Gadfly Klayman Chooses Consistency Over Predictability
Larry Klayman, chairman and general council of Judicial Watch, holds a news conference on suit filed against Vice President Dick Cheney in Miami Wednesday, July 10, 2002. (Washingtonpost.com Chief Political Correspondent
Tuesday, July 16, 2002; 7:32 AM
washingtonpost.com
Partisanship demands predictability over consistency.
That's why Democrats who argued during Bill Clinton's presidency that Whitewater was irrelevant are now making hay over George W. Bush's stock trading at the Harken Energy Corporation. And it is why Republicans who argued that Whitewater was relevant during the Clinton years dismiss Bush's Harken stuff as old news.
It is this enduring reality that makes the return to the spotlight of Larry Klayman and Judicial Watch so interesting. For those not familiar with Klayman: He is the conservative legal activist who created Judicial Watch to file dozens of Clinton-related lawsuits on the release of information regarding Vince Foster's and Ron Brown's deaths, Kathleen Willey's personal letters to the White House, Gennifer Flowers's claims of defamation, Janet Reno's return of Elian Gonzales to Cuba, and so on. Some Judicial Watch efforts were successful-in the Willey case most notably-but most were not. All were seen by Clinton supporters as a part of the larger relentlessly partisan effort to ruin his presidency.
Klayman was, no doubt, one of the people Hillary Clinton had in mind when she used the term "right-wing conspiracy."
But it turns out that Klayman is more consistent than predictable, as he has chosen to apply the same set of gadfly standards to the current White House, even though it is filled with fellow conservatives. In doing so, Klayman has confounded his former friends who are complaining bitterly that he has strayed from the reservation.
Klayman Sues-His Own Team
Last week, Klayman, self-described conservative watchdog, filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of shareholders of Halliburton, the Dallas-based oil services company formerly headed by Dick Cheney, for "alleged fraudulent accounting practices which resulted in the overvaluation of the company's shares, thereby deceiving investors and others." The suit seeks $200 million in damages.
While a handful of other shareholder lawsuits have been filed against Halliburton, Klayman's is the first, he said, to personally name Vice President Cheney. In other words, Klayman has not just picked a fight with a Fortune 500 company, he's gone out of his way to take on the White House.
In an interview on Friday, Klayman expressed no regrets, lashed out at critics on the left and the right and portrayed himself as a populist everyman-and the only person brave enough to stand up against the nation's most powerful corporate and political forces.
"That's why Judicial Watch takes these actions against the high and mighty no matter who they are," he said. "No one else will do it. No one frankly has the guts to do it because you pay a price for doing it. You've got to be able to take a lot of criticism. You've got to be able to take a lot of heat. And sometimes you've be able to take the government coming after you."
Klayman compared himself to John Adams, who wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "without virtue, there can be no political liberty." And that was just the first of the historical comparisons he offered. He also invoked the names of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, true heroes of the little guy, he said.
"The support of the Republican party is a mile wide and a millimeter deep. And a lot of people could maintain that the Bush administration isn't even very conservative. So everything gets blurred and the way you keep it from getting blurred is to do what's right, to do what's ethical, to do what's just and to do it on behalf of the American people. So those people who don't like it aren't really conservative at all. They're just simply Republican party hacks."
Arm in Arm With the Sierra Club
Earlier this year, Klayman also joined forces with the Sierra Club in a lawsuit seeking to compel the administration to release documents and information about its energy task force, which was led by Vice President Cheney. In a little-noted development last Thursday, a federal judge allowed the suit to proceed and chastised the White House for seeking "aggrandizement of executive power" (Suit on Cheney Energy Files to Proceed, Washington Post, July 12, 2002.) Judicial Watch has said it may seek to depose Cheney and other administration officials – a process that may be easier given the legal precedents set by the Paula Jones case.
Klayman said he was unconcerned that his actions could distract the White House at a time when the country is at war.
"If you don't hold the vice president accountable, and the Bush administration, how are they going to have the moral authority to clean up the corporate corruption? How are they going to have the trust of the American people to fight the war on terrorism? So I think we're doing the administration a favor by getting to the bottom of this."
The news of Judicial Watch's latest lawsuit comes in the wake of revelations that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Halliburton's accounting practices. Meanwhile, Cheney has been completely absent from the corporate scandal debate.
"We don't discuss Halliburton issues," Mary Matalin, Cheney's chief political aide, told Newsweek in this week's edition of the magazine. "His view is that it would be a distraction from what he's trying to get done here." Halliburton's folks are said to be a trifle peeved that the veep's folks keep referring reporters to them. "At some point, [Cheney] is going to have to address these [accounting] questions," Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman told the magazine.
Given that the same article (Sticky Business, Newsweek, July 22, 2002) quotes current Halliburton CEO Robert Lesar saying that Cheney was familiar with the company's accounting practices, Hall is probably correct.
"The vice president was aware of who owed us money, and he helped us collect it," Lesar told Newsweek. "We stand behind the accounting treatment."
Cold Shoulder from the GOP
At the same time, Klayman, 50, has been taking it on the chin from his former buddies, who have called him everything from a "Looney Tune" to a variety of terms we can't print on a family Web site. The thinking from some quarters in Washington is that Klayman needs a new target to stay in business, that Judicial Watch, which relies on the largess of its contributors, was running out of steam with Mr. Ready-Made-Scandal (Clinton) no longer in office.
Stephen Schmidt, communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, said as much recently to Insight magazine, arguing that "they sue frivolously" and derisively referring to Judicial Watch as "a huge fund-raising operation."
"It's interesting that Republicans think he's lost his mind, because Democrats never thought he had a mind," said Democratic National Committee spokeswomen Jennifer Palmieri on Monday.
In fact, Judicial Watch has grown into quite the substantial operation, with about 50 employees. It took in $27 million in donations in 2000. But that number dropped to $17 million last year, a Judicial Watch spokesman said. Call one of the numbers provided by Judicial Watch's Web site, and a chipper voice greets you with a request for a donation before you can say "Hello." While Klayman's $250,000 salary is not big-city law partner territory, it's still one that 97 percent of the American public would love to have.
To critics who say he's a publicity-hound seeking to bolster his fund-raising efforts, Klayman says, "We will never put the financial aspect ahead of doing what's right. Never have done that. If that was the case, I'd be in private practice and not chairman of a public interest group." |
