THE SCRAPBOOK has "obtained" (thank you, Judicial Watch) a March 16 memo from Cliff Bernath of the Pentagon public-affairs office, explaining how he and his boss Ken Bacon decided to leak information from Linda Tripp's confidential security file to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, thereby violating the Privacy Act -- a post-Watergate federal law passed to criminalize the Nixonian practice of rifling the confidential files of political enemies.
In the memo, Bernath describes a Thursday evening (March 12) conversation with Bacon, who "asked me to help Ms. Mayer get the information she needed as soon as possible in the morning." Which Bernath promptly did the following day, as he told Judicial Watch in a deposition and as Jay Nordlinger reported in this magazine's May 18 and June 1 issues (see page 10 for his latest installment). The information in question was contained in a highly confidential Defense Department personnel document, Form 398, on which Linda Tripp had failed to report being arrested when she was 19.
Mayer and Bernath and Bacon all thought that the result of Mayer's article would be to land Tripp in deep legal trouble. But Tripp's arrest turned out to be a Keystone Kops mix-up that had been quickly reduced by the judge to a minor infraction. The infractions of Bacon and Bernath, on the other hand, look to be more serious, but so far have gone unpunished.
Bacon testified under oath that Bernath "volunteered" to help Mayer. Bernath's memo contradicts Bacon's sworn account. Bernath says of the illegal file-leaking, "Ken has made clear it's a priority."
THE SCRAPBOOK discerns two important unsettled questions here. First, Bacon and Bernath and White House spokesman Mike McCurry and Sid Blumenthal and Ann Lewis and no doubt the neutered White House Labrador Buddy, too, have all denied that Bacon was in contact with the White House about the issue of Linda Tripp's arrest and what she reported on her security form. What THE SCRAPBOOK wonders is, How did Jane Mayer know to ask Bernath on March 13 in considerable detail about Tripp's responses on various confidential forms? Mayer's scoop was that Tripp had been arrested. What made her doggedly interested in, and knowledgeable about, the forms Tripp would have filled out as a government employee? It is by no means an obvious line of inquiry, unless she was chiefly seeking to damage Tripp's credibility, as the White House is doing these days, for obvious reasons.
Was Mayer tipped off to ask Bacon about this by someone else who had seen a file of Tripp's and knew she had said she was never arrested? Tripp, after all, had worked at the White House. Her standard personnel Form 171 may well have been available to someone there. Did a White House official suggest to Mayer that she pursue the lead at the Defense Department so there would be no White House fingerprints? This would have relieved Bacon of the responsibility to coordinate his dirty tricks with top presidential aides. Could this be one of the things Ken Starr is asking Sid Blumenthal about before the grand jury?
The second question is, When is President Clinton going to live up to his campaign promise to fire the likes of Bacon and Bernath? Back in 1992, when candidate Bill Clinton found out that his passport files had been rooted through by Bush appointees in the State Department, he was ticked off enough to do his finger-shaking, stare-in-the-camera trick: "If I catch anybody doing it," he said, "I will fire them the next day. You won't have to have an inquiry or rigmarole or anything else."
This was a lie, as we now know. It was already clear on March 16 that Bacon and Bernath at the very least had met Clinton's supposed standard for an immediate firing. But now, more than two months later, they still have their jobs, and Bernath has even received a handsome promotion. The only reaction of the administration was to order the Pentagon inspector general to investigate, and it must be one hell of an investigation, since it's still continuing. The appropriate congressional oversight committee might want to see how this investigation is coming along.
It's always possible, of course, that the president in this case is more of a coward than a liar. If Bacon didn't talk to the White House about Jane Mayer's Linda Tripp inquiry; if he didn't need to because he knew (from Mayer) what the White House wanted him to do; then maybe it would be too risky for the president to fire him.