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Fresh feathers, Mr. Safire? | page 1, 2
In 1996 (and again in 1998), Safire fingered Lindsey as a criminal, defaming him as the "coverup coordinator" and the president's "notorious consigliere." His column gleefully noted that Lindsey was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in Starr's 1996 trial of two Arkansas bankers who had contributed to Clinton. But Safire never mentioned the outcome of that trial, in which the two men were acquitted. During the Lewinsky affair, Safire twice pointed to Lindsey as the putative author of the famous "Talking Points" document, the supposed "smoking gun" in what his column termed a "corrupt pattern of witness-tampering." In fact, that document was produced by Lewinsky herself as a memorandum of an earlier conversation she had with Linda Tripp. The notorious Lindsey was wholly innocent, but he has never received an apology from Safire.
Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday.
Similarly in 1998, the columnist accused Sidney Blumenthal of a nonexistent crime, referring to the presidential assistant in another Watergate quip as "Colson Revisited," and suggesting strongly that the presidential assistant would be indicted by Starr for a "defamation conspiracy" to obstruct justice. Six months later when court papers were unsealed, the Associated Press reported that Blumenthal had never been a target of the independent counsel -- yet another exoneration that the columnist neglected to mention. Yet by far the most consistently battered target of Safire's misfires has been Hillary Clinton. Making headlines with a 1996 column branding the first lady a "congenital liar," he confidently predicted that her lost-and-found Rose Law Firm billing records would prove "her involvement in a fraudulent land deal" called Castle Grande. On several occasions, apparently misled by his own sources, the columnist has blathered about her imminent indictment; and once, Safire even advised the president to hire separate legal counsel for his own protection. Four years and tens of millions of dollars later, the first lady remains unindicted except in the minds of Safire and right-wing conspiracy nuts. According to the 1996 Pillsbury report, those billing records confirmed Mrs. Clinton's earlier testimony about her legal work in voluminous detail. By now it is hard not to wonder whether Safire -- who haughtily condemns "White House incompetence" -- ever bothered to read that federal report, which dismissed theories tying her to Castle Grande wrongdoing as "strained at best." Or whether he is aware that in testimony at Susan McDougal's contempt trial last year, deputy independent counsel W. Hickman Ewing admitted that despite his own Herculean efforts, no evidence pertinent to an indictment of the first lady was ever presented to any grand jury. Back in the Reagan era, the target of another independent counsel once asked where he could go to get his reputation back. It's a question that the scandal-crazed media too often disregards. But a newspaper as uniquely powerful as the New York Times carries unique responsibilities. When one of its most prominent writers recklessly damages the reputations of people who turn out to be innocent of the offenses he has alleged, a reckoning is in order. No matter how long Safire waits to eat it, that cold dish of crow won't taste good -- but it would be good for him, the newspaper that gives him such pride of place as well as for American journalism.
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