---

May 25, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - May 25

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DENNIS HASTERT, (R-IL) HOUSE SPEAKER: I think we can do that and hopefully we can negotiate a protocol that we can move forward, first of all, to make sure that justice prevails, at the same time to pull up the constitution.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And what is he talking about? He's talking and he's reacting to a statement today, an order really by the president today as follows. He directs the Justice Department he says, "I am directing the Department of Justice to seal all the materials recovered from Congressman Jefferson's office for the next 45 days and not to allow access to anyone involved in the investigation. This period will provide both parties more time to resolve the issues."

The issues of course are the claims made by senior members of congress in both parties, including as you just saw there the speaker of the house, that the search by the FBI of Congressman Jefferson's office pursuant to a court order last weekend, the complaint is that it's unconstitutional. Jefferson, of course, is caught up in a bribery scandal in which people have testified and pled guilty to trying to bribe him. He as yet has been charged with nothing. From some analytical observations on all this now from Fred Barnes, executive editor of "The Weekly Standard." Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call" and Jeff Birnbaum, columnist with "The Washington Post," FOX NEWS contributors all. Well, what about this -- first of all, what about what the president did today? Someone said this is a total climb down on the part of the executive branch. What do you say?

JEFF BIRNBAUM, WASHINGTON POST: Well it looks that way. This is an extraordinary circumstance in general of the 219 years in the U.S. constitution nothing like this has happened before. And I think it's quite clear that the administration took a look out there and saw a lot of average citizens wondering whether congressmen were above the law and they decided they would have to call a truce and pull back.

HUME: The idea of congressmen being above the law would point in the direction of hanging tough, wouldn't it?

BIRNBAUM: Would be hanging tough, but they also didn't want any sort of confrontation with the congress at the same time. This allows at least a little breathing space. And the president said at the end of his statement, that he did expect that the prosecutors would get this material eventually after they decided the etiquette of how to turn it over.

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Yeah I think this is a cooling off period.

HUME: Right.

KONDRACKE: Dennis Hastert had his dander up and Dennis Hastert has more to do with this than Nancy Pelosi, obviously. The president has a lot of business that he wants to conduct with the House of Representatives, and having the speaker in a fury is not a good way to proceed, so basically they're cooling it down to try to figure out some way to resolve this that will both produce the materials that the Justice Department wants and settle the congress down. I mean, there are various possibilities, one is that if there's ever a search again, that there will be pre-notice, that a member of the sergeant at arms staff would be there along with -- you can draw up all kinds of possibilities that they're going to have to work out.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: Give them pre-notice, hey, we're going to come and be searching for incriminating documents.

KONDRACKE: To the speaker I mean.

BARNES: Oh okay, jeez.

KONDRACKE: Unless of course the speaker is the object of the investigation, which he is not.

BARNES: Look, this was designed to do one thing, save Denny Hastert from himself. I mean, here he is out on this -- one, he's fighting the administration, does him no good and obviously it doesn't do the White House any good. But secondly, you know he and his lawyers were talking about filing suit against the FBI and the Justice Department and so on. Well that would -- what would that lead people to believe? At least this was the fear inside the White House. And that Denny Hastert was protecting a criminal. You know. I mean who's the beneficiary of this fight to try to get these documents taken away from the Justice Department? It would be William Jefferson who's in a lot of trouble already. But that's what it was aimed at. One, and let Hastert -- it's not a cooling off period for congress, it's a cooling off period for Denny Hastert.

BIRNBAUM: Well, there are -- it shows how inside the beltway people inside congress sometimes get, that they look at congressional prerogatives and they think that these things must be defended at all costs. In fact, there's more -- there's more tradition that's being protected here than any constitutional prerogative. In fact the constitution overtly allows the executive branch to arrest members of congress in cases of treason or a felony, for example.

HUME: Which is what's being investigated here, bribery is a felony.

BIRNBAUM: Is a felony, clearly. And certainly nobody thinks that illegal enterprises can be run out of congressional offices.

HUME: Immune from search.

BIRNBAUM: Immune from search. That just the question is usually there are a lot of niceties about this which are followed.

HUME: But one nicety was followed in this case Mort and that was that the congressman was served a subpoena many, many months ago.

KONDRACKE: Right.

HUME: And?

KONDRACKE: And what has -- one option here would have been for the Justice Department to go to court and get him declared in contempt of court for refusing to answer the subpoena. And they could have arrested him on the street and thrown him in jail until he complied with the subpoena. That would have been perfectly legal.

HUME: And you're suggesting this was not?

KONDRACKE: No, I think this was -- look, I think if this were ever tested in court it would be found legal.

BARNES: Jeff said it was a tradition of not raiding congressmen's offices. Just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it's a tradition. I've never been arrested but people aren't going around saying hey, Fred Barnes has a tradition of not getting arrested.

HUME: We're going to move on to talk about Speaker Hastert in another context in a minute but before we do, let's get some quick reactions to the senate enactment of the immigration bill. We've been saying all week it was going to pass, it was perfectly obvious that it was, it did. It sets up the situation with the house, what do you think, Fred?

BARNES: Well I think senators need to recognize that they're going to have to do a lot of compromising and make a lot of concessions. And the things that were voted down on the house floor are going to need to be resurrected in order to --

HUME: On the senate floor you mean?

BARNES: -- I'm sorry on the senate floor, things that they rejected are going to have to be resurrected --

HUME: Such as?

BARNES: For instance, elements of the Isakson amendment that scheduled -- you know, you have border enforcement first and a couple of years later a temporary workers program and then maybe a year after that a program for --

HUME: They (INAUDIBLE) that the house would accept. Mort, your thoughts?

KONDRACKE: I think it's going to be tough to get that agreement if everybody sticks to its guns. This pass by 62-36 something like that with the majority of the republicans I believe voting for it, which gives it a lot of wind going into the conference.

BIRNBAUM: I think there will be a compromise. The part --

HUME: You think they'll get a bill?

BIRNBAUM: I think they will get a bill. The part they're going to have to fudge on and maybe not including the final bill is the path to citizenship.

HUME: You think the guest worker program is more likely to make it?

BIRNBAUM: That will make it but not what republican conservatives are labeling amnesty.

HUME: When we come back with our panel Speaker Hastert is fighting another battle with "ABC News", we'll talk about that. Good story here in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS: Federal officials tell us the congressional bribery investigation now includes the speaker of the house, Dennis Hastert, based on information from the convicted lobbyists who are cooperating with the government.

The resolution is passed.

ROSS: Justice Department officials describe the 64-year-old Illinois republican as very much in the mix of the corruption investigation.

Do you know for certain that you're not under investigation?

HASTERT: All I know is what the Justice Department said, I'm not under investigation. They said it twice.

Or even in the mix, as "ABC" is reporting?

HASTERT: What's that mean? I don't know. They said I'm not under investigation. I take it for what it's worth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And the Justice Department did say some things about this investigation, a statement was made, issued by the department's spokesman Tasia Scalinas last night and she said, as you can see, "Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department." What about this question, as you heard Brian Ross say that he's in the mix of the investigation. Well, the U.S. attorney said about that that -- that that was also untrue, and this is now what Hastert's attorney has said in a letter today to "ABC NEWS." This statement is false. Talking about the idea that Hastert's under investigation. "And your republication of it after actual knowledge of its falsity constitutes libel and defamation."

That of course carries the possible threat of litigation, libel and defamation of course are actionable -- legally actionable claims that can be made. What about this, "ABC News," some of the headlines on their Web site said under investigation, that's the unmistakable it seems to me reasonable implication of what they're saying. Tonight they're saying well, he's really not a formal target you see but their sources are telling them that the letter he wrote, that we've known about for a couple of years now suggested that it's something that's being looked at. What about this?

KONDRACKE: Remember that -- I mean "ABC" should remember Dan Rather and the Bush National Guard case where they didn't do the right thing and say, you know, we can't prove the story and just get rid of it. What "ABC" is doing is slowly backtracking and trying to clean its skirts and it's not successful. I mean it ought to just say, we accept that the Justice Department has said that the speaker's not under investigation, and until he is, it's over.

BIRNBAUM: I think there were some -- first of all, the report was shrill and hyperbolic.

HUME: It was the lead of their broadcast you can say. And was followed by a Q and A session in which the anchor Elizabeth Vargas was asking Julius Stephanopoulos about what the political implications of this would be and so on.

BIRNBAUM: And he called it potentially seismic is what he said.

HUME: That Stephanopoulos said that.

BIRNBAUM: That's right. Seismic.

BARNES: Earthquake. Used earthquake too.

BIRNBAUM: There were some red flags here that "ABC" didn't see and should have. I'm told by the speaker's office that "ABC" did not call until -- call the (INAUDIBLE) speaker until an hour before the broadcast. And I'm also told that "ABC" did not check for an official response from the Justice Department, which seems sort of basic here, and that might have caused -- if it had a little patience which is a great virtue in journalism, they might have saved themselves a lot of problems today.

BARNES: I think they would have. I talked to people in the Justice Department and they say, among other things, that the initial statement that said Representative Hastert is not under investigation was not a cute one, it wasn't trying to be semantical and just say he was not a subject or a target of the investigation. But I talked to people that are saying he's not under investigation at all in any way. At the moment.

HUME: So that statement was intended to be categorical.

BARNES: A categorical denial. I talked to somebody who was in the room when this was discussed with Bob Mueller, the FBI director, and that's what he said, he just heard wasn't under investigation. Now but there is, you know when you think about it Brit, here's what at least I suspect happened, and that is in the beginning when they started investigating Abramoff and they were 30, 40, I don't know how many members of congress whom he had raised money for, he had met with them in their office and so on, Hastert was one of those. And he'd had a fundraiser for, and they sift through those and then get down to the ones they're actually prosecuting. Now you can say maybe he was under investigation in the beginning but they certainly claim now that he is not one of those who is under investigation now in any way.

KONDRACKE: This is in a way an old story. I mean it's been printed again and again in "Roll Call."

HUME: You mean details of it about the letter --

KONDRACKE: About the letter and all this kind of stuff. There is no quid pro quo, there would have to be that no proven quid pro quo.

HUME: What did happen?

KONDRACKE: What happened was that in 2003 Abramoff threw a fundraiser at his restaurant for Hastert and raised $26,000 at the fundraiser. Shortly thereafter Hastert and a bunch of other members of congress signed a letter to the interior department opposing a casino by a tribe that Abramoff was lobbying against. So in effect --

HUME: In other words they did something that, for whatever reason they did it, Abramoff would like to see done.

KONDRACKE: There was no connection established. What seems to have happened here is that you know Abramoff is trying to cooperate and tossing out information in order to keep himself -- limit his time in prison and is tying himself to all kinds of information in order to keep himself to limited time in prison. And is tying himself to all kinds of people. And whoever the investigator who knows about the Abramoff, what Abramoff has been saying, undoubtedly talked to Brian Ross and Brian Ross ran with it.

HUME: Quickly. Real quick.

BIRNBAUM: Bribery is very difficult to prove and the Justice Department knows that. They're not going to just to investigate anybody.

---

Sponsored Links

About Us | Contact | Advertise | Privacy Policy         © RealClearPolitics 2006