Justice for All

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 14, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

Judge Royce C. Lamberth has moved against the Clinton/Gore administration for obstruction of justice, recalling the Watergate rulings of Judge John Sirica.

District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth can forget that appointment to the Supreme Court. Since Lamberth recently ordered a hearing to evaluate evidence that the Clinton/Gore administration has obstructed justice in the "lost" e-mail scandal, Vice President Al Gore certainly isn't going to do him any favors. Nor is Texas Gov. George W. Bush likely to push such an appointment, however deserved, since Democrats would. view it as rewarding Lamberth for his rulings against so many perpetrators in the Clinton scandals.

So why would Lamberth risk a distinguished career by taking on the meanest White House since Richard Nixon? Like the late Judge "Maximum John" Sirica during the Watergate scandals, Lamberth just may have had enough Clinton/Gore stonewalling, having endured it from Whitewater to Chinagate to the withholding of the e-mail.

Sirica certainly knew when enough was enough. He put the hammer down when the White House refused to release what Sirica later called the "smoking-pistol" tapes and ordered President Nixon to surrender the recordings that ultimately led to his resignation. Lamberth now is confronting just such a moment, and those close to him say he seems unlikely to flinch.

Charles Lewis, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, or CPI, says Lamberth may represent the last branch of government to be free of widespread corruption. "But, even so, he is the only U.S. District Judge in Washington to have taken on controversial issues in the last 20 years and consistently ruled against the administration," Lewis says.

And Lamberth can put his foot down rather angrily -- as he did with the

U.S. District Court: Klayman submits evidence in his case before Lambert. Department of Commerce, or DOC, when it failed to come up with vital records about trade missions that may have been compromised by political contributions. He blasted the department for "egregious ... disregard for the law" calling several former DOC officials "hooligans" and "scofflaws."

Tough? Ask Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. In a 76-page citation, Lamberth ripped fiercely into Babbitt and held both he and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt of court for failing to find and deliver Indian Trust records after a two-year search. The records were needed to determine what happened to some $2.4 billion that seems to have disappeared from leasing Indian lands for mineral, timber, oil, grazing and other purposes. The government is trustee for the Native American Rights Fund into which these billions were paid and is expected to manage it in the best interest of the beneficiaries: about 300,000 American Indians and 2,000 tribes.

Lamberth declared bluntly, "The court is deeply disappointed that any litigant would fail to obey orders for production of documents, and then conceal and cover-up that disobedience with outright false statements that the court then relied upon. But when that litigant is the federal government, the misconduct is even more troubling. I have never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government."

He fined the government $625,000 for disobeying his November 1996 order to turn over the records in a law-suit brought by the Native American Rights Fund, saying that Clinton/Gore officials "covered up their disobedience through semantics and strained, unilateral, self- serving interpretations of their own duties."

Lamberth especially was outraged that he had to hold the taxpayers and not the perpetrators responsible. "Ultimately these taxpayers will be forced to pay for the misconduct of their government's officials and their government's attorneys," he said. "This is a troublesome concept for the court. In this judge's view, the American taxpayers should not continue to be forced to bear the burden of these types of misdeeds."

This was just one example of Clinton/Gore impudence to which Lamberth has had to respond. In more than 70 lawsuits filed by the conservative Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch, the administration has turned stonewalling into a political art. It has reached the point where Judicial Watch's executive director, Larry Klayman, is urging Lamberth to turn the heat up even higher. "He needs to say enough is enough, hold people fully accountable and send them to jail," Klayman tells Insight.

Other Lamberth critics, who refuse to go on the record, also say he is too patient with the Clinton administration -- almost bending over backward to tolerate the Clinton/Gore stall. For example, although Insight first revealed the existence of copies of White House e-mails in December 1998, the White House has yet to turn over the records despite repeated rulings by Lamberth that it must do so and warnings of severe consequences if it does not. Klayman, who is fighting for those e-mail records, calls this drama "E-mail Tales From the Crypt," noting that the documents being withheld contain internal communications about every Clinton/Gore scandal of the era -- from Filegate through Monica Lewinsky and beyond. "Judge Lamberth should appoint a special master," Klayman says. "This is not an 18-and-one-half minute gap -- this is the Grand Canyon."