The Hunting of the President

Richard W. Porter's Involvement

The Hunting of the President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.

p. 59

Richard W. Porter, a Bush White House aide working on opposition research for the Bush-Quayle campaign, also consulted informally with Smith on his project.  [This is the project Peter Smith spent $80,000 on to investigate WJC's sex life in 1992.]   After the election, Porter went on to a partnership at the Chicago-based law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he would continue assisting Smith on his projects -- and where he would eventually play a role in both the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky affair.

pp. 104-105

According to Brock, "I had been talking throughout this period with Cliff [Jackson] and Peter [Smith], keeping track of discussions about payments to the troopers, the various arrangements and deals they were discussing.  The troopers and Cliff kept trying to get more from Peter.  Whatever he offered was never enough."

Around the same time, Smith urged Brock to call Richard W. Porter, a friend of Smith's and partner in the Chicago home office of Kirkland & Ellis law firm.  Indicating that Porter knew all about his backing of Jackson and the troopers, Smith urged Brock to tell the lawyer about his concerns.

Brock didn't know Porter, but recognized his name as someone who had worked in the Bush White House.  He later found out that Porter's friends there included White House counsel C. Boyden Gray and Lee Liberman, a young lawyer who had helped to found the Federalist Society.  When Brock reached him at his office, "Porter didn't say very much.  I explained why the payments would be problematic.  He seemed nervous about being involved.  Peter had told me it was okay to talk with him, that Porter had been involved in opposition research and knew the stories about Clinton's philandering, et cetera.  He and Smith seemed pretty close, as if they didn't have any secrets from each other.  I had kept bringing this issue up, and I think he told me to call Porter to calm me down."

p. 125

Exactly how Paula Jones finally found her way to Gilbert Davis and Joseph Cammarata, the Virginia attorneys who filed her complaint against Clinton on the deadline date of May 8, 1994, was then unclear.  Reporters who asked about their sudden alliance with Traylor received vague answers or no answers at all.  The Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group that received hundreds of thousands annually from Scaife, played some matchmaking role at the beginning.  (Landmark attorneys reportedly convinced Jones not to sue the <i>American Spectator,</i> which of course was also funded by Scaife.)

A more direct role in the talent search was played by Richard Porter of Kirkland & Ellis -- the Chicago attorney who had consulted with financier Peter Smith and Cliff Jackson on a compensation deal for the Arkansas troopers.

Either Smith or Jackson had approached Porter, a former aide to both President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, to represent Jones.  Porter had turned the case down and instead called Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University with expertise in employment discrimination and civil rights law.  Lund, too, had worked in the Bush administration, serving as a lawyer in the White House Office of Legal Counsel; and like Porter, he was a Federalist Society stalwart with ties to Newt Gingrich.

Lund also declined the Jones case.  But it was he who put Davis and Cammarata in touch with Danny Traylor, through a mutual friend and sometime associate of Davis named Frank Dunham, a Republican layer who also taught at George Mason.  (Davis's friend Oliver North, whose benefactors at the Legal Affairs Council had paid for Jones and her husband to visit Washington, also encouraged Davis to take the case.)

p. 127

Davis and Cammarata also knew they could rely upon a brain trust of hotshot conservative attorneys, all affiliated with the Federalist Society, from some of the country's most eminent firms and law schools.  Included among these advisers, in addition to Richard Porter, were George T. Conway III, a tobacco litigator at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one of the biggest New York corporate firms; Jerome Marcus, a young partner at the Philadelphia firm of Berger & Montague; and Ronald Rotunda, a distinguished professor of constitutional law at the University of Illinois, who would also co-author an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jones.

The sole public hint of the hidden legal network accessible to Davis and Cammarata came in the presence of Kenneth W. Starr, who appeared on television and in the newspapers several times during the spring and summer of 1994 to argue that the Jones lawsuit should be permitted to proceed against Clinton without delay. "Our system is premised on the proposition not only that we're all subject to the rule of law," he told CBS News, "but secondly, that we will proceed as expeditiously as we can get to the bottom of things."

In Washington, Starr carried at least as much clout as Bennett, maybe more.  He had stepped down from the bench of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989 to serve as solicitor general in the  Bush administration.  He had long nursed hopes of a Supreme Court appointment, but when Clinton took office he had been exiled into the private sector.  Since 1992 he had been earning roughly a million dollars a year, handling appeals for major corporate clients in the tobacco and auto industries as a senior partner in the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis -- the same firm that housed Richard Porter.

Starr took a personal interest in the Jones case, speaking frequently with Gil Davis about the constitutional issues raised by Clinton's claim of immunity.  Early that summer, he even considered filing an amicus brief for Jones on behalf of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative group funded by Richard Mellon Scaife as a counterweight to liberal feminist organizations.  One of his younger partners told the Washington Times that Starr felt so strongly about the Jones case that he was willing to forgo his usual $400-an-hour fee and write the brief for free.

pp. 260-261

Behind Davis and Cammarata as they prepared for that momentous day was the same trio of youngish lawyers who had first assisted their representation of Jones -- Jerome Marcus, of the Philadelphia firm Berger & Montague; George Conway III, a partner at New York's Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and Richard Porter, the former Quayle aide who had joined Kenneth Starr's firm, Kirkland & Ellis, in its Chicago home office.   During the early eighties Porter and Marcus had attended the University of Chicago Law School, coming under the influence of its strongly libertarian faculty.

***

Money from the Pittsburgh billionaire's foundations also supported three conservative organizations prominently associated without he Jones case.  Between 1988 and 1996, nearly a million dollars in Scaife funds had been lavished on the Landmark Legal Foundation, an organization based in Kansas City and Washington which litigated on behalf of right-wing causes.  Well over half a million dollars had been doled out to the Independent Women's Forum since 1994, when its leaders engaged Starr to write a brief on Jones' behalf.

Another million or so had subsidized the Federalist Society, established as a national legal fraternity during the Reagan era.  It acted as a clearinghouse for clerkships with conservative judges, policy forums, and a right-wing political network.  Its roster of members and patrons included many of the most prominent Republican judges, attorneys, and legal scholars, including Kenneth Starr and Judge David Sentelle, the presiding judge of the Special Division that had appointed Starr.)  Certain of its members, including Starr, had provided a great deal of high-priced legal advice to Jones for free.

Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata weren't the sort of attorneys attracted to the highly ideological Federalist milieu.  But Richard Porter and George Conway were among the group's active members, and they had mobilized its resources during the early days of the Jones lawsuit to lend additional repectability to her claims.  At the urging of Conway and Marcus, a group of Federalist-affiliated law professors and constitutional lawyers had signed 'friend of the court" briefs in 1994 supporting her right to proceedings against the president while he was still in office.

Now, as the date for argument on that issue in the Supreme Court approached, the young Federalist attorneys in the Jones camp called upon two of the organization's legal eminences to help prepare Davis and Cammarata.  During the first week of January, the brought Davis and Cammarata to the Army-Navy Club for a coaching session with Robert Bork, who had addressed the founding conference of the Federalist Society at Yale in 1982, and Ted Olson, the chairman of its powerful Washington chapter.  [Olson was also David Hale's attorney.]

pp. 298-300

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' 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.

***

It was Porter who brought him [Marcus] into the Jones clique early on, as a specialist in the constitutional separation of powers.  Having helped put together the Jones legal team, Porter had foreseen the need for expert advice to counter Bennett's argument that the president cannot be sued while in office.

p. 338-339

The man who set up Tripp's long-awaited rendezvous with the new Jones attorneys from Dallas was Richard W. Porter, the conservative activist with an expanding resume:   former Bush White house aide, adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle, and Republican opposition researcher; fellow University of Chicago Law School alumnus and close friend of Jerome Marcus, with whom he had arranged continuing legal assistance for Paula Jones; law partner of Kenneth W. Starr at Kirkland & Ellis; lawyer and anti-Clinton researcher for investment banker Peter W. Smith, who talked to him about negotiations with the Arkansas state troopers in troopergate; and now conduit to the Jones team for Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg.

During the third week of November, the agitated Tripp had asked Goldberg to "get me subpoenaed" by the Jones camp.  She correctly assumed that the literary agent would be able to make the necessary connections.  And Goldberg either knew or guessed that Alfred Regnery, the right-wing, Chicago-based president of Regnery Publishing and a publisher with whom Goldberg dealt frequently, might offer a useful suggestion, Regnery said Goldberg should call his friend Peter Smith, which she did on November 18.

"I did tell him at the time, I told him why we needed some help," Goldberg recalled much later.  "Smith said, 'I'll be glad to help you with whatever you need, I know the whole story anyway.'"  Smith called back that day with Richard Porter on a conference call.  After Goldberg finished telling Tripp's story, Porter promised to take care of the subpoena.

Then, according to Isikoff -- who had his own sources among the clique of conservative lawyers helping Jones -- Porter also contacted George Conway in New York via E-mail.   "There's a woman named Lewisky," he typed, misspelling her name.   ....

p. 349

"After gathering preliminary evidence to test the information's reliability, the OIC presented the evidence to Attorney General Janet Reno.  Based on her review of the information, the Attorney General determined that a further investigation by the Independent Counsel was required."

But that wasn't quite how it all happened.  The January 12 date, for example, is deceptive.  The OIC learned about Monica S. Lewinsky at least several days earlier than the report acknowledges, and from sources whose complicity with his investigation Kenneth Starr had powerful motives to conceal.  In Michael Isikoff's version of the story in Uncovering Clinton, "it was not clear who first had the idea" of bringing the independent counsel into the Paula Jones case.  Isikoff lists several possibilities:  Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp, Richard W. Porter, and Jerome Marcus.   Additional candidates would be Ann Coulter and George Conway, two more of the so-called elves helping Jones.

But there is no doubt that all members of this group were in contact with one another from September 1997 onward, and also that Goldberg, Tripp, Coulter, and Conway, at least, were regularly in touch with Isikoff.  According to the Newsweek reporter (whose book expresses deep discomfort at his having become "a player -- one of the acts in the scandal circus"), he never realized that he was being used as a cat's-paw in a conspiracy against Clinton.  Although he had become aware of Conway, Coulter, and Marcus five months before writing his first story about Lewinsky, the existence of a group of high-powered conservative lawyers working behind the scenes for Paula Jones had never struck him as newsworthy.

"I had relied on the elves for information at critical junctures," Isikoff wrote, "even while they concealed from me their role in bringing the Lewinsky allegations to the Jones lawyers and later to Ken Starr.

Presumable alerted by Jill Abramson and Don van Natta Jr.'s pathbreaking investigation in the New York Times, Isikoff discusses a dinner party that took place in Philadelphia on January 8999, 1998.  Present were Porter, Marcus, and Paul Rosenzweig, the fellow Chicago alumnus who had joined Kenneth Starr's Washington OIC staff in November 1997.   Exactly why Starr hired an ambitious young lawyer at a time when the Whitewater investigation and Filegate, Travelgate, and the Vince Foster investigation were near completion isn't clear.  But during the intervening three months, the Times reported, Rosenzweig had spoken with Marcus about the Jones case several times by phone.

Rosenzweig traveled up from Washington for the January 8 dinner at the elegant Deux Cheminees restaurant in Philadelphia.  Porter, Kenneth Starr's law partner and Lucianne Goldberg's conduit to the Jones lawyers, flew in...

***

Even if the participants' accounts are taken at face value, it was surely no accident that the January 8 dinner was omitted from the Starr Report.  For Rosenzweig to be meeting with a clique of attorneys who had helped the Jones team was bad enough.  But the participation of Porter, as Starr's law partner, presented the OIC with ethical problems.  Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety was the whole point of the Independent Counsel Act.  It specifically states that "any person associated with a [law] firm with which such independent counsel is associated may not represent in any matter any person involved in any investigation or prosecution."

Moreover, as Clinton attorney David Kendall pointed out when Porter's role came to light, by law "a legal representation of a client by one partner is attributable to all partners."

p. 356

There were several other items the OIC did not confide to Holder and Attorney General Janet Reno.  No mention was made of Rosenzweig's conversation with Jerome Marcus, who represented paula Jones.  Nothing was said about Richard Porter being Kenneth Starr's law partner.