House Judiciary Panel Chairman Orders Study of Impeachment Process

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said Sunday he has ordered a study of impeachment procedures in case a “smoking gun” emerges in the White House fund-raising controversy, but a leading House Democrat called talk of such proceedings “preposterous.”

“We are studying the laws of impeachment, the procedures of impeachment,” committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) said on the “Fox News Sunday” TV program, although he stressed that he has no reason to think the furor over fund-raising practices employed by the White House will escalate to that point.

Another Republican, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, did his part to intensify the heat on the White House, charging that the Clinton administration knew well in advance of the 1996 election of alleged Chinese efforts to illegally funnel money to U.S. politicians. Despite that knowledge, he said, White House and Democratic Party officials continued to rely on fund-raisers with ties to Chinese business interests.

The White House has said neither the president nor his senior aides learned of the allegations until earlier this year. Hatch, appearing on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” disputed that, though he offered no evidence to support his claim.

Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee Chairman Roy Romer called on his GOP counterpart, James Nicholson, to agree to a ban on all “soft-money” contributions to their respective parties, starting today. Such donations--largely unregulated contributions that are not supposed to directly benefit a candidate and frequently involve large sums, have been at the center of much of the current controversy.

Nicholson dismissed the offer, making it clear that he and other GOP leaders want to focus on whether Democrats broke any laws in their 1996 fund-raising, not reforming the existing donation system.

Hyde’s remarks came two days after Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) said he had written to the Judiciary Committee chairman asking for a meeting of the panel to discuss whether campaign fund-raising activities by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore warranted impeachment proceedings.

“Right now, it’s a little bit of a stretch. I would like to have some evidence” before moving ahead on any impeachment procedures, Hyde said.

“That is a drastic, draconian remedy,” he added, saying he would want to see “at least one smoking gun before we proceed with impeachment” proceedings of any sort.

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Still, he made a point of saying he had asked the committee staff to study the laws and procedures governing the impeachment process to stay “ahead of the curve” in case the issue ever seriously comes up.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who appeared on the CBS program, dismissed the impeachment talk, saying it was merely an effort by some Republicans to “get even for Watergate, but they don’t have the basis for it.”

“That’s really a preposterous idea,” Waxman said. “What it really shows is the agenda that some Republicans have, and that’s so partisan, it’s so extreme.”

Hatch, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, made his remarks in response to earlier claims by the White House that the president was never informed about FBI warnings last June that the Chinese were trying to funnel large sums of money into U.S. political campaigns.

It was recently disclosed that the FBI warnings were given to several members of Congress as well as to two mid-level members of the president’s National Security Council, but that those staffers did not pass on the information to higher-ups.

The White House has blamed “miscommunication” between the FBI and the two staff members for the failure of the warning to be passed along, but Hatch scoffed at this explanation.

“I don’t believe any of that,” he said. “Since 1995, the FBI has told the State Department, the CIA, the Justice Department, both intelligence committees of the House and the Senate . . . that the Chinese were trying to buy influence in this country. . . . This administration knew that these attempts were being made. And that’s what makes it mind-boggling.”

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry told reporters that Hatch’s assertions were “not consistent” with the administration’s view of what happened. McCurry said he was “not sure whether the senator is hyperventilating,” but urged Hatch to present any facts he has.

Romer, in making his soft-money proposal, said he thought that if the two parties’ national committees were to take such a step together, there would be “substantial pressure” on other parts of the campaigning-financing system to follow.

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“We can . . . really lead America,” he said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “There were things that went wrong [in campaign financing during the last election] in both parties.”

“Right now, this country says, ‘Give us a solution,’ ” he said.

Romer, who also serves as governor of Colorado and has been pushing for campaign finance reform since assuming his DNC job earlier this year, said: “There is too much money in politics today, and something needs to be done.”

In rejecting the proposal, Nicholson argued, “The first thing that we want to do is to get after what laws were broken, and what we’re going to do about that. . . . We have a responsibility to the people for the enforcement of the rule of law.”