NOW IS THE HOUR OF BILL CLINTON’S greatest political need, and one senator has rushed to his side: Bob Torricelli of New Jersey. Torricelli has made the defense of Clinton his special cause. Other Democrats warily hang back, but Torricelli charges ahead, vouching for the president on television, bloodying Kenneth Starr, and joining Hillary Clinton in her battle against a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” In Torricelli, Clinton has found his Earl Landgrebe. Does the name ring a bell? Landgrebe was the Indiana congressman who vowed to stay with Richard Nixon till the bitter end. Shortly before Nixon’s resignation, Landgrebe said, “Don’t confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up. I’m going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” Torricelli is too self-preserving to go that far, but he has already gone far enough.
It was on a Wednesday that Hurricane Monica first blew through the nation’s front pages. That Saturday night, Clinton gathered a handful of intimates around him at the White House — including Torricelli. The group mulled over the president’s situation and watched The Apostle, a movie about a largehearted, slick-talking, approval-craving southerner whose chronic adultery leads to a fall from grace. Torricelli was quickly mobilized, declaring to reporters, “He told me it did not happen.” When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked him whether he believed the president’s denials, Torricelli answered — as though recognizing the unusualness of his position — “I do, actually.”
But Torricelli’s moment of true glory came on February 8, when he appeared on ABC’s This Week. There, he pulled out all the stops: Kenneth Starr was “operating outside of any sense of reasonable behavior” and “acting irresponsibly, illegally”; Clinton could not be expected to speak to the public, because “it would be shadow boxing.” Moreover, Torricelli would accept no tut-tutting about Hillary Clinton’s theory of a conspiracy. That idea, he volunteered, “is beginning to have some meat on its bones.” Torricelli cited an article in the New York Observer by Joe Conason, one of the media’s foremost Clinton loyalists. The piece examined the activities of Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, an impassioned foe of the president. Scaife once funded an adjunct of the American Spectator magazine called the “Arkansas Project,” which labored to uncover wrongdoing by the Clintons. The project’s director, Stephen Boynton, became acquainted with David Hale, the former state judge who was convicted of a felony in the Whitewater affair and who proved a valuable witness for Starr.
But Torricelli went far beyond the content of Conason’s story. The Observer, he falsely claimed, had revealed that the Spectator, and thus Scaife, “may have influenced or changed testimony, which indeed Mr. Starr may have known about.” The senator asserted that “Mr. Hale received money, which comes very close to witness tampering,” and that “Mr. Hale and one of these troopers . . . may have changed their testimony” — which would constitute a “serious federal crime.” Torricelli went on to allege that Starr, prior to becoming independent counsel, “was preparing a brief in the Paula Jones case, for which he may have been compensated by Mr. Scaife.” And if that was true, Starr’s “chances of remaining as independent counsel, and the Justice Department not taking back the case, I think are shrinking.”
Torricelli offered not a wisp of evidence for his allegations. And he was only warming up. On February 11, he sent a lengthy letter to Attorney General Janet Reno that, in essence, asked for Starr’s head. The letter was a catalogue of every complaint that has ever been lodged against the independent counsel and every talking point the White House has ever produced.
First, Torricelli chastised Starr for retaining his private law practice — though every other lawyer who has agreed to serve as an independent counsel has also done so, with the exception of Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had all but retired from his practice anyway. Then, Torricelli recycled Conason’s tidbits on Scaife and the Spectator, along with his own amplification of them: “Mr. Starr’s apparent failure to inquire into [the magazine’s relations with Hale] makes his investigation a ‘patsy’ for the Arkansas Project, if not actually complicit in its goal to undermine the President.” Torricelli also described Scaife as “Mr. Starr’s benefactor,” seeing that Scaife “has underwritten the faculty position that waits for Mr. Starr at Pepperdine University upon the expiration of his tenure” as independent counsel.
This much-repeated claim, however, is untrue. A year ago, Starr was offered the deanships of Pepperdine’s law school and (brand-new) school of public policy. He accepted them and then, following widespread criticism, changed his mind, promising to leave Washington for Malibu only when his job as Whitewater prosecutor was finished. According to a university spokesman, one of Scaife’s foundations contributed start-up funds for the public-policy school and also endowed a professorship there. But Starr’s two deanships will be compensated directly by the university, not by anything having to do with Scaife, and Scaife himself had no say whatever in the selection of personnel. What’s more, Scaife has hardly been friendly to Starr — he and his allies have long condemned the independent counsel as timid in his pursuit of Clinton, and they are particularly appalled that Starr has judged Vincent Foster a suicide.
In his appeal to Reno, Torricelli breathed very heavily about cooperation between Starr’s office and Paula Jones’s lawyers. Linda Tripp “briefed the Jones legal team” on her FBI-taped conversation with Monica Lewinsky, and this, Torricelli asserted, drew Starr “one step closer to the Jones civil litigation effort.” Any coordination between the Starr and Jones camps, he continued, would cast “serious doubt on the propriety of any investigation into the President’s alleged statements regarding Ms. Lewinsky during his civil deposition.” No doubt, “a primary purpose of the deposition questions regarding Ms. Lewinsky was to trick the President,” raising “the specter that an unlawful ‘trap’ may have been laid against the President.” All of this, of course, is feverish speculation. The White House’s fondest dream, according to a source familiar with the Starr investigation, is to discover that Starr directed Tripp’s taping of Lewinsky from the beginning. But it remains only a dream.
Perhaps the two most curious paragraphs in the Torricelli letter concerned the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee institution that Torricelli imagines “has been active in efforts to discredit the President in matters directly affecting the investigation.” Here, Torricelli flailed wildly — almost every word of the two paragraphs was false.
Torricelli charged that Starr “represented” the foundation “in an effort to uphold Wisconsin’s experimental school-choice program” and that Starr’s ” position in that case was in direct opposition to the Administration.” Worse, Bradley had written checks to the American Spectatar, as well as to other conservative outfits. Because Starr’s role in the school-choice case was ” based in significant part on his long-standing ideological beliefs,” Torricelli said, Starr “cannot possibly operate as an impartial investigator,” particularly when “his private client is funding efforts devoted to publicizing Mr. Starr’s investigation and related matters in an attempt to discredit the President and his political agenda.”
Michael Joyce, the Bradley Foundation’s president, hardly knew what to make of this bizarre attack, except to consider it an attempt to put flesh on Mrs. Clinton’s conspiracy. Bradley is not exactly a radical-Right machine, bent on destroying the Clintons. It is a conservative foundation that dispenses approximately $ 30 million a year, including to the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, which is closely identified with Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats.” Bradley indeed has contributed to the American Spectator, but also to such publications as the Journal of Democracy, TransState Islam, and the Chinese Intellectual. And though Bradley is keenly interested in the success of school choice, Starr represented, not the foundation, but the State of Wisconsin, which was defending its plan in court.
In a stinging letter to Torricelli, Joyce explained that Bradley had actually turned down “a series of grant requests that . . . could conceivably be identified as ‘efforts to discredit the president in matters directly affecting the investigation.'” A disgusted Joyce says that Torricelli reminds him of a Wisconsin senator of several decades back, one who also made reckless allegations and trafficked in guilt by association. It seems that, any day now, Torricelli, like Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, will start to intone, “I hold in my hand a photostatic copy . . .”
So, Bob Torricelli, however crudely, has presented himself as one of Bill Clinton’s most zealous defenders. What has lit his fire? A number of explanations suggest themselves. Torricelli does not face reelection until 2002, by which time Lewinskygate may be a mere memory. Also, he is a die-hard, Republican-despising Democrat who relishes a fight. He stood by disgraced House speaker Jim Wright long after it had become comfortable to do so, and he carried Clinton’s water while a minority member of Fred Thompson’s campaign-finance committee. His torch-bearing for Clinton does little apparent harm to his career: He has gotten himself on television where others in his party have feared to tread. And he has doubtless endeared himself to Clinton, finding his way into the president’s inner circle and standing to benefit should the current crisis pass.
Then, too, there is the matter of Torricelli’s vindictiveness: When someone crosses him, the senator retaliates. Two months ago, the American Spectator criticized Torricelli for his ties to the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, which the State Department has labeled a terrorist group. Torricelli did not respond personally to the magazine — his lawyer did, in a lengthy, bullying letter that cried defamation. Torricelli is not averse to payback, and his foray into the Lewinsky scandal gives him an opportunity to war against a magazine that has embarrassed him.
Torricelli and his staff declined to answer questions for this story. But one thing seems clear: He is getting a kick out of his role as presidential champion and attack dog. Torricelli is a lifelong politician who thrills to the game, and he will not readily back off — even as he hurtles toward Earl Landgrebe territory.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
