When ABC News on Sunday airs George Stephanopoulosâ interview with fired FBI Director James Comey and touches on claims the agency has been politicized, some viewers may recall that the interviewer faced accusations he manipulated the FBI in âTravelgate,â the emblematic scandal of the Clinton administration.
News reports at the time and an exhaustive House investigation pointed a finger at top Clinton aides including Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clintonâs communications director, for using the FBI to give the White House cover in the scandal.
âBy calling on the F.B.I. to help save the administration from embarrassment, the White House appeared to be deviating from two decades of efforts to insulate the law-enforcement agency from even the appearance of presidential manipulation,â said the New York Times in a report that said Stephanopoulos pushed the agency to reveal it was probing the travel office just days after Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said there were no criminal violations involved.
âGeorge Stephanopoulos and [press secretary] Dee Dee Myers relayed wrong information to the press about reasons for the firings and the involvement of the FBI. On May 21, 1993, the FBI again was misused and abused when Stephanopoulos and Myers summoned the FBI communications director to in effect come to the White House and take dictation for the FBI press release that the White House wished for, and insisted that the FBI release,â said a report from the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight that also detailed how the Clinton White House wrongfully gained access to FBI reports on aides to former President George H.W. Bush.
The scandal touched virtually every notable White House official at the time, including former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was a central figure, and former White House lawyer Vince Foster who later committed suicide and mentioned the travel office scandal in his final note.
President Clinton denied knowledge of the affair, but the House report said he knew.
Like many of the Clinton scandals, Travelgate didn’t have to happen. When it came into power, the Clinton team wanted to install friends — and a Clinton cousin — in the office. They could have just asked the seven staffers to leave and that would have been that.
Instead, it ginned up charges of kickbacks and lavish spending then forced the FBI to do something it rarely does — confirm an investigation — because of outrage from the White House press corps which liked the long-time travel office staff.
The attacks on the fired travel office staff went so far that Clintonâs Justice Department took the travel office director to court and his IRS dogged the director for years. The director was found not guilty after less than two hours of jury deliberations.
According to news reports and the House investigation, Stephanopoulos, now the face of ABC news, pushed the agency to prepare a press release to confirm its investigation of the travel office.
The move drew the ire of then-Attorney General Janet Reno who said calling in the FBIâs public affairs chief broke protocol. Wrote the Washington Post May 25, 1993:
White House officials yesterday acknowledged a series of unusual direct contacts between presidential aides and the FBI over operations of the White House travel office, prompting Attorney General Janet Reno to complain that the White House had ignored administration policies installed to protect against politicizing the bureau.
Among the contacts was a meeting at the White House last Friday with John E. Collingwood, director of the FBI’s public affairs office. At the meeting, Collingwood was given “guidance” in drafting a statement released by the White House later that day to back up its contention that possible criminal acts — not political cronyism — were the reason the seven-person travel staff had been fired abruptly two days before.
That meeting, said the House report, was called by Myers and Stephanopoulos. Wrote the New York Times also on May 25:
Mr. Stephanopoulos said today that last Friday, Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary, called Mr. Collingwood, the bureau’s director of public affairs and Congressional relations, and asked him to meet in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office with Mr. Stephanopoulos; Ms. Myers; David Watkins, assistant to the President for management and administration, who supervised the travel office; Mr. Nussbaum and two members of his staff.
White House officials acknowledged that the meeting was a political strategy session on how to quell the furor over the abrupt dismissal of the travel office staff.
