|
| |
>|SCHIPPERS: As I understand it -- this is secondhand. As I
understand it,
>|when Hazel O'Leary got into the office, she asked for the promotion list and
>|then asked them to strike the names of all white males.
>|FOX NEWS NETWORK
>|SHOW: THE O'REILLY FACTOR (20:00 ET)
>|July 28, 1999, Wednesday
>|Transcript # 072801cb.256
>|
>|HEADLINE: Interview with Former House Judiciary Counsel David Schippers
>|GUESTS: David Schippers
>|BYLINE: Bill O'Reilly
>|
>|
>|THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE
>|UPDATED.
>|
>|BILL O'REILLY, HOST: Hi. I'm Bill O'Reilly. Thank you for watching us
>|tonight.
>|
>|Most of THE FACTOR this evening will be devoted to exposing the cover-up
>|going on at the Justice Department regarding investigations of government
>|corruption. Now some Americans still do not believe the attorney general is
>|actively working to kill the corruption investigations. We will present more
>|evidence in just a few moments.
>|
>|But, first, the Talking Points memo tonight. Did you hear that rebuild
>|Kosovo? Did you also hear that 14 Serbian farmers were slaughtered in a
>|field by Kosovars just a few days ago?
>|
>|So what does the president think about that? We don't know because he hasn't
>|said anything.
>|
>|Talking Points feels that U.S. dollars should not be flowing into Kosovo if
>|NATO doesn't have things under control there -- and it doesn't.
>|
>|Now I supported the Kosovo action on humanitarian grounds, but I realize
>|there are bad people on both sides of this conflict. If Kosovars are going
>|to murder Serbs, why are we giving them money? Does dollars over there if
>|atrocities are being committed -- and they are.
>|
>|Kosovo. Aid money should be earned by the Kosovars. If they're willing to
>|work hard to rebuild and behave in a civilized way, then we should help them
>|out -- but not by dropping a huge amount of money in there with no
>|accountability.
>|
>|tax dollars and does not demand accountability. That's why so much of our
>|money is being wasted. If the Kosovars think they will be punished
>|financially, they are more likely to stop killing people.
>|
>|But all we get is silence from Washington. The administration is too busy
>|writing checks. File this under "Fiscal and Moral Irresponsibility."
>|
>|And that's the memo. Now for the top story tonight. You'll remember this
>|man, attorney David Schippers, who presented the House managers' case for
>|impeachment against President Clinton in his job as chief counsel for the
>|House Judiciary Committee. Well, Counselor Schippers is now back in private
>|practice but is still closely following what is going on in Janet Reno's
>|Justice Department. In fact, David Schippers is one of the few Americans to
>|see the full LaBella memo on the Justice Department's investigation into
>|campaign finance irregularities, which is being kept ultra secret by Ms.
>|Reno.
>|
>|Counselor Schippers joins us now from Chicago.
>|
>|I didn't overstate that ultra secret because I understand that you were
>|ordered by the Justice Department not to get specific about the LaBella
>|memo.
>|
>|DAVID SCHIPPERS, FORMER HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHIEF COUNSEL: Well, it --
>|it went beyond that. I was only permitted to discuss the contents of the
>|memo with Chairman Hyde personally. I couldn't even discuss it with other
>|members of the committee. So, to a great extent, my lips have been sealed
>|along with the...
>|
>|O'REILLY: If you violated that order and discussed it with me here on THE
>|FACTOR, would they come and put you in handcuffs, or what would they do?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I don't know what they would do, Mr. O'Reilly, but I'll tell you
>|this: I'm not about to find out.
>|
>|O'REILLY: So you -- you fear them.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, of course, I do. Of course, I do. I -- it's the most
>|unregulated, unanswerable part of the government, the Justice Department.
>|It's a totally out-of-control monster.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. Now I'm going to take it step by step so that we can
>|get at least a flavor of this. Charles LaBella was on the program. He gave
>|us a few tidbits, but, again, he -- he was afraid to say anything as well.
>|The LaBella memo, from what we understand, is almost entirely about DNC
>|problems with campaign money. Would that be accurate?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: No, it would not be accurate. It goes beyond that. And -- first
>|of all, I want to tell you that, as far as I'm concerned, Chuck LaBella is
>|one of the highlights of my stay in Washington. He's an honorable, decent
>|human being, a very courageous human being, and he did a great job, as did
>|Louie Freeh, by the way. You speak of the...
>|
>|O'REILLY: The FBI chief.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Yeah. You speak of the -- of the LaBella report, but remember Mr.
>|Freeh also made a report. It -- also, I saw that. No, it was not the DNC.
>|The DNC was not this whole issue in that case.
>|
>|I -- to put it in a fr -- proper frame of reference, I -- you'll probably
>|recall that, early on, there was a meeting in Senator Hatch's office. During
>|that meeting, a number of members of the committee and some of the senators
>|saw a redacted version of Mr. LaBella and Mr. Freeh's memos. What encouraged
>|me to want to see the entire memo was the fact that there were some 47 blank
>|pages in it which purported to carry the evidence that was backing up Mr.
>|LaBella's report and his conclusions.
>|
>|And let's put it this way: I was not that interested when I wanted to see
>|the memo in actually determining whether or not there was campaign finance
>|problems. There were other materials that I felt were in that memo that I
>|wanted to see before we closed down the investigation of the impeachment
>|inquiry, and I found what I was looking for.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Can you give us any hint in...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I wish I could, but I can't. I can't.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right, but it has to do with -- with election problems?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: It has to do...
>|
>|O'REILLY: It has to do with running for office, correct?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, that's right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. So it has to do with the 1996 presidential election?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Precisely.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. And you were looking for certain things, irregularities
>|in these -- in the report by Chuck LaBella...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: ... and Louie Freeh.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: And you found them. You found them.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Yeah, it went -- yeah, but it went beyond money matters. There
>|were other -- there were other considerations, and it -- without going into
>|specifics -- for example, some of the repercussions of the flow of money,
>|some of the repercussions of the campaign funds that were donated by various
>|individuals and entities in...
>|
>|O'REILLY: Quid pro quo?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Yeah. Quid pro quo or control. Whatever.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Right. Favorable treatment about people who may have given money?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Whatever.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I can't go into...
>|
>|O'REILLY: I understand. I mean, I want to give the audience a flavor for
>|this. So what we're talking about now is an attempt by not only the Chinese
>|but other individual Americans to basically buy influence with our
>|government.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: It seems to be a -- an indigenous sport out there.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. So you would not say that is inaccurate?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: No, I won't say that's inaccurate.
>|
>|O'REILLY: It goes to both sides of the aisle? Democrat and Republican?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I was -- I was not interested in that aspect of it, OK. I was not
>|interested in the aspect of campaign finance. Regardless of what the
>|Democrats said, this was not a last-ditch effort to come up with something.
>|We had something. We had a room full of evidence, and we had enough, in my
>|opinion, not only to impeach but to convict, and that's why -- people say,
>|"Why didn't you go on for the next six or eight months?" Why? Why bother?
We
>|had enough in January of 1999 to convict.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right, but the American people still are confused about what
>|you had.
>|
>|And when we come back with Counselor Schippers, we'll get more specific
>|about that. We'll also point out that Counselor Schippers voted for
>|President Clinton twice.
>|
>|And then, why did the Senate investigation into Whitewater get nowhere? The
>|man who headed it up will tell us.
>|
>|And we hope you stay tuned.
>|
>|<20:11>
>|
>|(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
>|
>|O'REILLY: Continuing now with David Schippers from Chicago.
>|
>|So now, from what I took out of our first interview, you saw in the
>|investigation done by Charles LaBella for the Justice Department and the
>|investigation by FBI agents -- they were done in conjunction. You saw
>|evidence in that memo that led you to believe that President Clinton,
>|forgetting all the Monica Lewinsky stuff, just on what they came up with,
>|could have been removed from office. That's what I took out of the
>|interview. Am I wrong?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, no. That's -- that is not true. What I got out of that case
>|was additional evidence to use in the -- in the material we was sufficient
>|evidence in that memo of any kind to remove the president or anybody. There
>|was evidence in there which, in my opinion, certainly should have required
>|the appointment of a special prosecutor.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. So there was evidence that needed to be investigated
>|further, in your opinion?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right. I fully agreed with -- with Director Freeh and with Mr.
>|LaBella.
>|
>|O'REILLY: OK. Now you said in the beginning of the interview that the
>|Justice Department's just an out-of-control monster.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: What do you mean by that?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I mean, they're totally unanswerable to anybody, and that
>|includes the Congress. They -- I don't know how many gillions of anybody.
>|They totally -- remember I went out there originally to conduct an oversight
>|investigation of the Justice Department at the request of Chairman Hyde and
>|the Republican majority of the Judiciary.
>|
>|When I got out there and began my investigation, we ran into a brick wall.
>|We would request information -- now this wasn't a situation where you would
>|request information, and they'd say, "Fine. Can we talk about it?" or
"Give
>|us a couple of days." They would say, "No. No," and they just refused
to
>|cooperate. They refused to give us anything.
>|
>|O'REILLY: And that -- is that -- are you laying this at Janet Reno's
>|doorstep?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, it -- it's at somebody's doorstep, and she's in charge of
>|the store.
>|
>|O'REILLY: And why...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I don't know...
>|
>|O'REILLY: Why do you believe that you couldn't get the information from Ms.
>|Reno and her...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, I can go into -- one specific area that we were
>|investigating could have been very embarrassing to the -- to the White House
>|and to the DNC, had we been able to prove what we were trying to prove, and
>|we just ran into a stone-cold roadblock. Now...
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. Tell me what that is.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, let me -- what the area was?
>|
>|O'REILLY: Yeah.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: It was in the area of an -- Immigration and Naturalization, and
>|it was when -- some of the things that one of the other congressmen had
>|already done some work on, the idea of putting people through, making them
>|citizens without having the proper FBI clearance. They tried to blame the
>|FBI, but I'll tell you this: The only agency in the -- in the Washington
>|area throughout my tenure there that was 100-percent cooperative,
>|100-percent integrity was the FBI. I...
>|
>|O'REILLY: Do you know -- I've heard about this, immigrants coming into the
>|United States not being cleared for criminal records...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: ... and then just being -- being let in here, but I don't...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Being let in.
>|
>|O'REILLY: I don't know why. Why? Why would that happen? What's...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well...
>|
>|O'REILLY: What's in it for the DNC and President Clinton?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, they tried to -- because they were in the major cities -- a
>|lot of them were in the major cities, and the major cities, of course, are
>|in the large states, the states that could be the swing votes in an
>|election. Let me tell you they tried to blame the FBI. The FBI had all of
>|those materials in the hands of INS in plenty of time. INS, we found in some
>|cases, had piles of FBI reports in a box in a corner that never got into the
>|files. We wanted to take the next step and ascertain whether or not any of
>|those individuals who had been let into the country with criminal records --
>|felony...
>|
>|O'REILLY: And you got nowhere.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, we wanted to find out...
>|
>|O'REILLY: And you got nowhere.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: ... if they'd committed any crimes since being here...
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: ... and...
>|
>|O'REILLY: We're going to have one more segment with David Schippers, and
>|we'll pick it up right there.
>|
>|And then, a look at one of the most intense power struggles our government
>|has ever seen.
>|
>|We'll be right back.
>|
>|<20:17>
>|
>|(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
>|
>|O'REILLY: Continuing now with David Schippers, a former chief counsel for
>|the House Judiciary Committee.
>|
>|So you say that there was questions about letting illegal immigrants into
>|the United States, I guess, in great numbers, right? I mean, a lot of them.
>|We're not talking a few.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: A lot of them.
>|
>|O'REILLY: A lot of them. And Janet Reno's Justice Department just simply
>|wouldn't investigate it.
>|
>|Now I want to...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: No, no. That's not...
>|
>|O'REILLY: Go ahead.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: They would not -- they refused to furnish us with the information
>|we needed to investigate. I had investigators working for me, and we asked
>|for specific information. The FBI compiled it for us, turned it over to
>|Justice...
>|
>|O'REILLY: And Justice wouldn't give it to you.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: ... wouldn't give it to us.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. I think we're getting the de -- I think we're getting
>|the picture here.
>|
>|But listen to this. This just came to me. This is a FOX News Urgent. The
>|head of the public integrity section of the U.S. Justice Department, Lee
>|Radick (ph), is going to be subpoenaed by Congressman Burton because,
>|apparently, Radick wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney in California, Steve
>|Mansfield (ph), who had assembled information about the Buddhist Temple
>|fund-raising event with Vice President Gore, and Mansfield received a call
>|after he had gotten the information from Radick saying, "Cease all activity
>|and desist," and then...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Bingo.
>|
>|O'REILLY: ... that was it.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Bingo.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. So now what we have here is almost a RICO situation
>|where every kind of investigation, whether it's the Buddhist Temple, the
>|Chinese money from the Red Army, the immigration that you are -- wanted to
>|look into -- Janet Reno stops everything dead.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, this started back in -- remember in Little Rock, Arkansas
>|-- or the Arkansas situation where the Arkansas United States attorney
>|refused to investigate the Whitewater thing. This has just been a classic
>|continuing effort to cover up anything that might embarrass, apparently, not
>|just the White House, but the Democratic Party, and I'm speaking as a
>|Democrat.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. Now why should Americans care about this? It's --
>|because most don't as this juncture.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: No, they don't.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Why should they?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I'll tell you something. Everybody's freedom is in the hands of
>|the Justice Department. Anyone -- and I have practiced in some areas of
>|criminal law. Anyone who's practiced criminal law, especially in the
>|criminal courts, knows the unbelievable and, again, unanswerable power of
>|the United States attorneys and eventually of the United States Justice
>|Department. They can destroy you just by charging you. They can ruin you
>|just by accusing. They don't have to convict.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Janet...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: The people of the United States should start taking a long hard
>|look. Sen -- Chairman Hyde wanted to do an oversight of Justice, and that's
>|why he asked me to come out there.
>|
>|O'REILLY: OK.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Had the Starr material not come over, we might have gotten
>|further.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Janet Reno raised her right hand and swore to uphold the laws of
>|this country, all right?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: She, according to you, according to almost everyone we've talked
>|to -- and we must -- you're a Democrat, but most of the other people
>|launching the accusations have been Republicans -- absolutely refuses to
>|investigate any wrongdoing that could lead, as you put it, to embarrassment
>|for the White House or the Democrats.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Isn't she a traitor?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, I don't -- that's a -- that's an awfully strong word to
>|use. But I'll tell you something. I'm a lawyer. I am supposed to be
>|interested in justice, equal justice under law, and apparently out in the
>|Justice Department these days, there's equal and then there's equal, and if
>|you're the wrong equal, you're in trouble.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Yeah, but if she's not a traitor, what is she then, Counselor?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I'm not going to put a word on it. I don't know what you'd call
>|her. She -- I think it's the entire department as of -- above a certain
>|level. The professionals out there, the people who are the career
>|prosecutors, the career Justice Department people, are all good, decent,
>|honorable people. Somewhere after it leaves those professionals, strange
>|things happen to criminal investigations.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Would you say that Ms. Reno is corrupt?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I can't say that because I have no proof. I...
>|
>|O'REILLY: Well, I mean, if she's not...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Something is wrong.
>|
>|O'REILLY: ... investigating things that are happening here and squelching --
>|it's supposed to be equal justice under the law -- under the law, is it not?
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: That's right.
>|
>|O'REILLY: You know -- and if we have illegal campaign contributions coming
>|in, illegal immigrants coming in, if we have security breakdowns at our
>|nuclear facilities, and none of it's being investigated, that doesn't sound
>|like equal justice under the law to me!
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, it isn't equal justice under the law. I'm not going to
>|blame Janet Reno personally. I -- I don't know where the -- where the
>|problems are there, but...
>|
>|O'REILLY: It's got to be...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: ... there's problems. There's problems in...
>|
>|O'REILLY: It's got to be her.
>|
>|Now you know something about Hazel O'Leary in your capacity as -- looking
>|over everything, and...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: No. Actually, I got that information as a private lawyer.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Well, tell us what you know.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: I -- I represent an individual, so I should put that -- in the
>|interest of fairness, I should say that I'm representing an individual who
>|worked at the Argonne lab, and he has told me some horror stories about
>|security lapses, security problems at Argonne that have just terrified me.
>|He's also told me that there is -- that there was an ongoing effort --
>|effort -- an ongoing conspiracy to make certain that no white males got
>|promoted to any offices of responsibility and got -- indeed got no
>|promotions at all.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Really? So Hazel O'Leary, then the chief of the Department of
>|Energy, you're saying that your client told you, was knocking out all white
>|males that -- when they -- when they were up for promotion.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: As I understand it -- this is secondhand. As I understand it,
>|when Hazel O'Leary got into the office, she asked for the promotion list and
>|then asked them to strike the names of all white males.
>|
>|O'REILLY: That's against the law.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, this information's been furnished to the -- to the
>|Congress. They have it.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. Now Hazel O'Leary also -- in addition to what your
>|client says, we've got the Los Alamos situation there. We've got the Rocky
>|Flats situation, you know, with the total breakdown. So the American public,
>|now watching you and I speak today, they're saying to themselves, "The
>|government is corrupt, and nobody's doing anything about it." I'll give you
>|the last word on it.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Well, whether the government is corrupt or not, I don't know. We
>|are having a grave problem, and -- you're right -- nobody is doing anything
>|about it. We've furnished information. Now the Congress has the information
>|from my client and, believe me, the information he's furnished to me is
>|terrifying, incompetence...
>|
>|O'REILLY: And this is about nuclear security. This is...
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Absolutely.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Right.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Absolutely.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Right. All right. Look, Counselor, I've -- I've got to take
>|another break. I want to have you back. We appreciate your candor and
>|filling us in. Again, you voted for Mr. Clinton twice. You're a lifelong
>|Democrat. And we'll let the people decide. But we'd like to see you back
>|real soon.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: OK.
>|
>|O'REILLY: Thank you very much.
>|
>|SCHIPPERS: Nice talking to you.
>|
>|O'REILLY: All right. And one footnote: We are working hard to bring you
>|Janet Reno's point of view and, hopefully, we'll have that report for you
>|next week.
>|
>|We'll be back in a moment with the Whitewater investigation.
>|
>|<20:27>
>|
>|(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
>|
>|--
>|
| |
|
