Editorial

CLINTON'S CREDIBILITY CONTINUES TO ERODE

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A spate of developments the last two weeks in the web of scandals enveloping the Clinton White House illustrates why the president's will be remembered as among the most scandalous administrations in American history. Where to begin?

How about beginning with Clinton's settlement of the lawsuit brought against him four years ago by Paula Corbin Jones? The president agreed to settle all the Jones claims against him for payment to her of $850,000. Jones is being paid for something Clinton has for years claimed never happened. How credible are those denials? After the Jones settlement and the president's serial perjury, who believes the Clinton version of, say, the allegations of former White House aide Kathleen Willey?

Willey claims the president groped her in the Oval Office on the day her husband committed suicide, after calling her repeatedly and asking that they get together. Among evidence independent counsel Kenneth Starr submitted to Congress week before last were videotapes of a campaigning Bill Clinton, asking local Virginia candidates who Willey was, upon spotting her at an airport rally in 1992. All who believe the president's denials on the Willey matter, step up for a chance to buy some swamp land.

The Willey affair doesn't end there. Longtime Clinton-Gore fund raiser and confidant Nathan Landow spirited Willey off in his corporate jet to his hideaway on the Maryland shore, there to try to persuade her not to talk. This fits a years-long pattern of the Clinton crowd's going to extraordinary lengths to silence women with whom this president has been involved.

One remarkable fact stands out from Starr's appearance last Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee. Amid all the shouting about Starr's tactics, which we now know followed Justice Department guidelines in all such cases, no spokesman for the Democratic side attempted to defend the president against the substance of Starr's allegations. No one said the president didn't lie to the American people. No one said he didn't lie to the judge. No one said he didn't allow his lawyer to lie to the court. No one said he didn't lie under oath. And no one said he didn't lie to the grand jury, often and repeatedly. Not Barney Frank. Not Maxine Waters. Not John Conyers. Not Democratic committee counsel Abbe Lowell. Not presidential lawyer David Kendall. From this silence we may infer assent to Starr's devastating allegations, a consensus that will go into the history books.

Clinton intimate Webster Hubbell, formerly the No. 3 man at the Clinton Justice Department and a felon indicted twice before, was indicted again by a Starr grand jury on multiple felony counts. Soon enough we will see whether Hubbell, for whom Clinton friends scrambled to pay $700,000 in hush money for doing no work, intends to "roll over for the Clintons again," as he told his wife from prison a couple of years ago.

Then there was the not-guilty plea of longtime Gore donor Franklin Haney to charges of making illegal campaign donations. Haney is the 14th person charged in a Justice Department investigation of unorthodox donations to Gore and other Democrats, including President Clinton. Haney, a Chattanooga developer, is charged with 42 counts, including making false statements to the Federal Election Commission and of conspiring with others to use "conduits" to donate his own money in others' names.

The Haney case only hints at the largest and most serious of all the Clinton scandals: a wide-ranging conspiracy to raise illegal campaign funds, including millions from illegal foreign sources, to steal the 1996 election. For these and other issues Attorney General Janet Reno is supposedly mulling whether to name another independent counsel to the seven who are already investigating the manifold corruptions of this administration. Don't hold your breath.