Weekend Question 2: When Will The 527 Media Report Hillary’s Inconvenient Untruth about Her Husband Being Warned about OBL?

ANSWER: Don’t hold your breath. This post not only refutes Ms. Clinton’s contention, but also presents a case that her husband was distracted by (and perhaps even obsessed about) his impending impeachment by the House, at the exact time the warning about Osama Bin Laden’s plans to attack targets in the United States was communicated to him.

This could explain why Mrs. Clinton’s expression has changed little from the one she had on September 20, 2001, the night of President Bush’s post-9/11 speech before both houses of Congress ……

….. to the one that accompanied Wednesday’s article where she defended her husband:

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Now to the story. Lots of sources have picked up on this, but the earliest that I saw was Jim Taranto’s item at Best of the Web on Wednesday (HT Porkopolis).

The underlying story in question is Hillary Clinton’s defense of her husband and simultaneous criticism of the Bush administration:

“I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks,” Hillary Clinton said. “I’m certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States’ he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team.”

There’s only one problem. Her husband was briefed on Friday, December 4, 1998, according to the 9/11 Commission report, as follows (text is about halfway through link):

SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks

1. Reporting [-] suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq ‘Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gama’at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin, but that the operation was on hold.A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options-perhaps including an aircraft hijacking.

2. ….. Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft. Accord-ing to [-] the IG in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane or, if unsuccessful, a US military or civilian aircraft.

3. [-] indicate the Bin Ladin organization or its allies are moving closer to implementing anti-US attacks at unspecified locations, but we do not know whether they are related to attacks on aircraft. …..

The first item definitely relates to possible attacks within the United States. The second probably doesn’t. The third certainly could.

So there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s backhanded claim that her husband never received warnings about planned attacks in the United States by Osama Bin Laden is false.

But equally importantly, I would suggest that Mr. Clinton had other things on his mind at the time that would have caused him not to treat the threat with the degree of urgency it deserved, as this portion of the impeachment timeline shows:

November 28, 1998: Republicans express disappointment and outrage at what some describe as President Clinton’s evasive and legalistic answers to the Judiciary Committee’s questions.

December 1, 1998: On a party-line vote, the House Judiciary Committee expands its impeachment inquiry to include alleged campaign finance abuses, approving subpoenas for Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh and federal prosecutor Charles LaBella.

December 3, 1998: After two staffers look at internal Justice Department memos, Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde tells Republicans that campaign fund-raising will not be part of the impeachment debate.

December 4, 1998: Lawyers for President Bill Clinton ask the House Judiciary Committee for three to four days to make their defense presentation.

December 6, 1998: President Clinton’s attorneys are granted 30 hours over two days to make his defense case before the Judiciary Committee.

December 8, 1998: In a daylong session, President Clinton’s lawyers and three panels of witnesses testify on the president’s behalf, saying Clinton’s behavior does not warrant impeachment.

After the November 1998 congressional elections, the Democrats had picked up a few seats. Newt Gingrich had taken a lot of heat for te GOP’s narrower majority in the House, and had announced his resignation as Speaker of the House and his departure from Congress at the end of his term.

With Republican fortunes ebbing, Clinton’s minions clearly felt they had beaten the rap. So when a series of interrogratories arrived from Henry Hyde’s Judiciary Committee shortly after the election, they treated them with a level of disrespect bordering on ridicule. Here’s an excerpt from a November 29, 1998 Washington Post editorial about those responses (link is to item at ProQuest library database; story is not available on the unfettered Internet):

PRESIDENT CLINTON’S answers to 81 questions from the House Judiciary Committee were guided by one basic principle: Admit nothing. Though each question was phrased as a request for an admission or denial from the president, Mr. Clinton never once responded by simply using the word “admitted.”

When he was asked to admit or deny that he called Betty Currie on Jan. 18 at 11:02 p.m., for example, he responded: “According to White House records included in the OIC Referral, I called Ms. Currie’s residence on January 18, 1998, at or about 11:02 p.m.” Even when he was asked to admit or deny that he is the chief law enforcement officer of the country — hardly a point of serious contention — he could not bring himself to offer a straight answer, giving, instead, a lesson in constitutional structure that was, presumably, not what the questioners had in mind. “The President is frequently referred to as the chief law enforcement officer, although nothing in the Constitution specifically designates the President as such,” he wrote, noting that “the law enforcement function is a component” of the president’s executive power.

The only misconduct to which the president was, in fact, willing to admit were those acts that cannot possibly get him into any more trouble.

Interviewed by PBS at the time, Arkansas congressman and Judiciary Committee member Asa Hutchinson reacted strongly:

But of 81 requests to admit or deny facts, none of the 81 were admitted. You had to read through and answer to figure out what the President was saying. I think that some of it is helpful in determining what’s an issue. It’s important to note that the President has not admitted any legal wrongdoing. And that’s a responsibility of the committee to determine the facts of this case and whether there’s been any wrongdoing. And he’s insisted that he did not lie under oath in the Paula Jones deposition, nor did he lie under oath in the grand jury testimony. And so that is still a factual issue, a legal issue that we have to determine, and he has denied that wrongdoing. People think that he’s admitted wrongdoing, and he – these 81 answers makes it clear that he persists in that denial.

Now, grasp the significance of this and you’ll understand why I believe that the warning about Osama Bin Laden was the LAST thing on Bill Clinton’s mind on the morning of December 4, 1998 — Until just days earlier, Bill Clinton and his team thought that they could effectively rewrite history in their interrogatory responses, and that the Judiciary Committee, after the negative November election result for Republicans, would not have the nerve to go forward with the impeachment process. This was the conventional wisdom in Washington at the time on both sides of the aisle. If the Clinton team’s expectations were correct, they could then point to the interrogatory responses as having “set the record straight,” and claim to a pliant press that the opposition must have agreed with them because it didn’t proceed further.

But the Clinton team overplayed their hand badly. It’s more than a little possible that had Mr. Clinton genuinely owned up to the obvious misdeeds he committed, the Judiciary Committee might have been persuaded to censure him, and would not have gone forward with articles of impeachment. It’s clear that they knew the ultimate chance of conviction in the Senate were low, so they may have welcomed a reason not to press forward.

But because of the brazen denials of what everyone knew to be true, Henry Hyde and his committee instead became more determined than ever to go forward with impeachment. They essentially felt that their hand had been forced, and that they would not sit by and enable the Clinton team’s attempted whitewash. The expansion of the committee’s inquiry, as noted on December 1 above, showed everyone, including the administration, that, like it or not, impeachment hearings were on the way.

I believe that Bill Clinton and his team were blindsided by the reaction of Hyde and the Judiciary Committee, and spent most of the next seven days (December 1-7) preparing a defense that they had previously thought would be unnecessary.

The December 4 briefing about Osama Bin Laden’s plans came right smack dab in the middle of those preparations. And contrary to the image portrayed, Bill Clinton was not a “compartmentalizer” — instead, a book by a Washington Post reporters Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf (Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton), written during the summer after the House’s impeachment and the Senate’s supposed trial, revealed that Clinton was constantly obsessed with what he was going through and nearly uncontrollably angry about it.

It’s very plausible that an angry Bill Clinton, who just days ago had thought he was home-free, and that his long Lewinsky-related nightmare was over, decided that he would worry about Osama Bin Laden later. As we now know from the historical record, despite knowledge of the dangers of inaction clearly indicated in the report Hillary Clinton lied about the existence of, and despite numerous opportunities to act, Bill Clinton’s administration failed to kill or capture the man who masterminded the 9/11 attacks.

So I hate to have to break it to Hillary Clinton, but there it is — Not only was your husband briefed about credible threat and plans by Osama Bin Laden to attack targets inside the US, there is ample reason to believe, based on when he was briefed about them, that he did not heed them.

I would also question whether Bin Laden’s threat to attack targets in the United States was ever appropriately communicated to the incoming George W. Bush administration, for the same reasons as I outlined at the end of this previous post, where I concluded:

The overall point, based on the behavior of outgoing administration’s staff, is that there is very good reason to doubt if there was any kind of effective transition in any area from Clinton to Bush. I also see no good reason to believe that anti-terror strategy would have received a transition treatment any more mature than that seen in other matters.

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UPDATE: Anchoress linked to a 2002 interview by Jim Angle of Fox News with Richard Clarke, which has this nugget –

ANGLE: And none of that really changed until we were attacked and then it was …

CLARKE: No, that’s not true. In the spring, the Bush administration changed — began to change Pakistani policy, um, by a dialogue that said we would be willing to lift sanctions. So we began to offer carrots, which made it possible for the Pakistanis, I think, to begin to realize that they could go down another path, which was to join us and to break away from the Taliban. So that’s really how it started.

….. ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you’re saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of ‘98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That’s right.