THE PROSECUTORIAL AGE OF POLITICS
It’s been more than four decades since Watergate brought down a president, but it must seem like yesterday to Hillary Clinton, as she has been witness to the creation of a new era in presidential politics: the great prosecutorial age.
In 1974, Hillary Rodham, fresh out of Yale Law School, joined the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, then preparing articles of impeachment for president Richard Nixon related to the Watergate cover up. Nixon’s resignation created a new possibility in American politics — bringing down a president, not at the polls, but by subpoena, congressional hearing, special prosecutor, police investigation.
When this happened, a new age was born. Hillary Clinton learned that, for those in office, survival meant strangling the investigative baby before it began to breathe. It was a lesson she would deploy well during the presidency of her husband, conducting character assassination on those who probed their financial dealings and on those women who protested Bill Clinton’s unwelcome probing.
So it is supremely fitting that on the threshold of her existential quest for the presidency, having climbed to the top of a pole that her own conduct has made greasier than it was even for her husband, her campaign would deliver a ferocious attack on the integrity of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It must be something of a relief. Having conducted a campaign almost completely absent of policy, with no compelling reason for running other than it is what the Clintons always do, and having the frustration of dealing almost daily with the bewildering eruptions of her unstable and unworthy opponent, she can in the final days revert to doing what she does best: attacking those who seek to do to her what she, in a peripheral way four decades ago, did to Nixon.
Of course, it’s curious that FBI Director James Comey revealed that he had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s emails less than a fortnight before election day. It seems to me that he didn’t have much choice, given that he had previously announced that he was no longer investigating Clinton — an investigation he has now reopened. Correcting the public record would seem to have been in order.
It would have been better, I suppose, back in the summer to say that he was only temporarily suspending the FBI investigation, given the moral certainty that, sooner or later, the Clintons would be under investigation again. They always are. In the prosecutorial age of politics, it is the norm for career politicians who believe themselves above the law.
The prosecutor’s box opened by Watergate, combined with the bending of the American criminal justice system toward political ends, has alighted upon Clinton at a most inconvenient time, but she is wrong to decry it as unprecedented.
She may have forgotten — but surely her husband has not — that four days before the 1992 presidential election, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh announced the indictment of Caspar Weinberger in the Iran- Contra affair, including in his indictment a vague reference to the possible involvement of president George H.W. Bush. To this day, the first president Bush believes he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, in part because of Walsh’s indictment. The indictment itself was thrown out just over a month later, with a judge ruling that it was beyond the scope of the special prosecutor and was beyond the statute of limitations.
Bill and Hillary Clinton certainly do not forget the meandering Whitewater investigation that eventually discovered that Bill Clinton had lied under oath about Monica Lewinsky in the deposition for the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit. Years later, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr would himself regret the course of that investigation, which seemed to set up a permanent office for the prosecution of the president.
There were other cases along the way. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald threw a journalist in jail and convicted Scooter Libby of making false statements to the police, while investigating a leak that he knew from the beginning had nothing to do with Libby. But Libby worked for vice- president Dick Cheney, and if the president was beyond reach, the vice- president’s chief of staff would have to do.
In 2008, the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, obtaining a conviction by suppressing exculpatory evidence. He narrowly lost re-election that year, and the deep corruption in the department was only revealed after the election.
It’s been going on a long time. If nothing else, the FBI director’s letter last week reminds Americans that it will continue. And if Clinton is elected, as expected, the career born in the investigation of a president will end as the same, with some bright young law graduate drawing up the charges for the transgressions of the new president, and they are legion.
CLINTON HELPED BRING DOWN NIXON. NOW SHE’S DEALING WITH THE CONSEQUENCES.