Crying Wolf
April 13th, 2007The great tragedy of the Clinton Impeachment was that it was in a very real way self-inflicted. The Republicans were looking to Impeach him and the case they formed was nonsense and wouldn’t even meet the high crimes and misdemeanors standard in Texas, but he did it to himself and he knows that to be true. By lying to the Independent Counsel about Lewinsky when he should’ve known that he was being asked for a very real reason, he made his own trial and damaged a fair Presidency, perhaps beyond repair.
Now Paul Wolfowitz is in the same boat after he transfered his girlfriend to the State Department and keep her on the payroll.
The events injected a new ugliness into what had already been a bitter rift between Mr. Wolfowitz and many of the bank’s employees, who have questioned his suitability for the job as a former deputy secretary of defense and architect of the Iraq war, and have challenged many of his policies at the bank, especially those cracking down on corruption in which he suspended aid to several countries without consulting the board. The World Bank’s 24-member executive board, the body that elected Mr. Wolfowitz to the job after he was nominated by President Bush in 2005, held hurried meetings throughout the day amid mounting speculation that it might reprimand him or ask him to resign.
But shortly after 10 p.m. a bank official released a statement from Mr. Wolfowitz to the board members saying that “in the interests of transparency,” he was requesting the “immediate public release of all documents related to the board’s current review of the case involving myself and Ms. Riza.” The statement appeared to reflect a concern by the bank president that he was being tarred by selective leaks. The board was also reported to be meeting late into the evening over what further information to make public about the matter. Whatever the outcome, the controversy appeared certain to produce more meetings and engulf delegates at the annual spring session of finance ministry officials in Washington, sponsored by the bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Wolfowitz apologized at a morning news conference and at the atrium meeting after the staff association disclosed that it had found a dated memorandum from Mr. Wolfowitz to a vice president for human resources at the bank, apparently instructing him to agree to the terms of a raise and reassignment for Ms. Riza. The transfer and a subsequent raise eventually took her to a pay of $193,590 from $132,660, tax-free because of her status as a diplomat, and exceeding the salaries of cabinet members. “In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations,” Mr. Wolfowitz said.
“I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he added, pleading for “some understanding” of the “painful personal dilemma” he faced when he left the Pentagon to become bank president. Mr. Wolfowitz said he had been seeking to avoid a conflict of interest by having Ms. Riza, with whom he had a personal relationship, transferred from his supervision. What drove the anger at the bank was not that Mr. Wolfowitz had denied earlier that he had sought Ms. Riza’s transfer, but that he had been less than fully candid in discussing it until documents surfaced showing his direct role. His earlier insistence that he had consulted with ethics officials was disputed by some of them, who say they were not involved in the salary aspect of discussions.
Shame, it is, because he’s been a fairly good and effective President of the World Bank and now the Bank faces a crisis that it shouldn’t have to face, there’s further bad press in the world on American diplomats, and Bush might very well have to appoint someone new that won’t be anywhere near as qualified as Paul Wolfowitz.
Donald Rumsfeld, is, after all, looking for work.