Ghosts of Travelgate

Byron York, the Washington Examiner’s political correspondent, is coming off a few slow weeks by relentlessly hammering the White House over the firing of Americorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, who had been looking into Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson. Today, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) asked for more details on the firing (which no one argues was done too hastily, without consulting Congress), but I’m stuck on York’s last column on why the story matters.

In 1993, just after Bill Clinton was elected and Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, a lone Republican congressman, Rep. Bill Clinger, wanted to investigate the suspicious firings of the White House Travel Office staff. But majority Democrats had no inclination to pursue the matter. Clinger tried and tried, wrote letter after letter, and jumped up and down, but he didn’t begin to get results until after November 1994, when Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.

The Travel Office? Really? To call “Travelgate” a phony scandal is to bring discredit to the concept of “phoniness.” After a seven-year investigation (nearly seven years after five of the fired employees got new federal jobs) all the inspectors discovered about the Travel Office firings was that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made some false statements about how it began. The Americorps story, like that story, might take on momentum, but “Travelgate” is typically and correctly remembered as an example of how politicized scandals can be spun out of nothing. If the Obama administration didn’t realize this before, it really should now.

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