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Black Hawk Up, Part 6:
The US Campaign In Somalia, 1993-1997
by Chris Oakley

Summary:

In the first five chapters of this series, we reviewed the circumstances that led up to Al Gore’s unexpected accession to the presidency in March of 1993; the start of the U.S. combat presence in Somalia and the first clashes between U.S troops and al Qaeda fighters in Somalia; the 1995 Congressional showdown over President Gore’s request for more troops to be deployed to Somalia; the escalation of the fighting in Somalia prior to the 1996 U.S. presidential elections; the course of Operation Swift Repulse; and the killing of Osama bin Laden. In this segment we’ll take a look at the domestic scandal that ultimately led to the downfall of the Gore Administration.

In the wake of President Gore’s re-election in 1996 there were few, if any, warning signs of the scandal that was about to overwhelm his administration. The Internet which Gore was alleged by some of his admirers to have invented was not yet the worldwide communications and information system it would later become; the whispers of corruption that had been dogging him since he began his re-election campaign were just that, whispers, and investigative journalists had their work cut out for them if they wanted to confirm or dispel the rumors. And Gore certainly wasn’t disposed to cooperate with the largely conservative magazines and newspaper columnists who were leading the charge to get to the bottom of said rumors. Nor, for that matter, were the majority of his senior political advisors.

      Nevertheless, publications like American Spectator and the Washington Times went after the corruption story like ants after a picnic basket. For months there had been suggestions that he hadn’t entirely played by the rules when it came to financing his reelection campaign, and where there was smoke there was...well, if not fire at least a few glowing embers. The first mainstream news outlet to pick up the story was the Los Angeles Times, which ran a five-paragraph article in its political affairs section just after Inauguration Day about the allegations against Gore’s reelection campaign. The White House immediately came out swinging, insisting the story was patently false and planted by the GOP in a blatant, deliberate attempt to smear the President out of a base desire to discredit his successes with the Somali campaign.

      But shortly after the Times story broke, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 broadcast a follow-up report suggesting the Times article had only scratched the surface of the administration’s suspected misdeeds during the ’96 campaign. President Gore once again insisted that the accusations against his campaign team were baseless; his former boss, Bill Clinton, took time out from the latest phase of a grueling post- aneurysm rehabilitation program to issue a two-page statement roundly denouncing the investigation of Gore as “a politically motivated witch hunt”. But not all Democrats were so quick to spring to Gore’s defense at this time: one younger Democrat in particular, an Illinois freshman state senator named Barack Obama, raised more than a few eyebrows when he dramatically and publicly broke with his party’s prevailing view on the scandal and called for a full Congressional investigation into the campaign finance impropriety charges against Gore. Though his audacity in making this demand didn’t win him many friends in the higher strata of the DNC at the time, it certainly endeared him to the party’s foot soldiers and would come in handy when he commenced his own run for the White House more than a decade later.

    The Illinois state legislator’s push for a Congressional probe into the questions surrounding Gore’s 1996 campaign was soon taken up by a number of federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill, and in spite of President Gore’s strongest efforts to defuse the political and legal time bomb which the campaign finance questions represented, the Senate was soon debating a bill which if passed would clear the way for a special prosecutor to be appointed by Congress to investigate the Gore re-election campaign’s alleged improprieties. The bill was passed in mid-May of 1997 by a vote of 61-38 and approved by the House of Representatives in early June by a vote of 247-188. To lead the inquiry into the Gore 1996 campaign’s financial conduct, the House Judiciary Committee chose former United States solicitor general Kenneth W. Starr, a BA graduate from George Washington University who had over two decades’ legal experience on his resumé.

     Right from the beginning the Gore Administration tried to cut the legs out from under Starr’s legal case, portraying the special prosecution as a fanatical 1990s Inspector Javert more interested in punishing perceived transgressions than in actually learning the facts about what did or didn’t happen in regard to the financial practices of Gore’s 1996 presidential campaign. The predominantly left-leaning media was highly receptive to this argument, and consequently their coverage of the inquiry left them open to accusations of bias against conservatives.

     Starr paid little if any attention to his critics: his focus was on conclusively establishing that the Gore 1996 presidential campaign had in fact committed financial improprieties. To that end he directed his legal staff to subpoena the White House for papers relating to the campaign’s fund-raising operations; repeating the same mistake Richard Nixon had made during the Watergate scandal, the Gore Administration invoked the doctrine of “executive privilege” in a desperate-- and in the end futile --attempt to keep the papers in question confidential. Just as it had in Nixon’s case, the ploy backfired for Gore; no sooner had the White House cited executive privilege than the Supreme Court issued a ruling that directed the president to immediately turn over to the special prosecutor’s office all documents concerning the 1996 Gore campaign’s financial operations. Within hours after the Supreme Court ruling was handed down, media White House experts had started writing Gore’s political obituary and the Republican Party was lining up its heavy guns to challenge entrenched Democratic Congressmen and Senators in the 1998 midterm Congressional elections. Some of the top national GOP figures were even beginning to contemplate the notion of making a run for the presidency in 2000.

   Sure enough, by the time Starr completed the first phase of his inquiry in August of 1997, at least three prominent Republicans had thrown their hats into the ring for the 1998 midterm Congressional elections and a dozen more had gone on record as saying they were at least considering a possible Senate or House run. Those in the know on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill predicted the Democratic Party-- which had already suffered an earth-shaking setback in the 1994 Congressional elections --was about to lose even more seats on the Hill thanks to growing voter disgust over Gore’s apparent lack of co-operation with the special prosecutor’s office. One Arizona man who was already a senator had started to be touted for an even higher office; Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam War POW, was mentioned in a late July 1997 New York Times feature article as being one of the early favorites for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination.

    As August became September, the weather began to cool off but the pace of Starr’s investigation heated up. A blizzard of subpoenas hit the beleaguered White House as the special prosecutor’s office started the second phase of its inquiry into the Gore ’96 campaign’s financial practices. The further Starr’s investigators dug, the slimmer Gore’s chances became of finishing out his new term in the Oval Office. Some people had already started writing Gore’s political obituary, and on Capitol Hill there was an increasing consensus among Democratic Senate and House leaders that Gore was on his way out even if he didn’t get impeached...

                               ******

    ....and despite the best efforts of Democratic Party operatives to take the wind out of the special prosecutor’s sails, the chances he would be impeached were mushrooming day by day. Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said in a Nightline interview in September of 1997 that he fully expected an impeachment hearing to be convened “any day now”, and many of his fellow legislators on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill seemed increasingly inclined to agree with him. A secret internal survey taken among members of the Senate three days after the Nightline interview indicated at least forty-two percent of the Senate Democrats polled were inclined to vote in favor of impeachment, and to add insult to injury from the Gore administration’s perspective a good deal of the strongest sentiment in favor of impeachment hearings came from senators representing the New England states-- all of whom had in the 1996 presidential elections gone solidly for Gore.

    By October 3rd both the House and the Senate had voted by heavy majorities to approve articles of impeachment against the president, and a week later the House Judiciary Committee began lining up lists of witnesses to testify at the first round of impeachment hearings. Gore responded by assembling a team of attorneys to mount a ferocious defense of his campaign finance practices and telling the media that he intended to fight the impeachment drive against him tooth and nail. His planned legal strategy was to mount a “scorched earth” assault on the credibility of the witnesses called to testify for the prosecution at the impeachment hearings; his hope was that by undermining them he could gain an acquittal-- or at least force a deadlock in the Senate.

     That hope was destined to be disappointed. The prosecution took Gore’s defense apart like it was an Erector set, making an airtight case against the sitting president. One particularly damaging piece of testimony during the impeachment trial came from a White House junior staffer who admitted under oath that his supervisors had directed him to erase a series of incriminating e-mails by Gore to his top campaign finance manager. Despite repeated attempts by the President’s defense team to force a recantation from him on cross-exam, the witness stood by his testimony-- and soon had it corroborated by a former employee of the White House secretarial pool who told the impeachment committee under oath that she’d distinctly heard the erasure order the moment it was given.

     Before long the question became less if the 67 votes were there to convict Gore of the charges against him than how quickly such votes would be cast. In December of 1997, as Congress raced to complete the impeachment trial before the Christmas break and the convening of the new Congressional session in January, Gore’s defense team presented a videotaped deposition that was meant to shore up the president’s badly crumbling arguments of innocence but ended up undermining his already weakened case even further until there was nothing left of it. By the time the Senate was ready to render its verdict, right wing satirists, riffing on the title of a popular Susan Sarandon movie, had nicknamed Gore “Dead Prez Walking”.

     Having already been convicted in the court of public opinion, the President was all but guaranteed of being found guilty when the Senate rendered its own verdict. On December 22nd, by a vote of 77 to 23, the Senate convicted Gore on all counts against him and declared he was to be removed from office immediately. Gore’s vice-president, ex-Speaker of the House Tom Foley, was sworn in as his successor amid mushrooming fears that Gore’s removal from office might be merely a symptom of an even greater fundamental cancer eating away at the very foundations of the U.S. government...

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