Four Months of Futility

Four months of hard labor by Senate special counsel Peter E. Fleming Jr. and his determined band of assistants have produced absolutely nothing. They were looking--fruitlessly, it turns out--for the source of leaks last fall of Prof. Anita Faye Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The counsel went out of business at the end of April and on Tuesday delivered its unastounding conclusion: “We are unable to identify any source of these disclosures.”

Nothing turned up in hundreds of interviews. Nothing turned up in thousands of pages of documents. This fishing expedition--authorized by the Senate “club”--amounted to nothing more than a colossal waste of time and taxpayers’ money.

We said from the beginning that it was wrong to investigate the messengers. Reporters Timothy Phelps of Newsday and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio properly cited First Amendment protections of press freedom in refusing to answer investigators’ questions about their confidential sources. There was little the special counsel could do but turn to such excessive devices as subpoenaing the telephone records of the University of Oklahoma Law School.

At a time when waste is uppermost in the minds of voters, and when the deficit weighs heavily on the country, the Senate investigators engaged in an expensive exercise aimed at extracting vengeance for some disgruntled Republicans.

This hapless venture ended, predictably, where it had begun--without much of anything to show.