L. Jean Lewis, the Whitewater crank who made big national headlines once upon a time. Amazingly, she has been appointed to an important executive position in the Defense Department.
The Bush admin has rewarded various Clinton pursuers from Starr's staff w/ federal patronage. (Brett Kavanaugh and John Bates, two principal authors of the Starr Report, were among the most fortunate. It was all part of what Bush spinners used to call "changing the tone.")
But Lewis is very special. Anyone who remembers the dramatic performances she gave before the House and Senate committees probing Whitewater will have to wonder how anyone in Washington would dare offer her a responsible position.
The scoop on her new job appears in Newsweek, somewhat ironically under the byline of Michael Isikoff. According to Isikoff, Lewis will join the Pentagon IG's office as chief of staff at a salary of $118k. She said top Defense officials interviewed her about her qualifications.
That's right: A normally nonpartisan, exceptionally important agency is being turned over to this peculiar lady, who used to peddle "Presidential BITCH" memorabilia, from a clerk's desk at the Resolution Trust Corporation in Kansas City. Obviously, she was executive material.
"With 1,240 employees and a budget of $160M, this office is the largest of its kind in the government," as he reports. "It investigates fraud and audits Pentagon contracts, including the billions of dollars being awarded in Iraq to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel."
Maybe that's why the Bush crowd put Lewis in charge of preventing Pentagon corruption. This isn't the kind of office where they want anyone who actually knows how to do the job. Dems should raise hell about this when asked for billions more for privatized defense functions
Schmitz also drew scrutiny for naming L. Jean Louis as his chief of staff. Louis was a bank investigator who gained notoriety for raising accusations, later discredited, against Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater scandal.
Jim Leach started as a staffer for Rep. Donald Rumsfeld and remained w/ him when Rumsfeld joined the Nixon admin. He resigned in protest of the Saturday night massacre.
As a Rep. for Iowa Leach was on the House Banking Cmte and worked on BCCI
Still, independent counsel Kenneth Starr soldiers bravely on, wrapping himself in the mantle of Sgt. Joe Friday, vowing to get to the "facts" as they pertain to Whitewater, travelgate, filegate and Monica Lewinsky.
The lead editorial in Sunday's New York Times, titled "Fairness for Ken Starr" again reminded us that Starr, for all his public relations mistakes, is the man to be trusted to get to the bottom of the Clinton scandals.
His acolytes in the Washington press corps, like Nina Totenberg of NPR, who regards Starr as her "friend and colleague", can scarcely enumerate his virtues: modest, judicious, fair-minded and devout, a man of spotless integrity and matchless dedication to the rule of law.
Somewhere safe, Laura Jean Lewis keeps her most valuable, and perhaps most volatile, possession. It is an audio cassette tape, a recording so important, so politically charged, that she is known to have played it for only one person.
The tape is supposedly a recording of a private conversation between Lewis & April Breslaw, a senior govt attorney who denies the convo ever took place, is like everything else about Jean Lewis and her critical role in the Whitewater scandal: It remains shrouded in intrigue.
L. Jean Lewis is emerging as Whitewater's mystery woman. Lewis will tell her story on Capitol Hill, allegations of check kiting and other questionable dealings between Clinton's and their Arkansas business partner, and a possible cover-up within the Clinton Administration.
While the aim of the report was clearly to defend the integrity of the investigation that produced it, tucked away toward the end is information that points to an opposite conclusion.
Starr & Ray investigation critics have long held the Whitewater probe was partisan from the start, born in dirty tricks and manipulation that began with the first Bush administration. Now the OIC itself is presenting facts that substantiate those claims.
The Pentagon’s top investigator has resigned amid accusations that he stonewalled inquiries into senior Bush administration officials suspected of wrongdoing.
Defense Department Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz told staffers this week that he intended to resign as of Sept. 9 to take a job with the parent company of Blackwater USA, a defense contractor.
The resignation comes after Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) sent Schmitz several letters this summer informing him that he was the focus of a congressional inquiry into whether he had blocked two criminal investigations in 2004.
Attorney and entrepreneur K. Barry Schochet is new to Aspen but no stranger to the controversy surrounding W. Mark Felt, the former No. 2 man at the FBI who went public this week as "Deep Throat," Woodward & Bernstein's Watergate source
At 25, Schochet was hired to be a Dem staff attorney for Select Senate Cmte on Pres. Campaign Activities, assigned to Sen. Herman Tallmadge. Schochet, an alumnus of UNC & Emory Law, admired Sen. Sam Ervin, the Democrat from South Carolina who chaired the Watergate committee.
As a staff attorney, he was in the midst of the investigation of the break-in by burglars linked to the CIA and the White House - and 1972 campaign finance irregularities connected to President Richard M. Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President, CREEP.