Republican Witch Hunts Against Clinton Cost $91.3 Million Over 12 Years

[Lasher]

Considering the current discussion about the distractions of the Republican witch hunt against the Clinton Administration, I did some research into the costs and duration. The witch hunt began with the Whitewater investigation in January 1994.

The original Whitewater special prosecutor was Robert B. Fiske Jr., a moderate Republican selected in January 1994 by Attorney General Janet Reno, who had the authority to make the appointment because the independent counsel law had expired.

In August 1994, with the law renewed and Fiske under fire from conservatives for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuit of the president, the three-judge panel in charge of appointing independent counsels abruptly replaced him with a conservative activist named Kenneth W. Starr.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/whitewater.htm

The inquisitions dragged on until - are you ready for this? - this year!

WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 - After the longest independent counsel investigation in history, the prosecutor in the case of former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is finally closing his operation with a scathing report accusing Clinton administration officials of thwarting an inquiry into whether Mr. Cisneros evaded paying income taxes.

The legal inquiry by the prosecutor, David M. Barrett, lasted more than a decade, consumed some $21 million and came to be a symbol of the flawed effort to prosecute high-level corruption through the use of independent prosecutors.

<snip>

Justice Department officials who disputed Mr. Barrett's findings portrayed his investigation as deeply misguided and said the tax case against Mr. Cisneros had little merit. They suggested that the prosecutor had turned his disappointment in his inability to prove the obstruction allegations into unprovable theories.

Robert S. Litt, one of the Justice Department officials involved, wrote in a comment letter on May 31, 2005, that he was allowed to read only edited parts of the report but that he concluded that the report was "a fitting conclusion to one of the most embarrassingly incompetent and wasteful episodes in the history of American law enforcement."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/politics/19inquire.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=ec21d85187f1bfcf&ex=1295326800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

This 1999 article, published symbolically on April Fools' Day by CNN.com, set the cost at $79.3 million.

Besides Starr, five other independent counsels are currently conducting investigations. Four of those focus on the Clinton Administration. The combined costs of those four inquiries and the Starr probe now comes to $79.3 million.

<snip>

A four-year investigation of Henry Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is scheduled to end in a trial of the former Clinton Administration official in July on charges related to statements he made about payments to a mistress.

Independent counsel David M. Barrett spent $1.4 million from April through September last year on the probe, which has cost $8.7 million so far.

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/04/01/counsel.probe.costs/

But the Cisneros fishing expedition dragged on until this year at an ultimate cost of $21 million, as noted above. $8.7 million had already been accounted for in the CNN.com accounting above, so $12.3 million more was squandered on this one probe between April 1999 and January 2006.

$79.3 million accounted for by CNN.com + $12.3 million = 91.3 million.

[aquart]

1. Damned inexpensive for those spendthrifts.

If they can't waste a billion they don't sleep at night.

[Lasher]

3. You're right, unless they're considering something like VA benefits

But there were other costs of the Starr, et al, witch hunts. Can you imagine the trauma that was wrongfully inflicted on all those persecuted people? And, perhaps more relevant to current discussions, what was the cost of distracting the Clinton Administration for almost his whole time in office?

[aquart]

8. Which is why I NEED to see them in orange jumpsuits. With leg irons.

[sakabatou]

2. ...

Now was the charge against Clinton adultery or lying on the stand (perjury)?

I'm a bit confused on this.

[Lasher]

4. The only thing they got him with was misdemeanor perjury

He lied to a grand jury about having had sexual relations with Lewinsky.

[sakabatou]

6. They wasted almost $92M for that?

WTF?!

[Lasher]

7. Makes ya wanna hurl, don't it?

And the now-expired independent counsel statute provided for almost no accountability for the spending. Wonder how many GOP activists got lucrative jobs doing nothing?

Edit: And for all that, no Clinton Administration official was convicted of any felony. There were 32 such convictions of Reagan era officials.

http://www.bartcop.com/convictions.htm

[Botany]

5. Give me $10,000 and one month and I guarantee you that I

could get a mountain of stuff on bush.