IMPEACHMENT FOR FUN AND PROFIT
IN JUNE 1997, people across the country who had purchased The Clinton Chronicles had received an urgent telephone call from Infocision, a Christian telemarketing firm located in Akron, Ohio. “Good evening,” the callers’ script began. “I’m calling on behalf of Citizens for Honest Government. Former congressman Bill Dannemeyer has recorded an urgent message on the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I will go ahead and play it for you, okay?”
If the “potential donor” answered yes, he or she was urged to stay on the line after the tape ran. If he or she replied no, the telemarketers were instructed to say, “If you are concerned about illegal activities going on in the White House, then you’ll really want to hear how Bill [Dannemeyer] plans to bring charges against Bill Clinton. I’ll go ahead and play that message for you, okay?”
Those who agreed to listen then heard the stentorian rumble of Dannemeyer, a retired Republican member of Congress from Southern California and longtime stalwart of the religious right:
“I’m calling you because I’m concerned about the future of America. We were once led by great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Ronald Reagan. But now the office of the president is held by a liar and a criminal … .
“Well, my friend, I have just about had enough. I have talked with other congressmen and they will consider a vote for impeachment, but they’re waiting to hear from … people like you and me. That’s why I’m calling on you to show your support for the impeachment of Bill Clinton … .
“My friend, Representative Henry Hyde, is already studying the law on impeachment, but it up to us as voters to pressure congressmen, especially
Clinton’s Democratic cronies … . I’m calling for committees of impeachment to be formed across the United States to lead concerned citizens and help them rise up in the name of democracy … .
“And I want you to serve with us.”
When the tape ended, the telemarketers would return. “Hi … As you heard, former congressman Dannemeyer feels the crimes at the White House are so serious he asked Citizens for Honest Government to distribute hundreds of thousands of petitions all across America, demanding that Congress begin the impeachment procedure immediately. Can we send a petition for you to sign?”
And if so, the telemarketers would continue, “Bill also wanted me to mention that this is going to be the most expensive fight we’ve ever faced! That’s why we are forced to go to the American people directly. Tell me, can you help Citizens for Honest Government get the petitions into the hands of five million concerned Americans, with a gift of …” The suggested dollar amounts ranged from $10 all the way up to $250 or more, depending on how much the listener had spent or given on previous occasions.
Upon encountering resistance, the Infocision telemarketers pushed forward with certain well-tested techniques for getting donations. Potential donors who immediately said they couldn’t afford to give, for example, were mildly admonished: “But I sense that you are deeply concerned about Bill Clinton’s illegal and immoral activities.” Plucking at certain common resentments, the telemarketers usually added that “the reason we’re calling is we expect fierce opposition from the radical feminist and homosexual activist groups who have gained influence with the Clinton White House.” And to all the skeptics who inquired, “What about Al Gore?” there came this instant reassurance: “Right now, we are in the process of impeaching Bill Clinton. We are planning the same process for Al Gore.”
Thousands of such calls, followed by an even larger volume of direct-mailed impeachment petitions to his organization’s eighty-thousand-name database, represented the vanguard of what Pat Matrisciana and his comrades at the Council for National Policy hoped would become a stong impeachment movement based in the religious right during the coming year. Sales of The Clinton Chronicles and Matrisciana’s other Jeremiah Films products had dropped off considerably since their initial vogue a few years earlier. Now, as the CEO of both Citizens for Honest Government and Jeremiah Films, Matrisciana hoped that this latest revival of the anti-Clinton campaign might improve his business in the wake of the president’s overwhelming 1996 victory.
Matrisciana and his allies had been planning their crusade to remove Clinton from office since no later than his second inauguration. Back then, the citizens for Honest Government’s January 1997 newsletter—which featured on its roster of contributing writers such figures as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
Christopher Ruddy, and Jim Johnson—had featured Dannemeyer on its front page, arguing “Why Congress Must Impeach Bill Clinton.”
The ex-congressman’s essay rehearsed many familiar themes from the Matrisciana video archive, from drug smuggling to Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, and, of course, the death of Vince Foster. “I for one believe that both Bill and Hillary Clinton know where, when, why and by whom Foster was killed,” Dannemeyer wrote, “and it was no suicide … . And he has been accused publicly of being responsible for the September 1993 murder of Little Rock private investigator Luther ‘Jerry’ Parks, and possibly involved in covering up other murders.” Any day now, Dannemeyer warned, former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and former personnel director Craig Livingstone “are likely to be indicted … for perjury and obstruction of justice.”
Matrisciana’s chatty essay in the same newsletter—headed “Slaying the Clinton Dragon in 1997”—reluctantly acknowledged that Clinton had been reelected a few months earlier.”I was heartsick on the night of last November 5. As the election returns came in, I realized that the unthinkable had happened once again … .
“Personally, I don’t believe that America can survive four more years of a Bill Clinton presidency. His ungodly, globalist, socialist agenda is deadly … . The good new is, he’ll never get away with it. You see, Bill Clinton can be impeached.”
Matrisciana, too, looked forward with eager anticipation to the “likelihood” that officials Bernard Nussbaum, Margaret Williams, Craig Livingstone, and Hillary Clinton would be indicted soon by the OIC.
“My top goal,” he continued, “for 1997 is to raise the groundswell of public opinion that eventually will result in the impeachment of Bill Clinton … . Will you stand with me, either with a onetime gift of $1,000 or more, if you are able, or as a monthly supporter of this organizing work, or both?”
Aside from some elderly patriots on fixed incomes who were willing to sacrifice for their country, Pat Matrisciana had found some very well-heeled conservative backers by 1997. Just before the 1996 election, for example, the widow of the late former CIA director William Casey had sent Citizens for Honest Government a check for $10,000.
More significantly, perhaps, Matrisciana had joined forces financially as well as ideologically with Christopher Ruddy, the journalist and entrepreneur associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Together Ruddy and Matrisciana were preparing to distribute a new video in early 1997 titled The “60 Minutes” Deception, a counterattack on the popular CBS magazine show and its venerable correspondent Mike Wallace for debunking Ruddy’s book on the Foster suicide. It portrayed Wallace and CBS as liars and liberal Clinton shills. Ruddy and Matrisciana had mapped out an entire promotional campaign for the
spring, including discounted advertising in the Washington Times; a special call-in premiere on National Empowerment Television, the conservative satellite network; and extensive appearances by Ruddy and others on talk radio.
With Ruddy came various other Scaife-funded entities, including Accuracy in Media—which paid part of the production cost of the “60 Minutes” video and would help to sell it nationwide—and the Western Journalism Center, as well as Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress foundation, which operated National Empowerment Television. And Ruddy apparently brought a substantial bankroll, too, to his partnership with Matrisciana. As Murray Waas later reported in Salon, Matrisciana and Ruddy controlled a Citizens for Honest Government bank account, separate from the other, depleted accounts of Citizens for Honest Government and Jeremiah Films, that had at one time a balance of roughly $3 million. Although Matrisciana always portrayed Citizens as a “bootstrap” nonprofit operation, that $3 million cash cushion was far more than the small average balance in the organization’s accounts a couple of years earlier.
By late spring, the impeachment drive was under way. The May issue of Matrisciana’s newsletter prominently displayed a call for a congressional “inquiry of impeachment” beneath a photo of its author, Representative Bob Barr, a backbench Republican whose Georgia district abutted that of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Barr, too, had long-standing ties to Scaife through the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative litigation outfit based in Atlanta which Barr had formerly headed and which received annual infusions of money from Scaife’s foundations. The short, mustachioed Barr, best known until then for his alliance with the National Rifle Association and other firearms interests, would become the point man for impeachment advocates in the House for a year before there was any realistic prospect of impeaching the president.
Matrisciana’s associates at the Council for National Policy were on the move, too. When the CNP met in June 1997 at a hotel in Montreal, Canada, impeachment was high on the agenda. Exact details of what the religious right leadership planned at that meeting are not known because, as always, the CNP meeting was closed to the press. But the text of an “impeachment organizer’s kit” later sent out by Citizens for Honest Government revealed that the drive had been encouraged by “an impeachment panel discussion” during that CNP gathering, as well as by “a follow-up [CNP] discussion in South Carolina.” Presiding over the Council for National Policy at the time was Edwin Meese III, the former Reagan administration attorney general, whose enthusiastic endorsement of Citizens for Honest Government (“doing important work on behalf of the American people”) appeared on every newsletter and fund-raising plea mailed out by the organization.
Ed Meese’s own career in government had ended with his resignation in disgrace from the Justice Department, while an independent counsel pursued
corruption allegations that resulted in indictments of several Meese associates but not the former attorney general himself. Yet this personal history in no way inhibited Meese from entering the political arena once more on behalf of impeachment. Memories were short, and Meese’s problems had concluded a decade earlier.
In June, Meese agreed to appear with Barr as the featured speaker at a Washington press event to announce that the Georgia congressman had sent a three-page letter urging Hyde, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, to open an inquiry of impeachment. The sponsor of this event was Floyd Brown, still the chairman of Citizens United (not to be confused with Citizens for Honest Government) and not incidentally a fellow member of the Council for National Policy. In reality, Hyde and Gingrich weren’t quite ready for such an ambitious undertaking. As Brown complained in a letter to his supporters that summer, “just before the news conference was scheduled to take place, the Republican congressional leadership pressured Barr to back out and cancel.” That scarcely discouraged Brown, whose organization had first proposed impeaching Clinton as early as the summer of 1994.
The same political fever had also raised temperatures at the American Spectator, where editor Bob Tyrrell was toiling over the manuscript of a paperback “political docu-drama” for Regnery Publishing titled The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. Its foreword was provided by the busy Barr, who also doubled as the hero of Tyrrell’s speculative fiction—on which Tyrrell was collaborating with a “secret source,” according to the jacket copy, who was “giving him ‘Deep Throat’ style information.” Tyrrell’s purported coauthor was dubbed “Anonymous” (evidently in homage to Joe Klein, the journalist whose novel Primary Colors under the “Anonymous” byline had been a major bestseller).
Tyrrell’s satire relied heavily, as always, on the metaphor of Watergate. His plot envisioned congressional impeachment hearings in 1998, sparked by a vaguely explicated “Starr report” on Whitewater. He imagined Henry Hyde filling the role of the wise, avuncular Sam Ervin, the late Democrat who once chaired the Senate Watergate committee. In the book’s denouement, Tyrrell depicted a heroic Bob Barr discovering a set of secret, damning White House tapes—one of which records the guilty Bill and Hillary Clinton squabbling over their bribery of Webster Hubbell. Unoriginal, certainly, but no doubt satisfying to the Washington conservatives who had yearned so long to avenge Nixon.
For the Spectator editor, such fantasies may have provided a happy refuge from the realities of the Arkansas Project, which over the summer had suddenly taken an unpleasant turn. Months earlier, Tyrrell’s own personal Arkansas
Project obsession—the Mena narcotics story—had proved to be little more than an entertaining myth. After two years of investigation, House Banking Committee chairman Jim Leach conceded that his investigators had found nothing to implicate Clinton in any illicit business there.
Still, the money had continued to flow from Scaife’s foundations, with a check for $150,000 from the Carthage Foundation on June 3 and another from the Sarah Scaife Foundation for $75,000 on June 5 (with a note accompanying the latter from Scaife himself, promising an additional $75,000 “during the third quarter of 1997”).
But not long after those checks arrived, Scaife Foundation president Richard Larry made an ugly accusation about the vast sums expended on the Clinton investigations overseen by Larry’s friends, Stephen Boynton and David Henderson. He said that Spectator publisher Ronald Burr was responsible for the misuse of $1 million in Arkansas Project funding. In response to that charge, Tyrrell, Burr, and other top Spectator Foundation officials had gathered at attorney Ted Olson’s downtown Washington office on July 10.
At the meeting, according to a furious letter that Burr dispatched to Larry four days later, Tyrrell had stated: “I am here to announce an audit. Dick Larry said that Ron [Burr] has misallocated $1 million of the Arkansas Project funds and we are going to have a complete audit of the project.” That incensed Burr, who believed that Larry was trying to deflect blame for the project’s shortcomings from his pals Boynton and Henderson, who were responsible for squandering hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Burr had raised questions about where the money had gone, and also about the creation of a full-time job for Henderson at the Spectator.
Firing back, Burr demanded that Larry either repudiate his unfounded accusation or make a formal written apology. Moreover, he added, “I look forward to a complete audit of the Arkansas Project … . I have asked Messrs. Boynton and Henderson to provide us with their accounting records in order to give the auditors a basis to verify how they spent the funds we paid them.” Burr copied the letter to Tyrrell and Olson.
Tensions had been growing between Burr and Tyrrell for months because in late 1996 the publisher had started questioning his old friend’s habit of spending foundation moneys on himself—his house, his dinner parties, his liquor bills, and myriad other unauthorized personal expenses. In an effort to conform with tighter IRS regulation of nonprofit organizations, Burr had been scrutinizing Tyrrell’s lavish spending and suggesting some changes.
When Richard Larry neither apologized nor withdrew his accusation of mismanagement, Burr didn’t let the matter rest. He felt that his personal honor and the integrity of the magazine were both at stake, and he continued to press for a full audit of the Arkansas Project after Tyrrell and Larry dropped the subject. He solicited proposals for an audit, first from the Spectator’s own
longtime accountants in Indianapolis, where the magazine had been founded, and then from Arthur Andersen LLP, the huge worldwide accounting company. The Andersen firm delivered its proposal on September 17, promising to complete a review of approximately $2.4 million in Arkansas Project expenditures between October 5 and early November, for a fee of $50,000. Among the Andersen partners on the proposed audit team was a white-collar-crime specialist from the firm’s “business fraud consulting practice.”
Preoccupied with completing and promoting his impeachment book, Tyrrell was in no mood for such ominous distractions. On September 9, he sent Burr a peremptory memo, telling him to buy costly advertising time on the Rush Limbaugh radio program in mid-October for his book—yet another expenditure of foundation funds that Burr considered dubious, since profits from the book would accrue to Tyrrell, not the Spectator. The editor was also impatient with Burr’s insistence on referring to the proposed examination of the Arkansas Project accounts as a “fraud audit.”
The two old friends were no longer on speaking terms. Indeed, Tyrrell had made it perfectly plain that he wanted Burr to vacate the post he had held for thirty years. Burr knew that Tyrrell had the authority to fire him, and was hesitantly dickering over severance terms. He didn’t want to leave, but he refused to back down on the audit. He thought a fraud had been committed, and he knew he wasn’t culpable.
On September 30, Tyrrell sent Burr another terse memo. “No one has accused anyone at The American Spectator with fraud. I do not want a ‘fraud audit’ of any project. I do not want any further audits until I have examined our accounting of the Arkansas Project. I want to review our accounting to familiarize myself further with it.
“This issue is now closed.”
Burr didn’t think so. On October 6 he sent Tyrrell a long memo, insisting that the only way to “close” the issue was “to hire Arthur Andersen to do a complete fraud audit.” What Burr evidently didn’t realize yet was that he had been officially dismissed the day before. At a special meeting of the Spectator Foundation board of directors at his home in McLean, Virginia, Tyrrell had pushed through a motion immediately removing Burr as publisher and electing Ted Olson in his place as the foundation’s secretary-treasurer. All this was done amid expressions of “affection and respect for Mr. Burr and gratitude for his service,” according to the board minutes.
If Burr agreed to abide by the agreement’s confidentiality provision, he could walk away with a “generous severance package” worth a total of $350,000. He eventually took the deal and has never spoken publicly about the Arkansas Project or the American Spectator since.
Ron Burr’s abrupt dismissal was not well received by the magazine’s staff and supporters. Conservative humorist and author P. J. O’Rourke quit the editorial
board in protest and canceled his appearance as master of ceremonies at the Spectator’s upcoming thirtieth anniversary festivities. “The tendency of the magazine to do this Clinton-obsessive stuff, I don’t get,” O’Rourke told the Washington Post. “It seems strange and somewhat embarrassing.” He wasn’t alone in viewing Burr’s treatment as “reprehensible.”
The sacrifice of Burr didn’t mollify Scaife and Larry. Two months later, after the Spectator ran a harshly negative review of Christopher Ruddy’s book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, it was reported that the angry billionaire called Tyrrell to say that he had cut the magazine off from his foundations’ wealth.
If Scaife ever did learn the details of how that money had been squandered by Richard Larry’s friends, he must have been truly appalled. Known for penny-pinching among his own employees, he could only have been outraged by the sums Henderson and Boynton were paying themselves, let alone the hefty checks they wrote Rex Armistead and others. According to the Washington Post, Scaife came very close to firing Larry over the Arkansas Project.
What had Scaife bought with all his money? For that matter, what had all of Clinton’s foes accomplished after almost five years of partisan warfare? While they had failed to destroy his presidency, certainly they had succeeded in crippling his leadership. They had done so by staining him and his wife with a spatter of accusations that, if not provable, would nevertheless leave a permanent mark on their reputations. The lasting irony is that by the autumn of 1997, the Clintons were closer than they or their enemies knew to vindication, if not exoneration.
Although Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors were in no rush to inform their friends in the Washington press corps, the independent counsel had for all practical purposes given up by then on charging Bill and Hillary Clinton with any wrongdoing involving the White House Travel Office, the FBI files fiasco, or, most importantly, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. The FBI files and Travel Office probes had been dormant for nearly a year, with no indictments filed and none contemplated.
The OIC had been more reluctant to give up on Whitewater. Earlier in 1997, according to Michael Isikoff’s book, a Starr assistant named Stephen Bates had drafted an impeachment report to Congress that accused the president of lying under oath during the Tucker-McDougal trial when he denied meeting David Hale at Castle Grande or receiving a loan from Madison Guaranty.
The Bates draft would never reach Capitol Hill. Even the politically inept Starr was sufficiently astute to see that an impeachment referral relying upon the shaky testimony of David Hale and Jim McDougal would embarrass him more than it would endanger the president. There was one final piece of evidence—a certified check made out to Bill Clinton and found in the trunk of an
abandoned Mercury outside a Little Rock transmission shop—that initially seemed to promise a breakthrough. Yet that very same piece of paper helped to prove that Jim McDougal, the OIC’s newest witness against the Clintons, was lying again.
Associated Press reporter Pete Yost broke the story on November 4, 1997. “In a bizarre Whitewater discovery,” he wrote, “a repair shop owner opened the trunk of a tornado-damaged car and found a cashier’s check for more than $20,000 payable to Bill Clinton from his former business partner’s savings and loan.” It seemed that the vehicle’s owner, a former Madison Guaranty employee named Henry Floyd, had been assigned to put some documents in storage ten years earlier but had simply forgotten they were in his car. Made out in the sum of $27,600 and dated November 15, 1982, the check had never been endorsed by Clinton.
It had been written on Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and stamped twice for deposit: first at Madison Bank and Trust in Kingston, Arkansas (the tiny bank in the Ozarks also owned by Jim McDougal), and then at Union National Bank in Little Rock.
“They’re going to hang them [the Clintons] with the documents they’ve got,” Jim McDougal boasted to reporters. Interviewed at the federal penitentiary in Fort Worth, he contended that the check “certainly proves the chief executive perjured himself.” In the Washington Post and elsewhere, the unearthed check was portrayed as possible evidence that the president had committed perjury.
The question no one asked was why Clinton would have lied about borrowing money from Madison Guaranty, which would have violated no law. The Clintons had borrowed and repaid loans from several Arkansas banks. Besides, if the president hadn’t signed the check, why would anyone conclude that he had even seen it? Under normal circumstances, as several bankers explained to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a cashier’s check that large wouldn’t be honored unless the payee endorsed it in a bank officer’s presence.
The fact that Clinton’s signature wasn’t on the check eluded some reporters. Susan Schmidt’s initial account in the Washington Post failed to mention his signature’s absence, or that the check had been cashed at a McDougal-owned bank.
An obvious explanation of the Clinton check lay within the pages of the 1995 Pillsbury Report. The report showed that Jim McDougal himself, and not the Clintons, had owed $27,600 to McDougal’s own tiny bank in the Ozarks back when that check had been drawn in November 1982. Without consulting his Whitewater partners, McDougal had borrowed $30,000 from his own bank in August 1981 for what the application called “Whitewater operating capital.” Some of the loan proceeds went to pay valid Whitewater debts; the rest ended up in McDougal’s pocket.
That same loan from Madison Bank and Trust had been satisfied on November 18, 1982, with what the Pillsbury Report called “a $27,600 payment from an unstated source.” It appeared almost certain that the resourceful McDougal had simply drawn a cashier’s check on his brand-new Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan to repay a bank loan he had made to himself a year earlier. When reporters from the Democrat-Gazette tried to locate the teller who had allegedly issued the $27,600 to Clinton, they were unable to find any such person.
But why would McDougal have written Bill Clinton’s name as payee on the cashier’s check? Possibly because that check, drawn on Madison Guaranty, ended up at Little Rock’s Union National Bank—where McDougal also owed a quarterly payment on $548,186 debt used to finance his purchase of the savings and loan. The Union National loan offices wouldn’t have been reassured to see their customer McDougal writing cashier’s checks to himself from the thrift institution they had recently helped him purchase. How wise of McDougal to use the name of his very prominent business partner, who had just been reelected governor of Arkansas two weeks earlier.
In any case, there was something else about the check that had drawn FBI special agent Michael T. Patkus’s attention immediately: the date.
After Jim McDougal “flipped” in August 1996, one of the first stories he told the OIC investigators was that Bill Clinton had indeed taken a $25,000 loan from Madison Guaranty—and thus had perjured himself by denying it. Agent Patkus had spent several months searching the Madison Guaranty records and interviewing its former employees, without finding any evidence for this assertion. According to McDougal, he had hand-carried a loan application to the state capitol, where Clinton had casually signed it while leaning against a doorframe in the governor’s office.
The problem, as Patkus quickly realized, was that on November 15, 1982, Bill Clinton hadn’t been in the governor’s office—because the governor of Arkansas was still Frank White, Clinton’s Republican foe. Therefore McDougal’s story, with all its otherwise convincing detail, couldn’t be true. Along with Hickman Ewing, Jr., Patkus had traveled to the federal penitentiary in Fort Worth to interview McDougal again. This time, wily Jim “remembered” asking Clinton to fill out a backdated application some months after the fact. McDougal also claimed to have destroyed all of the loan documentation.
Not surprisingly, the meticulous FBI agent didn’t really believe McDougal anymore. Much later, at Susan McDougal’s 1999 contempt trial, her attorney Mark Geragos put the issue to Patkus directly. “You still have those doubts as you sit here today,” asked Geragos, “whether or not Jim McDougal had told you the truth. Isn’t that correct?”
“On certain issues, yes, that’s correct,” Patkus answered. Digging a bit deeper, the FBI agent had also found an October 17, 1982, directive from state
and federal bank regulators giving Madison Bank and Trust exactly thirty days to “clean up” its loan portfolio by removing insider deals like McDougal’s $30,000 loan to himself. Under further questioning by Geragos, Patkus acknowledged that McDougal had been under pressure to get his own loan off the Madison Bank books, and might well have created a “phantom loan” to Clinton for that purpose. “Absolutely. That’s possible,” Patkus agreed. “I mean, just because there’s a check to Bill Clinton from Madison Guaranty—and if it is a loan, which I believe it is—does not mean that Bill Clinton had knowledge regarding that check or that loan.” He also agreed that without further confirmation of Hale’s and McDougal’s stories, he wouldn’t have felt comfortable indicting anyone.
Presumably the FBI agent would have felt that same discomfort or considerably more if the person to be indicted happened to be the president of the United States. Not a single newspaper or television correspondent reported his testimony, but it almost certainly represented the OIC’s own analysis of the Whitewater case in late 1997—as Starr himself confirmed in a 1999 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live.
Asked to explain how the Whitewater investigation had ended up probing the president’s sex life instead, the independent counsel told King that his office had “drafted a report to Congress on Whitewater … in December of 1997. But it was my assessment and an assessment shared within my office that the information did not reach what the statute requires, ‘substantial and credible.’ … It’s got to be weighty, and it’s got to have some believability to it—information that an impeachable offense may have been committed. We didn’t think that the evidence was there.”
Yet as Starr and his staff faced the likelihood at the end of 1997 that they would come up with no further indictments of Clinton associates—except for redundant prosecutions of Webster Hubbell and Susan McDougal—the independent counsel added another young associate to the OIC roster. His name was Paul Rosenzweig, and he had, for a brief period in 1994, flirted with the idea of helping Paula Jones. Two friends and fellow alumni of the University of Chicago Law School, Jerome Marcus and Richard Porter, had tried to bring Rosenzweig onto the Jones legal team—and when he joined Starr’s office that November, he was still in contact with them.
With the departure of Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata as counsel of record for Jones in September, prospects for settling her case gradually faded. For an interim period during the weeks that followed, Bill McMillan took over as her counsel. At first Bob Bennett regarded Susan Carpenter-McMillan’s lawyer husband with suspicion, but quickly came to regard him as a “savvy guy” who might sincerely want to reach a settlement. Any trust that might have been established between Bennett and McMillan, however, was lost in October when
two other Jones supporters, George Conway and Ann Coulter, took it upon themselves to leak details of the supposed “distinguishing characteristic” of the president’s genitals. With that humiliating disclosure, any attempted settlement agreement would surely be scuttled.
Just to be certain, Conway sent a confidential E-mail on October 8 to the Drudge Report. The New York lawyer refreshed Matt Drudge’s memory by identifying himelf as a friend of Laura Ingraham. (Conway forwarded the same message to her the following morning.) This “exclusive” was being provided, Conway wrote, on the condition that Drudge would conceal its source. Among other problems, Conway’s leak was a clear violation of Judge Wright’s gag order covering all attorneys in the Jones litigation.
“The distinguishing physical characteristic that Paula Jones says she believes she saw is that Clinton’s penis is curved when it is erect,” he wrote. “If she is correct, then Clinton has a urological condition called Peyronie’s disease … . It is caused by blockages in blood flow to the penis … . if blood is constricted on one side, the penis curves when it is erect … . Jones’s former lawyers, Cammarata and Davis, attempted to find a urological expert witness before they resigned for [sic] the case. The idea was that the expert witness, a physician, would examine Clinton in a turgid state (induced by injection), and then would render an opinion as to whether it is possible that Clinton had the problem in 1991 … .”
“Disgusting or what????” Conway had exclaimed over his forwarded message to Ingraham, and there he had a point. It later turned out that the president had no history of Peyronie’s disease and that, like other shifting allegations by Jones, this canard failed to survive close examination. But truth or falsity of the allegation mattered little to Conway and Coulter. Their interest, as Coulter candidly admitted later to Isikoff, was to “humiliate” the ρresident; she thought a settlement would be a “disaster.” While Conway pushed the Peyronie’s theory on Drudge, Coulter gave it to Richard Johnson of the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip column. When Johnson’s editors refused to let him print it, the item turned up on the front page of the Washington Times and on Don Imus’s radio show. Isikoff writes that it was offered to him as well, although he doesn’t say by whom.
In any event, Bill McMillan was soon replaced by a group of attorneys who displayed no interest in a settlement. The new legal team was comprised of John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit legal foundation based in Virginia, and lawyers recruited by Whitehead from the Dallas firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke. The Rutherford president planned to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars via direct mail for the lawsuit, while the Dallas lawyers conducted the actual litigation.
The sudden entrance of Whitehead—a prominent member of the Council for National Policy—provided yet another sign of the religious right’s determination
to bring down Bill Clinton. Whitehead had formerly worked as an attorney for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Legal Defense Fund. In 1982, he and another Falwell associate named Jerry Nims had left the Moral Majority to create their own “civil liberties” group, naming it after an obscure seventeenth-century Scottish cleric. Samuel Rutherford’s contribution to theology was a precursor of Christian Reconstructionism; he asserted that God’s law must be placed above any temporal legal authority of nation or king. Whitehead rarely admitted any such leanings. He preferred blander statements, telling reporters that his involvement in the Jones case “stems from the fundamental principle that no person, not even the president of the United States, is above the law … . I’m not out to hurt President Clinton, but I am here to see that justice is done and Paula Jones has her day in court.”
The Jones case scarcely fell within Rutherford’s organizational mandate, which is to defend religious freedom against the secularizing tendencies of government. As defined by Whitehead, his criteria for accepting legal work excluded any matter that did not “principally involve a violation of religious liberty or parental rights.” The Jones litigation had nothing to do with those issues, and until October 1997 the Rutherford Institute had not taken up a single case of sexual harassment. John Whitehead’s eagerness to help Paula Jones derived from his own lifelong ideological commitment to the religious right.
In 1982, the same year he founded Rutherford, Whitehead published The Second American Revolution, a treatise on the fundamentalist-Christian mission that became a genre bestseller. “The Church has a mandate from the Creator,” he wrote, “to be a dominating influence on the whole culture.” In practice, this meant Christians “taking control” of political parties and an educational system “reinstilled with Christian theism.” His vision was an American society in which “all of civil affairs and government, including law, should be based upon principles found in the Bible,” with indeed “nothing untouched by the Bible” as interpreted by right-wing theologians. His mentor in this totalitarian project was R. J. Rushdoony, whose views are cited numerous times in Whitehead’s book and whose library he used for research. Rushdoony was among the founding directors of Rutherford and spoke at the institute’s conferences. Rushdoony’s own literature boasted that the old theocrat had been “instrumental in establishing the Rutherford Institute.”
In recent years, Whitehead has adopted a more ecumenical tone, and his associates have denied that he was ever an adherent of Christian Reconstructionism. Among Rutherford’s log of hundreds of cases, there are certainly instances where it has defended the religious prerogatives of Orthodox Jews, Native Americans, and Hare Krishna followers. But the bulk of its work is devoted to advancing the Christian fundamentalist perspective on such issues as abortion, gay rights, and proselytizing in public schools.
Among the most forthright exponents of Rutherford’s view of civil liberties
is Donovan Campbell, Jr., recruited by his friend Whitehead to serve as lead attorney in the Jones case. A longtime member of the Rutherford board of directors and recently listed on its tax returns as the group’s secretary-treasurer, Campbell made his mark in Texas as the leading advocate for more than a decade to uphold that state’s 1974 law banning sodomy. When gay rights groups challenged the Texas statute in 1993, Campbell led the legal team that defended it before the state supreme court in Austin. Their brief argued that homosexuality was a “psychopathological condition … and a disorder from mental health,” and that gays were responsible not only for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases but for deviant mass murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. The grim, bespectacled Campbell betrayed no hint of irony when, in spite of his long history of opposing civil rights for homosexuals, he claimed to be representing Jones because hers was “a very significant constitutional and civil rights lawsuit. That’s the type of work that my law firm does.”
While the new Jones legal team professed complete faith in their client’s truthfulness, they eventually discovered that she and her adviser Susan Carpenter-McMillan were less than forthcoming even toward them. Near the end of 1997, Jones signed a fund-raising letter sent out by Whitehead’s direct-mail consultant. “I know many of you who are familiar with the work of the Rutherford Institute are wondering why this group is coming to my aid,” she said in the letter. “It’s because I’m speaking the truth and need help … . so please, in the name of freedom, send in whatever gift you can today to the Rutherford Institute to help them with my case.”
Whitehead was puzzled and dismayed when the letter got almost no response. Rather than being a cash cow, the Jones case was draining his organization’s resources. In a year-end plea to his regular donors, he wrote, “Our backs are against the wall. It is now do or die.”
He might have understood his financial difficulties more clearly if he had known then what he learned later. Paula Jones was also raising money for her own legal fund, which she and her husband operated as a nonexempt family business. In November 1997, around the time that Whitehead realized her case had brought him virtually no new contributors, Jones signed a fund-raising agreement with a prominent Virginia fund-raiser named Bruce Eberle. In exchange for the right to use her name in a series of direct-mail appeals, Eberle promised Jones at least $300,000 for her proprietary Paula Jones Legal Fund. Upon inking the deal, Jones reportedly received $100,000 up front from Eberle’s company.
Of course, she had always denied that money or politics were the motives behind her lawsuit. Early on she had vowed to donate any proceeds after expenses to charity. Her new lawyers learned differently in late November, when
she instructed them to answer any overtures toward a settlement from Bennett with a stunning new demand. Rather than the $700,000 she had originally demanded in her legal papers, Jones said she would accept nothing less than $2.6 million—a blatant breach of good faith in any legal negotiation.
Rather than explain to her that they felt that such conduct was unacceptable and even possibly unethical, Campbell and his partners simply transmitted their client’s message to Bennett, who could hardly believe what he was hearing. The president and his lawyer had always suspected that Jones’s backers were pursuing a political vendetta. The ideological complexion of her new backers had reinforced that suspicion. Now there was no further reason for doubt.