As the news of FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders was made public eleven days before the election, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta demanded Comey “explain why he took this unprecedented step,” and four Democratic Senators — Patrick Leahy, Thomas Carper, Ben Cardin and Dianne Feinstein — sent a letter to the attorney general calling Comey’s letter “troubling” for “break[ing] with the longstanding tradition of Department of Justice and FBI of exercising extreme caution in the days leading to up an election, so as not to unfairly influence the results.”
Hillary Clinton called it “strange,” “deeply troubling” and “unprecedented.”
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You can say a lot of things about the events of last weekend, but “unprecedented” isn’t one of them.
It was twenty-four years ago this weekend — in the fall of 1992 — and I was serving in the Bush administration. It was the Friday before the election, and the Clinton-Gore campaign and the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign were down to the wire.
David Bates, who was the Bush White House cabinet secretary, remembers internal overnight campaign tracking polls had Bill Clinton losing support and Bush pulling to dead even that morning; a CNN poll of likely voters had Bush down by one point. “I heard Jim Baker say on the Wednesday before the election he thought we were going to win it, because we were moving up,” Bates told Doro Bush Koch, President Bush 41’s daughter, in her biography entitled My Father, My President.
Then, I remember it very clearly: four days before the election, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra deal, Lawrence Walsh, announced the re-indictment of former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for allegedly lying to investigators about his lack of handwritten notes, and as proof produced a handwritten note by Weinberger saying that Bush had approved of the Iran-Contra deal.
Buried in the New York Times coverage at the time was this nugget: “Mr. Walsh’s relations with the Bush Administration have been frigid. Prosecutors could have used any of more than 1,700 pages of Mr. Weinberger’s notes to show that he failed to comply with Congressional requests for his records relating to the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Walsh appeared to select one that was acutely embarrassing to the President.”
President Bush had repeatedly said he was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra, and the note Walsh produced allegedly contradicted that statement; the news coverage was far less about Caspar Weinberger than it was about then-Vice President Bush’s alleged role in the arms-for-hostages scheme back in the mid-1980s. Clinton immediately slammed the president for promoting a “culture of corruption.” Clinton said that 41 had “diminished the credibility of the presidency,” and Gore calling it the “smoking gun” that proves Bush had lied years earlier.
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Bates recalls that from the moment the Weinberger indictment was announced on Friday until the polls closed on Tuesday, the press covered nothing else. “It was a Thursday before the election … and [James] Baker said that he was walking by and [ABC reporter] Ann Compton said, ‘How are you feeling, Secretary Baker?’ And he said, ‘We feel good, we’re moving.’ And she said, ‘I know, but I don’t think it’s going to last.’ And then the next morning, boom.” It felt as if the press and the Clinton campaign were in cahoots.
The Washington Post reported at the time that “Republicans were alleging that the Clinton campaign had advance notice of the October 30 Weinberger indictment, because the campaign’s press release on it was dated October 29,” the day before Walsh’s announcement. In what seemed like more than a coincidence, the Clinton campaign had a four-page press release attacking President Bush’s character ready to go as soon as Walsh announced the grand jury indictment.
The Post coverage also reported that one of Walsh’s prosecutors, James J. Brosnahan, took over the case just two weeks earlier, on October 15. Brosnahan was a registered Democrat, a trial lawyer and the head of Morrison and Foerster, a large San Francisco law firm. According to Federal Election Commission records, Brosnahan contributed to the Clinton for President Committee that March during the primary season. Partners at his firm contributed generously to the Clinton campaign as well.
“You talk about a politically timed indictment, but I didn’t say it then,” President Bush later told Doro. “Don’t blame somebody else. Just get along about your business. But that was a cruel blow …”
In Jon Meacham’s recent biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Meacham quotes from President Bush 41’s diaries: “The campaign senior staff was ‘worried and panicked that this will stop our momentum. Well, it might, but so be it — [I] told the truth and that’s all you can do.’ Whatever movement there had been in the polls was over. ‘The national press is still hammering away on Iran,’ Bush dictated. ‘A frantic, desperate, sinking Clinton tries to rap my character on this issue.'”
A month later, a federal judge threw out the indictment of Weinberger because it was well past the five-year statute of limitations, something Walsh surely knew when he prepared the indictment. On Christmas Eve of 1992, Bush pardoned Weinberger. Then he left office after losing to Clinton.
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There are some parallels to what’s happening now: as usual, the Clintons’ first instinct is to attack and go on the offensive. Her campaign is ‘frantic and desperate,’ as President Bush put it so long ago, as her polling lead disappears in state after state. And it’s not just a feeling — Wikileaks has shown us time and again that the press really are completely in cahoots with the Clintons, and even this week, that friends at the Justice Department continued to tip off the Clinton campaign about the email controversy.
But unprecedented? I don’t think so. In fact, what happened to Bush was worse than what’s happened to Clinton: he had only four, not eleven days to recover. Back then, the news was an indictment, not just an investigation. And perhaps most important of all, Bush and his team did not publicly question the political motivation of the independent counsel and his team, despite evidence to the contrary; Clinton’s campaign has waged a war of character assassination on Comey after praising him effusively this summer.
The Clintons never learn. It would have been smart for her to welcome the opportunity to respond to the FBI investigation, and stick with a positive agenda. Instead she’s vilifying others, attacking everyone and in the process is feeding the backlash against her. She has no one to blame but herself.
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Comey’s Email Investigation Announcement Is Not Unprecedented originally appeared on usnews.com
