Law Professor on Brill piece: 'Not good enough for small town newspaper'
Meet the Press
June 14, 1998 L.N. Smithee
BOB SCHIEFFER: So what do you make of this article that Steven Brill has written? Has the independent counsel done anything wrong, Professor Turley?
PROF. JONATHAN TURLEY: Well, it hardly makes a case for suggesting actual wrongdoing in any legal sense. I, I, I'd be surprised if this article made it past the copy editor of a small town newspaper.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Really!
PROF. JONATHAN TURLEY: .it's very, very, one-sided. And it also has a sort of misplaced emphasis. Rule 6E, the Grand Jury rule, does not prevent the prosecutor from doing background conversations with reporters. Everyone in this town must do [?], it's nothing cynical, nothing sinister. These are complex cases. Most reporters are not lawyers and they need to know what is being sort of done in this process, what the stage is, what is the direction. If you don't do that, then you have a lot of misinformation out there, and so there is nothing sinister about it. The White House has to do it, and so does Ken Starr. The important thing is for the independent counsel to able to assure the public that certain facts that might be wrong are in fact untrue, or to assure that the investigation is balanced.
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