No Smoking Cigar
Sunday's New York Times gave front-page, above-the-fold billing to a story by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jill Abramson on the legal arm of the vast right-wing conspiracy. It's a shoddy piece of work.

The story includes a lot of allegations and half-allegations, but here's the main one: Jerome Marcus, a conservative lawyer "with ties to the Jones legal team"- i.e., he filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Jones v. Clinton- tipped off a friend in Ken Starr's office about the Lewinsky affair "at least a week" before Linda Tripp called. Marcus and two other conservative lawyers helped Mrs. Tripp find a lawyer and conferred with Tripp's friend Lucianne Goldberg about how to get her information to Starr.

That's it: basically, one phone call. Starr's office did nothing about it. Van Natta and Abramson quote Starr spokesman Charles Bakaly III: "A person in our office did get a heads-up call that some information may be coming or may be out there. And this person was instructed that we accept information through the front door, and that the appropriate person to contact is Jackie Bennett, the Washington deputy." Only when Mrs. Tripp called Bennett bearing tapes was any action taken.

Van Natta and Abramson repeatedly note that the phone call was "not disclosed" in Starr's request to the Justice Department to expand his investigation or in his report last month. Of course it wasn't; it was irrelevant. But look at the sandcastle of speculation the Times builds on this foundation: "The tip in early January indicates that the independent counsel's office could have been developing a strategy to persuade the Justice Department to expand the scope of the stalled Whitewater inquiry before the call from Mrs. Tripp." The "could have been" isn't nearly good enough cover: the tip "indicates" nothing of the sort. Van Natta and Abramson produce zero evidence to support this accusation.

Instead, they produce more insinuations-in fractured English: "[T]he role of go-between played by a group of conservative lawyers with ties to the Jones case created an early and previously undisclosed back-channel between Mr. Starr's office and Mrs. Tripp." The implication of words like "go-between" and "back-channel" is a two-way flow of communication. But all Starr's office told Marcus was: brush off.

The story does not gain credibility by repeating the falsehood that Starr helped the conservative Independent Women's Forum file a brief in the Jones case. It's no surprise when Roll Call keeps peddling this story, but for the New York Times to report it is surprising-especially since the Times has acknowledged more than once that it isn't true.

Foreign Affairs
"[W]hat if [Linda] Tripp had taken those tapes to Chinese or Iranian diplomats instead of Kenneth Starr?" That's the arresting question John Fund poses in Monday's Wall Street Journal. In what most be the most troubling passage of Starr's report, Mr. Clinton is said to have told Miss Lewinsky that he suspected that a foreign embassy might be tapping their phones and to have proposed "cover stories": they knew they were being taped, "and the phone sex was just a put-on." As Fund observes, this bizarre exchange is of a piece with the lax security procedures of this White House. The fact that Miss Lewinsky was given a position with top-secret security clearance at the Pentagon is just more evidence of this. The president allowed himself to be threatened by Miss Lewinsky. She was a security risk. So is he.