ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 15, 1997 TAG: 9701150093
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: CAL THOMAS
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
THE SURREPTITIOUS and probably illegal interception, recording and distribution of a private telephone conversation involving House Speaker Newt Gingrich, other members of the House Republican leadership and Gingrich's attorney apparently does not concern those so hellbent on destroying the speaker that they are willing to violate the law in order to prove he is unethical.
New York Times Washington reporter Adam Clymer received the tape from a Democratic congressman he refused to identify. Clymer's story portrayed the conversation as a violation of a promise Gingrich had made to the ethics committee not to orchestrate a Republican counterattack to its charges against him. Clymer wrote that the transcript proves Gingrich broke his promise.
Others interpret the transcript as a strategy session designed not to attack the ethics committee but to defend Gingrich from the orchestrated and unrelenting smear by Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., and others.
In a classic end-justifies-the-means comment, Andrew Rosenthal, The Times' Washington editor, defended his newspaper's role in alleged violations of several laws concerning intercepted phone calls. ``Isn't what's on the tape what's important?'' asked Rosenthal.
By this reasoning, the people in Miami who swooped down on a wrecked Brinks truck like vultures after road kill were fully justified in grabbing the loot because they shouldn't care where it came from.
In Watergate days, wiretapping was a big deal for Democrats. When wiretaps were ordered on some of Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff and certain reporters in an attempt to discover the source of press leaks, congressional Democrats denounced the taps and the big media reacted with scathing editorials. The House Judiciary Committee made the wiretaps part of its recommendations for President Nixon's impeachment.
Tuesday, the House ethics committee's ranking Democrat, Jim McDermott, D- Wash., said he was removing himself from the Gingrich investigation, bowing to criticism of his role in handling the tape. McDermott did not say whether he gave the tape to The New York Times.
Just days earlier, that congressman had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. How can an ethics inquiry against Gingrich proceed if those charged with judging the ethics of others are themselves suspected of committing felonies? Vice in the pursuit of truth is no virtue.
(The FBI said Tuesday it has opened an investigation into whether federal criminal law was broken in the taping and dissemination of the Gingrich telephone call.)
Congress passed a law in 1993 at the behest of the cellular-phone industry to outlaw the manufacture or sale of scanners that can pick up cellular phone conversations. But there are many old units still in service, and it is possible to modify new scanners so they can intercept cellular calls.
Picture a retired Florida couple - bored with bridge, golf and shuffleboard - accidentally capturing a conversation involving the speaker of the House on a legal scanner and coincidentally recording it and, without malice, passing it along to a congressman, who then innocently sends it to The New York Times. The couple has a better chance of winning the Florida lottery.
This seems to be, rather, a sophisticated and coordinated operation, part of a larger game plan aimed at removing Speaker Gingrich from office.
Five years ago, heads rolled in the office of Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., when two of his top aides pleaded guilty to charges they conspired to disclose the contents of an illegally obtained taped phone conversation involving then-Gov. Douglas Wilder. At the time, Robb and the governor, also a Democrat, were involved in a bitter personal feud. The aides were found guilty under a federal wiretap statute, fined $10,000 each and sentenced to four months' probation.
Rosenthal believes his spin on the contents of the Gingrich conversation is more important than how the tape was obtained. Yet his newspaper's editorial page regularly takes the civil-libertarian approach against police when they illegally seize evidence in criminal cases. Shouldn't the unlawful search and seizure of conversation be at least as great a concern to The Times and its congressional co-conspirator as the unlawful search and seizure of evidence inside the car of a suspected drug dealer?
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde has asked Attorney General Janet Reno for a criminal investigation of the intercepted phone call. If ethical equanimity is to be maintained and consistency with Democrats' concerns over wiretapping in the Watergate affair, the attorney general should begin such an investigation with all deliberate speed.
- Los Angeles Times Syndicate
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB