The Book on Ben-Veniste
Sept. 11 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who grilled Condoleezza Rice on Thursday as if she were a criminal suspect, is usually identified in press reports as merely a former Watergate prosecutor.
But as the leading finger-pointer in the 9/11 probe, a few other details in Ben-Veniste's background might be deemed relevant.
The Washington super-lawyer's last high-profile roll came in 1995-96, when he served as lead Democratic counsel for the Senate Whitewater hearings. His chief mission: Defending Bill and Hillary Clinton for all he was worth.
A review of press reports from the period shows that he'd been auditioning for the job since at least 1993, when he stepped up to the plate to assure reporters that there was nothing untoward about the Clintons dispatching White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and other top aides to rifle Whitewater lawyer Vince Foster's office on the night of his death.
"Novelists aside and skeptical Washington journalists aside, I don't hear anything involved in this tragedy that leads me to suspect either Bernie Nussbaum, who himself has an impeccable reputation, or anybody else associated with the White House has done anything that is not on the up-and-up," Ben-Veniste told the Associated Press at the time.
The next year, when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was appointed to look into Whitewater, Dr. Rice's griller was troubled, telling CBS News that the move would "inevitably ... create an impression that this decision was in part politically motivated."
Of course, Nussbaum, Ben-Veniste and Hillary Clinton were by then already old friends, having worked shoulder-to-shoulder on the Watergate committee two decades earlier.
When the Clintons' fund-raiser extraordinaire Terry McAuliffe got into legal hot water in the campaign finance scandal of 1997, Ben-Veniste was ready to take his case.
Speaking of the allegations that swirled around his client at the time, Ben-Veniste told the Legal Times that McAuliffe "has been advised that he is not a target of any investigation. And on the basis of what I know about the matter ... the conclusion will be that there's nothing there."
The Clinton Justice Department decided that Ben-Veniste was right and McAuliffe was off the hook. Three years later, the Clintons installed Ben-Veniste's client as head of the DNC.
The Democratic legal ace's most unusual case by far, however, took place not in Washington - but in Arkansas.
Ben-Veniste's client, a flamboyant pilot named Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, was said to have flown guns out of Arkansas' Mena airport at the CIA's direction. On the return trip his plane was allegedly loaded with cocaine.
Still, the high-powered lawyering didn't do much to protect Seal. Ben-Veniste's client was assassinated in 1986 after he began cooperating with a federal probe into the Mena drug ring that flourished while Bill Clinton was governor of the state. |
