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American Morning

The Big Question: Is It Fair to Compare Enron to Watergate?

Aired February 11, 2002 - 09:04   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Our big question at this hour, is it fair to compare Enron to Watergate? Well, former Enron CEO Ken Lay says he will go to Washington, but will take the Fifth Amendment when he appears before two Congressional committees. And former White House counsel John Dean raised the question first in an editorial and then on our show on Friday: Is Enron the next Watergate? Dean, you might remember, warned President Nixon that a cancer was growing on the presidency.

He gave us his take on the White House involvement with Enron.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN DEAN, FMR. WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: What this appears, Paula, to me to be is the first step of a cover up. This is the way you start it. You stall, you stall, you stall. You try to get something like this to go on until it is no longer an issue, until something intervenes and replaces it, or the tissue becomes moot for some other reason, and that's the early signal here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: To that, the White House offered this response: "Washington has a typical way of responding to scandals. Mr. Dean's comments are coming from a different planet. The suggestion that the conduct of this administration is similar to the law-breaking that took place under the Nixon administration is not only not factual, but it is insulting. And it appears to be a cry for attention by someone from a different era."

Joining us now to offer his view from Washington, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

Good to see you, welcome back.

PAT BUCHANAN, FMR. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you, Paula.

ZAHN: So what you make of Mr. Dean's comments?

BUCHANAN: I read his two articles last night, and I think John must have had a couple of scotches or something. I used to be a good friend of John's a long time ago.

Paula, he's completely over the top. He said if Mr. Cheney wins his battle in the Supreme Court, not to give out the names over folks he met with, it will be worse than anything bin laden Could do to the United States of America.

Now does anyone seriously think this is on a par with September 11th?

I think John really is sort of filed a brief that he wants to be the lawyer for the GAO. This is simply a dispute between the GAO, which is an arm of Congress, which is subpoenaing -- or going to court to get documents for the constitutional officer, the vice president. This should be settled in the courts, and that's where it's going to be settled.

ZAHN: His argument is that executive privilege should not extend to vice president; it should only pertain to the president. And he says there is a comparison to be made here between what he described as stalling action on the part of Nixon administration and what he sees as stalling tactics by Vice President Cheney. Let's replay that small part of our conversation to revisit.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: Not an indictment at all. All I'm doing is saying if you look at the facts, you look at the practice, that is the way it was done in the past, and it was certainly the way we did it during Watergate was to try to stall everything, and this is a stalling action.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: So he could not point to any evidence of any wrongdoing at this point. He says, "It's just the perception that the vice president is trying to buy time."

BUCHANAN: That's demagogic to do that. Let me say that, clearly, I would agree that the vice president is using stalling tactic. Not only that, but he doesn't want to give up these names. But he does for a good reason. He is a constitutional officer. The GAO, and not the Congress, the GAO is demanding the documents. What the Congress ought to do if it wants these documents, Paula, is issue a subpoena from the Senate of the United States, which is controlled by Congress, and then take the matter to the United States Supreme Court to see if these are privileged documents or not, and settle it that way in the court of law.

But, you know, Mr. Dean said he went back and read Arthur Schlesinger's "Imperial Presidency." So did I last night. And Dwight Eisenhower told Senator McCarthy where he could go with his subpoenas for State Department documents. He would not give up anything even from the departments to the Congress of the United States.

These are constant quarrels, Paula. And I think the vice president is on excellent grounds, but let's let the court decide. Isn't that the right way to go? I mean, I don't call that a cover-up. No one has accused anyone in the administration or the White House of wrongdoing. They threw Enron to the wolves. ZAHN: He -- and once again, he didn't point to any evidence of wrongdoing, but he said he believes that this actually feeds the perception that maybe the Bush administration is hiding something. Let's replay -- can I replay something else for you, and then you can react to another thing he had to say. Let's watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEAN: I don't understand, frankly, why he's taken this hard-line stance he has. It's very difficult for me to accept that this is just matter of principle, because he is going to take a lot of heat for the position he's in, and he's ultimately, I think, going to lose in court, and people are going to say, hey, what is going on here?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And, Pat, even you have to acknowledge, public opinion polls already show that some Americans believe that maybe the vice president or his administration is already hiding something.

BUCHANAN: Well, look, they don't want the -- for whatever reason, they don't want to give up the names of these individuals. But the vice president has made a matter of high principle, and said in effect, go ahead and sue and let's let the courts settle this.

Now it is Mr. Dean, quite frankly, who keeps throwing out this idea that there's something corrupt and something evil when there's no evidence. You know, That used to be called "McCarthyism" in this city, Paula.

When Eisenhower rejected Senator McCarthy's request for the documents, "The New York Times" and "Washington Post" congratulated him. And so what you have is basically a political struggle, a fishing expedition on the part of this little agency, that wants to get these names, feed them out to the press, and say, oh, my goodness, Mr. Cheney met with energy companies in devising an energy policy, and so they can build up public steam and put a lot of smoke out there and hope to get scandal going.

This is a game that's being played against the White House, and I commend Mr. Cheney for taking it to that level. He's saying in effect, go ahead and suspect me, but I'm going to stand on principle, and its time someone did that in this city. And I think 100 percent -- I've worked in White Houses, and there are things that you have to protect if you are going to do the nation's business, and you have an obligation to protect that office.

ZAHN: Pat Buchanan, as always, good to have your perspective. Appreciate your time this morning.

We're going to turn to now to our senior political analyst Bill Schneider, who is in Boston this morning, for his reaction to what we have been talking about with Pat Buchanan.

Good morning.

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning, Paula.

ZAHN: So, Bill, first of all, what did you think of the White House reaction to John Dean's editorial and some of what he said here on A.M.?"

SCHNEIDER: Well, the White House was outraged, and I think they have good cause to be outraged, because their argument is John Dean is adding up two and two and getting seven. Dean's argument -- and I read the same article that Mr. Buchanan referred to on a Web site, a legal Web site. John Dean is making the argument of an attorney, of a lawyer, in which he is saying that really Dick Cheney and the White House, he does not believe have legal grounds to pursue this defense of keeping the information secret. He said the -- in his view, the GAO has a clear-cut legal right to the information it seeks, and therefore, he says, what's the White House doing? They must be covering up a crime. Well, that's leaping to conclusion in a big way. And the White House is very angry about that, predictably.

ZAHN: How do you expect this all to play out?

SCHNEIDER: I expect it to play out in the courts, as Mr. Buchanan said. Dean in his article does indicate that the White House is probably hoping this will go all the way to Supreme Court, and then maybe hoping that the five more conservative justices who put them in office, may decide in their favor in this case, in which case their hope is that they will be able to establish a principle, that the White House will be able to get what they call "unvarnished advice" from outside people when they're formulating a policy, in this case, the energy policy. It's likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court, because it's a basic conflict of interest between two branches of government, between the Congress and the executive branch, and that can only be decided by the Supreme Court.

But the White House argument is, they're standing on principle, they're not hiding anything. You've just cited the polls. People are very suspicious about the way they're behaving. If all Congress wants to know is the names and dates of places of people they met with and they didn't do anything wrong, why not release that information? It's very suspicious sounding.

ZAHN: So what are the chances of someone blinking in advance of this massive fight that could take this case all the way to the Supreme Court?

SCHNEIDER: I don't think anyone is going to blink. No one in the mood to blink, not if the White House insists that it's standing on principle. I mean, the only way that anybody is going to blink is if there is a sudden wall of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, that the White House is stepping on congressional prerogatives, and if the public is outraged by this.

George Bush is very popular right now. We are not in a Watergate period, when people suspect crimes are being committed. Americans are much more interested in the war on terrorism and the recession than they are in political aspects of the Enron controversy, so at this point, I don't think there's a lot of political pressure out there for the White House to give in, even though it is, as I say, it raises lots of clouds of suspicion.

ZAHN: All right, Bill Schneider, good to have you put this into context for us. Appreciate it.

SCHNEIDER: My pleasure.

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