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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
How a pack of conservative lawyers used Matt Drudge and Clinton-accuser Kathleen Willey to scuttle a deal in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
Mar 4, 2000 | If the lawyers for Paula Jones and President Clinton had reached a settlement during the summer of 1997 -- an outcome both sides were trying to achieve in good faith -- the nation would have been spared the Monica Lewinsky affair and the impeachment fiasco that followed. Jones' attorneys, Gilbert Davis and Joe Cammarata, thought they could work out a deal with Robert Bennett, the President's high-priced private counsel.
But a settlement, no matter how favorable to Jones, wouldn't have served the political purposes of the so-called "elves," an informal group of conservative attorneys who were secretly assisting her case. At a delicate stage, the settlement discussions could be scuttled by creating distrust between the Clinton and Jones camps. And there was no better way to raise tensios among the lawyers than by leaking sensitive investigative material about the president to the press.
This was explosive stuff, not wholly reliable but very juicy, and known only to a few insiders. It was to be used only if a settlement was impossible. Or so Davis and Cammarata believed-- until they came to suspect, much later, that they had been deceived not by the Clinton attorneys, but by their own clever little friends.
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On July 25, 1997, Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert Davis moved to subpoena Kathleen Willey. Although their settlement negotiations with Robert Bennett had progressed slightly, both sides remained stuck on what kind of statement Clinton might issue to satisfy Paula Jones's need for an "apology." The Jones lawyers hoped to strengthen their bargaining hand with the threat of a devastating new witness. The mercurial Bennett reacted to the subpoena by threatening to withdraw from the negotiations. Any exposure of Willey's claims, he warned darkly, would be a deal breaker.
Like his client, Willey's lawyer Daniel Gecker had been cultivating both sides, talking to both Cammarata and Bennett. With Cammarata he had discussed ways to "preserve Willey's testimony" without a subpoena, such as obtaining her affidavit. From Bennett he had sought a promise that the White House wouldn't publicly attack Willey if she resisted testifying for Jones. Still insisting that she was a "reluctant witness," he filed motions to quash the subpoena, claiming that she had no information relevant to Jones's complaint.
Under additional pressure from the two insurance companies that were paying most of Clinton's legal costs, the settlement talks intensified. There was one scenario where everyone could minimize their losses: Jones and Clinton would settle, Willey would remain silent, and the White House would release no derogatory information about her.
The worst mistake Davis and Cammarata made was to confide all those sensitive details to their behind-the-scene advisers, a little group of committed conservatives led by Philadelphia lawyer Jerome Marcus. (It was Marcus's name that appeared most often on the time sheets kept by the Jones lawyers, although they frequently spoke and communicated with George Conway in New York, and less often with Richard Porter in Chicago.) Both men valued the assistance donated pro bono by the group, though they had believed from the beginning that Conway, Marcus, and Porter all were motivated more by hatred of Bill Clinton than by any desire to rescue Paula Jones. Yet Davis and Cammarata, although Republicans themselves, wouldn't countenance the misuse of their lawsuit to advance a partisan agenda. They took their duties as officers of the court seriously, and consistently placed their client's interest ahead of politics. They had also assumed that the advisers would behave honorably despite the fact that all three had insisted upon keeping their work in support of Jones secret from their own law partners.
Cammarata and Davis treated the group with absolute trust, faxing internal documents to them and often including them in strategic discussions as negotiations with the president's legal team proceeded. According to Davis, both Conway and Marcus knew about Kathleen Willey, and they certainly understood that public exposure of her allegations would badly complicate any prospects of a settlement. He simply expected them to keep their mouths shut. "There were many times back then that they were both on the phone with us on conference calls," he said. "We talked as lawyers. They did good, workmanlike work and we just assumed that they would keep all information confidential." In Davis's view, "Working with us, they were ethically required to do that, just as if they were attorneys of record on the case."
