With friends like Richard Douglas, Mike Espy probably didn’t need enemies. At minimum, he didn’t need credit cards.
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The trial of Espy, President Clinton’s first agriculture secretary, played host to its 52nd witness Friday. At minimum, one can declare with no dispute that the number of citizens who have testified in the front of the room outnumber by many times the few journalists who’ve made cameo appearances in the back.
There is no reason to bore you with a detailed update on the recent testimony other than to say, don’t bet yet on the outcome of a case, which alleges that Espy received many thousands of dollars worth of illegal gratuities from firms regulated by his department.
By far, the star witness has been the radioactive Richard Douglas, a former bigtime lobbyist and good buddy of Espy. Already convicted in a related case of being a liar, this very hostile, immunized government witness (who gave the finger to one prosecutor in a hallway) raised the prospect of nuclear reaction with every question he touched, leaving it unclear whether the jury will see him as of greater benefit to the government or the defense.
Yet he did offer some lovely insights about life in Washington.
Once upon a time he was chief lobbyist for Sun-Diamond Growers, a huge collective of fruit and nut growers. It was in that position that he wined and dined Espy, including getting him bigtime sports tickets and fancy luggage, picking up a plane fare to Greece for Espy’s girlfriend and, most treacherous, agreeing to lie for Espy to FBI agents asking questions about the genesis of tickets to a Bulls playoff game the two men attended (they were from Quaker Oats).
He was, by his own admission, adept at faking expense accounts, especially after he believed he was passed over for the top job at Sun-Diamond because he was African-American.
“They screwed me. So, I would screw them,” he told the jury last week. So it became a completely routine practice to phony up paperwork.
He was not alone and, in fact, ripped off his company with the help of the firm’s own consultants, such as James Lake, once a power consultant-lobbyist himself.
Lake’s very hotshot firm had a roster of clients including Sun-Diamond. But, Douglas testified, when one client “hit the roof” over Lake’s providing and billing them for a fleet of limos used during a Washington trek, he just billed Sun-Diamond with Douglas’ approval.
Ultimately, Lake got caught in the Espy web when he illegally assisted Espy’s brother in retiring the brother’s own campaign debt. He pleaded guilty to a phony billing scheme in which Sun-Diamond was given bogus invoices to, unknowingly, cover the illegal campaign contributions from individuals in Lake’s firm.
But none of that diminished the respect, even awe, Douglas had for Lake.
“I wanted to be like Jim,” said an unabashed Douglas about Lake. He called him a “master spin doctor who could take the truth and massage it any way, one of the most effective spin doctors, lobbyists, communicators in America,” Douglas said.
Lake was making about $1 million a year, said Douglas, and still was cutting corners, ripping people off, in a manner that Douglas envied. Call it the realpolitik of Washington lobbying. Consider that Douglas would have traded places in a snap with Lake.
One more time: Lake subverted law by hitting up his twin sons and the president of his firm for $1,000 each for Espy’s campaign fund. He added a $1,000 check of his own. Then, he and Douglas made sure to concoct an invoice for $5,000 for client Sun-Diamond.
Thus, Sun-Diamond essentially paid for those political contributions, and Lake pocketed an extra $1,000. That’s chutzpah. That’s Washington.
Oh, then there was Douglas’ account of his desperately trying to ingratiate to some agricultural executive by getting him Kentucky Derby tickets. He called Lake. Lake called a scalper and got the tickets.
Guess who paid? Not Lake or Douglas. Once again, a phony bill for something else was sent by Lake to his client Sun-Diamond, according to Douglas. The firm was already paying Lake an annual retainer of $250,000, apparently not enough given his greedy ways. Douglas, the un-Diamond lobbyist, matter-of-factly went along.
And why not? With the Derby tickets in hand, Douglas came off looking like a can-do hotshot. It’s the coin of the realm for some here.
Sniffing out election truth
Wandering about the sleek studios of MSNBC in dour Secaucus, N.J., on election night, it was impossible to avoid instant punditry. After all, this was why I and others were beckoned.
I tend to find the power of the status quo in Washington an overriding reality and sensed same as the returns came in, though the body language of at least one fellow pundit suggested he was in the midst of a rank amateur with the aroma of a skunk.
After all, there he was finding grand lessons to be learned, about everything from the potency of the Spanish-speaking constituencies tapped by Texas Gov. George W. Bush to the anti-establishment unease said to have been tapped by Jesse “the Body” Ventura in his stunning Minnesota gubernatorial victory.
Well, when the dust had cleared, and as congressional Republicans feverishly feuded, plotted and strategized about the future of their own leadership, I put in a call to the numbers crunchers at Congressional Quarterly, including Bob Benenson and Creg Giroux, and learned the following:
– There were 402 members of the House of Representatives who ran for re-election this year. If you include Jay Kim, a California member who got into legal hot water and lost in his primary, a grand total of just seven lost their seats. That means 395 won.
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– The re-election rate of 98.26 is nearly a post-World War II record, topped only by the 98.29 success rate of the duly-entrenched in 1988. The six incumbents who lost Tuesday tied a post-war low set in 1986 and 1988.
– Seventeen House seats changed parties, either because an incumbent lost or an open seat was taken by the other party. That is the third-lowest in the post-war era, behind 1968 (1 changed hands) and 1988 (9).
– Seventy-seven percent of the incumbents who were re-elected did so with more than 60 percent of the vote in their races, the highest such percentage since 1988. That underscores the pure poppycock of the House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt’s declaration that Tuesday represented a “political earthquake” and “repudiation” of the Republicans.
– As Benenson underscores, even the ballyhooed Senate losses of Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina and Al D’Amato of New York don’t seem to be examples of great unrest. Each was deeply flawed and, as everybody knew going in, in a vulnerable political condition.
– And look at the races for open Senate seats. They were by the likes of former Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh, Gov. George Voinovich of Ohio and former Rep. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas. Hmmm. Not exactly firebrand outsiders.
– As for the much-publicized wins of the Bush boys, George in Texas and Jeb in Florida, if their surnames were Sipowicz, one suspects they would not have fared quite so well.
Still, a feverish Washington media helped fuel a furor over whether to replace Gingrich, in part proof that he who lives by the media sword (recall his press manipulation in leading the purge of then-Speaker Jim Wright) can die by it. Perception overcame reality. Without discounting an array of tactical blunders and his dismal personal approval ratings in national polling, it could nevertheless be seen as an effective firestorm but one with tenuous relation to certain realities, including that of the Republicans still running the House and Senate.
One could have argued that Gingrich continued to successfully steer the GOP ship in a status quo election, but instead he was pilloried for legislative miscues and for fumbling a Monica Lewinsky-inspired chance to bury the Democrats. To add a certain insult to injury, he found himself facing off with the likes of Louisiana’s Bob Livingston, who was openly campaigning for Gingrich’s post Friday, hours before Gingrich threw in the towel.
When the Republicans took over in 1994, Gingrich turned tradition upside-down by skirting seniority rules and promoting certain members to chairmanships of committees. One of those advanced out of normal seniority was Livingston, picked to run the big-bucks Appropriations Committee.
No good deed goes unpunished.