Beat you to it, loser. The Boston Globe article confirms both the reports of the Helms, Faircloth, Sentelle lunch and the fact that "The two other members are retired judges in their late 70s, one a Republican, one a Democrat." Is there anything else that you want me to track down before you admit your ignorance?
Judge's leanings central to claims of
conspiracy
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff, 01/28/98
CHARLOTTE, N. C. - On July 14, 1994, Judge David Sentelle, who
chairs the panel overseeing special prosecutors, lunched with his mentor,
Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Lauch Faircloth, another Helms
protege who is the state's junior senator.
Faircloth was a vocal critic of special prosecutor Robert Fiske's investigation
of President Clinton, convinced that Fiske wasn't looking hard enough at the
Arkansas savings and loan controlled by Clinton's Whitewater partner,
James McDougal.
Three weeks later, in a move that stunned the White House, Sentelle's panel
removed Fiske and replaced him with Kenneth W. Starr, a conservative
who had served with Sentelle on the US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Now, Sentelle's lunch with Helms and Faircloth, and his overall record of
choosing special prosecutors, have become central to the claim, made
yesterday by Hillary Rodham Clinton, that Starr's latest investigation is part
of a broader effort by Bill Clinton's opponents to discredit his presidency.
While Sentelle's power largely rests with appointing special prosecutors,
Hillary Clinton, for one, views him as one of the people who allowed Starr's
investigation to snowball beyond the land deal that he was appointed to
investigate.
''It's not just one person, it's an entire operation,'' Mrs. Clinton said on the
''Today'' show yesterday, tracing Starr's investigation back to ''the same
three-judge panel that removed Robert Fiske and appointed him - the same
three-judge panel that is headed by someone who was appointed by Jesse
Helms and Lauch Faircloth.''
Sentelle, Helms and Faircloth all maintained that the Whitewater investigation
wasn't on the menu the day they lunched together: They discussed prostate
problems instead. After a Virginia housewife filed a complaint accusing
Sentelle of violating his responsibility to remain impartial in overseeing the
Whitewater investigation, a judicial panel ruled that Sentelle did not violate
the code of conduct by having lunch with the senators.
Still, a review of Sentelle's decisions, while revealing no evidence of a
conspiracy to discredit President Clinton, shows a persistent lack of concern
for appearances of impartiality. For example, six months after his fateful
lunch with Helms and Faircloth, Sentelle's wife, Jane, joined Faircloth's staff
as a receptionist, only furthering the Democrats' perceptions that Sentelle,
who serves on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, never moved
too far from partisan politics.
Sentelle, 54, who was appointed to the federal appeals court by President
Ronald Reagan with Helms's sponsorship, has roots in the activist wing of
the North Carolina Republican Party. He was Republican Party chairman in
Mecklenburg County, which includes the city of Charlotte, and a member of
The National Congressional Club, Helms's political action committee.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist named Sentelle in the early '90s to chair the
three-judge panel overseeing special prosecutors. The two other members
are retired judges in their late 70s, one a Republican, one a Democrat.
Sentelle, according to observers, wields most of the decision-making power.
Whether he has used that power judiciously is now a matter of partisan
debate.
After Mrs. Clinton's comments yesterday, Republicans rose in defense of the
process and the prosecutors.
Sentelle has never commented in public on his role overseeing special
prosecutors, but yesterday, a former law partner who has followed his
decisions closely scoffed at the idea that he was biased.
''He's a man of the highest integrity,'' said Charles H. Cranford, a Charlotte
attorney. ''He didn't become a judge to be involved in politics. I would have
a hard time believing he had any partisan motives in his decisions.''
Some observers, however, detect a change in the type of person being
appointed independent counsel under Sentelle. His predecessor, retired
federal Judge George MacKinnon, tended to choose prosecutors who were
senior academic lawyers or career practitioners.
Starr, however, served under President George Bush as solicitor general. At
the time of his appointment as special prosecutor, Starr was at work on a
legal brief defending the constitutionality of Paula Jones's sexual harassment
suit against Clinton. His onetime interest in the Jones case, now being funded
by the conservative Rutherford Institute, has become part of a
connect-the-dots conspiracy theory by some Clinton defenders.
Jones's lawyers have denied having contact with Starr.
The accusation of partisanship that has been leveled at Sentelle also attaches
to two of his panel's choices as special prosecutors.
Starr, however, served under President George Bush as solicitor general, the
administration's leading voice on legal issues, weighing in on divisive social
questions like abortion and affirmative action.
Meanwhile, Sentelle's panel's choice of lawyer to investigate former Housing
and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, David M. Barrett,
raised eyebrows for a different reason. Barrett was a developer of
low-income housing with close ties to Thomas Demerey, a central figure in
the Reagan administration's HUD scandal. Barrett, according to a
Congessional subcommittee report, made 65 phone calls over 19 months to
Demerey, an assistant HUD secretary accused of giving lucrative housing
grants to friends and GOP political favorites.
Barrett was never accused of wrongdoing, but Representative Barney
Frank, who serves on the committee overseeing housing, said his
appointment was inappropriate. ''He was mentioned as someone receiving
special favors from HUD - and 10 years later he's investigating HUD,'' said
Frank.
Matthew Rosengart, a lawyer on Barrett's staff, yesterday denied any
conflict of interest in Barrett's investigation. He declined to characterize
Barrett's ties to Demerey, who pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and
obstructing justice.
Frank's complaints about the special prosecutors appointed by Sentelle's
panel go beyond Barrett. Last summer, the openly gay congressman sent a
letter to Starr demanding an explanation for why his Whitewater
investigators questioned, for reasons never publicly explained, three officials
about gays in the Clinton administration, at a time when their purview did not
include sexual matters.
Starr's investigators also were chided by Clinton supporters last summer for
goingbeyond their mandate to question women about alleged sexual
encounters with the president.
Somewhat similar complaints have been raised against the other special
prosecutors. Barrett's investigators, whose mandate was to probe Cisneros
for lying to the FBI about hush payments to a former mistress, allegedly
quizzed witnesses about additional Cisneros liaisons. And Donald Smaltz,
the prosecutor appointed by Sentelle's panel to investigate possible bribes
paid to former Agriculture Secretary Michael Espy, allegedly showed
interest in sexual matters as well.
Yvonne McDaniel, 54, a friend of chicken magnate Don Tyson, claims she
was subpoenaed by Smaltz and questioned about whether there was
homosexuality or prostitution on cruises she had taken with Tyson. The
Tyson Foods CEO came on Smaltz's radar screen because he allegedly
gave sports tickets to Espy as bribes.
The prosecutors' alleged eagerness to probe sexual misconduct strikes some
Democrats as an attempt to advance a conservative moral agenda by
unmasking embarrassing details about the sex lives of Clintonites.
Starr, the son of a fundamentalist Christian minister, has ties to the religious
right. And Sentelle himself, a devout Baptist, comes from the Helms school
of Republicanism, in which politics and morality are inseparable.
Sentelle worked his way through the University of North Carolina and UNC
Law School, from which he was graduated third in his class. As a young
lawyer he met Helms, who had won election to the Senate as a deeply
conservative insurgent in the local GOP.
While Sentelle stayed active in the GOP, working on Reagan's and Helms's
campaigns and raising money, his primary attention remained on his law
career, associates say. He was an assistant US attorney in the early 1970s,
prosecuting white collar crime. Later, in private practice, he defended
people accused of white-collar crime, but also won praise from liberals for
representing capital-murder defendants without fee.
David Erdman, a lawyer who worked on Democratic campaigns and ran for
mayor of Charlotte in 1995, said Sentelle always respected the idea of equal
treatment under the law.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 01/28/98.
c Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company. |
