After Richard Clarke spoke under oath before the September 11 commission, the single most powerful person in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, had no qualms about slicing into him and virtually accusing him of perjury. On two occasions in a late March speech on the Senate floor, Frist accused Clarke of lying, saying that he did, “by his own admission, lie to the press” and that he “has told two entirely different stories under oath.” Such lies would not go unpunished, warned Frist: “The intelligence committee is seeking to have Mr. Clarke's previous testimony declassified so as to permit an examination of Mr. Clarke's two different accounts. Loyalty to an administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied before Congress.”
The accusations stunned many of Frist's colleagues, who considered the ferocity of the attack out of character for the normally mild-mannered senator. “It's like he was handed a script from the White House,” Democratic Senator Dick Durban of Illinois told The Hill. As it turns out, that assessment may not be so far from the truth. That's because buried beneath Frist's overheated rhetoric lies an incestuous web of close relationships between his top national-security aide and the White House.
Frist's senior national-security adviser, who advised him on the speech attacking Clarke, is one Steve E. Biegun, former executive secretary of George W. Bush's National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice from 2001 through 2003. In this capacity, Biegun served as a senior deputy to Rice and as the chief operating officer for the council, the No. 3 spot, during the period leading up to and after the 9-11 attacks. Indeed, while CIA Director George Tenet did not speak with the president about the terrorist threat on August 6 or later that month, according to his testimony before the 9-11 commission, Biegun was at the president's side on the very day he received the classified brief reading “Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S.” According to an Associated Press report from August 6, 2001, after Bush took an 8 a.m. run that day, he returned to the ranch and held a 45-minute meeting with Biegun and Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff; Rice, meanwhile, was patched in by conference call. In 2002, when Bush was again on vacation in Texas, a White House spokesman described Biegun as Bush's chief national-security aide at the ranch.
Like Rice, Biegun is a Europeanist and a scholar of the former Soviet Union. Before joining the White House, he served as chief of staff for Jesse Helms' Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Helms describes him as being like a son) and, in the mid-1990s, advised Bob Dole on European issues during Dole's campaign for the presidency against Bill Clinton.
Frist's office denies that there was any communication between Biegun and his former employers. “Mr. Biegun did not have contact with the White House before Mr. Frist gave this speech,” says Frist spokeswoman Amy Call. But such direct contacts may not have been necessary, given Biegun's posture toward the White House and close ties there.
When Biegun left the White House for Frist's office shortly after Trent Lott was forced to relinquish the Senate majority leader's seat, he left it on such great terms that he's often mentioned as someone likely to return to it. Last August, The Washington Post noted that Biegun is a possible candidate to succeed Rice as national-security adviser should Bush win a second term. “He is said to have impressed Bush,” reported the Post. Another, more likely successor to Rice would be her second in command, Stephen Hadley, with whom Biegun also worked closely.
One Democratic Senate aide said he suspects that Frist was snookered by his own staff into giving the speech without adequately thinking it through. It wouldn't be the first time in history a senator has done such a thing. But, insists Call, “Senator Frist reviews carefully all of the information staff gives him and made a decision about a speech that he wanted to give and statements he wanted to make.”
Biegun's use of hyperbolic language had caused him some embarrassment earlier, according to Al Kamen's Post column, when, in March, Biegun had a problem figuring out his e-mail system and sent -- apparently by accident -- the following question to a group in response to a notice about European Union tariffs being imposed on U.S. products: “Just out of curiosity, what is the accepted tariff on exporting the United States military to defend the continent of Europe (in case we decide it might not be worth it anymore)?”
Frist's attack, you'll recall, was based on supposed contradictions between what Clarke told the 9-11 commission openly and what he had said previously in still-classified 2002 testimony on the Hill. So how could Frist have known that Clarke had contradicted himself? The answer is that, without a review of the 190 pages of 2002 testimony, he couldn't have known this firsthand. Nor had he consulted with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts before making his floor comments, Roberts told The Hill, to be briefed on the testimony. So what had Frist done before going ballistic on the Senate floor? “Frist spokesman Robert Stevenson said aides had briefed the senator on Clarke's six hours of testimony to the joint intelligence committee in 2002,” reported the Post. It was Frist's aides who told him about the supposed contradictions.
It now appears likely that Frist's staffers had improperly been in touch with partisan Republican intelligence-committee staffers who had taken it upon themselves to talk about Clarke's classified testimony in a bid to spur Frist into action. “A number of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee familiar with Clarke's 2002 joint intelligence committee contacted the senator's staff and said ‘the tone' was ‘quite different from 2002,'” the Post reported Stevenson telling them in April. And those contacts, Roberts told The Hill, were not appropriate.
The odds that Clarke would be prosecuted for perjury were always low; congressional testimony is notoriously difficult to prosecute, and all statements to Congress, whether under oath or not, are supposed to be true. But the odds have gotten even lower now that Frist's poor -- and likely improper -- sourcing is known.
Meanwhile the charge of perjury, once introduced into the political debate, completely backfired. Indeed, the first person to pick it up was a less partisan Republican than Frist: 9-11 commission Chairman and former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, who used the word to pressure the White House to allow Rice to testify. “I would like to have [Rice] testify under the penalty of perjury,” Kean told The New York Times. “I think she should be under the same penalty as Richard Clarke.”
Kean got his wish. Rice testified, telling the commission, under oath, that the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) "was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States." When the PDB was declassified several days later, it turned out that this statement of Rice's was demonstrably untrue. The PDB noted that there were "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York” and stated that “the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers [Osama] Bin Laden-related,” including one following leads about bin-Laden supporters “in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."
But did Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle call for a perjury investigation? No. Like most Democrats, he was reluctant to insert partisanship into the work of the commission, and thus barely mentioned Rice's testimony. According to South Dakota's Aberdeen American News, “Daschle said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice did a good job of testifying before the Sept. 11 Commission on Thursday, but other witnesses have different opinions as to what happened before the attack. ‘It's a matter of who do you believe,' Daschle said.”
And since then the Republicans have -- wisely -- let the matter drop.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. Her column appears weekly.
