(OT) Comic relief. Thinking about insiders information,
law suits etc? Here: some people sue their moms!
------------------------------------------------------------
Nut Watch
First Larry Klayman sued
Hillary Clinton. Now he's
suing his mom.
By Jacob Weisberg
(posted Friday, June 5, 1998)
Everything you need to know
about Larry Klayman can be gleaned
from a press release he blast-faxed to
the world two weeks ago. The
heading read:
CLINTON ALLIES BEGIN SMEAR
CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUDICIAL
WATCH
Use "Friendly" Newsweek Reporter
to Harm Memory of Grandmother of Larry
Klayman
Likely Complicity of Clinton Private
Investigators
The unhinged prose that followed
responded to an item filed by Newsweek
reporter Daniel Klaidman. Klayman did
not dispute the fact that he is suing his
mother, Shirley Feinberg. He claims his
mom won't pay him back $50,000 he spent
on private nurses for her mother, his
grandmother, Yetta Goldberg, who died
last August at 89. He did not want this suit
to become public, but the Clintonites, he
asserted, learned about it and leaked
word to Newsweek. The final paragraph
of his statement bears quoting in full:
Klaidman used this information,
obviously dug up by private
investigators of the Clintons to
suggest that the Judicial Watch
chairman will sue anyone, and
so hurt Klayman by trampling
on the memory of his
grandmother. This is untrue,
unfair, and outrageous! What is
true is that Klayman will do
what is right, no matter who is
involved. Whether it means
caring for his sick and dying
grandmother who raised him,
guaranteeing payment to her
nurses, or taking action to make
sure they are paid. Klayman
will not shrink from his
standards of ethics and
morality. Unlike Klaidman, who
wants to curry favor with
Clinton administration friends
such as [George]
Stephanopoulos, Klayman looks
to no one, other than God, for
guidance and direction.
In fact, Newsweek did not hear of this
lawsuit, which was concealed under the
name of a collection agency that belongs
to Klayman, from the White House. It
found out from Klayman's brother, who
volunteered the information. But the point
is not just that this Klayman conspiracy is
imaginary and far-fetched (Newsweek,
which broke the Lewinsky scandal, is
hardly "friendly" toward the White
House). It is that, as evidenced by this and
other paranoiac effusions, Klayman is off
his rocker.
his became abundantly evident when I
went to interview him at his Washington
office this week. After attempting to ascertain
whether I was a Clinton spy or worked for
Salon magazine ("in our view, a front for the
Clinton administration"), Klayman told me
that "private investigator types" working for
Clinton have been spotted "casing" his office.
With darting eyes and barely repressed rage,
he alleged that administration secret police
keep files on him. He went on to tell me that
Ron Brown was probably murdered because
of what he knew about various administration
scandals. Alleging the existence of forensic
evidence of murder, he explained,
"Everybody in that lab believed there was a
round hole the size of a .45 caliber bullet." (In
one TV interview, Klayman suggested the
killer was "perhaps the president himself.")
The Brown cover-up is the subject of one of
the 18 lawsuits Klayman has filed against the
administration. Another concerns the
investigation into the death of Vince Foster,
who Klayman thinks may also have been
murdered.
In other words, Klayman is one of the
fringe characters who has sprouted in the
moist ground of the Clinton scandals as
mushrooms do after a spring rain. But
Klayman is not treated like a fringe figure. He
has, by and large, achieved the mainstream
credibility he craves. He is a frequent guest on
such TV programs as Crossfire, Rivera Live,
MSNBC's Internight, and The Charles
Grodin Show (with whose twitchy host he
seems to have a special affinity). Klayman is
financially supported, praised, and frequently
cited by the wider conservative movement.
But he isn't just a nutter who gets right-wing
foundation money and gets on television. He's
a nutter with a law degree who takes
advantage of the courts to harass his political
opponents. How does he get away with it?
he press elevates Klayman for a couple of
reasons. On television, there are more and
more shows that take off from the Crossfire
format, expecting guests to represent strongly
contrary positions. If one thinks Ken Starr is
out of control, the other, ideally, should argue
that Bill Clinton knifes people and buries their
bodies in the White House basement. If these
guests scream and yell, so much the better.
Barking, however, undermines the pretense of
a rational debate. Klayman, who presents a
coherent fa‡ade while making wild and
unsubstantiated charges, is perfect. With print
publications, there's a different problem. Fine
profiles of Klayman have recently appeared in
Newsweek and the Washington Post. But the
conventions of newspaper journalism are such
that an "objective" reporter cannot render his
own opinion that the subject has a screw
loose. Klayman is described in such terms as
"controversial legal gadfly."
You might think mainstream
conservatives would be wary of Klayman's
tactics. Tort reform was part of the Contract
With America, and he is a one-man litigation
explosion. But so far, conservatives have been
silent, perhaps because Klayman has proved
remarkably effective at abusing the people
most right-wingers dislike. His primary vehicle
is a $90 million invasion of privacy suit filed
against Hillary Clinton and others on behalf of
the "victims" of Filegate. Never mind that
congressional investigators and Ken Starr
have decided that the gathering of FBI files on
previous administration officials with names
starting with letters A through G was not part
of a grand plot to harass political opponents.
Klayman has found an opening to harass his
political opponents, inflicting costly all-day
depositions on Harold Ickes, Stephanopoulos,
James Carville, Paula Begala, and many
others.
n these torture session, Klayman rants and
raves and demands to "certify" for the court
answers that he deems evasive. ("What does
'certified' mean," Ickes responded to
Klayman, "other than 'crazy'?") Klayman asks
administration officials about whom they date,
where they go after work, whether they were
expelled from school for disciplinary
problems. One 23-year-old White House
assistant was interrogated about a triple
murder that took place at a Starbucks in
Georgetown. Klayman videotapes these
depositions, excerpts of which air on Geraldo
when Klayman appears on the program, and
publishes the transcripts on the Internet. This
is in pursuit of a case about the invasion of
privacy, remember. But resistance is largely
futile. Last week, the presiding judge in the
case sanctioned Stephanopoulos for not
looking hard enough for documents covered
by a Judicial Watch subpoena. As
punishment, Stephanopoulos has to go
through the ordeal of another deposition and
pay some of Klayman's legal costs. The
ultimate goal of the Filegate suit appears to be
to inflict this treatment on Hillary Clinton.
Why don't the courts put a stop to this?
Some judges have tried. In 1992 in California,
Klayman lost a patent case on behalf of a
distributor of bathroom accessories. His
obnoxious behavior got him barred from
Judge William Keller's courtroom for life.
Klayman has hounded Keller ever since. He
appealed the ruling, accusing Keller of being
anti-Semitic and anti-Asian (Klayman is
Jewish; his client was Taiwanese). After
losing his appeal and being scolded by the
appeals court judges, he tried to appeal to the
Supreme Court. He has not given up yet. It is
this matter, he has said, which led him to
found Judicial Watch in 1994. The
organization supports requiring judges to
undergo psychological testing and holding
them personally liable for "reckless" rulings. It
also advocates removing Keller from the
bench.
ore recently, in a trade case in New
York, Klayman found himself on the
other end of charges of ethnic bias. When
Judge Denny Chin ruled against Klayman's
client, Klayman wrote Chin a rude letter
asking about his contacts with John Huang
and suggesting that Chin's being an
Asian-American Clinton appointee may have
biased him. The connection was imaginary. In
our interview, Klayman claimed press
accounts of this incident have made it sound
as if the Huang-Chin connection was baseless.
He said it was supported by a document
discovered in one of his lawsuits. But the
document, which he faxed to me, turns out to
be merely a list of Asian-Americans appointed
by the Clinton administration. Chin fined
Klayman $25,000 and barred him from his
courtroom for life. A three-judge panel on the
U.S. Court of Appeals threw out the fine but
upheld the expulsion. "I've got ethics
complaints pending against all four of them,"
Klayman says.
Despite Klayman's record of abusing the
courts, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Reagan
appointee, has been extremely indulgent of his
antics in the Filegate case, giving him wide
latitude to issue subpoenas. Whether
Lamberth has succumbed to Klayman out of
ideology, permissiveness, or fear of reprisal it
is impossible to say. Last week, Lamberth did
finally throw out a fishing-expedition type
subpoena Klayman sent to New Yorker writer
Jane Mayer. After Mayer reported Linda
Tripp had lied about a youthful arrest for
robbery, Klayman asserted Mayer had been
fed the information by the Clinton secret
police and that it was thus relevant to his
Filegate case. It turns out, as Mayer wrote in
The New Yorker this week, that her source on
the robbery incident was Tripp's former
stepmother--who has since agreed to go on
the record. But Klayman still believes the
White House fed the Tripp arrest story to
Mayer. "She's not telling the truth about that,"
he says. "Were there Clinton private
investigators working with her?" Maybe he'll
ask his mom in her next deposition.
Links
Read the transcript of Klayman's deposition
of Ickes at the site of an electronic magazine
called the Washington Weekly. Then find
other depositions by browsing the Weekly's
back issues. The March 23rd issue is a
mother lode, containing the depositions of
George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, and
Paul Begala. Learn more about Judicial
Watch's numerous legal efforts here. David
Segal profiles Klayman in the Washington
Post. (Note: Post links to articles go dark two
weeks from the date of their publication.) |
