Divorce, the death of a loved one or loss of a job are among the searing events that can inspire the deepest melancholy.
But for the likes of Larry Klayman, no trauma may approach the departure of President Bill Clinton.
Separation anxiety hangs over the capital like rancid smog choking a metropolis once run by Eastern European communists. The bane of so many conservatives’ existence is gone: stewing in his Chappaqua, N.Y., manse, left to self-pitying late-night phone calls to old chums, pocketing the filthy lucre of special interest speaking fees and seeking post-Marc Rich redemption by trekking to the impoverished of India.
Meanwhile, Klayman and hordes of others–Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Fox News, the Weekly Standard magazine, many die-hard C-SPAN callers, various legal foundations, Web sites and direct mailers–seem adrift as the Clinton minions who now confront the swift brutality of powerlessness in Washington, ambling about city streets without the cachet of old, prompting passersby to strain to identify faces seen on the front pages not long ago.
“I saw that big Clinton aide on the street yesterday. He was standing by himself,” a broadcasting colleague told me Friday. “That lawyer, the top guy. What was his name? “
Lindsey, I said, Bruce Lindsey. Clinton’s political bagman.
Klayman is still in the spotlight, albeit off to the side of the stage, near the drawn curtain, the choreographer of a side show whose vitality is waning and now seems to be undergoing hasty changes in the script.
So perhaps one should not have been surprised last week to see Klayman, a bespectacled human avalanche of press releases about his own actions and comments, announce an investigation of an influential Republican congressman, Tom DeLay of Texas, for allegedly violating “federal anti-bribery statutes” in his fundraising activities.
“It’s illegal, it’s un-American and it’s an outrage,” he declared late in his gathering. At that precise moment, his group’s logo, which had been affixed to the wall behind him, fell to the ground. Ah, if logos could talk.
The session was pure Klayman. There was a kernel of unequivocal truth (a DeLay fundraising solicitation, akin to many dollars-for-access GOP and Democratic gambits) wrapped within layers of the unconfirmed and speculative. It prompted Klayman’s conclusion that the congressman and House Speaker Dennis Hastert might well be in violation of anti-bribery statutes.
When I asked Friday about his practice of throwing out the clearly undocumented at times, he said: “We’re not reporting. We’re are trying to raise issues and provoke public awareness.” It’s a distinction that can justify the purely reckless.
And as flexible as an Olympic gymnast, Klayman, 49, last week also pounced on President Bush’s announcement that the China mess was over.
“JUDICIAL WATCH TO PROBE BUSH CHINESE HOSTAGE `APOLOGY,’ a fax blared. `DOES DEAL INCLUDE SECRET U.S. PROMISES NOT TO SELL ARMS TO DEMOCRATIC TAIWAN? FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT REQUESTS WILL SEEK DOCUMENTATION.”
Ah, yes, Clinton is gone. Where does one vent rage built up over eight years?
“In fact, we were the first to call for [Newt] Gingrich’s resignation,” Klayman told me, straining somewhat to underscore past GOP targets, who have included New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sens. Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Arlen Specter (Pa.) but without the ardor brought to his Clinton assaults.
In 1994 Klayman, a formerly unknown patent lawyer (pardon the redundancy) founded Judicial Watch, a conservative “watchdog group” whose salvation proved to be the money-driven stumblings of the Clinton White House. Filing more than 20 lawsuits against the administration (“Clinton was so corrupt, we had a major problem,” he said Friday), Klayman used virtually any news report suggesting shady dealings as reason to run to the courthouse.
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It’s all there on JudicialWatch.com, the handiwork of a man who even sued his mother for money spent while caring for his grandmother and has been ordered by two federal judges never to set foot again in their courtrooms (undaunted, he filed ethics complaints against one judge and accused the other of anti-Semitism).
Among 50 legal actions are Dolly Kyle Browning vs. Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers vs. James Carville, George Stephanopoulos and Little, Brown & Co.
Klayman has, in the minds of Carville, Stephanopoulos and other Clinton lieutenants, harassed them through six-hour, videotaped depositions (passed on to favored cable television hosts, like Geraldo Rivera), which have veered into the personal and seemingly frivolous, hinting at certain points that the steely interrogator was morphing into celebrity voyeur.
He would ask about speeding tickets, possible drug use, student loan delinquencies, dating practices, views on a triple murder at a local Starbucks, the name of somebody’s priest, why Carville called him “a little twerp” and other miscellany, all the time claiming it had some relevance to the serious allegations at hand. It has gotten so untidy that a judge has ordered that every deposition Klayman does in lawsuits before him must be done in the presence of a federal magistrate.
And, yet, Klayman’s messianic wanderings have mixed the uncovering of bona fide skullduggery with government ineptitude to bring a few successes and the patina of credibility, even if self-inflicted wounds have generated the caricature of the litigious zealot supposedly hated by conservatives.
For example, he has been unrelenting in uncovering problems with foreign trade missions run by the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. A Brown paramour funneled him tidbits, and it greatly aided Klayman in revealing suspect actions, which included the belated discovery of a Democratic fundraising list in the files of the very department official who picked participants for Brown’s travels.
In that dispute, his prodding also revealed that the Commerce Department intentionally ducked a judge’s order for a new search for documents. Similarly, in a flap about White House e-mail, he proved that a recalcitrant White House clearly lied to the same judge about missing e-mail.
But showing outright criminality is another matter. The high-profile controversy over the FBI personnel files of 900 people, mostly past and then-present administration officials, showed that those files were illegally procured, and that the White House lied about certain aspects. But it did not prove that they were then used for any illegal purposes.
Throughout, he tends to cut a rational, even bookish appearance and has been a fixture of the cable talk show circuit. Yet, there is no shortage of folks who have dealt with him and firmly believe that, as my colleague Ann Landers would put it, Klayman can behave as if he’s several sandwiches short of a picnic.
For example, he wouldn’t relent from suspicions that White House deputy counsel Vince Foster was murdered. It’s the same with Brown, who died in a plane crash. But Judicial Watch raised the prospect of murder due to Brown somehow being on the verge of going public with tales of Clinton misdeeds.
Then there are the ego-filled press releases, testaments to cosmic–or maybe comic–self-aggrandizement even by Washington standards. One even announced where he would be sitting at the annual White House correspondents dinner. They never leave a thing to the imagination: “Independent Counsel Ray’s Actions Irrational.”
The pot calling the kettle black?
Go see for yourself. But, instead of tediously scouring court files, hop aboard the Cruise to Clean Up Corruption, a Judicial Watch fundraiser through the Caribbean from May 13 to May 20, offering you the chance to plunk down anywhere from $3,374 (for a 563-square-foot suite with whirlpool, bath and private veranda) to $1,908 (182-square-foot outdoor cabin).
After leaving Ft. Lauderdale and on the way to and from Mexico, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and the Bahamas, “seminars” will feature Gennifer Flowers, actress Morgan Brittany and Donato Dalrymple, “The Fisherman” of Elian Gonzalez fame.
And, of course, Klayman, the whirling dervish of the capital scandal machine.