As if the tale of Mike Wallace, Louis Freeh, and Bill Clinton weren't strange enough, it turns out that there's more to the story. A great deal more.
In recent days, CBS and Wallace have taken a pummeling for granting Freeh, the former FBI director, airtime on 60 Minutes to criticize Bill Clinton without allowing Clinton administration officials any meaningful chance to counter Freeh's sensational charges.
The now-notorious interview took place on October 9, when Freeh spoke extensively with Wallace about his new book, My FBI, which makes a scathing accusation: In a 1998 meeting, Freeh claimed, the former president failed to press Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to let the FBI question Saudi-held suspects in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing -- and instead hit up the Crown Prince for a financial donation to his presidential library. CBS insisted that Clinton himself respond to these and other charges in the book. When Clinton declined, the network refused to allow any Clinton aides -- including those present at the meeting in question, all of whom deny Freeh's version of events -- to offer an on-air rebuttal. Under intense pressure, CBS agreed to read a brief statement from Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger. CBS's decision provoked sharp criticism from the people at Media Matters and elsewhere.
Yet this tale turns out to be even murkier than it first appeared. Indeed, a close look at the bitter behind-the-scenes back-and-forth between CBS and the Clinton camp in the runup to Wallace's interview reveals fresh details about the whole saga -- and raises further questions about CBS's journalistic conduct.
In extensive interviews with The American Prospect, former White House counsel Lanny Davis and current Clinton spokesman Jay Carson leveled new charges at CBS. For instance, Davis says that when he learned that 60 Minutes wouldn't allow a Clinton surrogate on the show, he tried to reach CBS chief Les Moonves to make a direct appeal. But Moonves didn't call back; instead he had a secretary call Davis and refer him to CBS executive producer Jeffrey Fager. Davis also tried -- but failed -- to reach Wallace himself, he says, leaving messages at his home and office which Wallace didn't return.
Davis also revealed new details about extensive conversations he had with Fager, which left Davis convinced that 60 Minutes had already made up its mind not to accept anyone but Clinton.
The story began in August. Wallace, who was in Martha's Vineyard, contacted Carson, told him about the Freeh book and asked if he could interview Clinton -- who, as it happened, was vacationing on the island at the same time. According to Carson, Wallace told him that the book charged that Clinton was "soft on terrorism" on an array of fronts, including in his response to Khobar, without ever mentioning Freeh's account of the meeting, perhaps his most specific, explosive and newsworthy charge.
Carson, who didn't want to interrupt Clinton's vacation, said Clinton wouldn't respond to Freeh, particularly since the charges then seemed so vague. Carson said he'd be happy to provide a surrogate, but Wallace said, "We're only interested in the president responding to this," Carson recalls. They had a similar conversation a week later.
Carson says he didn't hear any more about the story until October 6, three days before the report aired. What's more, he adds, he didn't hear it from 60 Minutes or Wallace but from a New York Post reporter who was calling for a comment on a CBS press release which had already been sent out touting the upcoming Wallace interview.
When the reporter told Carson what was in the press release, he adds, it was the first time the Clinton camp had been made aware of the substance of the allegations.
"The meeting was the most damning allegation," Carson says. "But we had 24 hours to respond to this scathing accusation, even though CBS had been working on the story for two months. We had 24 hours to call all the Clinton people who were in the room and get their side of the story. They were all over the world." What's more, Carson adds, 60 Minutes never elaborated at all on another central charge: That it required George H. W. Bush's pressure on Abdullah to get the Saudis to cooperate with the FBI. "The first we learned of the details of that charge was watching the show on Sunday night," Carson says.
In an e-mailed response, a spokesperson for CBS rejected Carson's version of events. "Back in August, 60 Minutes contacted Bill Clinton's office asking for an interview with the former president and detailed a laundry list of Louis Freeh's charges," the spokesperson wrote. "In subsequent phone calls, the president's people said he did not want to be interviewed. They gave no substantive response to any of the allegations until Lanny Davis launched his PR campaign on the Thursday before the broadcast and offered himself as the person from the Clinton camp who would merely disparage and attack Freeh rather than deal with his allegations." The spokesperson didn't appear to address Carson's assertion that Wallace failed to detail Freeh's specific allegations.
Either way, the call from the Post reporter to Carson set in motion a frenzy of negotiations between the Clinton camp and CBS that were far more heated and convoluted than has been previously revealed.
Davis says he called Moonves about the Freeh allegations because in the wake of the Dan Rather draft scandal, "I could not conceive that this wouldn't be being debated at the highest levels." But if it was, Moonves wasn't going to discuss it.
After Moonves' secretary referred Davis to Fager, the producer, the two men had several conversations. Davis says he appealed over and over to Fager to explain why they wouldn't allow a Clinton surrogate to rebut Freeh's charges. "I appealed to him on basic journalistic standards," Davis says. But Fager, Davis says, simply repeated over and over the line "we're all taken care of" without further explanation, suggesting, Davis insists, that CBS had already made up its mind.
"He must have said, 'We're all taken care of' four times," Davis recalls. "It sounded to me like it already was a done deal … I asked him for a yes or no answer: 'Are you saying no to putting a senior official on to deny what Louis Freeh is saying?' He said, 'We're all taken care of.' "
Davis also claims he made a last-ditch effort at compromise. "I said, 'You're probably finished taping and it's already locked in. But can't you tack on at the end a 45-second segment where you put on one of us?' His answer: 'We're all taken care of.' "
Asked for comment on Davis' recollections, the CBS spokesperson said: "Jeff Fager never uttered the phrase Mr. Davis repeatedly attributes to him."
Ultimately 60 Minutes did agree to read statements by Berger and Carson. However, Davis adds: "They claim credit for doing that, but in my opinion it would not have happened if we hadn't pressed them at the last minute."
Davis also says he had conversations with another CBS producer, Robert Anderson. In one, Davis claims, Anderson confirmed that CBS hadn't tried to call anybody who'd witnessed the meeting first-hand. (Freeh's recreation of the meeting had come, as he ambiguously put it, from "usually reliable sources.")
"He confirmed to me that up until then, he or anyone from 60 Minutes had never called or talked to anyone who was actually in the room," Davis says. "He said, 'We relied on Louis Freeh and his source. We haven't called anybody who was at the meeting.' "
The CBS spokesperson responded: "Davis keeps asking why 60 didn't talk to people who were at 'the' meeting. Fact is, President Clinton had more than one meeting with the crown prince, including a one-on-one meeting from which only Clinton would know first-hand what he'd said." Actually, Wallace did interview Freeh about the specific meeting in question on the show. Referring to a specific scene from page 25 of Freeh's book, Wallace said: "You write this: `Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate, and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.'" And Freeh responded: "Well, that's the fact that I'm reporting."
Finally, the Clinton camp also says CBS sent contradictory signals over another question at the heart of the report's credibility: Whether CBS ever tried to interview Freeh's anonymous source. Davis says Anderson told him that 60 Minutes had, in fact, spoken with the source. But Carson says Wallace subsequently told him "three or four times" he hadn't. This mixed message on such a critical point angered Davis, he says, because "the entire issue" was "the reliability of Freeh and his source."
At bottom, the blow-by-blow negotiations between CBS and the Clinton camp are really part of a larger story: How a single journalistic decision at one news organization set the tone for days of one-sided coverage in the rest of the media. After CBS's broadcast, Freeh's charges were injected into the bloodstream of cable TV and right-wing blogs, but also into the mainstream media. The charges resonated for over a week with little or no effective rebuttal. Perhaps the most perfect example of this came in a New York Post editorial on October 17 that said: "Bill Clinton owes the American people some answers to Freeh's charges." Those answers, of course, were the ones that the Clinton advisers appear to have tried -- but weren't permitted -- to provide.
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes a bi-weekly column for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
