Power of attorney

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by Rich Lowry

ON July 9, attorney Bob Bauer was at his downtown Washington office late talking to a senior aide to Sen. Fred Thompson. The aide wanted to know why Bauer's client, former DNC finance director Richard Sullivan, had seemingly changed his testimony from his frank private deposition to his guarded public testimony. Bauer had a pointed response. "I told him," Bauer recalls, "I would entertain that evening any material discrepancy he believed had developed between the deposition and the hearing testimony. Lo and behold, he didn't have any to offer."

Sullivan had, in fact, drastically changed his tone in a matter of two weeks -- just not in a way that would create any "material discrepancy." Republican senators wound up reading to Sullivan from his deposition in order to get him to admit at the hearings what he had told them in private. "Clearly," says a committee staffer, "he was coached by someone or other to be not quite as forthcoming." Sullivan was Thompson's lead witness, and his testimony helped make the crucial opening week of the hearings a debacle.

Bob Bauer's proximity to a partisan disaster is not unusual. His job is to help create them for Republicans and avert them for Democrats -- and he is adept at both. For some Washington Republicans, the synonym for Bob Bauer is "focus of all evil." Tough and silver-tongued, Bauer is the Washington political lawyer par excellence. "He's very partisan," says GOP lawyer Mark Braden. "But is he good? The answer is, Yeah. He's real good."

Bauer arrived in Washington in 1977 and became a pioneer in the new area of law created by Watergate-era campaign legislation. His political-law group at the D.C. office of the Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie is as plugged in as a Christmas tree. At one point, its offices were simultaneously the address for Dick Gephardt's leadership PAC, Tom Foley's leadership PAC, and Rep. John Dingell's campaign committee. Bauer is close to Gephardt -- he was the attorney for his 1988 presidential campaign -- and is legal counsel for both the House and Senate Democratic Parties.

While Bauer has become a permanent part of the Democratic establishment, he is also a sharp partisan streetfighter -- Clark Clifford with a sting. The Watergate-era rules have made the law a political weapon, and Bauer is an eager warrior. He defended Dick Gephardt in the flap over his North Carolina beach property and Tom Daschle in his Federal Aviation Administration case. He has filed Federal Election Committee complaints against Americans for Tax Reform and the Christian Coalition. And he wrote the 1994 ethics complaint that kneecapped Newt Gingrich.

Bauer played a big -- and characteristic -- role in the just-concluded Jenkins - Landrieu case. Together with Republican lawyer Bill Canfield, he was charged by the Senate Rules Committee with writing a preliminary report on the Jenkins petition. Bauer drafted a report that recommended an initial investigation, but a tightly limited one that he and Canfield would conduct. The shrewdly crafted language seemed reasonable enough, but the committee inevitably had to go beyond it. Which played in the press as Republicans rejecting a bi-partisan recommendation. "The report became a political albatross for us," says one GOP staffer.

Bauer's role in the case was sometimes controversial. As counsel to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee he had, in some sense, represented Mary Landrieu during the very election that is in dispute. Then, at one point during the complicated maneuvering over his investigation, Sen. John Warner (R., Va.) mistakenly stated publicly that Bauer was actually representing Sen. Landrieu in the case -- which would have been a blatant conflict with his role as a committee-hired investigator. Bauer made incensed telephone calls to quash the idea. Or as he puts it, "I made it clear very, very, very quickly that I would react very, very, very strongly if something fabricated out of whole cloth was farmed out any more."

With Democratic scandals continuing to blossom, Bauer has no lack of work. One GOP lawyer -- who has taped to his office door a newspaper picture of Bauer whispering in Richard Sullivan's ear at the witness table says: "I'm very happy when Bob Bauer is busy. I may be more happy than his partners." The Thompson Committee recently got a new lease on life with the Teamsters scandal. One non-profit group fingered in the series of complicated Teamster financial transactions is called Vote 96. Its lawyer? Bob Bauer. "I'm completely comfortable," he is quick to note, "that no one will find a penny that was not spent the way the law says it should be spent."