Why A History-Making Offer Was Spurned
By Reed Irvine
August 11, 1999
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The Associated Press reported on August 9 that Deputy White House Counsel Cheryl Mills had rejected President Clinton's offer to promote her to chief White House counsel. If she had accepted, Ms. Mills, 34, would have been the first woman and the first black to hold that job. Ms. Mills informed the President that instead of accepting his history-making offer, she had decided to resign her position as deputy counsel.
Ms. Mills had been at the White House since the beginning of President Clinton's first term. The AP quoted White House Chief of Staff John Podesta as saying, "She is tired and wants to get her life centered," whatever that means. Podesta praised her as "a wonderful lawyer."
A dedicated Clinton loyalist, she defended him before the Senate in his impeachment trial, denying that he had violated the civil rights of Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who charged that Governor Clinton had shocked her by asking that she service him sexually. She refused, and ended up suing him in 1994. The suit was settled last year for $850,000, and Clinton was recently ordered to pay Jones's attorneys $90,000 to cover the extra expense they incurred as a result of his having lied under oath when they deposed him.
One has to wonder why a young lady who rose from a junior attorney to deputy White House Counsel in just six years would spurn the opportunity to cap her White House career with the title of chief counsel. The explanation may lie in the fact that in September 1998, Rep. Dan Burton, the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, had demanded that the Justice Department prosecute Cheryl Mills for perjury and failure to produce documents in her possession that his committee had subpoenaed.
The committee was looking for evidence that White House employees had been illegally used to compile a database of possible donors to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton reelection campaign. The Washington Times pointed out in an editorial last January that "Ms. Mills was the White House point person dealing with congressional requests for information." It said, "She was quite effective in thwarting congressional investigators—she hid documents that would have been damaging to the White House. When caught, she was questioned under oath by the committee and denied hiding any subpoenaed papers. The committee concluded that Ms. Mills committed perjury in her effort to cover up her initial obstruction of justice."
The committee's report stated, "The withheld documents included: (1) the handwritten notes of Brian Bailey, an assistant to then-Deputy Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, expressing the President's desire to integrate the White House database with the DNC data base; and (2) a June 28,1994 memorandum from Marsha Scott to Harold Ickes, Bruce Lindsey, and the First Lady, showing that the First Lady was informed of Marsha Scott's interest in using the database for political purposes and employing White House staff to create political databases."
The Times said that Cheryl Mills acquired these two documents in Sept. 1996, but she didn't turn the Bailey memo over to the committee until the following February. She withheld Marsha Scott's memo until October 1997. "In both cases," the Times said, "these documents were handed over when other White House lawyers looked at Ms. Mills' files and discovered what she was illegally hiding there."
But Ms. Mills testified under oath that she didn't give these documents to the committee because she thought they pertained to a different database. They said that was perjury because "there was no other database to which the documents could have referred." It concluded that she withheld the documents because she believed they would be politically damaging if they were released before the 1996 election. This was the basis of the request to Attorney General Reno that she be prosecuted for obstruction of justice and perjury.
In ordering the government to pay the Native American Indian Rights Fund $625,000 because officials from the Interior and Treasury departments had disobeyed court orders that they produce certain documents and then lied about it, Judge Royce Lamberth said he had "never seen more egregious conduct by the federal government." He apparently didn't know that Cheryl Mills had done the same thing. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times mentioned her egregious conduct in their stories about her rejecting the promotion. The AP story, which was used by the Washington Times, said only that she had denied charges by House Republicans that she had withheld documents from investigators.
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