Keep your mouth shut
Washington superlawyer Bob Bennett knows a thing or two about ethics. He’s conducted investigations for the Senate ethics committee on several occasions, including the famous Keating Five scandal that ensnared John McCain.
But speaking at the Q&A Café at Nathans of Georgetown on Wednesday, he confessed that he doesn’t have much regard for the process at this point. “I think both sides … really don’t have an interest in enforcing the ethics laws,” he told host Carol Joynt. “It’s really a joke,” he added, blaming the situation on “collegiality.”
He didn’t have much legal advice for the crowd, except to shut up. What gets people into trouble, he said, is “always [that] you said something you shouldn’t have said,” pointing to Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby and Caspar Weinberger.
In fact, he said, he has a brown trout on his wall with a plaque below that reads, “If I kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t be on this wall.”
And he made clear that you can’t take the New Yorker out of the man. During the impeachment saga, he said, President Clinton asked to see him late at night. So Bennett drove to the White House, entered via a special gate, parked close to the door and locked his car. The steward who met him, said Bennett, immediately asked him if he was from New York. Because they were both “big, beefy Irishman,” Bennett thought they might have gone to school together.
But the steward quickly disabused him of that notion. “The only people who park their car here and lock it are from New York,” he said.
