Does anyone remember how House Republicans in Congress spent 10 days taking 140 hours of testimony into whether Bill Clinton used the White House Christmas card list for political purposes? And then how the accused Clinton of being a thief?
These people who thought that was a massive threat to the Republic have refused to hold hearing about Abu Ghraib, about alegations of abuse at Guantanamo, about profiteering by Halliburton and other contractors -- and about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Those things are all less important than the White House Christmas card list.
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:xYbL1ilUYB0J:www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20050124114450-11867.pdf+clinton+christmas+card+hearings+committee+reform&hl=en&ie=UTF-8The majority report accuses the President, the First Lady, senior White House staff, and Democratic National Committee (DNC) employees of theft of government property. These conclusions are extraordinary. Simply put, the record does not support an allegation of theft. It is not theft to remove duplicate addresses from the President’s holiday card list so that recipients do not receive duplicate cards. It is not theft to answer an inquiry as to whether an individual has attended an event at the White House. Yet, at bottom, this is the type of evidence the majority cites as support for its conclusions.
There has not been any prosecution for “theft of government property” that even remotely resembles the conduct examined here -- nor will there ever be. Violation of the “theft” statute occurs where an individual “embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or theuse of another, or without authority sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States.” As the Supreme Court has ruled, to be guilty of this crime aperson must have a “criminal intent to steal.”
No one “stole” the President’s holiday card list. In both the Republican and Democratic administrations, the President’s holiday cards are paid for by the President’s political party, so as to avoid any appearance that taxpayer money is being used to pay for greetings to political supporters. In the case of the 1994 list, a conscientious DNC employee, Brooke Stroud, learned that the contractor that had been hired by the DNC to remove duplicate addresses from the President’s holiday card list did not properly “de-dupe” the list. She therefore worked over a weekend with her parents and several volunteers to properly remove duplicate addresses from the list. This is not embezzling, stealing, or purloining the holiday card list. Ms. Stroud obtained the holiday card list for the purpose of insuring that the President did not send two cards to the same address -- not for the purpose of stealing the list. Similarly, there was no theft of the 1993 holiday card list. Apparently, the contractor charged with “de-duping” the 1993 holiday card list failed to remove the list from its computer. The computer was later moved -- for unrelated reasons -- to the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign. There is no evidence that this list was used for campaign purposes. In fact, the Clinton-Gore campaign never even accessed this list. Not only was there no intent to steal, but it appears that the Clinton-Gore campaign was not even aware that it possessed the list.
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