Douglas Turner: Clintons’ imprint seen on Obama appointees
Updated: 02/16/09 10:57 AM
WASHINGTON — When I can’t sleep, I slip downstairs and munch cereal and milk while I surf the news channels. Suddenly the gray face of attorney Lanny Davis flashed by on the local Fox News. A nightmare, I thought.
A decade ago, Davis appeared around the clock explaining away President Bill Clinton’s foibles with Monica Lewinsky and Paula Corbin Jones during the impeachment crisis.
No, I wasn’t dead and in purgatory. It was really Davis, and his steel rims and his steely smile. The Clintons’ envoy to Fox News was defending the choice Presidentelect Barack Obama has made for attorney general, Eric Holder.
Holder didn’t do anything wrong, insisted Davis, who worked in the Clinton White House. What had Holder done?
Holder, deputy attorney general, looked the other way when Clinton pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich in the closing hours of the administration.
It didn’t mean anything that Rich’s lawyer was Jack Quinn, another former Clinton White House counsel, and that Holder had asked for Quinn’s support to become attorney general if Al Gore won the 2000 election.
Holder’s nomination will fly through the Senate with scarcely a rumble. But his appointment was a reminder that nobody ever really leaves Washington.
Moreover, the Clintons’ recruitment of Davis to justify Holder’s abandonment of his duty to block an improper pardon is clear evidence of the influence the Clintons’ have in Obama’s administration.
It started with Obama’s appointment of John Podesta as head of his transition team.
Podesta joined the Clinton administration in 1993. Podesta was White House chief of staff when the pardons moved through, when Clinton repealed the last restrictions on the investment banks, and when the last of the big oil company mergers got administration support.
Podesta was a top aide when Clinton created four regional railroad monopolies across America.
Podesta is being helped by law professor Dawn Johnson, who served in Clinton’s 1992 transition group.
Then Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., a Clinton political and press aide, was tapped to become the next White House chief of staff. Emanuel has other big bullets on his resume, but it is said he was a strong advocate of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Obama claimed during the primary to have reservations about.
On Thursday, it was reported that Peter Orszag, a senior economic adviser to President Clinton, will be the next White House budget director. On Wednesday, it was announced that Lisa Brown, who served in senior Justice Department and White House roles under Clinton, would serve Obama as overseer to his entire White House staff.
In between was Obama’s reported choice for chief counsel, Gregory B. Craig, a Yale Law School friend of both Clintons. Craig successfully defended Clinton in his Senate impeachment trial.
Obama has named former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S. D., to become secretary of the mammoth Department of Health and Human Services. Daschle didn’t work in the Clinton administration, but his wife, Linda Hall Daschle, served Clinton as acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration. She is one the capital’s most powerful lobbyists, who has grown wealthy contacting former FAA colleagues in behalf of the airlines.
While not a registered lobbyist, former Sen. Daschle gives “strategic advice” to customers of his firm who are in the prescription drug trade and other health issues, which HHS regulates.
With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N. Y., on her way to becoming secretary of state, and with her husband’s ready access to the White House corridors of power, it will be fun to see who really won the Democratic presidential primary.
