Fund-Raising Probe Shed Little Light, and Now It’s Lights Out
WASHINGTON — No more investigative jaunts to Asia. No more subpoenas or closed-door interrogations. No more hearings stretching from morning until night.
Ding, dong, the Senate’s campaign fund-raising probe is dead.
At its peak, it was the biggest show in town--with bustling office suites near the Capitol, a small army of lawyers and truckloads of evidence to pore over.
But at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigation will officially turn out the lights. Filing cabinets are being cleared out. The sleuths are moving on to less attention-getting pursuits. And the evidence is being summarized into two voluminous reports, one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.
In its wake, the investigation will leave a mixed legacy, say those who conducted the probe, those who were its targets and those who watched from the sidelines.
Virtually all agree that although committee Chairman Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) honed his skills as a young investigator on the Watergate probe of the Nixon administration, this was no Watergate.
After 32 days of hearings, 418 subpoenas, 196 depositions and 70-plus testifying witnesses, nobody has gone to jail as a result of the Senate’s multimillion-dollar inquiry into fund-raising improprieties during recent campaigns, no laws have been changed and no public outcry has surfaced.
“It certainly wasn’t a blockbuster set of hearings,†said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington who testified before the committee as an expert on campaign finance reform. But, Mann said, “The jury is still out†on the impact of the hearings, given that criminal prosecutions are still possible and campaign-finance reform legislation will again be pushed in Congress in 1998.
“I think [the 1996 campaign] will be remembered as the year the regulatory regime for campaign finance collapsed,†Mann said. “That was well reported in the media, but the Thompson committee provided an official forum to register that collapse.â€
At Common Cause, officials welcomed the attention the Senate hearings generated for an issue that the nonprofit group had been struggling to publicize for years.
“History will look on this investigation kindly because it painted a picture and gave a human face to what has been a very serious but abstract problem,†said Ann McBride, Common Cause’s president. “Who can forget Roger Tamraz?â€
For those who have, Tamraz was the controversial oilman who admitted in his testimony that he contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats during the ’96 campaign in order to pitch an overseas pipeline project directly in the president’s ear.
In his committee testimony, Tamraz memorably boasted of his White House access: “If they keep me out of the door, I’ll come through the window.â€
Although his shady reputation--including an Interpol warrant for his arrest--was publicized during the hearings, Tamraz considers the exposure he received so invaluable that he is toying with the idea of becoming a politician himself.
On his new Internet home page (www.Tamraz.com), Tamraz offers holiday greetings and asks viewers to give him advice on whether he ought to run.
Ever since Oct. 31, when Thompson called an end to the hearings, investigators who had been busy tracking fund-raising misdeeds were faced with an additional mystery: Where would they work next?
Jeffrey S. Robbins, the deputy chief counsel for the committee Democrats, has returned to his law firm in Boston. “I both enjoyed it immensely and do not miss it,†Robbins said.
Other staffers have merely moved across the Capitol to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which is conducting its own campaign fund-raising inquiry. The House panel has no official deadline.
The last remaining task for the Senate panel is to issue its report--a tome that insiders say may appeal to policy wonks but will not likely make any bestseller lists.
The White House, which took a beating during the hearings for sloppy fund-raising practices, is not eager to review the Senate’s work. “We have very little interest in the committee’s majority report since we know this is a partisan exercise with not even a pretense of evenhandedness,†said oft-quoted White House special counsel Lanny J. Davis.
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