ALL right, we can’t squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube over the FBI’s screw-up on Timothy McVeigh.
But could you imagine if New York City cops dropped the ball as the FBI did, how loud Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would be screaming for a federal monitor?
There is a reason for her silence.
Her husband’s Janet Reno presided over an ongoing cultural breakdown of the FBI. Consider the following:
* She treated FBI Director Louis Freeh as if he were her gardener and shattered top-level morale.
* She was at the helm over the disaster of Waco, which reportedly triggered McVeigh’s crime of the century.
* She handled the Wen Ho Lee case like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
* She kidnapped little Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint.
But Reno’s “collateral damage,” as McVeigh would say, is just as disturbing.
She created a climate that is reflected in the FBI’s travesty.
No, those 3,150 pages the feds didn’t turn over in the McVeigh case won’t change his guilt, which he has shouted from the rooftops. However, it does fuel hand-wringing liberals in their campaign against the death penalty.
Former talk show host Phil Donahue, a pathological liberal, waved the banner yesterday on “Meet the Press.”
“I think it [the death penalty] reduces our image in the world . . . Timothy McVeigh’s case is Exhibit A.”
Conservative Pat Buchanan responded to Donahue: “McVeigh should be dead by now . . . his case has taken longer than World War II.”
Ever since J. Edgar Hoover went to a higher office, the FBI has increasingly been a politicized fiefdom of those who consider themselves elite – arrogant models for Brooks Brothers who can’t find their ears with their hands.
Some agents – I stress the word some – couldn’t shine the shoes of New York City cops.
The FBI’s mistake of omission in the McVeigh case certainly was not by commission. In fairness, it was the feds themselves who fessed up.
But the long-term result could be devastating. Every tin-pot, ambulance-chasing criminal lawyer will be using this to get every crook off the hook, not to mention the monstrosity of McVeigh dodging the needle.
And the death penalty, the will of the people, will be threatened.
The Phil Donahues of the world would have McVeigh doing life.
Oh, what a great idea. He is a celebrity now, and Donahue would make him a lifetime celebrity like Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan.
Great torture for the families of those who were slaughtered on April 19, 1995.
If the FBI’s unwitting blunder fuels a liberal fire that somehow can never be extinguished, then it’s about time they hopped on a train and came to New York’s police academy to get a little bit of on-the-job advice.
Maybe Hillary will pay for it.