Nut Watch
Everything you need to know about Larry Klayman can be gleaned from a press
release he blast-faxed to the world two weeks ago. The heading read:
CLINTON
ALLIES BEGIN SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUDICIAL WATCH
Use "Friendly" Newsweek
Reporter to Harm Memory of Grandmother of Larry Klayman
Likely
Complicity of Clinton Private Investigators
The
unhinged prose that followed responded to an item filed by Newsweek
reporter Daniel Klaidman. Klayman did not dispute the fact that he is suing his
mother, Shirley Feinberg. He claims his mom won't pay him back $50,000 he spent
on private nurses for her mother, his grandmother, Yetta Goldberg, who died
last August at 89. He did not want this suit to become public, but the
Clintonites, he asserted, learned about it and leaked word to Newsweek .
The final paragraph of his statement bears quoting in full:
Klaidman used this
information, obviously dug up by private investigators of the Clintons to
suggest that the Judicial Watch chairman will sue anyone, and so hurt Klayman
by trampling on the memory of his grandmother. This is untrue, unfair, and
outrageous! What is true is that Klayman will do what is right, no matter who
is involved. Whether it means caring for his sick and dying grandmother who
raised him, guaranteeing payment to her nurses, or taking action to make sure
they are paid. Klayman will not shrink from his standards of ethics and
morality. Unlike Klaidman, who wants to curry favor with Clinton administration
friends such as [George] Stephanopoulos, Klayman looks to no one, other than
God, for guidance and direction.
In fact,
Newsweek did not hear of this lawsuit, which was concealed under the
name of a collection agency that belongs to Klayman, from the White House. It
found out from Klayman's brother, who volunteered the information. But the
point is not just that this Klayman conspiracy is imaginary and far-fetched
( Newsweek , which broke the Lewinsky scandal, is hardly "friendly" toward
the White House). It is that, as evidenced by this and other paranoiac
effusions, Klayman is off his rocker.
This became abundantly evident when I went to interview him
at his Washington office this week. After attempting to ascertain whether I was
a Clinton spy or worked for Salon magazine ("in our view, a front for
the Clinton administration"), Klayman told me that "private investigator types"
working for Clinton have been spotted "casing" his office. With darting eyes
and barely repressed rage, he alleged that administration secret police keep
files on him. He went on to tell me that Ron Brown was probably murdered
because of what he knew about various administration scandals. Alleging the
existence of forensic evidence of murder, he explained, "Everybody in that lab
believed there was a round hole the size of a .45 caliber bullet." (In one TV
interview, Klayman suggested the killer was "perhaps the president himself.")
The Brown cover-up is the subject of one of the 18 lawsuits Klayman has filed
against the administration. Another concerns the investigation into the death
of Vince Foster, who Klayman thinks may also have been murdered.
In other
words, Klayman is one of the fringe characters who has sprouted in the moist
ground of the Clinton scandals as mushrooms do after a spring rain. But Klayman
is not treated like a fringe figure. He has, by and large, achieved the
mainstream credibility he craves. He is a frequent guest on such TV programs as
Crossfire , Rivera Live , MSNBC's Internight , and The
Charles Grodin Show (with whose twitchy host he seems to have a special
affinity). Klayman is financially supported, praised, and frequently cited by
the wider conservative movement. But he isn't just a nutter who gets right-wing
foundation money and gets on television. He's a nutter with a law degree who
takes advantage of the courts to harass his political opponents. How does he
get away with it?
The press elevates Klayman for a couple of
reasons. On television, there are more and more shows that take off from the
Crossfire format, expecting guests to represent strongly contrary
positions. If one thinks Ken Starr is out of control, the other, ideally,
should argue that Bill Clinton knifes people and buries their bodies in the
White House basement. If these guests scream and yell, so much the better.
Barking, however, undermines the pretense of a rational debate. Klayman, who
presents a coherent façade while making wild and unsubstantiated charges, is
perfect. With print publications, there's a different problem. Fine profiles of
Klayman have recently appeared in Newsweek and the Washington
Post . But the conventions of newspaper journalism are such that an
"objective" reporter cannot render his own opinion that the subject has a screw
loose. Klayman is described in such terms as "controversial legal gadfly."
You might
think mainstream conservatives would be wary of Klayman's tactics. Tort reform
was part of the Contract With America, and he is a one-man litigation
explosion. But so far, conservatives have been silent, perhaps because Klayman
has proved remarkably effective at abusing the people most right-wingers
dislike. His primary vehicle is a $90 million invasion of privacy suit filed
against Hillary Clinton and others on behalf of the "victims" of Filegate.
Never mind that congressional investigators and Ken Starr have decided that the
gathering of FBI files on previous administration officials with names starting
with letters A through G was not part of a grand plot to harass political
opponents. Klayman has found an opening to harass his political opponents,
inflicting costly all-day depositions on Harold Ickes, Stephanopoulos, James
Carville, Paul Begala, and many others.
In these torture session, Klayman rants and raves and
demands to "certify" for the court answers that he deems evasive. ("What does
'certified' mean," Ickes responded to Klayman, "other than 'crazy'?") Klayman
asks administration officials about whom they date, where they go after work,
whether they were expelled from school for disciplinary problems. One
23-year-old White House assistant was interrogated about a triple murder that
took place at a Starbucks in Georgetown. Klayman videotapes these depositions,
excerpts of which air on Geraldo when Klayman appears on the program,
and publishes the transcripts on the Internet. This is in pursuit of a case
about the invasion of privacy, remember. But resistance is largely futile. Last
week, the presiding judge in the case sanctioned Stephanopoulos for not looking
hard enough for documents covered by a Judicial Watch subpoena. As punishment,
Stephanopoulos has to go through the ordeal of another deposition and pay some
of Klayman's legal costs. The ultimate goal of the Filegate suit appears to be
to inflict this treatment on Hillary Clinton.
Why don't
the courts put a stop to this? Some judges have tried. In 1992 in California,
Klayman lost a patent case on behalf of a distributor of bathroom accessories.
His obnoxious behavior got him barred from Judge William Keller's courtroom for
life. Klayman has hounded Keller ever since. He appealed the ruling, accusing
Keller of being anti-Semitic and anti-Asian (Klayman is Jewish; his client was
Taiwanese). After losing his appeal and being scolded by the appeals court
judges, he tried to appeal to the Supreme Court. He has not given up yet. It is
this matter, he has said, which led him to found Judicial Watch in 1994. The
organization supports requiring judges to undergo psychological testing and
holding them personally liable for "reckless" rulings. It also advocates
removing Keller from the bench.
More recently, in a trade case in New York,
Klayman found himself on the other end of charges of ethnic bias. When Judge
Denny Chin ruled against Klayman's client, Klayman wrote Chin a rude letter
asking about his contacts with John Huang and suggesting that Chin's being an
Asian-American Clinton appointee may have biased him. The connection was
imaginary. In our interview, Klayman claimed press accounts of this incident
have made it sound as if the Huang-Chin connection was baseless. He said it was
supported by a document discovered in one of his lawsuits. But the document,
which he faxed to me, turns out to be merely a list of Asian-Americans
appointed by the Clinton administration. Chin fined Klayman $25,000 and barred
him from his courtroom for life. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of
Appeals threw out the fine but upheld the expulsion. "I've got ethics
complaints pending against all four of them," Klayman says.
Despite Klayman's record of
abusing the courts, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, has been
extremely indulgent of his antics in the Filegate case, giving him wide
latitude to issue subpoenas. Whether Lamberth has succumbed to Klayman out of
ideology, permissiveness, or fear of reprisal it is impossible to say. Last
week, Lamberth did finally throw out a fishing-expedition type subpoena Klayman
sent to New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. After Mayer reported Linda Tripp
had lied about a youthful arrest for robbery, Klayman asserted Mayer had been
fed the information by the Clinton secret police and that it was thus relevant
to his Filegate case. It turns out, as Mayer wrote in The New Yorker
this week, that her source on the robbery incident was Tripp's former
stepmother--who has since agreed to go on the record. But Klayman still
believes the White House fed the Tripp arrest story to Mayer. "She's not
telling the truth about that," he says. "Were there Clinton private
investigators working with her?" Maybe he'll ask his mom in her next
deposition.
