IT’s SOMEHOW FITTING that senators and pundits should be swooning over the White House lawyer who made the weakest defense of President Clinton. Cheryl Mills, a deputy counsel to the president, argued on January 20 that Bill Clinton did not obstruct justice in conversations with Betty Currie last January. To make the case, Mills distorted or ignored inconvenient facts. She also resorted to emotional ploys, including the race card. Yet when she finished, even crabby conservatives like Phil Gramm were queuing to shake her hand, and the Washington Post was comparing her performance to a Liza Minnelli show.
The reaction to Mills says more about the mood on Capitol Hill than the merits of her argument. After listening to harangues from familiar figures like Bob Barr and Greg Craig for two weeks, the senators and commentators were thrilled by a new face — especially the face of a composed 33-year-old black woman presenting herself as “powerful proof that the American dream lives.” Any scrutiny of both her Senate presentation and her six-year tenure in the White House counsel’s office, however, reveals an uncompromising loyalist in the mold of representatives Barney Frank and Henry Waxman.
Consider Mills’s response when she learned last March that Kathleen Willey was scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes, charging the president had fondled her. Mills scoured the White House for letters Willey had sent Clinton, and then made sure these letters, many of them affectionate, were given to the press. The move had the intended effect: Willey’s credibility as an accuser was shredded.
Mills’s spirited partisanship is captured by the screen saver in her West Wing office: “The lioness is the hunter.” Not surprisingly, she is close to the first lady, with whom she shares an aversion to the press. A member of the legal team that crafted Clinton’s defense strategy last year, Mills enjoys friendly relations not only with Betty Currie — whom she helped procure a lawyer when the Lewinsky story broke — but also with Vernon Jordan and Bruce Lindsey, two of the president’s closest confidants. Acknowledging her access to the inner circle, Kenneth Starr last year paid Mills the compliment of a subpoena.
Mills began her Senate defense of Clinton by recounting her personal history. She revealed, for example, that her father had been in the Army for 27 years, and that her presentation was being made six years to the day after she started working at the White House. She also reminded her audience that she is “a lawyer, an American, and an African-American.”
Then Mills launched into a spirited defense of her client. She began by claiming that Asa Hutchinson, one of the House prosecutors, had himself conceded that Clinton couldn’t be convicted of obstruction of justice. But like much of Mills’s presentation, this was dishonest: Hutchinson had simply insisted on the need for live testimony. “How can you vote to remove a president without hearing the key witnesses?” he had asked. Quoted in full, Hutchinson’s statement had a meaning that Mills blatantly misrepresented.
Later, Mills discussed Clinton’s summoning of Currie to ask her a series of leading questions: “I was never really alone with Monica, right?”; “Monica came on to me and I never touched her, right?” Mills claimed Clinton couldn’t be guilty of obstruction because “there is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of threat or intimidation.”
This argument had several weaknesses. First, federal law does not require that threats or intimidation be shown in order to prove witness tampering. Second, Mills didn’t suggest what legitimate reason Clinton could have had for asking Currie to confirm assertions he knew to be false or she knew nothing about. Third, Mills didn’t address why the president called Currie into the Oval Office on a Sunday as opposed to simply calling her on the phone. And, fourth, she didn’t address why the president repeated these leading questions to Currie a few days later.
The irony in having Mills defend the president against the charge of obstruction of justice is that she herself has been cited for obstruction. In August 1996, a House oversight subcommittee wrote to Clinton requesting documents relating to a White House database that might have been illegally shared with the Democratic National Committee. The White House turned over documents six weeks later, but Mills personally withheld two memorandums highlighting the interest of the president and Mrs. Clinton in merging the White House and DNC databases (one of the memos has a handwritten notation from Mrs. Clinton saying, “This sounds promising”). Mills claims she withheld the memos because she didn’t think them relevant to the subcommittee’s request. Yet when Charles Ruff, her superior in the White House counsel’s office, discovered the memos six months later, he immediately gave them to the sub-committee.
Minor though this may be, there’s overwhelming evidence Mills’s sole motive in withholding the documents was to prevent embarrassment on the eve of the 1996 presidential election.
Indeed, testimony from numerous White House officials left no doubt she knew exactly what she was doing. Yet in November 1997, when Mills testified before a congressional committee, she maintained that withholding the memos had not been improper and that she didn’t know which White House database the subcommittee was inquiring about. The subcommittee chairman, Rep. David McIntosh, was sufficiently dismayed by this testimony under oath that last September he wrote to Janet Reno to request an investigation of Mills for obstruction of justice and perjury. He has still not received a response.
Mills closed her defense of the president with a soliloquy on civil rights. She reminded the senators that Clinton’s grandfather had owned a shop serving a mostly black clientele; and she portrayed the president as an “imperfect” crusader, akin to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Saddled as she was with a dreadful case and a cad for a client, Mills chose to make an emotional plea rather than argue the facts. It’s hard to blame her.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
