PRESS 2 STANDARDS ON COKE ISSUE

Candidate Clinton Escaped 'Fair Question' For Bush

Even before GOP front-runner George W. Bush announced his bid for the White
House, the nation's biggest newspaper ran a Page 1 story amplifying rumors
few Americans had heard at the time.

Throughout the lead story, readers were reminded that the charges were just
rumors.

In fact, the words "rumor," "gossip," "innuendo" and "dirt" appeared at
least 30 times to describe what the reporter, Ellen Joan Pollock, didn't
even pretend to confirm - that Bush had somewhere, at some point in his life
snorted cocaine. The 2,500-word Wall Street Journal story offered no proof.

Not long after it ran on May 14, venerable news outlets like ABC News and
The Washington Post advanced the story, spreading the rumors further. Asking
Bush about the coke rumors quickly became a "fair question" for the old media.

"It is a fair question," said Richard Noyes, analyst for the Center for
Media and Public Affairs in Washington. "It's completely fair to ask it, and
it's completely fair to investigate (the rumors)."

Especially since the FBI won't; the president is exempt from White House
background checks. A candidate's drug history also gives voters clues to his
judgment and how he'd enforce U.S. drug laws.

Just asking such a sensitive question can also forever change the public's
view of a candidate. So reporters should take extra care, Noyes says.

"What's unfair is the media have been publishing stories that imply Bush did
drugs in his youth (with) no evidence," Noyes said. "No enemy has come
forward and charged him. No former friend has come forward."

That's a big switch from the 1992 campaign.

The national media had plenty of evidence - including court testimony and
police recordings - that Bill Clinton did coke. Yet they withheld it from
the public. And they never pressed Clinton on the coke issue.

"Several Arkansans, credible or not, have accused Clinton of cocaine use,"
said Media Research Center analyst Tim Graham, citing what he calls a
glaring double standard in coverage.

Some editors now say they dispatched reporters to run down leads. But they
came up empty.

"The (Los Angeles) Times, at my direction, sent four reporters to Arkansas
to investigate. They spent four months pursuing the question," said former
Times national editor Norman Miller. "They found many tantalizing leads -
and all of them collapsed after careful reporting."

Miller added: "No evidence was turned up, o) no story was published."

Miller implies that he counts as "evidence" a lot of similar tales from
credible witnesses.

Specifically, Miller said the team ran down a rumor that then-Gov. Clinton
used coke "because he had socialized with a person who had been convicted of
cocaine dealing."

That person is bond underwriter Danny Ray Lasater, convicted in 1986.

At the time of Lasater's arrest, Clinton told local reporters that Lasater
was just "a person who supported me" in his campaigns. He also said he'd
never been with Lasater in a "social setting." In 1994, Clinton claimed he
barely knew Lasater.

That's at odds with the testimony of state troopers who served on Clinton's
security detail and were subpoenaed in separate Lasater drug cases.

Cpl. Barry Spivey, for one, recalled "flying on Dan Lasater's Lear jet . . .
to the Kentucky Derby, the governor and I and Dan" in May 1983. He added:
"There (were) other times that Gov. Clinton took flights with Dan."

Witnesses who flew aboard Lasater's six-seat jet told the FBI of coke-filled
ashtrays.

Another trooper, Larry D. Brown, said he escorted Clinton to one of
Lasater's parties at his apartment in Little Rock, Ark. Brown says he
ushered Clinton out when the trooper saw a silver plate of coke being passed
around. Witnesses told the FBI they'd done coke at Lasater's apartment.

Clinton pardoned Lasater in November 1990.

Association doesn't spell guilt. But Lasater (whose former aide worked as a
top Clinton White House official before moving to the State Department)
wasn't the only coke felon Clinton socialized with back in Arkansas. There
was also half-brother Roger Clinton. He and other witnesses said Bill
Clinton used coke.

Roger Clinton, convicted in 1984, was a coke addict who also sold
quarter-pounds of the drug.

In April 1984, Hot Springs police Detective Travis Bunn recorded Roger
Clinton trying some coke and saying: "I've got to get some for my brother.
He's got a nose like a Hoover vacuum cleaner."

Then there's federal drug informant Sharlene Wilson.

Testifying before a Saline County, Ark., grand jury in December 1990, Wilson
swore that, in 1979, she sold Roger Clinton two grams of coke near the
ladies' room of a Little Rock nightclub called Le Bistro. She said Roger
handed some to Gov. Clinton, who was also at the club.

"I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall. He casually stuck my
tooter (coke paraphernalia) up his nose," Wilson later told a British
reporter. "He slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat there."

Jane Parks, a resident manager of a Little Rock apartment complex where
Roger Clinton lived in the summer of 1984, recalls Gov. Clinton stopping by
routinely.

Parks claims she could hear the brothers partying in unit B107 through an
adjoining wall. She claims she could make out the governor talking about
coke. Parks says that when Roger moved out, she found coke on the furniture
and drug paraphernalia in a kitchen drawer.

Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who says she had an affair with
Clinton, swore that in late 1983, the governor pulled out a small bag of
coke in her living room, shook its contents onto a table and cut a line.

"He had all the equipment laid out, like a real pro," she recalled.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz doesn't think Perdue's account is
"credible."

He said, "Sally Perdue was somebody who most journalists didn't take seriously."

But another Clinton mistress, Gennifer Flowers, has said Clinton told her he
did coke. (Under oath, Clinton admitted to a sexual affair with Flowers.)

In December 1978, Clinton gave a keynote speech at a Democratic awards
banquet in Little Rock. Guests recall he was unusually animated, waving his
arms wildly and ranting.

"He was out of control . . . wired," said a former Democratic supporter who
was seated at the table next to Clinton. "I have never seen him give a
speech like that."

Stunned, the observer, who wishes to go unnamed, turned to a state official
in the next seat and asked: "What's wrong?" The observer says Peggy Tucker,
then-executive director of the Arkansas Racing Commission, replied: "He just
snorted cocaine."

Tucker, a longtime Clinton insider, denies the account. She explained that
Clinton "had just been elected and was excited." Tucker, who claims Clinton
doesn't even drink, did recall meeting with Clinton before the speech.

Indeed, rumors that Clinton dabbled in coke while governor were
"widespread," said Meridith Oakley, an editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Yet no one in the national press put the coke question to Clinton in 1992.

An Arkansas reporter in October 1986 asked Clinton if he'd ever used coke.
"No," Clinton replied. "I'm not sure that I would know what it looks like if
I saw it."

Clinton also denied smoking pot several times when asked by the press in the
late 1980s and early 1990s -before finally confessing under more precise
questioning in May 1992.

In contrast, the prestige press, going on pure gossip, hasn't stopped
quizzing Bush about coke.

"We need to ask the cocaine question," Washington Post reporters bluntly
told Bush in their recent interview.

Why? The Post never plied Clinton.

One reason is that Bush won't answer it, which just chums the water for more
questions. All other candidates in the race, including Vice President Al
Gore, have denied using coke (though they were asked after Bush).

That still doesn't explain why Bush was singled out early for such a tough
and unprecedented question. Noyes finds it odd, especially when "they had
more information (on Clinton) than is available in the Bush case."

Despite dispatching teams of investigative reporters to dig up coke stories
on Bush, the national press has come up dry.

Even Bush's Yale classmate and Houston roommate "never saw Bush use illegal
drugs," the Post story reported in a single sentence tucked away in its
seven-part series, which began in July.

"That should have been the lead" sentence in that story, Noyes said.

Texas Monthly also did an expose on the Texas governor. It also came up
short on the coke issue.

"In truth, the loose talk about Bush may be somewhat exaggerated," the
Austin-based magazine said.

Noyes can't dismiss media bias.

One poll showed 89% of Washington reporters voted for Clinton in 1992,
compared with just 43% of the electorate. Other polls show most reporters
are overwhelmingly Democrat.

"There's still some residual anti-Republican bias in the media from the
election of the Congress in 1994," Noyes said. "That got a lot of reporters
concerned that some 'incorrect' social policies were going to start being
enacted unless there was some galvanized opposition."

With Bush trouncing Gore in the polls, many fear he could pull off the rare
marriage of a GOP Congress with a GOP White House.

Reporters' "friendly" sources are telling them "bad things are coming if
Republicans take over," Noyes said.

"That is hogwash," Kurtz said.

"Most reporters are not terribly ideological. Nor do I believe Bush is being
subjected to this cocaine question because he's a Republican," he said.
"It's more a reflection of a feeding-frenzy media culture."

In just the last couple of weeks, the networks have aired nearly a dozen
stories on Bush and the coke rumors, Noyes says. Allegations of Clinton
using coke have never made it on the evening news.

TV news even dismissed former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich's charges
that many Clinton staffers used hard drugs like coke, LSD, speed, even
crack. Some admitted to recent drug use, he said, yet were still allowed
access to the White House.

There is also a new allegation that Clinton, who insists on keeping his
medical records secret, snorted cocaine while in the White House -
specifically in the East Wing theater, where he, staffers and friends are
known to regularly watch movies.

"We have it on extremely reliable authority that according to the Secret
Service, the president has used cocaine in the White House theater," said
Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman. "The impression is that it (Clinton's
alleged coke use) continues to this day."

He would not elaborate other than to say Clinton was observed allegedly
snorting coke with others. Klayman's source is a new, walk- in client of
Judicial Watch, a public-interest law firm suing the White House over
several scandals.

The White House counsel's office spokesman, Jim Kennedy, has denied that
Clinton has ever used cocaine.

After all that, there's a White House connection to the Bush rumors.

Last year, on the day Clinton went before the grand jury probing the
Clinton-Lewinsky case, former White House aide Lanny Davis went on MSNBC and
suggested Bush had skeletons in his closet. Davis was in Bush's Yale fraternity.

Another Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, egged
on reporters in August to "find out whether he (Bush) is telling the truth."