High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton by Ann Coulter Page A

audits.
    Coincidentally, Dale was first warned that he was going to be audited personally when being questioned by the IRS about the Travel Office accounts. He described this in testimony before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee:
    Well, I can tell you that, I don’t remember the date but somewhere along October-November of 1993, I got a summons from the IRS to appear in my attorney’s office and bring all documents pertaining to the Travel Office. I went and it was our understanding that they were going to question me about the excise tax and how the White House Travel Office had handled it. And as the meeting was drawing to a close, they had asked me a lot of personal questions, what kind of an automobile did I drive and things like that, and they looked at me and they said, “Don’t be surprised if you hear from Baltimore and they want to audit you.”
     
    Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) followed up Dale’s disturbing account by accusing politicians of “playing politics instead of shaping policy”—but she was attacking the Republicans . She went on to praise herself—“at the risk of sounding constructive”—by proposing that the committee address an imaginary problem: how to “depoliticize” the Travel Office.
    The difficulty with this was the office had never been “politicized.” Dale had begun working at the White House in the Kennedy administration—playing Santa Claus on the telephone for little Caroline—and moved into White House travel operations during the Johnson administration. He had served seven presidents—three Democrats and four Republicans. The office had not become “politicized” until the Clinton White House purged the entire office because it needed “the slots,” accused Dale of embezzling funds, ginned up an FBI investigation and prosecution against him, arranged for a compliant IRS to audit this public servant, and then turned to reliable flacks like Representative Maloney to defend the White House from legitimate inquiry.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S FAULT
     
    In some respects, what was done to the White House Travel Office employees is the worst of the Clinton scandals. There is no more pernicious abuse of power than using the police powers of the federal government for personal or political gain. The most damning charges against Nixon had been that he had attempted to use the office of the president to influence the FBI and the IRS. He got an FBI investigation delayed for two weeks, and he was completely ignored by the IRS.
    The very first indictment of Nixon in the second article of impeachment charged that he had attempted “to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns” and had attempted “to cause” IRS audits or other income tax investigations. And, incidentally, this was for “endeavor[ing]” to politicize the IRS “personally and through his subordinates.” Poor Tricky Dick could never actually get the IRS to audit one of his enemies. He couldn’t even get them to back off from auditing him while he was president.
    Still: he asked. Technically, Nixon stormed around his office bellowing about it, and a low-level functionary took him at his word and asked, but even that was once an alarming fact in this country. In the wake of Watergate, rules were quickly adopted prohibiting the White House from having any contact with the IRS, precisely to avoid the merest potentiality of political abuse of this powerful government agency. 38
    Nixon was also charged with “impairing the due and proper administration of justice” for attempting to have the FBI “conduct or continue” investigations. The accusation was that he had tried to gin up FBI investigations and to use information obtained by the FBI “for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function.” In fact, Nixon wanted one