The propaganda corps

Gene Lyons chimes in on the L. Jean Lewis matter:

Both Banks’ letter and Lewis’ nationally televised comic opera swoon, it will be recalled, went unreported in The New York Times and Washington Post, the two newspapers most deeply committed to the scandal she helped them conjure out of thin air. It says a lot about today’s Republicans that Banks’ principled action in the face of the first Bush White House’s covert efforts to convene an "October surprise" probe of the Democratic nominee probably doomed his chances for a federal judgeship.

Documents showed that Lewis and like-minded RTC colleagues spent thousands of man-hours probing Madison Guaranty, ignoring Arkansas S&L collapses 10 and 20 times larger in their futile quest. But if getting Whitewater upside-down disqualified a person from employment, half of official Washington and most of the city’s name-brand journalists would be out of work.

Judging by the utter lack of press interest in her hiring, Lyons is clearly right.

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler makes a similar point:

Just how far in the bag is your "press corps?" At last, we get a small-bore chance to find out. Newsweek reports that L. Jean Lewis has been named chief of staff of the Defense Department's inspector-general office; this is one of the most amazing news reports of the year. Gene Lyons' column gives you the background, although we recommend Lyons' Fools for Scandal for the early account of Lewis' clowning. In a rational world, one would expect a "press corps" to jump when a circus clown is named to such a high position. But as Lyons explains, the press corps managed to look away when Lewis engaged in her first round of clowning (and when she baldly lied to the Congress). The question is obvious: Will the press discuss Lewis' bizarre history with her ascension to this position? Or is the corps so far in the bag that even this remarkable event will be ignored? Lewis is a crackpot and clown. But then, many in the press may say, "Hail to thee, kindred spirit."

Speaking of propagandists, also worth adding to the L. Jean Lewis files is this rather hilarious version of events from a 2000 Carl Limbacher piece in NewsMax:

Democrats on the Senate Whitewater Committee subpoenaed all Lewis' relevant written correspondence, some of which she had stored on computer disks. Also on those same disks: private letters that had nothing to do with her investigation.

Lewis had simply deleted the personal mail and handed the disk over to Democrat staffers. Just like Vice President Gore, she presumed that her deleted mail was "lost forever."

But thanks to White House ingenuity, it turned out she presumed wrong.

When it came time to cross-examine Lewis in televised hearings, chief Democratic Whitewater counsel Richard BenVeniste hit the RTC prober with embarrassing revelations gleaned from private letters that had nothing whatsoever to do with Whitewater.

Some of the information was about her teen-age stepson, who was humiliated before the world in an attempt to discredit Lewis. Other tidbits revealed that Lewis had a political dislike for Bill Clinton even before she began looking into Whitewater - and had once even considered marketing a line of anti-Clinton T-shirts.

Suddenly the investigator with a spotless record and a personnel file folder full of commendations was being smeared as a "Clinton-hater" and a "gold digger" whose testimony was so hopelessly tainted by bias that it could not be taken seriously.

Confronted with the embarrassing information, a stunned and shaken Lewis asked BenVeniste how he managed to get his hands on her deleted personal correspondence. His reply: "I don't know how they do these things, but I'm told they can do it."

Whitewater Committee Democrats later explained that they had hired several computer experts to examine Lewis' files. The technicians were able to "reverse delete" the disks and voila: The RTC investigator's private correspondence had magically appeared.

Lewis, who suffered from high blood pressure, was so rattled by the invasion of privacy that she collapsed right there at the witness table and had to be taken to a doctor.

What's missing from this account, of course, is the content of those e-mails, which in fact proved beyond a doubt that Lewis had perjured herself regarding her testimony about her attempts to push the criminal referral against the Clintons for their Whitewater dealings with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office. It also established that she had fantasies about "changing history" and was driven by extreme partisanship, contrary to her assertions in testimony.

Limbacher, ever the chorus swell, thus adds this palpably false characterization of things:

Though nothing Clinton's allies had unearthed about Lewis compromised her testimony or the evidence she presented in any way ...

The Limbacher piece is rotten to the core, of course, but the information about the e-mail revelations is a suggestive detail. If the heat starts coming down on the Office of Inspector General's staff at DoD, someone might want to keep an eye out for smashed disk drives in the dumpster out back (figuratively speaking).

Not that it appears such a thing will ever come to pass.