Prosecutors Wanted Dale Indicted Before '94 Elections

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, June 26) -- It's been a bad day for the Clinton Administration. As House Republicans were roasting White House aides over the FBI file flap for what they said was either rank incompetence or devious criminality, in the background simmering was a new and related revelation that federal prosecutors wanted to indict former White House travel director Billy Dale before the 1994 mid-term elections.

That charge emerged from just-released FBI e-mail messages. The messages, obtained by congressional Republicans, date from fall 1994, when Dale was indicted. One reads: "I contacted Jane who advised that she was advised by (FBI special agent) Pam Bombardi, that (Department of Justice) trial attorney Stuart Goldberg had stated that she was to 'do the indictment before the elections, probably on Oct. 4, 1994," FBI employee Gregory Meacham wrote to a colleague by e-mail.

If not a smoking gun, this cryptic correspondence has fed into Republican suspicion of an administration plot to fire Dale and his six longtime travel office colleagues on politically motivated charges. "Since when do indictments hinge on election dates?" House Government Reform and Oversight Committee chairman William Clinger (R-Penn.) asked earlier today.

Adding to conspiracy theories, one FBI agent interviewed by Senate Republicans said he was pressured by top Clinton aides for confidential information on Dale.

The administration has maintained the travel workers were fired for sloppy management and wrongdoing. All were acquitted of criminal charges, and President Bill Clinton later apologized for the administration's handling of the affair. But Republicans haven't dropped the matter, suspicious that Hillary Clinton has been covering up her role in the firings, and believing the White House may have illegally abused the FBI and the IRS in an effort to install political cronies in the travel office.

Republicans are also chewing over reports that the White House has compiled an extensive database containing intimate details on reporters, members of Congress and political contributors. Aides defended it as something "every White House has," but Republicans aren't so sure.

"I think that spending the kind of money that they have spent to buy this computer system in a very secret way to compile data on members of Congress, the media and others is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer funds," fumed Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Prosecutors Wanted Dale Indicted Before '94 Elections

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