultant Mary Matalin, who co-hosts a CNBC political talk show; semi-retired columnist Rowland Evans; and MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour reporter Margaret Warner. None of the three had seen fit to report Rollins's assertion prior to the breakfast. (Warner told the Washington Post that, after she read the breakfast stories, "In general, though not in every specific, I had the feeling I'd heard it before." Duh.) - However, the story causes enough consternation among Whitman officials and black spokespeople to force Rollins to withdraw the claim; Rollins claims that the whole point of his telling such tales is to demoralize his opponent, Democratic consultant James Carville, who had worked for Florio. Under oath in a Democratic Party-filed lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, Rollins again denies the story, but under questioning, he reverses field again by saying he had indeed discussed efforts to strip black votes from Florio with a campaign official, Lonna Hooks, advising her to tell wavering black leaders: "Whatever their favorite charity may be, there are other ways of helping them besides state funding Florio has.... But I didn't authorize her to go commit resources." Instead of the media treating the story as prima facie evidence of vote tampering that may have resulted in a candidate being illegally elected to govern New Jersey, the media passes the entire imbroglio off as mere campaign tomfoolery. This is perhaps best exemplified by the New York Times's Richard Berke, who on November 10 blandly terms the alleged vote suppression an "unusual tactical effort," part of a "gray area in campaign ethics." The Wall Street Journal even tries to claim that such payoffs are legal in New Jersey. Ultimately the story and the lawsuit both fizzle, partly due to the media ignoring the scandal. Rollins will continue to deny the story, but an examination of voter turnout in the New Jersey race shows an unusually low turnout among black voters in that election. (Columbia Journalism Review, Marvin Kalb, Laura Flanders)
- November 11: NBC broadcasts a lurid and largely fictional story featuring accused embezzler David Hale's tale of Clinton's financial misdoings concerning the Whitewater real estate deal.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
This is not the first or the last mass media presentation of Hale's stories, but it is the first one to bring up the suicide of Vince Foster as potentially linked to the Whitewater deal. Anchor Tom Brokaw tells his audience that Foster may have committed suicide for fear of an impending investigation into Whitewater, and links the suicide to the July 21 raid on Hale's office. The report electrifies the Washington press corps. A few weeks later, the Moonie-owned Washington Times reports that White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum moved the Clinton's personal legal files from Foster's old office to his own shortly after Foster's death; this mundane incident becomes a scandal in the media. Reporters fail to note that in the days after Foster's death, there was no Whitewater scandal, nor had any investigative entities asked to see the Clintons' files. FBI investigators had no interest in the files; they were searching Foster's office for a suicide note. Yet the move, completely proper and legal, causes a firestorm of allegations that Nussbaum moved the files for some unknown, but undoubtely nefarious, purpose. - Newsweek's Michael Isikoff recalls that the move of the files precipated the press corps' interest in Whitewater as a potential scandal, saying that, in the view of the press, Nussbaum "spirited out" the files with suspicious motives. "No single allegation seemed more troubling than to somehow link Foster's death to Whitewater," Isikoff recalls. "You know, is there any possibility that he was so worried about Whitewater that he killed himself because he was fearful about some damaging disclosure? Or is it even worse than that? Some people believe that Foster was murdered, even though there's really no evidence for that." Citizens United, Floyd Brown's and David Bossie's right-wing pressure group formed to smear Clinton, orchestrates as much of the media coverage as possible, often being quoted as "independent sources." The prestigious Columbia Journalism Review, after thoroughly examining the media's coverage of the Whitewater "scandal," concludes that the media had regurgitated Citizens United's "highly partisan" tips and opinions "without identifying the group as the source of their information." It is months before Brown's and Bossie's roles are revealed, and even then, the involvement of their colleague, white supremacist and virulent Clinton-hater Jim Johnson, remains in the shadows. Johnson himself prefers to stay in the background, knowing that his long and ugly history with Arkansas's White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan will color the media's reporting. He continues to pass information along to Washington's conservative community without coming out himself, to the benefit of Hale, himself, and the accelerating movement to destroy Clinton. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
"The Arkansas Project" born
- November 12: Lawyer Stephen Boynton, representing the conservative magazine The American Spectator, arrives for the first of several meetings with representatives from the Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
Boynton meets with Richard Larry, who manages the educational and charitable interests of right-wing billionaire and newspaper publisher Richard Mellon Scaife. Days later, Boynton meets with Parker Dozhier, the owner of a bait shop and fishing resort near Hot Springs; Dozhier is a longtime acquaintance of indicted Little Rock judge David Hale. (Boynton has extensive contacts among Arkansas conservatives, most notably his longtime association with Jim Johnson.) Numerous phone calls and meetings between Hale, Boynton, representatives of the Scaife financial empire, and Arkansas white supremacist and political fixture Jim Johnson. In return for helping promote Hale's lurid and mendacious story of financial misdeeds by the Clintons, the Sarah Scaife Foundation cuts the Spectator's Educational Foundation a check for $60,000, which will be spent on anything but education. The check, accompanied by a glowing letter from Scaife himself, is the first of a $120,000 grant awarded by the foundation. Days later, another check and another letter from Scaife arrive, this time from the Carthage Foundation, in the amount of $200,000. (Boynton and Henderson will ensure their own profits: by June 1997, Boynton will have given himself almost $600,000, and Henderson will have garnered over $475,000. Records make it impossible to prove how much was given to Hale, but conservative estimates place Hale's take in the hundreds of thousands.) - This is not the first donation by Scaife to the magazine -- without literally millions of dollars' worth of donations between the magazine's founding in 1971 and now, the magazine would have long ago foundered if forced to survive in the free market on its own merits. Scaife has donated over $300 million in his lifetime to support a variety of hard-line conservative outfits and ventures, beginning with his support of the Goldwater presidential candidacy in 1964 and his over $1 million in contributions to the candidacy of Richard Nixon in 1972. Scaife is also a longtime domestic asset of the CIA, and has participated heavily in CIA-overseen media operations. As the manager of the "news service" Forum World Features, based in London, Scaife helped in 1970 to orchestrate a right-wing smear campaign that attempted to unseat Prime Minister Harold Wilson and leftist menbers of Parliament. In 1969 he used his family's fortunes to purchase the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a small, mainstream newspaper which he reorients to advocate his conservative ideology and personal causes.
- By 1992, Scaife has made it a personal crusade to discredit and, if possible, unseat Bill Clinton. "He disliked Clinton's liberal politics and Clinton's cleverness at cloaking them in moderate and conservative-sounding policies," says a friend of Scaife's. "To him, Clinton was the embodiment of the sixties antiwar leftist movement that is amoral through and through. He suspects Clinton was a serious drug abuser; thinks he's still a huge womanizer. He bought all the stories, including the tabloid stories about Clinton having illegitimate children." Scaife will use his assets, including his money and his CIA colleagues, to propagate these stories.
- On December 2, Boynton pays Dozhier a $1000 "consulting fee" out of the money donated by Scaife to the Spectator in return for facilitating his and a Spectator official, David Henderson's, meeting with David Hale. Dozhier's premises in Hot Springs will serve as the local "headquarters" for the Spectator's get-Clinton project, as well as a hideout for Hale, who is actively trying to avoid state investigators pursuing another, unrelated fraud case. Dozhier himself is a hardline conservative and segregationist, and a passionate enemy of Bill Clinton: "If Parker got a flat tire," one acquaintance explains, "it was somehow Clinton's fault." Dozhier is the ideal choice for the conspirators, being close friends with everyone involved, including Boynton, Henderson, Jim Johnson, and David Hale.
- Around this same time, Boynton and Henderson meet with prestigious conservative lawyer and former Bush official Theodore Olson. Olson moves in the absolute top of Republican and conservative circles, boasting among his clients former president Ronald Reagan, and sits on the boards of several Scaife-funded conservative groups. Olson, after discussing how best the Spectator can use Scaife's money to facilitate probes into the Clintons' financial and personal lives with Boynton, Henderson, and a group of lawyers and Scaife representatives, agrees to join the legal team of David Hale. Olson's express purpose in joining Hale's defense is to ensure that Hale's stories of Clinton's misdeeds winds up as firmly impressed on the public mind as possible. Olson's participation, along with the others from the Scaife empire and the Spectator staff, marks the beginning of what will come to be known as the "Arkansas Project." It would last for at least four years, soak up millions of dollars (largely from Scaife), and drive the country a long way towards a loathing for the president that would culminate in his impeachment (Scaife would tell friends and employees of his drive to "get that g*ddamn guy out of the White House"). None of the participants are apparently concerned that their point man in the Project, David Hale, is an embezzler, an adulterer, a thief, and a con artist, or that their own decision to use funds from nonprofit, tax-exempt entities for partisan political purposes, is illegal and unethical. "After all," write authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, "the Arkansas Project wasn't supposed to become public knowledge." Even the Spectator's star reporter David Brock would not learn of the existence of the Project for months.
- Scaife, the primary funding source for the Project, uses his experience in running front groups for the CIA to keep the Project's machinations as secretive as possible. In the process he tramples upon the tax laws designed to keep non-profit, charitable, and educational foundations such as the Spectator Foundation accountable, and falsifies the tax documents submitted by the Foundation to the IRS. Most of Scaife's donations go directly into a fund controlled by Boynton; the Spectator's publisher, Ronald Burr, knows little about the donations and has no control over their distribution. By January 1995, Boynton has received around $500,000 from Scaife, virtually none of which is accounted for in records. Managing editor Wladyslaw Plesczynski believes that Spectator editor Robert Tyrrell is running the Project, and works to keep the Project separate from the daily business of the magazine. Plesczynski later says that he was quite skeptical of the Project's dealings: "[Boynton and Henderson] seemed to have a source or two -- David Hale, Parker Dozhier -- but not much more than that. There always seemed to be a lot of hush-hush and heavy breathing, but it never amounted to anything concrete enough for a story." Plesczynski is aware that the Project is keeping close contacts with Kenneth Starr's investigation of Whitewater. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
Brady gun control bill
- November 30: Clinton signs the so-called "Brady Bill" into law.
Gun violence
Officially dubbed the "Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act," the bill, passionately opposed by conservatives and the National Rifle Association among others, requires a five-day waiting period for customers purchasing firearms or handguns, and mandates a national criminal background check on purchasers buying handguns from ATF-licensed dealers. (Private-party sales are not affected, which proves to be an enormous loophole and sees the advent of so-called "gun shows" featuring non-licensed dealers.) The provision which mandates that local law enforcement officials carry out the background checks will be struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997. The waiting period provision expires in 1998; the so-called "instant-check" system, developed by the FBI, is still in use today. The bill is named for James Brady, an assistant to President Reagan who was shot and permanently injured during the 1983 assassination attempt on Reagan. Brady's wife Sarah is the most prominent and vocal supporter of the bill. Opponents predict, wrongly, that the bill will see the eradication of the Second Amendment right for Americans to own guns. (Wikipedia, Brady Bill Text)
