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Jewish World Review Feb. 28, 2001/ 5 Adar, 5761

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It's time to disarm the hired guns


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE American Bar Association must be very proud.

Lawyers haven't gotten this much bad press since the Dream Team set O.J. free to vent his road rage on unsuspecting Florida motorists - and, oh, yeah, search for the real killers.

Quinn, Rodham, diGenova, Cunningham. It's a veritable Murderers Row of influence peddlers. All we need is to put their exploits on tape, and we'll have a new TV series: "D.C. Law." Only problem is, there aren't any sympathetic characters.

"He acted as a lawyer," said longtime Clinton adviser Harold Ickes of his law partner William Cunningham's pardon work while he was treasurer of Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. As if that explains - and excuses - everything.

The preening amorality of the current scene makes this the perfect time to demand that lawyers stop hiding behind the "I'm just a hired gun" stance that tries to legitimize anything a lawyer does - moral or immoral, right or wrong - as long as it's in the client's interest. The pendulum has indeed swung far from the Abe Lincoln paradigm of the lawyer ruled by his conscience.

"Jack Quinn is an honorable man," said Joe diGenova of his client. "He did what any good lawyer should do." This is the same diGenova who a few days earlier had said: "There is no justification for the pardon of Marc Rich, none whatsoever." This is the apotheosis of the "hired gun" defense: simultaneously believing that the Rich pardon is, in diGenova's words, "a corrupt bargain" that "stinks to high heaven" and that Quinn, like the "great lawyer" that he is, pulled it off with "vigor" and "integrity."

The same, no doubt, holds true for Hugh Rodham. His reputation as a "great lawyer" must be so legendary that convicted con man Glenn Braswell and Horacio Vignali, the Los Angeles-based father of a convicted drug dealer, just couldn't imagine calling someone other than Rodham in Miami. The fact that another lawyer altogether - Kendall Coffey, who resigned as U.S. attorney after biting a stripper during a nude table dance - actually filled out the Braswell pardon application is further proof of just how little great lawyering had to do with Rodham's fat paychecks.

According to a lawyers' guidebook, Rodham specializes in "governmental relations." How's that for a rare moment of truth in advertising? He could have earned his $400,000 windfall just as easily if he had been a circus clown. All that mattered was how often he bunked at the White House and how many billable hours were spent on the golf course with the president, a man he called "my buddy."

Appropriately, the story of Rodham's involvement in the Vignali and Braswell cases was broken by The National Enquirer. What more do you need to know about the sleaziness of the "legal work" in the pardon orgy?

The chief moral problem with making the client's interest a lawyer's only consideration is that there is no limit to how far the lawyer will go. When Rodham called Clinton adviser Bruce Lindsey to push the Vignali pardon, he indicated that the original prosecutors on the case "might be supportive of a commutation." In fact, the prosecutors had written a stinging letter opposing it. Was misrepresenting the truth part of his duty to his client? Did he have no duty to his country, his brother-in-law, his own self-respect?

"We get calls all the time," explains Lindsey. "If you had a friend and knew someone who had a pardon application, you would call me up. I don't know if you're calling as a friend or a paid representative." As for Rodham's involvement with Vignali, Lindsey claimed: "We were aware he was interested in it. But nobody in the White House counsel's office knew whether it was for a client." Yeah, maybe this is just the kind of thing Rodham likes to do with his spare time - make a few volunteer calls for well-heeled strangers. A little pro bono work for deep-pocket drug dealers and con artists.

Instead of the law being a vehicle for righting social wrongs, as the young Hillary envisioned at Yale, in all these cases it has most spectacularly become a vehicle for exacerbating them. As Todd Jones, the African-American U.S. attorney who prosecuted Vignali, put it: "The fact that Hugh Rodham may have had some impact ... further erodes any confidence that the public, particularly communities of color, may have that federal drug laws are enforced fairly."

Over the weekend, we were served another story of a major Democratic donor who received special treatment. This time Arnold Paul Prosperi, a convicted embezzler and tax cheat who had spearheaded a campaign to raise $425,000 to refurbish the White House, got his prison sentence commuted to house arrest. Pleading for his pardon was none other than Ted Olson, who had also written Prosperi's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That appeal was denied, but as the nation remembers, Olson plead George W. Bush's case in front of the Supreme Court to great success and is now the president's nominee for U.S. solicitor general.

Applications to law school plummeted after the Simpson trial. Americans had witnessed close-up a profession that, as described by Prof. Peter Gabel of the New College School of Law, "exalts cleverness and adversarial challenge as its highest virtue and calls it the pursuit of justice." Now the front pages are filled with Rodhams, diGenovas and Quinns, selling blood ties and political influence and excusing it as just another day at the firm. The legal profession can't take much more of this free publicity.



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