John Podesta's Ethics

Over at NRO, Byron York has a piece on the efforts John Podesta's new liberal think tank has undertaken to attack Tom DeLay on ethics charges. Given Podesta's involvement in obstruction of justice as Bill Clinton's deputy chief of staff, he as no business impugning anyone's ethics.

After a variety of scandals came to light involving Ron Brown and the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration, Judicial Watch filed Freedom of Information requests for documents. After being stonewalled, Judicial Watch filed suit to compel the production of the relevant documents. As Federal District Judge Royce Lamberth described in these opinions available here, the Clinton Administration responded with a cover-up that involved the illegal shredding of documents, the illegal removal of documents from offices, lying under oath, lying by government lawyers and other officials to the Court and various other offenses amounting to obstruction of justice and other felonies. The obstruction efforts included Commerce Department officials, lawyers from the Inspector General's office, the Justice Department, White House lawyers and the White House chief of staff and his deputy. John Podesta was that deputy.

In describing the sworn testimony implicating Podesta, Judge Lambert wrote:

On March 23, 1998, Hill appeared before this Court and gave extensive testimony as to her knowledge, gained from communications with Secretary Brown, relating to this action.(6) Upon examination by Mr. Klayman, Hill testified that the Secretary told her that White House officials had actually instructed him to delay the production of documents responsive to Judicial Watch's requests and to come up with a way to avoid compliance with this Court's orders. See Transcript of March 23, 1998 Hearing at 85. Hill vividly recalled the Secretary's comment that Leon Panetta (then White House Chief of Staff) had urged him to "slow pedal" the document search. See id. at 85-86. According to Hill, this message was conveyed to Secretary Brown by Panetta and by John Podesta (then White House Deputy Chief of Staff) on several occasions. See id. at 85-88.