A little history on Toobin
Wrote 'A Vast Conspiracy' to defend Clinton's serial adultery in office. Toobin said Clinton was a victim of a vast conspiracy just like Hillary said:
Jeffrey Toobin, Chicken!
Fifth in a series.
Posted Saturday, February 19, 2000
Jeffrey Toobin, whose book A Vast Conspiracy has been a subject of continuing interest in this space, backed out of a scheduled Wednesday appearance on Rivera Live at which he would have confronted Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter he slimes in his book. Since the show's host, Geraldo Rivera, is an ardent Clinton defender, it would presumably have been a favorable venue for Toobin, who describes the president as the victim of a cabal of greedy opportunists in the Flytrap scandal. Not favorable enough, I guess.
To compensate for this loss, kausfiles presents this, the fifth installment of its ongoing series, "Jeffrey Toobin, Hypocrite" (see Parts I, II, III, and IV.):
When I called Toobin last month to ask him why he was decrying "tawdry voyeurism" while dumping sex documents on the Web, I expected him to be hypocritical about it. ("Guilty as charged," he later admitted to Ted Koppel.) What I didn't expect was the general position he took regarding reporting about the private lives of public figures. "I believe the 'character' issue is a completely bogus journalistic concept designed to put a bow tie on" a vulgar interest in sex, Toobin told me. He added that a politician's sex life "tells you absolutely nothing about their performance" in office.
Note that he didn't say, "I thought Clinton's privacy interest outweighed any interest in asking him those questions," or "I thought what Clinton did was bad but not that bad," or "it wasn't enough to impeach him." He said Clinton's sexual misbehavior was a "completely bogus" issue and "absolutely" irrelevant.
Toobin's extreme position, of course, requires us to think that JFK's reckless trysting with Judith Campbell Exner told us nothing about his presidency. It also defies much of our learning about human psychology (be it Darwinian or Freudian), grounded as it is in the recognition that sex and the pursuit of sex is an important part of an individual's personality that profoundly affects all of that individual's behavior. It ignores the obvious point (made by Isikoff in his book) that "private misbehavior on Clinton's scale required routine repetitive, and reflexive lies to conceal itself" and that "lying, engaged in often enough, can have a corrosive effect." It says it's fine for future historians to get tenure and win prizes for unearthing the psychosexual roots of presidential folly, but terrible if voters find out about them in real time, when something could be done. It finds inexplicable the current behavior of the electorate, which is in the process of conducting an entire presidential election centered on what Toobin calls the "completely bogus" character issue.
But never mind that. You knew that. The point I want to make is that Toobin's position is so extreme and untenable that he doesn't believe it himself, not when he's assessing Clinton in his own book. On Page 49 of Vast Conspiracy, for example, Toobin sets out to explain a key turning point in Flytrap--Clinton's failure to settle the Paula Jones case, a course of action that would (at the least) have saved the president from wasting much of his second term: [T]he president ... said he didn't want to settle, but not because he was eager for a fight. He didn't want to settle, Clinton told [his attorney Robert] Bennett and others, because he couldn't do that to Hillary. A settlement would suggest that Clinton was admitting to Jones's charges, and the president said he could not put his wife through that kind of humiliation. This reluctance to settle had dramatic--and catastrophic--implications for the Clinton presidency, and it was rooted in the complex dynamics of the relationship between husband and wife. [Emphasis added.] Hmmm. This passage doesn't exactly make Clinton's sex life sound "absolutely" irrelevant to his public decisions. Quite the opposite. And if this "dramatic" and "catastrophic" course of action was "rooted in the complex dynamics of the relationship between husband and wife," isn't it possible that other decisions--say Clinton's refusal to humiliate his wife by abandoning her ambitious health-care proposal during his first term--were also rooted in those complex dynamics, which in turn were perhaps made more complex by Clinton's practice of carrying on affairs behind his wife's back? Certainly that thought isn't "completely bogus." Once you've accepted the "complex dynamics of the relationship between husband and wife" as the ultimate cause of a presidential action, it would seem you've opened the door pretty wide for all sorts of journalistic inquiries far more intrusive than any Michael Isikoff or Jackie Judd or William Rempel undertook--at least for a president whose wife played such an important public and (her aides now tell us) private role in governing.
kausfiles.com
Jeffrey Toobin, Hypocrite, Part II: In his book A Vast Conspiracy, you'll recall, New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin denounces "sexual investigative reporting" as "tawdry voyeurism" and "sleaze." But that doesn't prevent him from recounting, on Page 53, the allegation of one Dennis Kirkland that Paula Jones "gave him a 'blow job'" and that he'd seen her "giving blow jobs to three of his friends, whom he named." Is that really relevant? Well, maybe it is. What's inexcusable is that Toobin waits 100 pages to mention that a) Kirkland is a convicted forger; who b) had had "five, six, seven, eight even" beers the night in question; and c) hadn't actually seen Jones give the serial blow jobs to his friends. Simple fairness should have suggested that Toobin at least hint strongly during his initial presentation of Kirkland's tale that it was uncorroborated and would later prove a problem for Clinton's lawyers. Toobin could easily have done that while preserving narrative suspense. ... He might also have mentioned that none of Kirkland's friends backed up the allegations. ... But then, actually checking out and evaluating a story like that is "sexual investigative reporting," isn't it? ...
kausfiles.com
... Let's not forget that Toobin, the man who now decries the baleful influence of book deals, first made his mark betraying Iran-Contra special counsel Lawrence Walsh, for whom he worked as a lawyer, by quitting to publish a book about the case before it was even over!
...
kausfiles.com
Seems Toobin is an expert on adultery and abortion:
The Jeffrey Toobin / Casey Greenfield Drama Rolls On By David Lat
 Over on the website of the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has a nice post on how Elena Kagan deftly finessed the “gays in the military” / Solomon Amendment issue while serving as dean of Harvard Law School. It’s an interesting read; check it out here (via Dahlia Lithwick’s Twitter feed).
Alas, these days Toobin is apparently busy with pursuits other than journalism. Over the weekend, the New York Daily News provided a rather salacious update on his alleged affair and resulting love child with Casey Greenfield — the Gibson Dunn litigator, daughter of well-known political pundit Jeff Greenfield, and a media figure in her own right….
According to the NYDN:
In 2008, when Greenfield became pregnant, and when she told Toobin the news, he offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” says a source. He also allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later via a sperm donor.
“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claims another source.
Adrian Chen of Gawker had this take: “[T]his fight between two lawyers appropriately raises some important legal issues: So much has been made about a woman’s right to choose. But what about Jeffrey Toobin’s?”
[ That would be Toobin's choice to have his baby aborted. ]
The NYDN piece unearthed some additional tidbits about the Toobin/Greenfield relationship, which you can read about here (with commentary from Gawker here and here). On the positive side, Toobin is now in compliance with his child support obligations, and has started to visit with his son Rory.
http://gawker.com/5534609/cnn-analyst-jeffrey-toobin-graciously-offered-to-pay-for-mistress-abortion
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