No Grounds for Skepticism Here

By Rick Horowitz

Believe them? Of course I believe them -- why shouldn't I believe them? They're the White House!

The thing you have to realize -- I'm talking about those Coffee Talk tapes, naturally -- is that these are very busy people, White House people. So if something slips through the cracks from time to time, even something as interesting as Coffee Talk tapes, it's perfectly understandable.

It's like the president said the other day: "I think it was just an accident."

Sure, the timing looks kind of peculiar. After all, it was months and months ago that the Senate committee and the Justice Department investigators first asked the White House for anything that might have to do with their campaign fund-raising activities. Not just asked for it -- subpoenaed it. Now, that would have gotten my attention pretty quickly, but I'm not the White House.

Anyway, it wasn't until just the other day that they finally handed over this videotape that shows the president doing dozens of caffeinated meet-and-greets with big donors and big potential donors. They didn't shoot the coffees start-to-finish, this White House Communications Agency, but some people think the tapes might still show whether any laws were broken, or only bent a little.

The messy thing about the timing, of course, is that the longer it takes them to turn stuff over to the Senate committee, the less time the committee will have to follow any leads before its investigation is supposed to shut down on December 31. Not that the White House was even thinking about that, I'm sure.

The other messy thing about the timing is that they didn't let the Attorney General know about the tapes until the day after she announced she hadn't seen any evidence that the president had done anything wrong at these coffees. Maybe she would have preferred looking at the tapes, or at least knowing they were out there, before she made an announcement like that. But hey -- it happens.

Anyway, the White House has explanations for all of it. They didn't find the tapes sooner because it didn't quite occur to them (not even to the staffers who were there during the tapings) that there were any tapes. Then, when they did a computer search of their archives, they didn't type in the right "key word."

In fact, it was only the other day that they finally stumbled on the right word to use if you're looking for information about coffees. They typed in "coffees." Talk about a lucky guess!

As for letting the Attorney General know right away, the White House says they tried, really they did. They didn't learn about the tapes until last Wednesday, you see, and then Thursday was a big Jewish holiday, and then when they called the Justice Department on Friday, their message just "didn't get through." They've got a White House switchboard that's legendary for its ability to track down anyone, anywhere, anytime -- and they couldn't even reach their own Attorney General! You can just imagine their frustration.

At least they're handling it graciously. The White House lawyer said right away that he wasn't going to blame the White House Communications Agency for the delay in uncovering the tapes. "We're not pointing fingers here," he said.

And even the president chimed in. When reporters asked him how his own staff could not have known about the tapes, first he said, "probably they'd never discussed it with anybody in the White House Communications Agency." But then he defended the agency, too.

"I don't believe for a moment," the president said, "that any of the career military people in the WHCA would in any way deliberately" not say anything about the tapes. That was particularly generous of him, especially since most people hadn't even been focusing on the "career military people," but were wondering about the president's own people.

And about the president. Certainly he knew he'd been videotaped -- why he didn't he offer up the tapes himself when they were first requested? The White House lawyer had an explanation for that one, too.

"I don't think the president of the United States has been reading his subpoenas in detail," the lawyer said.

And I believe him. Why shouldn't I believe him?

Of course, I also believe in the tooth fairy.

10/7/97