Mary Matalin: The Other Pellicano Tapes
Monday, Nov. 17, 2003 12:03 a.m. EST
With Los Angeles private eye Anthony Pellicano beginning his jail sentence on Monday, Hollywood is on pins and needles wondering about the Pellicano tapes, illegal wiretap transcripts discovered on the celebrity gumshoe's computer while he was under investigation for a witness intimidation rap.
But those aren't the only recordings that document the work of the man known as the "investigator to the stars."
In 1992, when "the Pelican" hired on to do damage control for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, Mary Matalin, then the political director for President Bush 41's re-election campaign, found herself in the unenviable position of being sought out by women who were linked to Clinton - and threatened into silence by Mr. Pellicano.
Matalin, now a senior White House adviser, discussed the episode in 1997 during a stint as a talk radio host on CBS's Washington, D.C., affiliate.
"I got the letters from Pellicano to these women intimidating them," Matalin told her audience. "I had tapes of conversations from Pellicano to the women. I got handwritten letters from the women."
"I got one letter from one of the women's dad's saying, 'This is so horrible. Here's what they're going to do to us,' you know, essentially. It's not like they said, 'We're going to go out there and bust your kneecaps. (It was more like) we're going to say this, that and the other.'"
Matalin said she first noticed something was amiss when the Clinton campaign announced publicly that there were 19 women who would likely claim some sort of relationship with the Democratic candidate.
"I controlled the money in the [1992 Bush] campaign," Matalin explained. "And [Clinton damage controller] Betsy Wright announced that she was putting $28,000 on the 'bimbo' patrol and on Jack Palladino and Pellicano, the other guy.
"And $28,000 to me, the political director, was four states in the Rocky Mountains. You had a limited budget. I said, how could they spend this much money? How could they basically give up four states to track down 'bimbos'?
"That's why it was kind of shocking to me that it must have been a bigger priority than putting money into states for the purpose of winning and that's why I flagged it at the time. I don't even remember how many or what kind of women."
However, even though Pellicano's tapes and letters offered smoking-gun proof of the Clinton campaign's heavy-handed attempts to silence the future president's ex-girlfriends, then-President Bush refused to use the damaging info to save his re-election bid.
Matalin explained: "When I went to my boss in the campaign with this information and then they went to Bush, Bush himself called me up and said, 'I don't want to hear it. Don't even tell me what you have. Throw it all out,'" she told her radio audience.
Luckily for Mr. Pellicano - not to mention Bill and Hillary Clinton - Mary Matalin did as she was told. |
