White House Watch - Page A3
October 3, 1996 WHY PRESIDENT CLINTON REFUSED TO HONOR SUBPOENA FOR DRUG MEMO!
by Staff Journalists, The Daily Republican NewspaperWASHINGTON DESK - The Clinton White House is under fire again for refusing to answer a subpoena for drug use documents. The latest dispute concerns a memorandum that president Clinton received from the heads of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. That memo has been widely reported in the press as highly critical of Clinton's anti-drug policy.
At a hearing Tuesday, the subcommittee questioned White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert Kramek and others about a Pentagon-ordered report that found flaws in federal anti-drug policy. Some Republicans have accused McCaffrey of suppressing the report.
Campaigning in Elizabethtown, Pa., on Wednesday, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole called on Clinton to release the memo. 'The White House is evoking executive privilege to keep that memo from seeing the light of day' he said. 'Mr. President, it’s time to release this memo so that the American people can see how bad your drug policy has been over the past 44 months. We’re going to demand its release.'
Last spring, the White House and a GOP congressional committee battled over 2,000 pages of documents related to the White House travel office firings in May 1993.
Before the White House relented in the travel office case, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee voted to seek a criminal contempt charge against White House counsel Jack Quinn and two other White House aides.
While not disclosing his next move, Rep. William Zeliff, R-N.H., chairman of the panel’s national security subcommittee, said Tuesday his subcommittee would do everything possible to secure the memo by Louis Freeh, director of the FBI, and Thomas Constantine, head of the DEA.
Clinton took the rare step Tuesday of asserting presidential privilege over the memo.
'It concerns me a lot (because) Louis Freeh is a guy I respect' Zeliff said. 'We’re going to do everything we can to get our hands on' the subpoenaed memo.
Releasing the memo would not harm the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government. It was a non-political government document. It was not written by a member of the presidents' Cabinet or political advisors.
It has been reported in the nations papers that in the memo, Freeh complained to Clinton about the lack of “any true leadership” in fighting the influx of heroin and cocaine, according to an August report in Newsweek magazine. Freeh hand-delivered the memo to Clinton some 18 months ago, the magazine said.
The latest fight over documents came as the Republicans, led by Bob Dole, pressed their criticism of Clinton for what the GOP contender has portrayed as a lax anti-drug program and a casual attitude toward narcotics use.
'Leak, scandal, cover-up seem to be the modus operandi of the Clinton administration,'Christina Martin, a spokeswoman for the Dole campaign, said of the executive privilege assertion.
'The American people have a right to know if the director of the FBI believes the president showed no true leadership in the war on drugs' Martin said. 'Bill Clinton should be ashamed of hiding behind a shield of executive privilege. It’s wrong, it’s secretive and it reeks of guilt.'
Mike McCurry,White House press guru was asked about Freeh’s memo on Wednesday. He chose to answer reporters questions by launching a bitter partisan attack on Congress. He said, 'In the closing days of the 104th Congress, some Republican committees have lost track of a very important part of our U.S. Constitution called the separation of powers.'
McCurry accused Republicans in Congress of infringing on confidential contacts with government officials that the president wants kept secret. However, McCurry did acknowledge some of the 'secret' content of the disputed April 1995 memo, which he said had been addressed to Clinton by the FBI director.
FBI spokeswoman Angela Bell and DEA spokesman Jim McGivney had no comment. McCaffrey,was asked by the Congressional Oversight subcommittee hearing about the memo. He told Congress he knew nothing about it. The memo was written before he became the national drug-control policy director in March. He took the opportunity to state that he did nothing to suppress the Pentagon study on Clinton's drug policy. He acknowledged that he disagreed with its conclusion that the administration’s emphasis on treating cocaine addiction and other drug problems had been less cost-effective than efforts to cut off drug supplies.
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