Clinton Leaves Another Legacy
Media Monitor | By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid | July 18, 2000
This story may be at an end, but the full story about Clinton’s use of IGI has still not been told. Is this because the major media are depending on IGI for story ideas and even documents?
We’ve commented that President Clinton’s legacy includes an epidemic of cheating. If the president can cheat on his wife, can’t school kids cheat on their exams? Media such as U.S. News & World Report and ABC’s Nightline have discovered this national cheating problem, never alluding to Clinton’s role in sparking it. Now, Clinton has given us another legacy - the use of private detectives to dig up dirt on our adversaries. In a major disclosure, Oracle Corporation has admitted to using a detective agency to investigate Microsoft. The tactics included paying janitors at the office of Microsoft in D.C. to get documents from the company, and searching through Microsoft’s trash. Microsoft believes that two of its laptop computers were stolen as part of this effort, and documents from those computers were later leaked to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. These papers then ran stories claiming that Microsoft was funding groups to promote its point of view in the media. This was supposed to be a controversial practice. There are several interesting points about this story: Number one, the media apparently received stolen documents and publicized them. Number two, the investigative firm hired by Oracle is the same company hired by President Clinton’s lawyers to investigate his adversaries. It appears that Clinton has left us another legacy—using spies on our fellow citizens. The name of the firm is Investigative Group International, IGI, headed by Terry Lenzner. The firm also includes Larry Potts, the former Director of the Criminal Division of the FBI. Judicial Watch has tried to force Potts and Lenzner to testify in court about what they have done to discredit critics of President Clinton, such as whistleblower Linda Tripp. Lenzner has refused to answer if anyone ever requested him to use FBI files against those critics. Oracle claims it didn’t do anything wrong, but its president and chief operating officer, Raymond Lane, resigned just days after news about the surveillance campaign appeared in the press. However, Oracle also says it didn’t realize that Lenzner’s group would resort to deception and rifling through trash. The groups under investigation included the Independent Institute, the National Taxpayers Union, and the Association for Competitive Technology. They had taken the side of Microsoft in its battle with the federal government. Oracle wanted them investigated to see if they had taken money from Microsoft. It was natural to assume they had, for it is common for companies to put money into advocacy groups that take their side in public policy debates. But this was deemed so serious by Oracle that IGI was hired to search their trash and their offices. The D.C. police claim no laws were broken because trash belongs to anyone who finds it. There’s no word on whether the police investigated whether IGI engaged in breaking-and-entering and actually stole documents or computers. This story may be at an end, but the full story about Clinton’s use of IGI has still not been told. Is this because the major media are depending on IGI for story ideas and even documents? Perhaps the reporters realize they could be the next targets.
Reed Irvine is the former Chairman of Accuracy In Media and Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.
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