OVER THE YEARS, Tom DeLay has suffered an impressive array of insults. Former senator Al D’Amato called him a “crazy right-wing wack-job,” while George magazine deemed him “The Meanest Man in Congress.” Columnist Molly Ivins suggested he bore the “air of a small-town car dealer.” And during a spat on the House floor, Rep. David Obey allegedly called the majority whip an epithet that rhymes with “sock-tucker,” while DeLay called the distinguished gentleman from Wisconsin a “gutless chickens — t” and shoved Obey for good measure. But one thing DeLay has never been called is a racketeer. At least he hadn’t until May 3. That’s when Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, announced in a press conference that the DCCC had filed a civil racketeering suit against DeLay and three nonprofit fund-raising groups.
Kennedy, along with DCCC attorney Robert Bauer, alleged that DeLay, through these “shadowy” organizations run by his close allies, was overseeing “an illegal political operation” that was circumventing election law by raising unseemly amounts of cash through “systematic extortion,” while laundering the money through the organizations in order to “conceal . . . donors” without “public or legal accountability.” (It warrants mentioning that none of the organizations is legally required to report its contributions or donors, any more than Patrick’s father, Ted, is required to disclose the donors who have kicked in $ 350,000 to the soft-money arm of his PAC.)
As political theater, the press conference bore all the hallmarks of the malaprop king of the Kennedy family, a man who once said that he never had to worry about “making mends meet.” There was Patrick’s mangled syntax, the shrill overemphasis of every other syllable, and the gulping nervousness and pride as he became the first congressman ever to file a RICO suit against a colleague. Still, despite the helpful flowchart purportedly representing “DeLay’s pattern of racketeering activity” and a stack of press clips that Kennedy and Bauer offered as their only evidence (the clips detailed DeLay’s fund-raising methods but failed even to hint at extortion), the suit raised more questions than it answered, such as: If DeLay has engaged in criminal behavior, why is the DCCC seeking civil redress? How can they know DeLay extorted donors if they don’t even know who the donors are? And most important: Is Patrick Kennedy compos mentis?
After all, he did admit last February at a Tipper Gore campaign stop, “I am on a lot of medications, for among other things, depression.” And lately, he’s been under duress after videotape was released that showed him shoving an airport security guard into a metal detector when she obstructed his path after he refused to check his unwieldy carryon bag (carrying on the family tradition, Kennedy escaped charges and the security guard has been terminated). While the RICO suit has largely blown up in his face — even drawing friendly fire from Democrats such as Paul Begala, who wrote that the suit was wrong “ethically, legally and politically” — Kennedy deserves points for boldness. This election-year stunt, after all, comes after years of allegations of Democrats patting down Buddhist nuns and Chinese businessmen for illegal contributions (Kennedy himself was forced to return $ 5,000 from convicted felon Maria Hsia).
Still, Republicans aren’t prepared to believe that Kennedy, who has long been regarded as Pinocchio to minority leader Richard Gephardt’s Geppetto, is the brains behind the operation. “He couldn’t brainstorm his way out of a paper bag,” says Tony Rudy, DeLay’s deputy chief of staff. “Putting it in racketeering terms,” says the Republican National Committee’s Mike Collins, “If the Kennedys were the Corleones, Patrick would be Fredo.”
The man Republicans are crediting instead as the evil genius behind the RICO suit is Robert Bauer, a whiskered, bespectacled campaign-finance authority who looks more like a humanities professor than a pitbull litigator. Bauer, a managing partner at Washington, D.C.’s Perkins, Coie, has served as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s outside counsel since 1977, and the DCCC’s attorney since 1981. Dry-witted an well-liked, even by some of his Republican rivals, Bauer has over the course of two decades become widely regarded as the Democrats’ foremost expert on election law. He literally wrote the book on it, with the enchanting title United States Federal Election Law: Federal Regulation of Political Campaign Finance and Participation (Amazon.com sales rank: 1,548,526).
Over the course of two decades, Bauer, who sometimes bears the oxymoronic title “ethics lawyer,” has become not merely the man Democrats turn to when navigating gift-ban considerations — such as when does legally scarfing lobbyists’ hors d’oeuvres become enjoying an illegal meal (“It probably helps somewhat if you’re standing,” Bauer has said). He’s also become their point man in attacking Republicans. Serving as outside counsel to everyone from Gephardt to Tom Daschle, Bauer was the lawyer who helped strategize the Clinton censure resolution that was the Democratic alternative to impeachment. He also incorporated James Carville’s Education and Information Project, the “Def-Con 2” vehicle Carville used to wage war on Kenneth Starr. But no skirmish is too small for Bauer to join. In 1990, he attacked South Dakota senator Larry Pressler for letting his staff aid an elderly woman in writing a campaign-related letter to the editor. (She’d asked for typing assistance — because of her arthritis.)
DeLay staffer Tony Rudy calls Bauer “the most partisan lawyer in Washington” — a left-handed compliment of sorts in party-hack heaven. Many consider his RICO suit so aggressively frivolous that Bauer is now drawing comparisons to conservative gadfly Larry Klayman (who recently announced that his Judicial Watch is representing Donato Dalrymple, the man who fished Elian Gonzalez out of the Atlantic, in a $ 100 million lawsuit against Janet Reno and other administration officials). When I ask Bauer if he has any plans to sue his own mother, as Klayman has, the comparison rankles, though he replies with glib judiciousness, “I’m not commenting on any pending matters.”
Bauer’s most important role, however, isn’t playing offense, but defense. Unlike the flamboyant Bob Bennett or Abbe Lowell, Bauer has quietly become a Zelig, popping up in almost every case involving an ethically challenged Democrat, a gig that keeps him busy. When the House Ethics Committee in the early nineties published a list of the 22 top bad-check writers, Bauer represented five of them. During the marathon Hill hearings into Democrats’ campaign finance abuses, Bauer or his firm represented no less than seven witnesses.
It’s a tad ironic that the lawyer now accusing DeLay of unprecedented campaign finance abuses represented Richard Sullivan, the former DNC finance director and Johnny Chung party contact, in not one, but two fund-raising scandals. Chung, who pled guilty to using illegal straw donors while funneling thousands to the 1996 Clinton campaign, testified that Sullivan solicited a $ 125,000 donation a month after Sullivan said he’d grown suspicious that Chung was acting as an illegal conduit for Chinese contributions. While Sullivan has never been charged, the judge who sentenced Chung said that if Sullivan and his fellow DNC official Don Fowler “didn’t know what was going on . . . they are the dumbest politicians I’ve ever seen.” Sullivan was also asked to explain what he knew about a complex fund-swapping scheme where the Teamsters planned to pay $ 1 million to the DNC in return for $ 100,000 from DNC donors that would be funneled to Ron Carey’s campaign for Teamster president (Carey’s election was overturned, and the Teamsters’ former political director was sentenced to three years in prison for similar schemes).
Bauer has also represented Vote Now ’96, a non-profit voter registration group that was investigated for accepting contributions from foreign donors who were ineligible to give money to the Democratic party but who were steered to Vote Now by DNC officials expecting the group’s independent expenditures to benefit Democrats in the elections (a scheme that bears striking similarity to the DeLay allegations — minus the foreign donors). It is also odd to see Bauer’s sense of propriety so offended, since he represented former congressman Tony Coelho, who resigned before ethics police could catch him over an investment scandal, but not before the book Honest Graft canonized him as the Democrats’ reigning shakedown artist. Bauer also represents Jacksonville, Florida’s embattled Rep. Corrine Brown, who is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for a series of suspect incidents, one of which includes the allegation that her daughter accepted a $ 50,000 Lexus from aides of a West African millionaire nicknamed “Baba,” three months after Brown implored Janet Reno to allow Baba to go home to Africa before he could be sent to prison over a bribery charge in Miami. The whole transaction might have been a mistake. One of Baba’s attorneys said the car was intended for Brown herself, as a “gesture of friendship.”
As for the DeLay case, many Democrats don’t give it much chance of achieving liftoff. “It’s idiotic,” says one prominent Democratic consultant. Even James Carville, the high priest of partisan warfare, is sitting this one out. “I’m very skeptical about using the courts to settle political differences,” he says. Still, Bauer might be onto something. After all, when a lawyer with his expertise says he’s spotted a politician who’ll stop at nothing to bend the law for his own political gain, he ought to know. Just look at his clients.
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
