A Busy Time at Justice
Friday, April 7, 2000
So, this simple Cuban worker, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, gets on a private jet in the pre-dawn hours in Havana, waves adios to Fidel Castro who has joined him on the ramp, and departs at the exact moment which will cause him to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC smack in the middle of the morning news programs.
I wonder if this guy thinks EVERYONE in America flies around on a private jet. And who paid for it? And who, by the way, is paying for Greg Craig, Juan Miguel Gonzalez' attorney?
Now we read that simple worker Juan Miguel will meet with Attorney General Janet Reno and the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Doris Meissner, on Friday.
See, this is why the GOP has such a tough time catching up in the public's mind. In the midst of all the important work they have to do - prosecuting Microsoft, finding ways to let Al Gore off the hook, and so on - senior Administration officials still find time to meet with regular, every day people about their regular, every day problems. Remember when then-UN Ambassador Bill Richardson met with a lowly White House intern about a potential job in New York?
Here's another rule I will institute when I take over the world: No television correspondent will be allowed to refer to the number of satellite trucks which are parked around them in an effort to convince us this must really, REALLY be an important story and they must be a really, REALLY important correspondent to be covering it.
While Janet Reno is busy meeting with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, the AP ran the following headline: "Two Nuns Indicted for Failing to Appear at Fund-Raising Trial." Two Buddhist nuns who had been subpoenaed to testify at the Al Gore Buddhist Temple trial, skipped the country and are believed to be on Taiwan.
How about having the Justice Department spend as much energy getting those two witnesses BACK to the US as it is getting Elian OUT of the US?
Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Henry Hyde, Chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees respectively, have asked for the original memos by Chuck LaBella and FBI Director Louis Freeh regarding the refusal to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Al "Imperfect Messenger" Gore's fundraising habits. Ms. Reno refused, saying it could have a "chilling effect on the candor of future prosecutorial deliberations." The mind boggles.
Nevertheless, the Justice Department said Thursday, in all candor, it will not bring any criminal charges in the Pentagon's release of information from Linda Tripp's personnel file. This was the case were Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, was accused of releasing unfavorable information about Tripp to a reporter in an effort to discredit her.
I looked and looked and looked, but I didn't see anything on the wires which said the Justice Department's candor extended to urging the state of Maryland to drop its case against Linda Tripp for taping her conversations with the White House intern who had been meeting with, amongst others, Bill Richardson.
One day after Microsoft was found to be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (in a suit brought by the very, very busy Justice Department) Bill Gates was at the White House for an event with Bill Clinton on high tech and its future in American society.
Gates was not asked to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. Gates has suffered multi-billion dollar losses as his stock has sagged in the wake of the ruling, so the best the White House fund raisers could offer was a cot in the Rutherford B. Hayes Memorial Bunkhouse located on the South Lawn between the Old Executive Office Building and the Secret Service guard house.
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