The Notebook: A Leaky Justice Department
(TIME, April 6) -- Drip, drip, drip. JANET RENO's plumbers are back on the job, mounting yet another investigation of leaks to reporters. It's a subject that seems to have a particular fascination for her, though such probes rarely yield anything conclusive. The impetus this time is a Feb. 27 Wall Street Journal item saying Department of Justice prosecutors had recommended indicting former Republican National Committee chairman HALEY BARBOUR in connection with his solicitation of funds from an overseas businessman. The spate of probes to track down loose lips in the halls of Justice--including one to find the source of a Washington Post story from last year about intelligence findings on the Chinese plan to influence the 1996 elections--"have changed the whole atmosphere around here," says a senior Justice official. Clearly they have left the department's Office of Professional Responsibility with a near impossible task on its hands: everybody resents these leak investigations, and nobody wants to talk.
--By Viveca Novak/Washington
Iraq: Inspectors Ask, Was It a Ruse or an Arrest?
The Iraqi government announced last week that NASSIR AL-HINDAWI, a 70-year-old microbiologist who is the former director of Iraq's biological-weapons program, was arrested trying to fly out of Baghdad with 200 pages of documents on SADDAM HUSSEIN's germ-warfare program. Though Iraqi police claim he was taking the documents to a "rogue" nation, White House aides suspect that the arrest was staged as part of an elaborate psychological operation by Saddam to persuade the United Nations that he is now serious about dismantling his weapons of mass destruction. After the arrest, the police turned over the documents they say were confiscated from Hindawi to U.N. inspectors in Baghdad. The papers turned out to be photocopies of material the inspectors already had, and, unlike other defectors Saddam's security agents have nabbed, Hindawi is being kept alive and offered up to the U.N. team for interviews. "The scam was to show that this was a guy who was a rogue operator," says a senior Administration official, "and that Saddam is now cleaning up and cracking down."
--By Douglas Waller/Washington
TIME Capsule
The dimensions of his problem were very different, but RICHARD NIXON, like Bill Clinton, was happy to change the subject with a foreign trip. TIME's June 24, 1974, report:
From the moment Richard Nixon set foot on Egyptian soil, beginning his historic, seven-day trip to four Arab nations and Israel, the huzzas and hosannas fell like sweet rain. For the President, coming out of the parched Watergate wasteland of Washington, the praise and the cheers of multitudes were welcome indeed, particularly since each stop, each spectacle, was beamed in living color back to [U.S.] living rooms...[H]ome was never like this, and the President's aides were convinced that the accolades abroad would strengthen Nixon's hand in his battle to stave off impeachment. The hegira to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and Jordan had, of course, far broader purposes. It constituted not only what some Nixon critics scorned as "impeachment diplomacy" but also sound foreign policy. His trip, said Nixon, was "another journey for peace," like his earlier trips to Moscow and Peking...[After all, trust in the Mideast still rests] largely in the power of the U.S., which Nixon, for all his difficulties at home, still embodies.
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