‘Excuse Fatigue’: Clinton-Gore’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy Toward Yeltsin, Russian Corruption Won’t Fly

(Washington, D.C.): Vice President Al Gore’s pollsters tell him his campaign for the
presidency
is suffering from “Clinton Fatigue.” An even more vexing problem for the Veep — and the man
he hopes to succeed — however may be the source of much of that sentiment: the perception that
no one in the Clinton-Gore Administration is responsible for anything; when things go wrong,
they were never in-the-loop, it was always somebody else’s fault. The American people’s
understandable ennui with such tripe might be called “Excuse Fatigue.”

Unfortunately for Messrs. Clinton and Gore, the excuses with respect to their implication in
what
the Economist has called the Russian “climate of corruption” ¹ are becoming so implausible as to
render them not just fatiguing, but laughable. Their Administration’s culpability is laid bare by
two op.ed. articles that appeared earlier this week in the New York Times and
Wall Street Journal
(see the attached).

Authored, respectively, by Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and a former State and
Pentagon official,
Wayne Merry, these essays confirmed a longstanding contention of the Center
for Security
Policy and its Casey Institute ²: The
Clinton-Gore Administration’s stewardship of U.S.-Russian relations has been defective from its
inception. Matters have been greatly
exacerbated by the Vice President’s personally micro-managed and self-serving co-chairmanship
of a non-transparent, out-of-channels bilateral committee that bears his name. Its lasting legacy
has been to diminish the chances for real, systemic reform in Russia, accentuate conditions for
massive corruption and expose the United States to new, dangerous national security abuses.

The “Great Escape?”

With the scrutiny on “What did the Vice President Know and When Did He Know It”
intensifying day by day, ³ high-level policy officials in
both Washington and Moscow are
trampling over one-another to find exit doors. Indeed, the sheer magnitude and suddenness of
the Clinton-Gore policy meltdown vis vis Moscow has turned briefing
rooms into political
infernos and left leadership figures scrambling to blow the whistle on their fellow officials. Even
the control-rod mechanism long represented by the so-called Gore-Putin Commission (the latest
incarnation of the infamous Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission) has been rendered ineffective, and
now it’s everyone for themselves in the effort to scramble free of the politically radioactive
perimeter.

Cases in point are the recent assertions by National Security Advisor Samuel Berger, and the
Vice President’s staff, that they only learned of the international investigations of the Russian
connection to multi-billion dollar money-laundering/corruption schemes involving the Bank of
New York when it was revealed in press reports. As Berger put it in his press conference on [8]
September:

The first briefing that was received by the foreign policy community, including senior
NSC officials, State Department, was soon after August 26th, when I believe the
Attorney General first was briefed on this matter by the FBI, which I think was soon
after the New York Times stories appeared….We contacted the Justice Department at
that time [after the State Department was notified by a foreign government of an
investigation of the Bank of New York-Russia connection] and said if there were
matters here that we thought were pertinent to national security or foreign policy
considerations, we would like to be briefed about them. The Justice Department did
not feel that was either the case or appropriate at the time and did not brief us until, as
I say, after August 22^nd.

The Bottom Line

An editorial in yesterday’s Washington Times puts this blather in its proper light:

“Given that the White House’s National Security Council, as well as the State and Treasury
departments, were all intimately aware of the money-laundering investigations conducted by the
Justice Department, White House assertions that Messrs. Clinton and Gore learned of the
investigation by reading their morning newspapers are simply, and utterly, preposterous.
Congress’ impending investigation has become all the more urgent in the face of the White
House’s incomprehensible explanation.”

Amen.

¹ See the Casey Institute Perspective entitled
Message to Wall Street and Pennsylvania
Avenue: Bank of New York’s Russian Debacle is but a Symptom of a Larger
Problem (No. 99-C 94, 1 September 1999).

²For more information see the following Center Decision
Briefs and Casey Perspectives
Clinton Legacy Watch # 33: ‘See-No-Evil’ Security
Policy-making (No. 98-D 189, 23
November 1998); S.O.S.: Save Our Space Station — and More Tax-Dollars —
From Being
Squandered in Al Gore’s ‘Russian Cooperation’ Scam ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_164″>No. 98-D 164, 21 September 1998);
Clinton Legacy Watch # 19: Will Gore-Chernomyrdin At Last Put a Halt to
Russia’s
Dangerous Nuclear Sales to Cuba, Iran? (No.
98-D 40, 6 March 1998); Clinton Legacy Watch
# 6: Crises Involving U.S.-Russian Space ‘Cooperation’ Show Clinton-Gore Errors, Need for
Changes (No. 97-D 139, 18 September
1997); Yeltsin Has Been Politically Terminal for
Months; What Did AL Gore Know — And When Did He Know It? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-C_89″>No. 96-C 89, 24 September
1996).

³ For example, presidential candidate Steve
Forbes said today on the campaign trail in New
Hampshire: ‘Russia’s ruling elite have siphoned tens of billions of dollars in Western aid into
foreign bank accounts while Russia’s government workers get no pay, or wait months for what
they are owed….Why has Vice President Gore — the point man for America’s relations with
Russia — allowed this intolerable situation to go unnoted? He and this Administration give the
impression that they are more interested in photo-ops than in taking bold, substantive steps to
alleviate the distress of tens of millions of Russians. And this has been going on for months. In
spite of warnings from U.S. intelligence organizations that the Russian kleptocracy was looting
Russia, Vice President Al Gore feigned ignorance.”