The Cox Report: Full of Familiar Embarrassments

For a supposedly top-secret document -- and one that condemns the Clinton administration's inability to keep secrets -- the 700-page Cox report doesn't have many surprises left. Yes, China has stolen the design secrets of no fewer than seven U.S. nuclear warheads from four separate labs; yes, the information was used to dramatically update China's existing arsenal. And yes, the spying began in the 1970s, continued into the Clinton years, and "thefts almost certainly continue to the present." But months of leaks and investigative newspaper stories -- and a 29-page executive summary released Monday night -- have rendered most of the report's would-be bombshells into duds.

That doesn't mean Congress, though, with its sheaf of documentation in tow, will be any less intent on nailing both the Clinton administration (for unpatriotic negligence) and the Chinese (for -- gasp -- espionage!). Janet Reno, no stranger to calls for her resignation, looks likelier than ever to take the fall for denying the FBI a wiretap of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee. And China's Most Favored Nation status, up for renewal by Congress in June, could finally go down as well. (Though, as Beijing correctly points out -- while denying all charges -- the U.S. couldn't have gotten 700 detailed pages together without some serious spying of its own. "The U.S. does as much spying as any other country, or more," reminds TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell.) So it will be up to the Clinton administration to either accept responsibility for the lapses on its watch or lop off enough internal heads to defuse the report's impact -- or a combination of both. Or it could go into major denial mode. "If you're looking at this presidency," said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart Monday, "I can't point to a case where we know something was stolen, we know who did it and we know where it went to and we know where it came from," he said. "That's the bottom line, as disappointing as it may be." It is, Joe, it is.