Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
A look at the two legal titans behind the Gore and Bush teams.
Nov 19, 2000 | David is Bill Gates' former nemesis; Ted is Bill Clinton's.
David once was chief counsel and staff director for the Senate antitrust subcommittee, and then the Judiciary Committee, for Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Ted served as an assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration and later represented the president during the Iran-Contra scandal.
David wears off-the-rack suits from department stores and scuffed Rockports. His hair is messy, and he wears a $20 Casio wrapped around his shirt sleeve. Ted sports the $1,500 suits he buys at Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco.
High-profile attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson couldn't have been better cast for their new star appearances. Boies represents Vice President Al Gore, while Olson is adding his expertise to efforts by Gov. George W. Bush in the post-election lawsuits related to the Florida recount. Where these two attorneys come from and the cases they've left in their wake reveal at least as much about them as they do about where Florida's electoral hurricane may end up landing. Their participation in the Florida fracas shows just how determined each side is to outmaneuver the other in the legal rulings that may determine who will be the next president of the United States.
On Saturday evening, neither side was sure who would represent it in the Florida Supreme Court on Monday, but both Boies and Olson have played major roles in all the legal maneuverings to date.
"You've got two stars here, I think it's fair to say," says Dick Wiley, former director of the Federal Communications Commission and a friend of Olson's. "They're both at the top of their profession."
Rumpled and media savvy, Boies is best known for his role in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft. Gates attacked him personally at one point, saying Boies was "out to destroy Microsoft ... and make us look bad." He has certainly never shied away from attention; he successfully defended CBS from a libel suit brought by Gen. William Westmoreland, and has represented radio talk show host Don Imus, comedian Garry Shandling and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
Until this past week, he had never taken a side in such a clearly partisan battle.
The dapper Olson, conversely, is -- as he once said jokingly at a meeting of conservative legal organization the Federalist Society -- "at the heart" of "the vast right-wing conspiracy."
One of independent counsel Ken Starr's best friends, Olson helped ABC News negotiate an interview with Monica Lewinsky, and ran the Arkansas Project -- a multimillion-dollar investigation into the life of President Clinton funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. And Olson defended controversial Arkansas witness David Hale during the Senate hearings on Whitewater. He has taken on some landmark conservative causes, defending the Virginia Military Institute in its failed attempt to remain all male and successfully representing four white students who sued the University of Texas law school, claiming its affirmative action policy denied them their rightful acceptance by the school. Olson and Boies have yet to square off against each other -- and may not. The fight over the validity of the hand recounts is taking two legal paths: Olson is on the federal track while Boies is handling Florida state litigation.
This seems only appropriate considering their respective strengths, though both, in the past couple of days, have suffered legal setbacks.
Members of the Gore team think local attorney Dexter Douglass ably represented them at the trial level. A folksy local attorney, he effused colloquialisms and spoke the judge's language. Boies was flown in Tuesday night to work on the case as it proceeds up to the appellate and state Supreme Court.
He has "clicked very, very well" with the heads of the Gore recount committee, former campaign chairman Bill Daley and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, according to a Gore lawyer.
But what does Boies, based in New York, know about Florida law? It doesn't matter, say his friends. "He's the best legal mind I know," declares James Fox Miller, former president of the Florida Bar Association and Boies' "best friend since four days into Northwestern Law School in 1963."
Boies' experience is largely as a trial lawyer, not an appellate one. Then again, Boies had never tried a libel case before the Westmoreland suit, Miller says. But when the case was over, "he was the No. 1 libel lawyer in the country." Similarly, Miller adds, "he'd never even turned on a computer before the Microsoft case."
The decision was made to have Boies sit second chair to Douglass on Thursday before Circuit Judge Terry Lewis as they fought Secretary of State Katherine Harris' announcement Wednesday that she wouldn't accept any new vote tallies as a result of county hand recounts.
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