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Starr's Grand (Self-)Illusion
President Clinton's rope-a-dope strategy in handling slugger Kenneth Starr has become unbearable to watch. The executive privilege fight waged by the White House, with Clinton at first declining to even acknowledge it, was silly, especially given what is at the heart of this tussle. Claiming attorney-client privilege for a conversation between the President and a taxpayer-funded White House lawyer on a personal matter was iffy. And there remains that Clinton promise to explain his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. It's stuck to his shoe like a piece of toilet paper, and he keeps on ignoring it. But as aggravating as the President's behavior has been since Monica started her public path to Vanity Fair pin-up, it still ranks behind that of Kenneth Starr, Lawyer-Warrior.
Last week, Starr continued on his course to make all of us pay for the mess Clinton cooked up. He trundled into the Supreme Court--where he'll never sit in a robe, as he once hoped--and, in his relentless pursuit of Clinton, sought to obtain a decision that could affect you and me. He asked the court to force Vince Foster's lawyer to turn over notes of a conversation he held with Foster before the White House lawyer killed himself in 1993. Starr's reasoning: attorney-client privilege does not cover a dead man. As scores of legal experts pointed out, if Starr succeeds, people will be hindered in speaking candidly with their attorneys. The what-ifs are obvious. Assume a terminally-ill woman wants to discuss sensitive family matters with a lawyer in drawing up a will? How freely could she talk, if an attorney said, "Thanks to Kenneth Starr, anything you say can and may become public should some government official with subpoena power ask for it"?
There seems to be little modulation in Starr's style. He has one gear: get 'em. Perhaps he should be reminded that he is not hunting Nazis. Is the Foster case worth rewriting privacy law? Even some conservatives have concluded Starr's gone above-and-beyond. Clint Bolick, vice-president of the deeply conservative Institute for Justice, questioned this slice of Starr's jihad. "I'd love to see Ken Starr get to the bottom of this [scandal]," Bolick commented. "But there's certain things that we've got to be very, very careful about, things like attorney-cleint privilege....I think we've got to honor those principles even if they get in the way of going after the President...There's got to be a realm of privacy in this country." Referring to the next time a conservative is nominated for a high-profile government job, he added, "I mean, do we want that person's library records [and] video records [examined]?" Bolick was cautioning his fellow rightists: Live by the Starr, die by the Starr
But the problem with Starr is not merely that he's overly zealous. He is also a self-righteous hypocrite. Not too long ago, he took a day off to deliver a speech to the Mecklenberg County Bar Association in North Carolina. The address contained a few not-too-hidden jabs at Clinton, as Starr pointedly referenced the unsuccessful legal manuevers of the President's team. It is unseemly for a prosecutor to be conducting this sort of public spite-fight. Yes, the President's henchmen and henchwomen beat up Starrr whenever they can. But criminal targets are less encumbered than government prosecutors--as they should be--and prosecutors ought to do their talking with indictments and evidence. (Neither should they be leaking to reporters, while posing as models of probity.)
What made this latest Starr speech so special was how high-and-mighty he sounded. Drawing from the work of Stephen Carter of Yale Law School, Starr bemoaned that "Americans have lost their sense of civility" and that "many believe that they should be able to act selfishly in whatever manner that suits their immediate interests, regardless of the effect on others." Starr sadly informed the lunching lawyers that attorneys--who are portrayed in pop culture as "greedy and unethical people who hock their services...to the highest bidder"--have become part of the problem. He wrung his hands over the legal profession's "apparent loss of respect for the truth." He decried the fact that "a good many lawyers have decided to pay less than scrupolous regard for the truth in the service of their clients." He declared that truth must be "the primary goal of our judicial system," that "lawyers have a duty not to use their skills to impede the search for truth." And he went on and on: "The lawyer-statesman has virtually disappeared." He gloomily noted that the "legal profession has become a business."
Amen, Brother Starr. But there is a slight problem. You. Starr is wearing the suit he criticizes. With a clientele that includes General Motors, Bell Atlantic, Dean Witter, Hughes Aircraft, and the tobacco industry, he epitomizes law as big business. And tell us, Counselor, do these clients--particularly the tobacco companies--pay you to pursue the truth? Or to save their rears?
The hypocrisy goes beyond this obvious cheap shot. In June of 1996, Starr appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of Hughes, which had been accused by a whistleblower of defrauding the Air Force. He argued that the federal whistleblower law involved in this case should be held unconstitutional. (The Court ended up ruling for Hughes on a technicality.) Years earlier, though, when Starr was Solicitor General in the Bush Justice Department, he had refused to okay a White House attempt to declare this same law unconstitutional. He later boasted that saying no to the White House in this instance had been an act of principle for him. Well, it certainly looks as if Starr changed his view of that principle in order to serve a client and pocket a heap of corporate moolah.
And there's more. Starr and his rake-it-in law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, have a specialty: representing corporate clients who try to avoid disclosure of critical information regarding defective products. That is, they defend companies who want to smother the truth to limit their liability. For instance, when the wife of a man severely injured when his Suzuki Samurai rolled over during an accident sued Suzuki, the company vigorously opposed handing over documents related to the car's safety. The company went so far that an U.S. appeals court sanctioned it for having "engaged in an unrelenting campaign to obfuscate the truth." To take the case to the Supreme Court, Suzuki turned to...Kenneth Starr. Unfortunately for Starr, the Court wouldn't hear the case, and Suzuki had to settle. But in this instance Starr was hardly billing Suzuki for efforts to make public the truth about the Samurai.
When GM was sued by two people severely burned when a GM pickup truck caught fire following a collision, the company, represented by Starr, ferociously fought the plaintiff's atempts to obtain documents regarding the truck. The judge called it "a discovery war of unprecedented magnitude." When it became clear that GM would have to turn over the information, it settled the case, on condition of confidentiality. (How's that for promoting truth?) And when a former GM safety engineer was willing to testify for plaintiffs in product liability cases, GM--and Starr--went to court to shut him up. A Missouri federal judge said that barring this fellow from the courtroom "amounts to concealment of relevant evidence." But a certain star lawyer succeeded in winning a court decision that kept the engineer silent. Once again, Starr was pushing corporate interests, not those of the truth.
So please, Kenneth Starr, spare us your high-minded morality. Face up to it, you're another legal mercenary.
In the speech in North Carolina, Starr woefully observed that these days people think of lawyers more as Bruiser of John Grisham's "The Rainmaker" than as Atticus Finch of "To Kill A Mockingbird." He can thank himself for that. Yet if Starr believes he is more Finch than Bruiser, that's reason enough to yank the Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation from him. Do we want an independent counsel who is delusional?
(The examples cited above of Starr's discovery work are drawn from a 1997 Public Citizen report, "Discovery Abuse: How Defendants in Products Liability Lawsuits Hide and Destroy Evidence.")
Apocalypse Then
The day after Time and CNN reported that in 1970 U.S. Special Forces commmandos used nerve gas during a CIA-backed mission in Laos to to kill American military defectors, the mailman plopped a large box on the floor of my office. The return address was the Central Intelligence Agency. Inside were 2558 pages of agency documents related to political and military matters in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA finally had responded to a Freedom of Information Act request I had filed with the agency in 1990. Back then I was writing a book on the CIA. That book was published in 1994. Thanks for all the help, Langley. This shows how worthless the FOIA has become. It is only of use to the slowest researchers, scholars and writers. And now the CIA wants me to pay $250 in copying fees. We'll see about that.
In any event, I hoped that this box might contain a document or two regarding American GIs who defected during the Vietnam War and took up residence in Laos. (Laos was technically neutral, even though both North Vietnam and the United States routinely violated its neutrality, one with thousands of troops, the other with thousands of not-so-discriminating bombs.) No such luck. Instead, I had reports prepared by the CIA for decisionmakers throughout the national security bureaucracy on such topics as "Road Construction And Repair in the Laotian Panhandle" and "Commmunist Logistical Developments in Southern Laos And Cambodia During the 1970 Wet Season." But amid the chaff, there was one intriguing intelligence report. Written in January 1971 and entitled. "Opium Production and Movement in Southeast Asia," the document shows--but was careful not to point out explicitly--that the CIA and the Nixon White House realized that its anti-communist allies in Laos were principle movers in the global drug trade.
The paper reported that the Meo tribespeople (also known as the Hmong) were the "principal producers of opium in Laos" and that "much of the product" was transported on Royal Armed Forces vehicles and aircraft of the Royal Lao Air Force. What the report did not mention was that the Hmong tribe had for years been collaborating with the CIA in waging a secret war in Laos against the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese and that the U.S. military supported and worked closely with the Laotian armed forces. Here was undeniable evidence the U.S. government was aware its comrades in Laos were key figures in the drug business. Yet there was no discussion in the report of how these players were intimately tied to Washington's Vietnam policy. It was as if the report's authors purposefully had put on blinders so as to not see the uncomfortable truth of the situation: the U.S. was in league with the growers and transporters of opium destined to be processed into heroin and sold to U.S. troops in Vietnam and American citizens back home.
There probably remains tons of secret history from the Vietnam War and the overarching Cold War. The Tailwaind operation revealed by Time and CNN is a mere sliver. No doubt, there were other gruesome ops--in Southeast Asia, in Central America, in South America, and elsewhere--that have yet to find a place in the public accounts. Perhaps we could use a Truth Commission, like the one in South Africa, to ferret out the true costs and true history of the Cold War. Sure, that's a pipedream. But if one should ever come into existence, let's not allow it to be run by the guys and gals who handle FOIA requests at the CIA.
What's in the Water Republicans Drink?
You have to wonder if the Republican Party is tuned to some alternative-reality cable channel. Starr, for one, apparently thinks he's worthy of being played by good-guy Gregory Peck. A smarmy Gene Hackman might be more appropriate casting.
And after the city of Orlando put up rainbow flags as a sign of support for diversity and gay people, Pat Robertson predicted Orlando would pay a terrible price: "A condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor....And I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes." Yeah, perhaps God will bring forth Godzilla or the ebola virus or a fleet of spaceships filled with planet-destroying aliens! If you pass a guy ranting on a street corner about retribution from the Almighty, you' think he's nuts. Yet the G.O.P. courts Robertson, flatters him, craves the support of his flock, and eagerly pockets his bucks. (It's not much of a choice, but I'd rather have a system financed by Chinese wheeler-dealers than a loon who believes God is going to flatten DisneyWorld because of a flag.)
Then there's former veep Dan Quayle. While prospecting in New Hampshire, and pondering his possible entry into the G.O.P. presidential sweepstakes, Quayle granted an interview with CNN. He bumbled his way through a few questions on the latest Monicagate developments before turning to his "vision for America"--which was nothing other than tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts. (After his political career is finally done, Quayle can do commercial endorsements for index cards.) Asked if far-right partisans have too tight a grip on the party, Quayle replied, "Let me just be very clear that the Republican Party will select a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Bill Clinton? Whoa, dude, Quayle's having a flashback. Republicans should hope that whoever wins the nomination has enough of a hold on reality to know that Clinton, a two-term president, will not be running in 2000.
T.C.B.
Last week I wrote about cybergossip Matt Drudge and showed that a recent Drudge "exclusive"--that Monica Lewinsky was down the hall when Clinton was firing political consultant Dick Morris at the 1996 Democratic convention--could not bear minimal scrutiny. The basic facts were demonstrably wrong. (Clinton was not the one who gave Morris the shove.) Drudge's source--who was not named but whose identity he later revealed to me--denied the account. (That was Morris' wife.) And Drudge admitted that he had not checked the story before slapping it on his web site and zapping it to his readers. In response to my column, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post took an interest in all this. He called Drudge and asked for an explanation. Drudge, Kurtz reports, said he stood by his story.
But how? Kurtz asked, awaiting proof from Drudge.
I stand by my story, Drudge said. And that was it.
Perhaps Drudge is getting advice on how to frame reality from Kenneth Starr.
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