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Subject: Dirty Tricks Charged By Perot; Bush Camp Denies Allegations; Texan Offers No
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 92 04:30:31 EST
Message-ID: <33.1992Oct26.043031@AmeriCast.com>

Dirty Tricks Charged By Perot; Bush Camp Denies Allegations; Tex-
an Offers No Evidence<By Eric Pianin and John Mintz<Washington
Post Staff Writers<

Ross Perot, hitting the campaign trail for the first time since
reentering the presidential race, charged in two speeches and in
interviews that President Bush's campaign engaged in dirty
tricks, including efforts to wiretap his Dallas office and to
doctor a photograph so it would embarrass his daughter.  Perot
said he dropped out of the presidential race in July to spare his
daughter Caroline from humiliation and to avoid what he feared
would be a disruption of her Aug. 23 wedding. He claimed that he
later learned that the Bush-Quayle campaign organization subse-
quently tried to wiretap and manipulate some of his businesses'
international communications in an effort to ruin him financially
and prevent him from rejoining the campaign.

The allegations are the latest in a series of highly speculative
and derogatory charges Perot has leveled against Bush and his
campaign organization, even as Perot has surged in voter prefer-
ence polls in the presidential race. He made the latest charges
yesterday at rallies in Flemington, N.J., and Pittsburgh, as well
as in interviews earlier with the Boston Sunday Herald and CBS's
"60 Minutes." But Perot offered no evidence to substantiate his
charges and acknowledged that one of his sources was a man
government investigators said often has promoted unprovable
tales.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater and Bush-Quayle campaign
aides dismissed Perot's allegations as "preposterous" and "total
nonsense."

"There's simply nothing to it," Fitzwater told reporters yester-
day. "It never happened. There haven't been any dirty tricks
against Ross Perot. This business about his daughter is just cra-
zy, and he's been told that, and he knows that."

At the time he abandoned his initial quest for the presidency
July 16, Perot said he had concluded he could not win in November
and that his continued presence in the race would only "disrupt
the political process." He also said the Democratic Party "has
revitalized itself."

Perot aides and former campaign officials, however, said the real
reasons he quit were that he hated being criticized by the news
media, could not stomach taking part in what he believes are the
phony exercises of presidential campaigning and disliked putting
his family through the ordeal of public scrutiny.

Democratic candidate Bill Clinton, who yesterday sharpened his
attack on Perot in response to the Texan's rise in the polls,
seized on Perot's allegations of dirty tricks, as well as earlier
stories that Perot had investigated the Bush children.

"So now we've got this bizarre situation where Bush and Perot
have accused each other of investigating each other's children,"
he said in Saginaw, Mich. "I want to tell you something, folks. I
want to investigate your children - their problems, their prom-
ise, their future. . . . "

At a rally in Pittsburgh, Perot told 2,000 supporters: "I could
not allow my daughter's happiest day of her life . . . to be
ruined because of people who will do anything to win. . . . I
realized this was a risk I did not have to take . . . and I
stepped back." Later in his 40-minute speech he returned to the
episode saying, "I cannot prove any of that happened. I just got
these reports. But it was a risk I could not take."

In the "60 Minutes" interview last night, Perot acknowledged that
one of his sources about the supposed Republican dirty tricks was
Scott Barnes, a former Inglewood, Calif., police officer
described by government investigators as a publicity seeker who
tries to interest news organizations and government agencies in
bizarre stories about his supposed secret work for intelligence
agencies.

In an interview with The Washington Post in June, Perot said
Barnes dispenses many unprovable stories about supposedly living
U.S.  prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Perot described Barnes
as a "mystery box," and added that Barnes telephones him periodi-
cally with offbeat information.  Orson Swindle, executive direc-
tor of the Perot-Stockdale campaign, said on NBC's "Meet the
Press" yesterday that "if Mr. Perot said it happened, you can put
it in a book."

During the third and final presidential debate last Monday, Perot
accused "the Republican dirty tricks group" of going to "extraor-
dinary sick lengths" to destroy his and his family's reputation.
Perot also has alleged many times that GOP dirty tricks opera-
tives were the source of information in news stories critical of
Perot, even when they were not the source. One example was an ar-
ticle in The Post in June reporting that Perot had investigated
Bush's private finances in the late 1980s.

In his interviews with the Boston Herald and "60 Minutes," Perot
said he decided to drop out after two Republican sources informed
him in June about efforts by GOP operatives to "smear" his
daughter with a fake photograph produced through computerized im-
aging.

"I received multiple reports that there was a plan to embarrass
her before her wedding, and to actually have people in the church
at the wedding to disrupt her wedding," Perot told "60 Minutes."

"I finally concluded that I, as a father who adores his children,
could not take that risk. And, since the wedding was on a finite
date, I made the decision that I would step aside."

Perot said he did not know how his daughter's wedding might have
been disrupted but told the Herald: "Watch how they disrupt ral-
lies; watch how they tried to disrupt the Democratic convention.
. . . They got a bunch of neo-Nazis there that do this kind of
stuff."

Perot also asserted that after dropping out, he obtained a video-
tape of a meeting on a park bench in Dallas between a former CIA
contract employee and a "very senior person in the Bush campaign"
discussing a plan to wiretap Perot's office.  Perot declined to
identify the Bush campaign official or the former CIA operative,
other than to say he was from Arizona and had had a falling out
with the intelligence community. Barnes is from Arizona and
claims to have been in the CIA.

Perot said that while on vacation in Bermuda, he sent the video-
tape to the FBI. A spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington
said yesterday, "We have no comment on that at this time."

In August, the FBI in Dallas looked into allegations that someone
had bugged Perot's office telephones and then offered the alleged
tape recordings to Bush's campaign chairman in Texas. The probe
stemmed from allegations made by Barnes that the Bush-Quayle cam-
paign had hired him to bug Perot's phones.

To check out Barnes's claim, the FBI asked Perot to make a tape
recording of his voice and then sent an undercover agent to see
James Oberwetter, the Texas chairman of the Bush-Quayle campaign,
in a sting operation, CBS reported last night. The agent told
Oberwetter that he was working with Barnes and they had a tape of
Perot they were willing to provide the campaign - an offer
Oberwetter refused.  Yesterday a Bush-Quayle spokesman said cam-
paign officials were notified informally by the FBI that the in-
vestigation turned up no evidence of a wiretap.

At Perot's first campaign rally since rejoining the race, a crowd
of about 12,000 cheered him at a stock car raceway in the rural
town of Flemington, N.J. They held signs saying, "Now there's a
choice," and chanted, "We want Ross."

"If you were going into combat, which one (of the three candi-
dates) would you want by your side?" he said. "I've laid $60 mil-
lion on the table so you can have a voice in your country."

"Thank you," the crowd chanted in reply.

In Pittsburgh, one Perot supporter said he was pleased to hear
the candidate's explanation for dropping out in July. Arden Ald-
erman, a management consultant from Salem, Ohio, said, "This has
troubled some people and it needed to be cleared up. This was ex-
actly what we wanted to hear."<Staff writer Jonathan Freedland in
Pittsburgh contributed to this report.<02:27 10-26C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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