QUESTION TIME
Scott Armstrong, former Democrat Watergate
investigator, who many former colleagues on the Watergate Committee
believe leaked inside information about the investigation to
Post reporters Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein, and then apparently parlayed those
ties into a job as a Post reporter, wasn’t happy enough
with his 15 minutes of fame back in the 1970s. Now that his former
colleague on the committee, former Sen. Fred
Thompson is garnering some attention, Armstrong is
elbowing his way back into the news.
Armstrong went public last week,
claiming that Thompson had secretly been a mole for President
Richard Nixon and the White House during his time as minority
counsel to the Watergate Committee. Armstrong was apparently irked
that Thompson was attempting to take credit for asking a question
of former White House aide Alexander Butterfield
that revealed to the public the existence of an Oval Office
recording system.
Thompson learned of the system from witness interviews conducted
by, among others, Armstrong and his GOP investigative counterparts.
The Associated Press makes much of the fact that
Thompson asked a question for which everyone on the committee
already knew the answer.
“For the most part, there isn’t a single witness that goes
before a House of Senate committee who hasn’t told us beforehand
what he or she is going to say,” says a current Judiciary Committee
career staffer. “The Boston Globe and the Associated Press
know this, but they treat the Watergate hearings like they were
somehow different. Big surprise.”
In fact, Woodward and Bernstein routinely reported ahead of time
what Watergate investigators were discovering during the interview
and interrogation process, sometimes breaking news that was bound
by lawyer-client privilege. While Armstrong claims he was
attempting to find a mole working for the White House, others were
trying to find a mole working for the Washington Post.
“There were a number of us who were trying to figure out who was
leaking to Woodward, and we never were able to find out,” says a
Washington, D.C. based lawyer, who back in the early 1970s served
as a junior aide to one of the senators sitting on the committee.
“Once everything was over and Armstrong went to work at the
Post, it all made sense.”
Perhaps the recent attempt for the spotlight wasn’t such a smart
thing, as it raises the specter of Armstrong’s own background. He
has a history of raising his profile, but then getting burned.
Back in 1985, Armstrong founded the National Security Archive, a
group that was operated through the leftist Fund for Peace. The
Archive encouraged the leaking of national security information to
the public. Armstrong, according to insiders at the Ford
Foundation, was too extreme politically for the foundation, which
at the time was the Fund for Peace’s key donor. Armstrong was
pushed out.
Today, Armstrong is involved in another leftist group, the
Information Trust. Again, its mission is the enabling of federal
government leakers of classified information. Information Trust,
according to Senate Intelligence Committee staff and Federal Bureau
of Investigation officials, is believed to have played a critical
role in the leaking of national security and intelligence data to
the New York Times and Washington Post about the
CIA’s secret prisons that housed al Qaeda terrorists overseas. The
organization also is believed to have assisted in the leaking of
information on the SWIFT financial monitoring system out of the
Treasury Department.
Given the organization’s reputation and Armstrong’s, it’s not
surprising that a Democrat mouthpiece like the Boston
Globe would play this game on Thompson.
PICKING AT STRAWS
If you subtract the 100 or so “guests” former Gov. Mitt
Romney brought with him to stuff the ballot box in Florida
on Saturday night, Fred Thompson won another straw poll.
As Erick Erickson over at RedState pointed out on Saturday, Romney, struggling in
the polls everywhere he isn’t spending money on media buys, is
reduced to also buying up straw polls to promote his candidacy.
He will have plunked down close to an estimated $5 million to
make the Ames Republican Straw Poll in Iowa next month a personal
political rally (no other major GOP candidate will be
participating), and that includes outbidding by sometimes three
times as much his nearest competitor for bus rentals to get his
folks into Ames.
Romney did something similar over the weekend in Hollywood,
Florida, at the Young Republicans convention there. Romney paid for
the YR dinner, according to several YR board members, but with the
proviso that the straw poll rules be changed so that anyone
attending the dinner could vote (previously, only YR delegates
voted in the straw poll).
Romney, and his on-site organizer, Jordan
Sekulow, bused in about 100 Romney donors, all of whom
appeared to exceed by at least 20 years the under-40 age
requirement typically used as a guideline for YR membership.
“We’re all young at heart,” said one Romney backer, who happily
submitted a ballot for Romney and claimed to be “younger than
70.”
In the end, Romney won the straw poll with 168 votes. Fred
Thompson, who made a surprise appearance at the YR luncheon earlier
in the day, came in second with 103. Rudy Giuliani
was far back in 3rd, with 37.
“I guess Governor Romney did need every one of those 100 tickets
he used,” said a YR board member. “This isn’t one of our finer
moments.”
