Welcome to the GATE Web Pages

(This is an update containing a link to the web page THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA'S ROLE IN THE WHITEWATER SMEAR CAMPAIGN)

Since 1992, when the first article on Whitewater appeared in the New York Times, hundreds of "news" articles on the Clinton Scandals have appeared in the Mainstream Media. The New York Times article, researched and written out of the offices of the Republican National Committeeman for Arkansas, Sheffield Nelson, did not derail Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, but it did became part of an overall effort to discredit Clinton after he had won the White House in November.

The first year (and perhaps the first eighteen months) of the Clinton presidency was greatly influenced by the incompetence, the stupidity, and the arrogance of an inexperienced White House staff. For this, Clinton himself bears much of the responsibility. But, in addition, the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party was planning what became a successful coup -- they intended to remove the Democratic Party as the majority party in both the House and Senate in 1994, and to replace them with a group of hard-right congressmen and senators. They wanted to defeat the Democrats in congress and to discredit the Democrat in the White House. They succeeded in the first case and are now working on the other. Starting the day after Clinton entered office, any slip or mistake in the White House, no matter how minor, would be exaggerated, loudly commented on, and distorted, all out of proportion to the thing that occurred. Normally, this would not matter, as an innate sense of responsibility in the Mainstream Media would serve to curb the worst excesses of partisan zeal. But in recent years, there has been a sea change in American journalism.

At one time, the White House could count upon the fairness and the objectivity of the Washington Post and the New York Times to deflect some of the wilder accusations and attacks. But sometime during the late 1970s or the early 1980s, the Post and the Time seemed to turn a blind eye to activities in the Reagan White House and then in the Bush White House. Things were going on in both administrations that in other years would have called forth a large corps of investigative reporters. In the case of the New York Times, perhaps this was because a doyen of the New York establishment, William Casey, was the Director of Central Intelligence in the Reagan administration. Or perhaps there were corporate machinations in the higher echelons of the Times with the political integrity of the paper giving way to commercial concerns. As for the Post, perhaps that newspaper was still making amends for Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon. In any case, both papers rolled over for the Republican administrations of both Reagan and Bush and gained for President Reagan at least, the well-earned name the Teflon President.

The looting of publicly-owned resources in the West for private profit appeared to be the new mission of the Department of the Interior under James Watt. Well-connected Republicans were able to treat the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a private piggy-bank. Senior DOD officials, including the Reagan-appointed number two man in the Navy Department, saw the trillion-dollar defense buildup, funded by borrowed money, as an opportunity to create new personal fortunes. But the thing the Post and Times really missed was something that will perhaps go down in history as the Crime of the Twentieth Century -- the Looting of American Savings and Loans by organized crime, wheeler-dealers, and wealthy Republicans (and a few Democrats) .

The Post and the Times reported on much of the suspect activity but did nothing to investigate it. Having become sensitized to the harsh prosecutorial tone of many Times and Post articles on the various Clinton scandals, it is remarkable to go back to articles in the Washington Post detailing indications of wide-scale corruption in the S&L regulatory agencies and the many instances of favoritism towards Republicans running savings and loans or borrowing money from them. However, you then realize that the articles appeared once and one time only, and there was never any investigative reporting done.

The Clinton White House should have expected what it got in the pages of the Post and the Times as soon as the target had walked on stage. Republican accusations repeated time and time again in the newspapers, with no attempt to examine their validity, to question their logic, or to question the motives of the accusers.

In a sense the Whitewater Smear Campaign began in May 1993 when the first highly negative articles on the inept firing of the White House Travel Office staff appeared in a number of national newspapers. The White House press corps had a personal interest in these firings (see below). No attempt was made by the White House to publish the Peat, Marwick audit of highly-irregular fiscal practices in the Travel Office under Billy Dale, no was the criminal indictment of Dale which was based upon the FBI criminal investigation of the Travel Office. This was unfortunate as the Mainstream Media totally ignored both documents and most Americans do not know they exist. The Mainstream Media and the Republican Party were able to create TravelGATE and to portray it to the American people as an attempt by the Clinton's to get their Arkansas Cronies into the Travel Office. There was some truth to this as I will show in the TravelGATE page when it is written. But the TravelGATE story known to the American people is a "Hyped-truth," a deception meant to sell you a lie. See the following Web pages in the Media section.

Chronologically, the "Clinton Scandals" the first news items appeared on the following dates:

TravelGATE (May 20, 1993)

Whitewater (October 31, 1993)

TrooperGATE (December 21, 1993)

PaulaGATE (March 14, 1993)

FosterGATE (April 20, 1995)

FileGATE (June 6, 1996)

MenaGATE (August 7, 1996)

HubbellGATE (February 6, 1997)

Zipper or MonicaGATE (January 21, 1998)

Many of the studies in the GATE pages are still being researched and written, and will appear at first in a summary form. But the examination of the news coverage of the various GATES has thrown up a few interesting nuggets of information.

TravelGATE.

My research into TravelGATE suggests the reason the White House press corps jumped on this so hard can be traced back to their joint fears and anger. The fear of certain members of the press corps that an investigation of the White House Travel Office might expose the details of the illegal importing of expensive goods into this country after press junkets. As these were illegal acts, some members of the press corps might have become liable to legal sanctions. Fear and anger usually go hand in hand. But in addition, perhaps certain members of the press corps were angry because a previous "perk" of the job was no longer available.

The White House press corps had known for years that Billy Dale was running a poorly-controlled and highly-suspect fiscal operation in the White House Travel Office. When this was reported to previous legal counsels in the White House, a number of whom are now consulted weekly on the morality of the Clinton White House, no action was taken to investigate the handling of large sums of money in that office. Both the Mainstream Media (and the Republicans) thought it was much better to point to the firing of the White House travel office staff and to say that it was all simply a matter of Arkansas Cronyism --that Clinton wanted to get rid of long-term civil servants and replace them with his friends. That fact that Dale co-mingled $60,000 of Travel Office funds with his own bank account was candidly admitted in the first news accounts of TravelGATE. But this was put down to simple human error. "Billy did not mean to do it." "And besides, who is going to pay the bribes at those overseas airports."

The firing followed an audit of the Travel Office by the accounting firm, Peat, Marwick. Some of the violations of government regulations and the evidence of considerable fiscal wrong-doing uncovered in this audit was announced to the press corps prior to the firings. The fact that an outside audit by a well-respected audit firm had been conducted and had found evidence of major fiscal problems was given the BLIP NEWS treatment. This information disappeared as soon as it was reported and it was never mentioned again. When the FBI was brought in to criminally investigate the Travel Office, much was made of the White House jumping channels. When the FBI found enough criminal evidence to indict Dale, a number of reporters in the White House press corps were willing to testify as defense witnesses. What did Dale have on those reporters, any way?

Whitewater

The research into Whitewater is interesting because of the roles of several prominent Arkansas Republicans in the financial mis-dealings of James McDougal and David Hale. In addition, it appears that the really large Arkansas S&Ls, the ones that failed at costs of over a billion dollars to the American taxpayer all had Republican connections. I guess it was just luck that these S&Ls were not examined in a criminal investigation. This is kind of strange because these S&Ls were specifically identified by the Little Rock FBI office as being good candidates for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. The Bush S&L regulatory agencies ignored the recommendations of the Little Rock FBI office, and the Bush FBI took no further action. When the Resolution Trust Corporation closed its doors in December 1995, the last possible legal case against these S&Ls disappeared. There were concerns in 1993 that the Clinton administration would put its own people into the S&L regulatory agencies. A preemptive strike was needed and a preemptive strike was launched.

In the summer of 1993, Federal authorities were moving to indict David Hale, an Arkansas judge and the owner of a lending company authorized to make Small Business Administration loans. It seems Judge Hale defrauded the SBA (and the American people) of $3.4 million dollars. Turned down by the Federal attorney in Little Rock on a plea bargain, Hale, for the first time, accused President Clinton of pressuring him in 1986 to make a $300,000 SBA loan to Susan McDougal. This accusation was the basis for the appointing of a Whitewater Special Prosecutor in early 1994.

Prior to his indictment in September 1993, Hale also contacted right-wing activists that had previously been active in Arkansas. One of them, David Bossie, was now working in Virginia in a well-funded conservative Republican organization called Citizens United. He worked with the head of Citizens United, Floyd Brown, the author of the Willie Horton ads in the Bush-Dukakis presidential election of 1988. Bossie played an important role in the Dole presidential campaign in 1988 and in the Bush campaign of 1992.

Citizens United was publishing a monthly attack sheet on Clinton called Clinton Watch. ClintonWatch is and was a newsletter dedicated to "Proving Character Does Count in a President," and is widely distributed to the Mainstream Media. Floyd Brown interviewed Hale and published the interview in the October 1993 issue of Clinton Watch. At the same time, they began orchestrating a series of interviews between Hale and the nation's media. Many of these interviews were used in the Mainstream Media, but for some reason, the role of Bossie and Brown in facilitating the Hale interviews was never acknowledged by the newspapers or TV programs that used them.

Meanwhile, a reporter from the Washington Post was interviewing L.Jean Lewis, an investigator with the Resolution Trust Corporation. Lewis, who had attempted to jump-start a criminal referral against the Madison Guaranty S&L in 1992 prior to the presidential elections, was a self-decribed conservative Republican and Clinton hater. It was therefore no coincidence that the Whitewater "scandal" hit the Mainstream Media in late 1993. In early 1994, the Attorney General appointed Robert Fiske, a moderate Republican lawyer from New York as the Whitewater Independent Counsel. Unfortunately, Fiske was too moderate and was deposed by a three-judge panel in August, being replaced by one Kenneth Starr.

Filegate

In my initial research into Filegate, I discovered an interesting Washington Times article at the Web Site of the Republican National Committee. It seems that in March 1994, someone in the Federal Bureau of Investigation ILLEGALLY released the results of 1,040 background investigations into members of the Clinton White House staff. According to the Washington Times, the FBI background investigations revealed many nasty things about Clinton White House personnel. To date, over four years later, the FBI has never investigated this violation of the law and the Starr people could not care less.

When the second Filegate scandal broke in June of 1996, there was no mention of the illegally-leaked information from the FBI background reports two years earlier. I have just started putting together a timeline on the FileGATE matter, and have uncovered a now familiar pattern of a Republican smear that was only possible with the full and enthusiastic support of the Washington Post and its reporters.

Back in the late 1930s and in the first years of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were viewed as master propagandists and the developers of the BIG LIE technique. After looking at the first three weeks of Washington Post coverage of Filegate, I really believe the Republican Party and the Washington Post could make a serious claim to have bested the Nazis.

As each of the GATE stories take time to research and write, they will graduallly appear in these pages over the next few months.

Go to the Politics forum, then to Zippergate and then to the Thread:

The Media's Handling of the Clinton Scandals.