D’Amato Keeping Truth At Arm’s Length

So, Sen. Al D’Amato, the time has come, right?

You’ve exhausted your staff’s supply of euphemisms and other artfully dodging ways of calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a liar. You say there is new evidence, documentary in nature no less, and you’ve plumbed the thesaurus looking for indirect means of saying that the first lady is at the center of whatever it is your Senate committee is holding hearings about; and you find this evidence deeply troubling, and you tell us it raises all sorts of serious questions about her conduct and past statements, and you put on your best, distressed face and say how profoundly concerned you are at this latest turn of events.

So that means the moment has really arrived, hasn’t it? After months of fits and starts, misdirection plays and false alarms, the time has come to subpoena Hillary Clinton, to haul her before your Senate Whitewater Committee and get what has always presumably been the central goal of your work - the truth, right from the horse’s mouth.

Not exactly. Solemnly, he informs us that he knows others on his panel have demanded she testify. The D’Amato position, though, is that he “hopes” it won’t come to that.

As positions go, it is about as disingenuous and nonsensical as a position crafted by a politician can be, even an incurable machine pol like D’Amato. On the one hand, months of hearings are conducted touching on everything from the original Whitewater real estate investment by the Clintons to the occasionally linked Madison Guaranty S&L to the Rose Law Firm to the aftermath of Vincent Foster’s suicide.

Evidence aside (a Whitewater trademark), the only name that runs through the impossibly complicated narrative is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s. There’s no directly presidential or constitutional issue here, no danger of setting some harmful precedent; there is only the fact that Hillary Clinton is in possession of the best evidence, the direct evidence, concerning every topic that has been expertly and partisanly swirled around her.

So why would the leading Republican inquisitor shrink from summoning her to testify, to deal directly with the questions that he says trouble him so deeply? The answer goes to the heart of modern, partisan scandal-mongering; Hillary Clinton is about answers, but partisan scandal-mongering involves the continuous generation of questions, to which answers are inconvenient and inconsequential.

The prospect of Hillary Clinton in front of his committee directly confronts the issues D’Amato is more comfortable raising from a distance. The best example is the evidence that surfaced last week in the billing records of her former law firm from 1985-86. From 68 contacts by telephone and in person, the long-range bombers like D’Amato can imply that her involvement with Madison-connected real estate ventures was much greater and more direct than they had previously believed, based on her past statements - a meaningless, irrefutable non-contention.

D’Amato has much more trouble dealing with her direct assertions. According to her, she gave legal advice concerning an option on one small, separate chunk of a larger real estate deal about which legal questions have arisen that have never involved her; the option on the small piece of land was never exercised.

Similarly, she has said she helped draft a legal opinion on whether the S&L could issue preferred stock as part of a recapitalization plan 10 years ago, a plan that was never carried out. In all she has said that she earned at most a couple of thousand dollars for at most a week’s work spread out over many months and never served as the S&L’s attorney for its ongoing operations that caused multimillion-dollar failure. There is no evidence or testimony contradicting those statements.

To evade challenges that he subpoena the person he prefers to defame from a distance, D’Amato says Hillary Clinton could always ask to testify, an odd position for one relentlessly seeking truth. It is far more likely that D’Amato doesn’t want Hillary Clinton’s testimony because it would deflate his preferred strategy of indirect accusation; her answers would get in the way.

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