All the president's fault - US First Lady Hillary Clinton's dismissal of public employees

Reason, April, 1996 by Michael McMenamin, James Oliphant

The only way Hillary Clinton can avoid lawsuits over Travelgate is to blame her husband.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is not getting much support these days from those close to her, especially on Travelgate, the abrupt, harsh dismissal of seven career government employees from the White House Travel Office in May 1993. The dismissals were followed by FBI and IRS investigations designed to smear the employees' reputations and cover up the real purpose of the purge: getting them out so the Clintons could get their people in. A recently released memo from David Watkins, the former White House director of administration, places Hillary directly in the middle of the decision to fire the Travel Office employees and makes her previous statements of non-complicity look like less than the complete truth. Instead of threatening the nose of New York Times columnist Bill Satire for calling her on this, a really loyal husband ought to be out there saying, "Look, my wife had nothing to do with it. If any of my staff thought they felt pressure from her, they're wrong. She was simply conveying my wishes, nothing more. It was my call all the way."

The fact that President Clinton has not said this, indeed had previously gone out of his way to distance himself from Travelgate, is...disturbing. There may be any number of explanations for allowing his wife to twist slowly in the wind, but we prefer to believe that, preoccupied as the Clintons are with their criminal exposure before the Whitewater special prosecutor and the political risks associated with the Senate Whitewater Committee, no one has paid much attention to the first lady's very real exposure to substantial civil liability over her role in Travelgate and its aftermath.

With no one else around to volunteer, REASON asked us to look into the problem on a pro bono basis and come up with a legal plan to protect her against any civil suits by the Travelgate Seven. We do this in the same spirit as REASON's efforts in the summer of 1994 to offer President Clinton sound legal advice on how to quickly and expeditiously dispose of Paula Jones's sexual harassment charges so they would not be lingering around to haunt him in his re-election campaign ("Defending the President," August/September 1994). He spurned our advice in favor of the stall-and-delay strategy engineered by his $400-an-hour Washington lawyer, Robert Bennett, the brother of the nationally prominent Republican William Bennett. Today, Paula Jones's embarrassing sexual harassment case is still in the headlines while she inches toward the Supreme Court, fresh from her victory in the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which laughed Bennett's immunity defense for Clinton out of court.

We trust that Mrs. Clinton - who finished higher in her class at Yale Law School than the president and actually made a living for a while in private practice - will maintain a more healthy skepticism toward legal advice from high-priced Washington lawyers with Republican connections. So let's get to it. What is Hillary's civil exposure in Travelgate, and how can we get her off without a messy jury trial that would further deplete the Clintons' dwindling resources?

The first point - one often lost in the scandal's serpentine turns - is that the seven Travel Office employees could have been fired at any time for almost any nondiscriminatory reason. As at-will employees without contracts, they served solely at the pleasure of the president. This means that if he wanted to blame any or all of the seven for, say, his $200 haircut on the California tarmac in 1993, they could have been fired during the evening news. The first lady's exposure lies not in the fact that the employees were fired but in the role she played to bring this about, the manner in which they were fired, and her subsequent statements about the reasons for the firings.

Mrs. Clinton could face tort liability for her instrumental role in encouraging the firings. No outsider to a contractual or business relationship may intentionally interfere with that relationship unless he (or she) has a privilege to do so. Hillary had no such privilege. As first lady and someone beyond the management structure of the White House, she had no right at law to injure the employment relationship between the seven employees and their employer, the Clinton administration. Any direct pressure by her to fire the seven is a potentially tortious act. And with torts come punitive damages, something the Clintons can ill afford. By dismissing people in a humiliating manner, employers have been found liable for inflicting emotional distress on workers whom they had every right to fire. Thus, any extreme or outrageous conduct on the part of people acting on Hillary's directions in the course of termination or its aftermath which caused severe emotional distress to any of the seven could also make her liable as a tort-feasor.

Finally, Hillary and the White House broke a cardinal rule for employers in termination situations: Don't bad-mouth your employees, even after their terminations. Let your actions - and the employee's personnel file in a formal proceeding - do the talking. In scurrying about for a cover story to justify the firings, the White House told America that the seven had been sacked because of financial mismanagement in the Travel Office. That, of course, turned out to be a lie. Unfortunately, Mrs. Clinton continues, to this day, to push the party line. Now, after all seven have been cleared of any financial misconduct, Hillary may have to defend a defamation action for continuing to drag their reputations through the mud.