FLASHBACK: Clinton Appointees Meet Secretly (Magnificent Eight Judge Who Resigned From FISA Court)

The eight federal judges appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. District Court in Washington meet privately every month in closed-door sessions that other jurists believe are improper and call into question the court's impartiality. "I cannot imagine any legitimate reason for them to meet together once a month, even socially," said one veteran courthouse official familiar with the sessions. "It's not only in bad taste, it certainly has the appearance of impropriety. It's hard to imagine any rationale for these meetings.

Another court official said they "reek with impropriety." Concern among courthouse officials about the meetings, which are described in e-mail addressed monthly to each of the eight judges, comes at a time that Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson is being publicly criticized for selectively assigning criminal cases against friends and associates of Mr. Clinton's to judges the president has appointed. None of the eight Clinton-appointed judges, all of whom were named to the bench between 1994 to 1998, would comment on the meetings or their content.

Committee member Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, echoed Mr. Hatch's concerns, adding that as a former prosecutor he was "stunned" by the Johnson assignments. He said it "might be necessary" for the committee to investigate the matter to restore the public's confidence.

On Tuesday, Judge Johnson defended her decision not to follow the court's traditional random-assignment process when she assigned the Hubbell and Trie cases to U.S. District Judges Paul L. Friedman and James Robertson, both Clinton appointees. She said the cases were assigned to "highly capable federal judges" and that "politics was not and is never a factor in our case assignments."

The Integrity of the Federal Courts

By Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor of law at the University of Illinois.

Justice is supposed to be blind, deciding the law without favoritism. But there is a gradual accumulation of evidence that points in a contrary direction -- that when criminal cases important to President Clinton were assigned and decided in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., Justice lifted her blindfold and politics controlled. The cloud of suspicion can be removed only if the D.C. federal court system and Congress thoroughly investigate and make public their findings. Let's look at some of the facts.

When I was a special consultant to Kenneth Starr's Office of Independent Counsel, the OIC often found its investigation delayed and disadvantaged by lower-court rulings subsequently reversed on appeal. When the Department of Justice brought its campaign-finance prosecutions, it also ran into a series of adverse rulings, also reversed on appeal. The trial judges who made a series of errors were all members of "the Magnificent Seven," a label the Clinton appointees gave themselves (until Mr. Clinton added an eighth judge in 1998).

Normally, criminal cases are supposed to be assigned randomly. However, we now know that when criminal prosecutions were brought against Webster Hubbell and others with close ties to Mr. Clinton, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., secretly bypassed the traditional random assignment system, passed over more experienced judges, and assigned the cases to the Magnificent Seven. When her colleagues discovered what she had done, some of them disclosed this information to the press. In a stunning rebuke, they last month took away her power to tamper with judicial assignments. But the damage was already done.

Judge Johnson assigned the Hubbell case to Judge James Robertson. She assigned to Judge Paul Friedman the campaign-finance case against Charlie Trie, the campaign-finance case against Democratic fund-raiser Maria Hsia, and the false-statements case against Thai lobbyist Pauline Kanchanalak. These Clinton-appointed judges then issued rulings that crippled the prosecution; in all these cases, various panels of the D.C. Circuit reversed. Do you detect a pattern here?

In the case of Ms. Hsia, Judge Johnson asked the Justice Department to ask her to assign the case to Judge Friedman. Then she used that request as her justification to make the special assignment. Some people launder money; others launder requests. I have never heard before of a judge playing such cat-and-mouse games in an apparent effort to hide her motives.

Judge Johnson assigned the case against Democratic fund-raiser Howard Glicken to Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., a 1997 Clinton appointee, claiming that it was "complicated or protracted," although Mr. Glicken's lawyer announced, when Mr. Glicken was charged, that he would plead guilty. She assigned the case against Miami fund-raiser Mark Jimenez to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, a 1994 appointee.

One case in particular stands out, the prosecution of Webster Hubbell for income tax evasion. Parties not particularly close to Mr. Hubbell -- but close to the president -- paid Mr. Hubbell nearly $1 million. In return, Mr. Hubbell, who was in prison at the time, appeared to do no work. A cynic might call the payments hush money.

Judge Robertson, who presided over this case, had worked in and donated money to, President Clinton's 1992 campaign. In the Hubbell tax-fraud prosecution, Judge Robertson ruled that he could ignore the ruling of the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit and hold that the OIC did not have jurisdiction to prosecute Mr. Hubbell and the other defendants, and that it could not use tax documents subpoenaed from Mr. Hubbell. Judge Robertson used incendiary language, calling the OIC's tactics (which other circuits had approved) "scary." The D.C. Circuit agreed with these other circuits and reversed.

At the time, the OIC did not know that Judge Johnson had manipulated the assignment to get the case before Judge Robertson. I went back to the transcripts after this information became public and saw Judge Robertson's comments in a new light. The transcript reads as if Judge Robertson had decided that the case was not going to trial; he just had not decided why.

At the hearing of May 8, 1998, OIC counsel asked Judge Robertson to set a trial date, which is standard operating procedure. The judge responded that he normally does that but it would be "arbitrary" to do so here, "when we're looking at the kinds of motions that I'm sure are coming." In other words, the judge refused to set a trial date because of motions not even filed; that is not standard operating procedure. The OIC attorney replied that he had already talked to defense counsel and they were prepared to find a mutually agreeable date, to which Judge Robertson answered, apparently in surprise: "Oh." He still refused to set a date.

At the June 2, 1998 hearing, the judge again questioned whether "it makes sense for us to set a trial date," and he volunteered that any date will be written "in sand here if there are, heaven forfend, interlocutory appeals." The defendants are not entitled to interlocutory appeals but the prosecution is, so once more it appeared that the judge had already decided that there would be no trial.

On July 1, three business days after oral argument, Judge Robertson issued a lengthy written opinion. This is an extraordinarily brief time in which to formulate a decision and write it up, unless the judge had made up his mind in advance.

Perhaps it was happenstance that Judge Johnson secretly assigned the Hubbell case to Judge Robertson, a Clinton appointee. Perhaps Judge Robertson's statements in the transcript do not indicate that he, from the very beginning, had prejudged the matter and decided there would be no trial. But then another eyebrow-raiser occurred: It was discovered that Clinton-appointed judges on the D.C. district court were holding monthly caucuses from which other federal judges were excluded.

Four non-Clinton judges in the D.C. court, appointed by both Democrats and Republicans, were so upset that they anonymously told the press they questioned the propriety of these caucuses. One was quoted as saying: "We all come with political viewpoints but we try to leave politics behind. Unfortunately, the Clinton appointees have gone off on their own."

Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp have been called victims of the Clinton presidency. Perhaps the Clinton presidency will claim as its greatest victim the reputation of the federal courts for integrity and impartiality.

END
Ronald D. Rotunda
March 20, 2000

Robert Novak: Clinton's D.C. Judges

April 13, 2000 CLINTON'S D.C. JUDGES WASHINGTON -- When U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on March 29 ruled that President Clinton committed a crime in releasing Kathleen Willey's personal letters, a presidential aide delivered this appraisal of the judge: "A loose cannon." That was reported over national television, and shortly thereafter, the White House was prompting Democratic senators to threaten that they never would permit Lamberth's promotion to a higher court.

Considering the admission by sometime Clinton private eye Terry Lenzner that in 1997 he was employed to investigate sitting judges, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch wrote FBI Director Louis Freeh April 7 asking for a probe of "threats and coercion by the Clinton machine" against Lamberth. That coincided with an unprecedented judicial investigation of alleged favoritism toward Clinton in assignments made by the District of Columbia's chief federal judge.

SNIP

The way the D.C. judges operate under the public's radar was demonstrated in an unpublicized courtroom proceeding. Friedman was also given the criminal case against Democratic activist Pauline Kanchanalak for laundering illegal campaign contributions. Early last month, Justice asked for merely a two-month postponement of the April trial. Friedman agreed but privately informed the prosecutors that it would be too hard to get a Washington jury in the summer and so he was delaying the trial until mid-November -- after the presidential election.

The classic case is income-tax evasion charges against Clinton intimate Webster Hubbell. The case went to Judge James Robertson, another liberal Washington lawyer who actively supported and contributed to Clinton for president. Robertson denied the jurisdiction of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and called his tactics "scary."

The assignments were made by Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, a government lawyer or judge for the past 37 years who has abandoned random selection of judges. There is no disputing some facts. She did ask the Justice Department to ask her to assign the Hsia case to Friedman. She arbitrarily gave the Hubbell case to Robertson.

A Judicial Watch complaint that the Clinton D.C. judges were meeting privately was dismissed as "frivolous" by Appeals Court Judge Stephen Williams, acting on Judge Johnson's assurances. But Republican Rep. Howard Coble of North Carolina renewed the request, and a scathing account of Johnson's conduct by University of Illinois Law Professor Ronald Rotunda (published in the Wall Street Journal) was filed in court.

Consequently, the circuit's Judicial Council reinstated the issue, and a five-judge panel was named. It was supposed to be secret, judges privately observing a colleague's conduct. But news leaked of an inquiry that could expose an outrageous means of survival for Bill Clinton.

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