A Vast Conspiracy (10 page)

Terry was joined on his tour by the Reverend Patrick Mahoney, the executive director of a group called the Christian Defense Coalition, who announced at that first press conference, “We are going to be holding demonstrations at the Rose Law Firm and in front of Clinton’s former church, asking them why they did not discipline this man, or excommunicate this man, or censure this man. This man is flagrantly promoting rebellion against God’s word. We are going to grass-roots America and rip off the facade. This is the single most un-Christian administration in the history of this country.”

So, on April 15, the tour did indeed kick off in the parking lot of Hillary’s former law firm, and there Terry’s motor coach was joined by a satellite uplink van belonging to Vic Eliason. A minister based in Milwaukee, Eliason used the van on behalf of the Voice of Christian Youth, an organization that syndicated radio programs to about two hundred religious stations around the country. Eliason, Terry, and Mahoney spent the day broadcasting from the parking lot, calling on a series of local guests, including a man who accused Clinton of participating in a conspiracy in the murder of his father. During the course of the call-in portion of the show,
Mahoney heard the name Paula Jones for the first time. After a caller brought Jones’s claims about Clinton to Mahoney’s attention, he asked his assistant, Gary McCullough, to see if he could arrange to speak to her. McCullough tracked her down, and Mahoney, sitting in the satellite van, spoke to Paula for about forty-five minutes on the telephone.

It was a difficult time for Paula and Steve Jones—scant attention, little money, and no lawsuit. In addition to her paid session with Matrisciana, which had not yet been broadcast, she did two interviews for free. She and Steve spoke to a reporter from Pat Robertson’s
700 Club
, which produced a taped spot. (“We want to warn our viewers that this interview contains graphic descriptions that are offensive to all of us, but especially for your children,” the anchorwoman said in introducing the piece.) Paula and Traylor also appeared on a live local television program called
A.M. Philadelphia
. The lawyer was horrified to see that Paula wore what appeared to be a brown negligee for that interview.

Mahoney was the first person to show sustained personal interest in Jones and her story. Over the next few days, Mahoney called Paula and Steve several more times. They began praying together over the telephone. Gradually, Steve took over most of the communications with Mahoney, and they decided that they needed higher-powered legal help than Traylor could provide. There was one problem. Almost as soon as Mahoney heard Paula Jones’s name for the first time, he heard a rumor that naked pictures of Paula existed somewhere. He knew this could be a problem if she embarked on a lawsuit against the president. In one of their first telephone calls, Mahoney asked Steve if these pictures existed. After checking with Paula, Steve told Mahoney the answer: there were no pictures.

Though he mostly operated on the fringe of American politics, Mahoney was a man of considerable sophistication, and he recognized that it would help Jones’s cause—and hurt Clinton’s—if she was represented by a feminist organization. After all, they were the ones who were supposed to be concerned about sexual harassment. So Mahoney persuaded Patricia Ireland, the head of the National Organization for Women, to participate in a conference call with Jones. But Jones was confused about the time, and she missed the call. Mahoney then fell back on his contacts in the religious right. That, he knew, was the most likely source of a lawyer who might want to sue Bill Clinton.

The anti-Clinton bus tour wound through the Midwest and finished its journey on Sunday morning, April 24, outside the Foundry United
Methodist Church in Washington, where the president and first lady were attending services. Randall Terry led about twenty protesters in prayer.

“Father,” he said, “this is not a Christian president.”

A week later, Paula Jones had new lawyers.

The search for new lawyers began, as did so much else, with Cliff Jackson. Traylor recognized from the start that he was in over his head, but he didn’t even have the resources to know where to look for legal help. Jackson, on the other hand, did. Though he never spoke to Pat Mahoney, they independently came to the same conclusion about what kind of lawyer Jones would need. Jackson called it the “go-left” strategy, and he suggested that Traylor get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Anita Hill, and Gerry Spence. Jackson even sought out a leftist lawyer he knew in Los Angeles. But these approaches came to nothing, and Jackson saw that the May deadline for the three-year statute of limitations was fast approaching. Go-left became go-right. So Jackson went back to Peter Smith, the Chicago financier who had underwritten Brock’s article and then supported the troopers themselves.

Smith immediately went to work trying to find someone to represent Jones. He called a young lawyer in Chicago named Richard Porter, who had recently joined the firm of Kirkland & Ellis after serving on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle. Porter did mostly corporate work, but he wanted to be helpful, so he called a lawyer in Philadelphia named Jerome Marcus. They had been classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, and they were politically in synch. Marcus was interested, so he and Porter arranged to have a conference call with Jackson to discuss the case. They liked what they heard, and so the two lawyers began speaking regularly with Traylor, offering to pitch in with some of the work that needed to be done if a lawsuit was going to be filed. As a litigator, Marcus had more to offer Traylor, and he even took a stab at a first draft of a sexual harassment complaint against the president. For Traylor, though, their help came with strings attached. The most important condition was absolute secrecy. Porter worked with a large corporate firm, and Marcus’s firm, while smaller, had strong Democratic ties in Pennsylvania.

The involvement of Porter and Marcus marked the unofficial beginning of what became known much later, in Hillary Clinton’s words, as the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” This phrase lent their activities a more sinister
cast than they deserved. There is nothing illegal or improper in one lawyer’s assisting another in the way that Porter and Marcus (and later others) helped Traylor. The issue was not what they did but why they did it. In other words, what separated the actions of these lawyers from, say, those of the private attorneys who assisted Thurgood Marshall in his civil rights battles was the question of motive. Most public interest lawyers volunteer for a case because they believe in a cause—an area of law they want to change. Here, in contrast, Porter, Marcus, and their later recruits had no interest or expertise in sexual harassment law. To the extent they cared at all about the state of the law in this area, they were more sympathetic to defendants than plaintiffs. They joined the cause of this sexual harassment plaintiff because their agenda was to try—in secret—to damage Bill Clinton’s presidency. Their involvement was a classic demonstration of the legal system’s takeover of the political system. Indeed, Porter, Marcus, and their colleagues used this lawsuit like a kind of after-the-fact election, to use briefs, subpoenas, and interrogations to undo in secret what the voters had done in the most public of American proceedings. In time, this secret group of lawyers would call themselves, half-jokingly, “the elves.”

As Danny Traylor saw it, though, the problem was that Porter and Marcus weren’t doing enough. He valued their private assistance, but he needed a lawyer to stand up and take over the case for him. “When are you gonna stop chicken-shittin’ around and get me a lawyer?” Traylor would ask the pair during their frequent phone calls in the spring of 1994.

Finally, though, Traylor did get a call from someone who wasn’t just chicken-shittin’ around. The lawyer searches led to Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata, who would remain anomalies during their three years of work for Paula Jones. Though virtually everyone else who participated in the case operated with a political agenda foremost among his or her priorities, the two of them behaved, in an old-fashioned sense, like lawyers. And though they resembled a mismatched comedy team—Davis the big and beefy Southerner, Cammarata the wiry and intense New Yorker—they acted with a degree of professionalism that was uncommon among the lawyers in the case. All they tried to do was help their client—and they were ultimately driven from the case because of it.

Their initiation to the case, however, revealed its political roots. To be sure, Davis was a Republican. He had served as a junior federal prosecutor during the Nixon years, and he was in the process of planning a run for the Republican nomination to be Virginia’s attorney general. (He finished
fourth in a primary in 1997.) But Davis was more iconoclast than ideologue, and the proudest achievement of his legal career was his twenty-year battle on behalf of a hillbilly farmer who won $39 million from Bethlehem Steel on a claim that the company had stolen the coal from underneath his land. (Davis made $6.5 million from the case, a fee that allowed him to dabble in politics and causes like Jones’s.) It was the kind of David-and-Goliath struggle that appealed to Davis—which is how he saw Paula Jones’s situation when he first heard about it in the last week in April.

Davis had sublet an office to Cammarata in his suite in Fairfax, a suburb of Washington. Though also a Republican, Cammarata had even fewer political ties than Davis. He had served as a lawyer in the tax unit of the Justice Department under George Bush, but his work involved the routine kind of litigation that carries over from one administration to the next. Cammarata wanted a little more excitement than he found in tax cases, so Davis agreed to share a few personal injury trials with him. On Monday, May 2, 1994, Davis told his younger colleague that he might have something more piquant than a slip-and-fall case to share.

The following day, Davis called Danny Traylor for a briefing. The most important thing he heard concerned the statute of limitations. The upcoming Sunday would mark three years since the alleged incident in the Excelsior Hotel, and that meant that Paula would have to file her case by Friday, May 6, or lose her right to do so. (Most sexual harassment cases are filed under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but that law’s 180-day statute of limitations had long since expired. Most other possible claims had three-year statutes of limitations.) Almost as an aside, Traylor mentioned that he (actually the elf Marcus) had prepared a complaint for a lawsuit against Clinton. Traylor had already alerted the press that he was probably going to file it the next day. Davis asked him to fax it to his office so he could look it over.

Davis exuded laconic calm, while Cammarata nearly vibrated with nervous energy, and after they spent almost the entire Tuesday night reviewing Traylor’s draft complaint, they had characteristic reactions to it. Davis thought it could use some work. Cammarata called Traylor on the phone and said, “Cancel the goddamn press conference. If you file that piece of shit, it’s going to get thrown out.” Then he turned to Davis and said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re getting on a plane to Little Rock.”

On Wednesday morning, May 4, they caught the first plane to Little
Rock—but they received an important boost when they picked up the newspaper on the way to the airport. That day, the
Post
finally ran Isikoff’s story, which bore Shepard’s and LaFraniere’s bylines as well. As the
Los Angeles Times
did with the trooper story, the
Post
used a pretext other than the underlying event as an excuse to publish the story. Clinton had just hired Robert S. Bennett, a well-known Washington litigator, to represent him in the case, and the
Post
made Bennett’s hiring the focus of the piece. “Over the past three months,” the front-page story read, “
The Washington Post
has interviewed Jones extensively about what she said happened in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel. She said she was alone with Clinton in the room—making it impossible to independently resolve what, if anything, happened between them.” Bennett was quoted as saying, “This event, plain and simple, didn’t happen.” Davis and Cammarata had been on the fence about whether to go through with filing the suit. The imprimatur of the
Post
on the story nudged them closer to proceeding.

The combination of Traylor’s announced press conference, the appearance of the
Post
’s story, and the looming statute of limitations prompted a horde of journalists to descend on Little Rock. After Davis and Cammarata (along with their paralegal, Bill Stanley) landed, they made it to Traylor’s shared office suite around noon Wednesday, and they found Traylor as relaxed as ever. The Arkansas lawyer was fingering an inch-high stack of telephone messages, noting with amusement all the famous newspapers and networks that were calling him. (Bob Bennett had called several times, but the lawyers felt they’d gain a strategic advantage if they waited awhile before returning his call.) As it happened, the three men could see out the window to the front door of the federal courthouse, and they watched with astonishment as the crowd of journalists there swelled to more than a hundred.