The good news is several House Republicans expressed outrage yesterday over a White House controversy involving classified materials. For a change, these GOP lawmakers want Congress to take its oversight responsibilities seriously and launch a formal congressional investigation.
The bad news is these House Republicans are still talking about the Clinton White House.
House Republicans on Wednesday sought a congressional investigation into the improper handling of classified documents by President Clinton’s national security adviser.
The aide, [tag]Sandy Berger[/tag], admitted last year that he deliberately took classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 and destroyed some of them at his office. He pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and was fined $50,000.
Ten lawmakers, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said in a letter they wanted the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.
Sometimes, these guys just become parodies of themselves.
In this case, there are at least two major angles that make this one of the more ridiculous GOP efforts in a while.
First, the [tag]Berger[/tag] matter has already been resolved. I’m not even going to try to defend his judgment — I still have no idea what Berger was thinking — but we know for certain, thanks to a lengthy Justice Department investigation, that the documents in question were copies. Berger didn’t destroy, or attempt to destroy, any original documents or classified materials. Yesterday’s letter from the GOP lawmakers said the House Government Reform Committee should determine whether any documents were missing. Why Republicans would ask a question to which we already know the answer is, well, it’s actually pretty typical.
Second, for House Republicans to seriously argue that it wants to take administrative oversight seriously — for an administration that’s long gone — is almost too ridiculous for words. Consider the pre-2001 record.
During the Clinton administration, Congress spent millions of tax dollars probing alleged White House wrongdoing. There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.
Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.
Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries.
At one point the House even created a select committee to investigate whether the Clinton administration sold national security secrets to China, diverting attention from Osama bin Laden and other real threats facing our nation.
At one point, House Republicans thought the president’s cat was worth an investigation. Seriously.
In contrast, congressional Republicans have rejected calls for investigations into the war in Iraq, the Plame scandal, the Medicare scandal, Abu Ghraib, non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the list goes on and on. Consider this tidbit: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database, but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.
And now House Republicans believe Congress should launch another Clinton-related investigation about an incident that was fully resolved 18 months ago.
Note to [tag]Republicans[/tag]: when we complain that you guys aren’t serious about governing, this is what we’re talking about.