To appreciate just how much dirt is being flung at independent counsel Kenneth Starr by the White House and its spin-agents, you must first learn a few things about cars and trucks.
One: Cars and trucks run on gasoline. Two: When cars and trucks are involved in horrific accidents, the gasoline sometimes spills and then ignites. Three: The nation’s army of trial lawyers, auto tort division, regards any such accident as a welcome opportunity to sue the vehicle’s manufacturer for a gigantic sum of money. And four: Those lawyers will stop at nothing to destroy anyone who stands between them and their contingency fees.
Which is where Ken Starr comes in.
On May 5, 1990, brothers Mark and Steve Cameron were heading south in a 1977 Chevrolet pickup on Highway K99 just outside of Summerfield, Kansas. A 1976 Ford Torino was heading north on the same road. The two vehicles collided at what the Camerons’ own expert witness would later estimate to be a combined speed of no less than 99 — and perhaps as high as 122 — miles per hour. As you might expect, both vehicles were totaled. The wrecked Chevy pickup caught fire. Steve Cameron was so badly burned that he eventually lost his right arm.
Though the Camerons had been lifelong residents of Kansas, in April 1993 they suddenly moved to Greenville, South Carolina. How come? Well, “job opportunities,” Mark Cameron would testify in a deposition a few months later. And “the weather.” And “NASCAR racing. . . . It’s kind of a racing country down here” and “I’m interested in that sort of thing.” Any other reason? “I don’t know. Looks like a good place.” Also, “To be closer to our attorneys.”
Attorneys back in Kansas were useless to the Camerons, you see; that jurisdiction’s statute of limitations for product liability had expired in 1992. But the litigation window remained open in South Carolina, which, as an added attraction, imposes no limit on punitive-damage awards by juries. So the Camerons packed a few days’ worth of clothes and “bathroom items,” drove to Greenville, and — in their new “home state” — immediately sued General Motors for having sold them the Chew they’d crashed four years earlier. Representing the Camerons in this action were a local tort lawyer, J. Kendall Few, and James Butler Jr. of Atlanta, who had just won a highly publicized $ 105 million verdict against GM in a Georgia truck-fire case.
Few and Butler are men with a theory. The theory is that car and truck fires are not an inevitable risk of driving but a correctable design flaw — and that for 25 years GM has deliberately declined to fix the problem because it is cheaper simply to pay off the occasional victim. It’s a sensational charge, and it makes for excellent courtroom drama. But it rests almost entirely on a crude, two-page “value analysis” produced under unclear circumstances by a junior Oldsmobile engineer in 1973. The so-called “Ivey memo” assumed the existence of a “non-flammable fuel” and then appeared to conclude that preventing fire fatalities would be “worth” 20 cents less to GM per automobile than allowing them to continue.
Of course, there is no such thing as a “non-flammable fuel” for automobiles. Undeterred by the logic of science, however, tort lawyers like Few and Butler have been arguing for years and years, in case after case, that the purported spirit of the Ivey memo represented — and still represents — official GM policy. And they have used that memo to justify multi-thousand- page document searches through the GM archives for corroborating evidence that has never emerged. In the Cameron case, Few and Butler were lucky to draw Judge G. Ross Anderson Jr., a salty former plaintiffs’ attorney given to public boasts about how much he enjoys goring corporate defendants. Judge Anderson granted Few and Butler’s demand that GM turn over a series of Ivey- related papers prepared by the company’s lawyers during previous litigation.
Okay, what does the Cameron case, up to this point in the story, have to do with Ken Starr? Nothing whatsoever. Starr is not a trial lawyer. Until Judge Anderson’s “discovery” rulings, Starr had never met any of the principals in the Cameron litigation or read most of the documents involved — and he still hasn’t.
But Starr is an appellate lawyer, and GM is one of his clients, and Starr did take a handful of Judge Anderson’s discovery rulings to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fourth Circuit stayed those rulings as blatant violations of attorney-client privilege and essentially ordered Anderson off the case for his intemperate out-of-court pronouncements. Then, after a year’s exhaustive review of the Few-Butler conspiracy theory and all relevant documents, the Fourth Circuit again agreed with Starr and overturned the discovery rulings of Anderson’s replacement, Judge Charles H. Haden II. The Cameron case was settled without the sought-for grand prize: a fat punitive- damage award.
Also in 1994, incidentally, Starr won a GM appeal overturning James Butler’s most famous grand prize, the $ 105 million Georgia truck-fire verdict. And because during subsequent proceedings in Georgia Butler used Cameron-case material that the Fourth Circuit had ordered stricken from the record, Butler was held in contempt and personally fined $ 190,000. Messrs. Butler and Few, it’s safe to say, do not like Ken Starr very much. He has cost them a lot of money.
So flash forward to Larry King Live on February 23, 1998, when for the first time somebody publicly connected the Cameron case with Ken Starr’s duties as independent counsel investigating Bill Clinton’s misadventures. That somebody was James Carville, who waved around on camera, without explanation, a piece of paper that he said “indicates Mr. Starr may be part of covering up some documents in a GM case down in South Carolina.”
It seems that a few days earlier, the trial judge in another GM fuel-fed- fire lawsuit, this one in Florida, had released an Ivey-related document. That document had never been subject to a ruling in the Cameron litigation. And that document — a GM lawyer’s report on a 1981 interview with Mr. Ivey — doesn’t prove very much at all to anyone who bothers to read it carefully. But reading things carefully has never been James Carville’s strong suit, and so the new piece of “evidence” was enough for him to declare Starr guilty of ” encouraging perjury in the General Motors case when a tank blew up and killed a child.”
Where did Carville get this outrageous idea? And how did he make the outlandish connection between Starr’s South Carolina work in 1994 and this year’s Florida litigation? One can venture a pretty good guess. Hours after the Florida Ivey material was entered into the trial record, an outfit called Ralph Hoar & Associates had that material up on its World Wide Web site. Ralph Hoar is an auto-safety expert who does research for plaintiffs’ attorneys in product-liability litigation. He did some work for his friend Kendall Few on the Cameron case, and he is now doing work on the Florida case.
Hoar is an amiable, honest-sounding fellow, and he convincingly insists that he doesn’t know how the Clinton clique learned about the new document: ” I don’t know Carville.” But Ralph Hoar doesn’t have to know Carville. Hoar reports that beginning February 23, the date of Carville’s Larry King appearance, his company’s Web site began tracking a flurry of unexpected visits from computers ending in the domain designation “eop.gov” — which stands for “executive office of the president,” or, in the vernacular, the West Wing of Bill Clinton’s White House.
Kendall Few, for his part, claims to have had no recent contact with anyone in Clinton’s ambit and denies caring whether a GM controversy surrounding Ken Starr might help the president survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But Few also worries, in writing, about how “Susan MacDougall [sic] languishes in shackles in the bowels of some California federal prison” and how “Monica Lewinski’s [sic] mother was publicly humiliated” before Starr’s grand jury. And on March 1, Few asked the U.S. attorney for South Carolina to convene a grand jury to investigate whether Ken Starr had feloniously obstructed justice by suppressing evidence of GM perjury in the Cameron case.
On March 2, this U.S. attorney, a Clinton appointee, agreed to look into the matter. On March 3, his superiors in Washington at the Department of Justice, sight unseen, took the case away from him and announced that they’d look into the matter — notwithstanding the fact that a three- judge federal appellate panel already has looked into it, in 1994, and concluded it amounts to nothing. On March 4, employees at the White House, whose salaries are paid with public money, spent the day blast-faxing ” information” about the Cameron case to national reporters, which made it a ” legitimate” story. You have to sort through mountains of court records to figure out that the story is actually unmitigated baloney, and who has time for that?
Pretty neat, huh? Vengeful trial lawyers to the World Wide Web to James Carville and the White House to the big-time newspapers and television networks, where it is reported that the United States Department of Justice is conducting an inquiry into whether Kenneth Starr is a criminal. How is it even remotely appropriate for taxpayer dollars to be spent this way, in an effort to undermine a court- and Justice Department-sanctioned independent- counsel investigation?
Can it really be true that William Jefferson Clinton remains, effectively, above the law? And why do so few people seem upset about it?
David Tell, for the Editors
