JUDICIAL WATCH DEPOSES JANE MAYER'S ALLEGED SOURCE
J. Lowe Davis Denies She is Source of Quotations
By Wesley Phelan
*Washington Weekly Exclusive*
Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch on Friday, June 26, deposed J.
Lowe Davis, to whom New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer attributed
information about a 1969 arrest of Linda Tripp. J. Lowe Davis
admits telling Mayer that her former husband and Linda Tripp's
father, Albert Caretenuto, had once bailed Linda Tripp out of
jail. But Davis claims not to be the source of other quotes
attributed to her by Mayer.
The Washington Weekly caught up with Klayman Saturday, and asked
about the J. Lowe Davis deposition as well as the recent
revelation that James Carville keeps voluminous files on White
House 'enemies':
QUESTION: Judicial Watch recently got 38,000 pages of
documents in discovery from James Carville, correct?
KLAYMAN: We got about 40,000 pages of documents.
QUESTION: That is a mountain of documents. Have you had a
chance to go through these documents in any detail?
KLAYMAN: We're going through them, but we haven't finished.
What we've found is that James Carville and his group, the
Education and Information Project, is keeping files on a
number of Republicans, conservatives, and others who have
been critical of the Clinton Administration. He is a very
organized individual, contrary to the impression he creates
on national television, and he works in conjunction with the
White House. In his files we found numerous communications
from the White House Chief of Staff's Office, from the Legal
Counsel's Office, and from others. He is in constant
communication with the President's lawyer, Mr. David Kendall,
and with other Clinton allies such as George Stephanopoulos
and Harold Ickes. He in all likelihood is the ringleader of
the massive smear operation that this White House is mounting
against anyone who challenges it.
QUESTION: Do these documents indicate that Carville has
someone collecting information for him?
KLAYMAN: They indicate the information comes from many
different sources. He has people inside his organization who
collect information. He also gets information from the White
House. If information sent to him from the White House comes
out of identifiable files in the White House, this may
constitute a violation of the Privacy Act. If so, we may
have both civil and criminal remedies for that. This is
something we are currently looking into. We also know he
gets information from David Kendall on a regular basis. One
would assume, since David Kendall has hired Terry Lenzner on
behalf of the President, that Carville is also in
communication with him. This is why we suspect he is the
ringleader of the White House smear campaign.
QUESTION: Did Carville have any files on federal judges?
KLAYMAN: We have not identified any at this time.
HAND OF CARVILLE SEEN IN MEDIA SMEAR CAMPAIGN
QUESTION: Was there a file on Judicial Watch in the files
you received?
KLAYMAN: Yes, they do have a file on Judicial Watch, and
they have used materials in that file against Judicial Watch
and against me. In the last several weeks they have
obviously undertaken a smear campaign against Judicial Watch.
[1]
QUESTION: Does this smear campaign involve Newsweek and
other media outlets?
KLAYMAN: We don't know if Carville was in contact with any
of these. But Stephanopoulos was quoted in Newsweek saying
our legal proceeding was a 'kangaroo court,' showing
disrespect, not just for Judicial Watch and Larry Klayman,
but also for the court itself. On an unrelated matter,
Stephanopoulos was recently sanctioned by the court for not
being truthful, and for not searching for documents in a
timely manner. He will have to pay Judicial Watch's
attorneys fees. Of course, that was not widely reported in
the so-called 'liberal media.' They obviously don't want to
report that one of their own was found to have lied.
QUESTION: I believe that Robert Novak reported that.
KLAYMAN: Yes. He is one of the few who did report it. He
is a very fine journalist who reports events in a fair way.
QUESTION: Have other media outlets joined in the attack on
Judicial Watch?
KLAYMAN: The Clinton smear campaign has used an editor at
the Washington Post. His name is William Hamilton. He
happens to be the husband of Jane Mayer, whom we sought to
depose in our lawsuit. Jane Mayer wrote the article dealing
with Linda Tripp's arrest record. One of the reporters
working under Hamilton, David Segal, has written a number of
smear pieces against Judicial Watch in the last several
weeks, for which the Washington Post had to issue multiple
retractions and allow for the publication of a letter to the
editor. It is one of the poorest pieces of journalism, over
a short period of time, that I've ever seen. We have
complained to the Washington Post that this is obviously
retribution by William Hamilton, because we sought to depose
his wife, Jane Mayer.
QUESTION: Could you characterize some of the misstatements
of fact made by the Post?
KLAYMAN: There are so many I couldn't get into them all.
But to give you a few, the Post stated that Judicial Watch
had said publicly Ron Brown was murdered by people at the
White House. We've never said that. What we've said is
there was a hole in Ron Brown's head the shape of a .45
caliber bullet. We said that two of our clients in the Armed
Forces Institute of Pathology, along with other pathologists,
wanted to conduct an autopsy in order to find out what was
the cause of death. They were called off by the White House,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Commerce and
Transportation Departments. The Post also did not report
that we have been joined in our efforts to try to get an
investigation of Ron Brown's death by the NAACP and by Dick
Gregory -- quite a nonpartisan approach.
It is ironic that the Washington Post and other liberal
media, which have published in the last several weeks a lot
of false information about Judicial Watch, much of which was
retracted, would have complained about the apparently false
and misleading reporting that occurred in Content Magazine in
the Pressgate story. It is obvious that the liberal press
will take offense when they are misquoted and smeared in the
public domain. Yet they have little sensitivity when it
happens to others.
SOURCE DISPUTES MAYER QUOTES
QUESTION: What date did you depose J. Lowe Davis?
KLAYMAN: We deposed her on June 26. She is the ex-
stepmother of Linda Tripp.
QUESTION: Why would you have her in for a deposition?
KLAYMAN: We had sought to take the deposition of Jane Mayer,
the reporter for the New Yorker. She is a former colleague
of Sidney Blumenthal, the White House spinmeister who puts
forth a lot of information about adversaries of the Clinton
Administration. As you know, Jane Mayer printed the
information about Linda Tripp's arrest record, which came out
of Pentagon files, and which was provided to her by political
appointees at the Pentagon. We are seeking to find if Mayer
was working in conjunction with the White House as part of a
campaign to intimidate and smear a key witness against the
Clinton Administration. We are interested in this in the
context of Filegate, because we want to see whether there is
a pattern of releasing information from government files in
an attempt to harm perceived adversaries of the Clinton
Administration.
We asked the court if we could depose Jane Mayer herself.
The court said we hadn't made a specific enough showing at
this time to be able to take her deposition. That is because
she is a journalist and would otherwise have a journalist
privilege. Shortly after the court did not allow her
deposition to be taken, Jane Mayer revealed that one of her
sources was J. Lowe Davis, the ex-stepmother of Linda Tripp.
For that reason we took J. Lowe Davis' deposition.
QUESTION: Did you ask her about the content of the phone
conversation she had with Jane Mayer?
KLAYMAN: Yes we did. She did receive a phone call from Jane
Mayer. She did not know whether or not Jane Mayer had found
her through other means, for instance, whether Clinton
private investigators had put Mayer on to her. She doesn't
know what other sources Jane Mayer may have or whether those
sources are the result of private investigators. But she did
speak with Jane Mayer, and she did provide information to
Jane Mayer. She herself is a journalist with a Pensacola
newspaper.
QUESTION: So it is clear from the deposition that Mayer got
in touch with Davis, not the other way around?
KLAYMAN: That is correct.
QUESTION: Did Mayer already know what to ask for, or was she
on a fishing expedition?
KLAYMAN: It's hard to say. Davis was somewhat protective of
Mayer since they are fellow journalists. Davis gave the
impression that she was shocked to learn that the woman she
was seeing on the news, in regard to the Monica Lewinsky
scandal, was her former stepdaughter. And what's most
bizarre is that after she supposedly was shocked, she then
may have suggested to Jane Mayer that she should look into
what Linda Tripp had put down on Pentagon forms about whether
she had been arrested in the past. According to J. Lowe
Davis, she provided the information to Jane Mayer, that her
former husband and Tripp's father, Albert Caretenuto, had
once bailed Linda Tripp out of jail. However, she did not
remember much more about that episode, except that Albert
Caretenuto bailed Tripp out of jail. That is a very
interesting piece of information -- that she doesn't remember
much of anything else.
We went through the second article written by Jane Mayer,
after Mayer revealed Davis as her source. Many of the
quotations in this second article simply did not come from
Davis. They were, however, attributed to Davis. They appear
to have been fabricated. That raises another question, as to
whether Mayer had an agenda here. Was she working on behalf
of the White House to smear Linda Tripp, manufacturing
quotations from Davis which were never given? All of this
creates the aura that Jane Mayer might have done much the
same thing the liberal media accuses Steven Brill of doing --
manufacturing quotations. As I said, the press has
complained about the article by Brill, which they claim
misquoted them on the topic of Judge Ken Starr. It will be
very ironic if this turns out to be a similar situation,
which it appears at this point to be.
If you look at Mayer's second article, she provides a lot of
information and suggests that the information is coming from
J. Lowe Davis. However, J. Lowe Davis, in her deposition,
revealed that much of the information did not come from her,
leaving open the question, "Where was Jane Mayer getting this
specific information? Was she working with Clinton private
investigators to get the information?"
FUTURE DIRECTION OF INVESTIGATION
QUESTION: Tony Snow on June 15 wrote that the language Jane
Mayer cites in her New Yorker piece does not appear in the
Pentagon records, suggesting that it may have come from forms
at the White House. Is this the smoking gun of White House
involvement in the Mayer piece?
KLAYMAN: I did read the Snow piece and it raises an
important question. We don't know if that is the case or
not, but we will be pursuing this Linda Tripp issue, because
it is very important in the context of our Filegate lawsuit.
The court has given us authority to take discovery not only
into FBI files and their release from the FBI to the White
House, but also into whether other government files have been
misused by the Clinton Administration. If there is a pattern
of this conduct, this would raise an inference that the
administration in the context of Filegate intended to misuse
the FBI files. It also has other evidentiary value.
The Kathleen Willey issue is also important. Were those
letters that were released by the White House -- which James
Carville admits in his deposition to having discussed with
the President -- released from Willey's personnel file? If
so, that would be another violation of the Privacy Act. And
we know of other instances during the Clinton Administration
where government information has been released from files, in
an apparent attempt to harm adversaries. That is why the
conduct of Filegate is much broader than just FBI files. It
gets into Pentagon files, personnel files, and a number of
different instances. There appears to be a course of conduct
going back to 1992, where the Clinton Administration has used
information from a number of government sources to harm its
perceived critics.
QUESTION: What is the schedule for future depositions in the
Filegate case?
KLAYMAN: Coming up soon are depositions of Mickey Kantor and
Lanny Davis. We have scheduled the deposition of Mack
McLarty for August. That will be a major deposition. We are
waiting for him to leave the White House. We will be taking
the deposition of a number of records custodians in the White
House, including the representative who has been designated
to testify about the White House computer system, WHODB, also
known as 'Big Brother.'
NOTES:
[1] See recent Washington Weekly stories: "The Washington Post
and the White House Enemies List," June 15; and "Larry Klayman
Responds To Newsweek Smear," May 25.
[ Wesley Phelan can be reached at wphlen@mtco.com ]
Published in the Jun. 29, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly
Copyright 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)
Reposting permitted with this message intact
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