Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 14, 1993 TAG: 9301140453
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FOR ROBB, ONE JURY IS STILL OUT
WITH SEN. Charles Robb legally off the hook, Virginia will be spared a criminal trial of a high-ranking official.Also, with the end of a dreary 19-month grand jury probe into what were, after all, not the most serious of allegations arising from a ridiculous political-spying scandal, Robb may be less distracted now from senatorial duties.
All of which is good news.
Yet a Norfolk grand jury - while concluding it did not have the goods on Robb - has not laid matters entirely to rest.
Robb has cause to feel vindicated, to be sure. He has consistently (and self-righteously) denied any wrongdoing in the affair.
Grand juries more often than not follow prosecutors' recommendations. This one, however, found no basis to criminally indict Robb for his involvement in the dissemination of an illegally taped phone conversation of Gov. Douglas Wilder in 1988.
One has to wonder about the value and wisdom of the prosecutors' effort. Yet nagging questions about Robb, too, remain.
Even while releasing the senator, the grand jury indicted Robb's former friend, Bruce Thompson. In doing so, it opined that Robb was deeply involved in a plot by his staff to leak the tape to the news media.
It was a plan carefully calculated, the grand jury said, to give Robb "plausible deniability," to let Robb's former chief-of-staff David McCloud "take the hit."
Undeniably, political skulduggery was going on in the senator's office. The tape was leaked to divert attention from a television report alleging that Robb had engaged in sordid activities in years past, while he was governor.
Because Wilder had discussed those alleged activities during the taped phone conversation - allowing as how they would "finish" Robb politically - the leaking was intended to make Wilder look bad, to paint Wilder as the villain who had fueled the firestorm of Robb's troubles.
Never mind the sheer stupidity of this reasoning. (It actually gave Wilder opportunity to play the victim, while sicking the U.S. Justice Department on Robb's tail.)
At this point, it might be asked: Who cares? Political feuding is not new, or criminal. The law regarding taped cellular phone conversations is itself untested and murky. And whatever the circumstances of the tape's origins, the leaking of its contents to the public hardly qualifies as a high crime - if, indeed, it should be a crime at all.
The zealousness of Robb staffers in their failed effort to defend the senator's image may well have been matched, moreover, by the zealousness of Republican federal prosecutors in their long, expensive and failed effort to indict the senator.
So let us now move on.
But let us note that former Robb aides have pleaded guilty to infractions in the taping affair. They were working for Robb at the time. Note, too, that more serious allegations are still to be answered, regarding efforts to keep from the public eye details of Robb's questionable personal life as governor.
And note there are concerns besides criminal culpability.
One hopes that Robb, if he runs for re-election in 1994, will find a better campaign motto than: "Hey, I wasn't indicted." Standards for high office should be higher than that.
The Norfolk grand jury has let the senator off the hook. Another jury - Virginia's electorate - is still out.