June 08, 2007
WH Counsel Expands Legal Team
Fred Fielding, President Bush's third and most seasoned White House counsel, is eager to talk about the new team of lawyers he is building.
The question is how one -- plus 21 -- experienced in-house lawyers can influence a president's second-term choices. And with 68-year-old Fielding -- a survivor of Watergate as John Dean's deputy; a veteran counsel to President Reagan; a transition specialist for both Bush presidents; and an incisive inquisitor on the 9/11 commission -- the answer in 2007 is, We shall see.
"I hope my mark will be zero defects," he said in an interview with National Journal this week. "I hope that my mark will be this group of people I've assembled as our team -- that it will be one of the most exciting experiences in their professional and personal lives, and I hope that we will leave this a better place. Not to sound corny."
Fielding has so far created five new positions for lawyers, and filled another handful of existing slots. He has expanded the size of the White House counsel's office to 22 lawyers -- about the size of former President Bill Clinton's White House team handling his second-term investigations and policy challenges. As Fielding remembers his days as Reagan's counsel from 1981 to 1986, he managed nicely with eight lawyers.
"The workload and the need for additional attorneys is generated by Congress," said Joel Kaplan, Bush's deputy chief of staff for policy. "Fred is looking for the right mix and skill sets to deal with the particular challenges that come from divided government and from the Congress being in the hands of the other party. The counsel's office is dealing with really an avalanche of requests."
Democrats leading the congressional oversight committees have said they will subpoena the White House, if necessary, to get testimony from Bush's current and former advisers in addition to documents they argue should be produced on demand, under past precedent. Bush has not invoked executive privilege -- yet. Fielding has offered to make Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers available to lawmakers in private to discuss the matter of the fired U.S. attorneys, if the president's advisers are not placed under oath and no transcript is created. Lawmakers have rejected the approach, seeking a counteroffer from Fielding, who has let the first bid ride.
In other document-production requests, such as the search for missing e-mails, the White House responses thus far have been described by Democrats as "constructive." On requests for documents tied to oversight of pre-war intelligence, on the other hand, Fielding has told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the administration has already "sufficiently responded to the legitimate needs of Congress."
Asked if Fielding has shown an ability to persuade the president in matters that might involve giving ground to legislative scrutiny -- not Bush's favorite cup of tea for the last six years -- Kaplan replies obliquely. Fielding (whom he lauds as a "natural fit") has demonstrated to Bush that he will be "vigilant in protecting the presidency" as well as Bush's interests as president, Kaplan says. The counsel, he added, has shown that he can "distinguish between that oversight which is responsible, and that which is not."
The president's new lawyer -- who gave up his litigation and white-collar crime and crisis practice with Wiley, Rein & Fielding -- said that if Congress clashes with the White House through subpoenas, his stance will be, "We have our constitutional prerogatives, which it is my responsibility to help protect. They have their constitutional prerogatives as well, and I want to find a middle ground, if we can."
Richard Hauser, who was Fielding's deputy counsel in the Reagan White House and has known him since the Nixon administration, said his friend has shown a knack for assembling staffs of people with judgment as well as expertise. And having been through the searing experience of Watergate, Hauser added, Fielding has seen "how even well-meaning people can get into trouble -- how bad things can happen, and how careful you have to be."
Fielding said he recruited three people from his law firm and others he has worked with over the years, to give him a sense of "total confidence." He offers an analogy for what he wants from his team: "It's a really dangerous place on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and there are people with red suits on and some have yellow, and not one of them looks over their shoulder. They all trust each other, and they're all trained."
Fielding's choice to be the president's new deputy counsel is J. Michael Farren, who began work at the White House on May 31 and will succeed William Kelley, who was Miers' deputy. Kelley, a conservative who helped Kenneth Starr investigate Clinton, is one of the Bush aides who approved the plan to purge eight U.S. attorneys last year. After two years in the White House, Kelley will return to teaching at Notre Dame University Law School before the end of June.
Farren, 54, returns to government service after years with Xerox, where he was general counsel; Fielding, who got to know him in the Reagan White House, considers him "a get." "I knew he was leaving Xerox -- I planted the seed, and for a while I thought he was going to do something else," Fielding said.
Farren worked with Fielding on the transition to the administration of former President George H.W. Bush and became Commerce undersecretary for international trade, followed by service as deputy manager for the Bush-Quayle re-election campaign.
To handle the sensitive particulars of personnel clearances, Fielding hired 76-year-old Stephen Potts, who is leaving as board chairman of the Ethics Resource Center to join the White House in July. The first President Bush appointed Potts to direct the Office of Government Ethics, and Clinton kept him there.
As special counsels and deputy assistants to the president, Fielding has hired Emmet Flood, a litigator with Williams & Connolly who was a clerk to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and a former member of Clinton's defense team, and William Burck, who had been Bush's deputy staff director and then counselor to the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division at the Justice Department. Fielding said he is pleased to have three lawyers with training in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
From his law firm, Fielding brought in as associate counsels partner Kate Todd and associates Amy Dunathan and Al Lambert. Todd clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas and has taught constitutional law at Cornell University; Dunathan worked for two Senate committees; Lambert clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Fielding also recruited a friend and former associate with his firm, Scott Coffina, 39, from the Philadelphia firm of Montgomery McCracken, Walker & Rhoads. Coffina, a white-collar defense lawyer, plans to commute back and forth to spend time with his family.
Fielding's other hires are Francis Hoang, an associate with Williams & Connolly and a former Army military police platoon leader, and Michael Purpura, who comes to the White House from Justice, where he was senior counsel to the deputy attorney general. Later this summer, Fielding said, he will add John Adams, who was a private litigator and is wrapping up a clerkship with Justice Thomas.
Posted at 12:36 PM
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