Who is Michael Chertoff?
REES, MATTHEW
Who is Michael Chertoff? by Matthew Rees Michael Chertoff, chief counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, can make smart people look stupid. Fade back to the summer of 1995. He is getting his...
...That's the worst news the Clinton administration, and Susan Thomases, are likely to hear for some time...
...Asked on Larry King Live to name the single most important issue in the Whitewater probe, he answered: "What did Mrs...
...He wasn't talking about Arkansas, but he might as well have been...
...Chertoff calls the delays "very disturbing" and says they have gotten worse...
...And what did he expect in return...
...Even the lawyer who defended one of Chertoff's targets, a former mayor of Jersey City charged with savings and loan fraud, said the effect of Chertoff's cross-examinations was to "turn our witnesses into his witnesses...
...For now, Chertoff and his staff of seven lawyers continue working 14-hour days, ensconced in their austere eighth-floor offices in the Senate's Hart building...
...Most lawyers would follow up by asking why the president's being away presented a problem...
...attorney in New York (his boss was Rudy Giuliani) and New Jersey, successfully prosecuting four mayors, as well as notorious figures like consumer electronics tycoon "Crazy Eddie" and Genovese crime king Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno...
...After joining the Whitewater committee staff in the summer of 1994, he quickly perceived the need to probe what appeared to be improper contacts between the White House and the Treasury over possible criminal referrals springing from the failure of McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan...
...This time Chertoff could assume a higher profile...
...With reference to Foster, he says: "I still find myself baffled by the memory lapses [of Clinton administration officials] on key days in July 1993...
...Quite apart from his talent, Chertoff is motivated by an almost Puritan desire to root out political corruption...
...attorneys, Senator Bill Bradley, a New Jersey Democrat, requested that Chertoff be retained...
...In an intense cross-examination, he asks Susan Thomases, New York lawyer and close friend of Hillary Clinton, why she was notified before President Clinton of the discovery of a torn up note in Foster's briefcase six days after his death...
...That suits D'Amato, who doesn't want to be seen as conducting a witch hunt...
...Yet, while the chief counsel uncovered no smoking gun, he did elicit conflicting testimony from a slew of current and former administration officials about the White House's response to Foster's death...
...Listen to his words in a May 1995 interview with the New York Times: "There is nothing more corrosive of people's faith in the system, and of people's faith in the larger citizenry, than if there is a special group that has an in, that controls everything, and that shuts everybody else out...
...And can he handle Washington's rough ways...
...One who says he is the best possible choice for the job is William Codinha, chief counsel to the Whitewater committee when it was under Democratic control...
...Will Chertoff have the same success at unraveling Whitewater that he had at prosecuting crooks...
...He cites the administration's refusal to turn over e-mail records and says, "I doubt we have everything we need...
...Later, Chertoff had a meteoric rise through the ranks as a U.S...
...Under D'Amato, the committee's approach has been plodding...
...In the spring of 1994, however, Chertoff moved to the private sector...
...A 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, he studied under Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and worked on the law review...
...What did Jim McDougal give to the Clintons...
...At the time, he had only a "casual acquaintance" with Whitewater, but he accepted, and-except for a nine-month hiatus between the summer hearings in 1994 and the committee's reconstitution by the newly Republican Senate the following spring-that byzantine tangle of money and politics has occupied him ever since...
...Amidst all the minutiae of Foster's death, not every lawyer would have recalled the whereabouts of Susan Thomases at a moment's notice...
...He is getting his first crack at the Clinton inner circle in the matter of the death of Vincent Foster, deputy White House counsel, two years before...
...Critics in the press and many Democrats dismissed the hearings in the summer of 1995 as a thinly disguised attack on the Clinton administration...
...His prowess at argument made him the inspiration for not one but two characters in Scott Turow's bestselling book about law students, One L. He went on to clerk for Supreme Court justice William Brennan, who called him "exceptional...
...Senator D'Amato told me he wanted to get the facts out and to do it professionally," Chertoff says...
...But Chertoff commands a more expeditious means of torpedoing her explanation: He points out that Thomases herself was out of town...
...This is a case that's going to be built one step at a time," Chertoff says...
...After control of Congress changed hands, D'Amato chaired the reconstituted Whitewater Committee, and he persuaded Chertoff to return...
...In pursuit of the answer, Chertoff has put the White House on the defensive, with his rapid-fire questioning and encyclopedic knowledge of the Whitewater labyrinth...
...She explains that the president was out of town...
...The ensuing hearings revealed that Roger Altman, deputy secretary of the Treasury, had lied in previous congressional testimony about his contacts with the White House over Madison, and Altman was forced to resign...
...And Chertoff says he expects to stay with the committee until the end: "My attitude is, if you begin something, you should finish it...
...It is unclear what's next on the agenda, but Chertoff remains intrigued by Arkansas mores and the death of Vince Foster...
...But Chertoff is a lawyer of rare skill...
...When President Clinton, shortly after assuming office, took the unprecedented step of firing all the U.S...
...Clinton's client, Jim McDougal"-the same McDougal who is under a 14-count indictment for assorted business schemes in Clinton's Arkansas...
...He was, and he went on to develop a good working relationship with Attorney General Janet Reno...
...As a prosecutor, Chertoff handled cases involving large and complicated financial crimes, as well as the misdeeds and coverups of politicians...
...His success was widely noted...
...Plainly, he possesses a more thorough understanding of some once-confidential White House meetings than people who were actually there...
...But it is also a matter of necessity, as important documents continue to dribble out of the White House...
...Clinton and what did Governor Clinton know about the activities of their business partner and Mrs...
...He had barely settled into the Newark office of the Los Angeles law firm Latham & Watkins when a call came from Senator Alfonse D'Amato asking him to take the job of minority counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee...
...The Whitewater Committee is only authorized to work until February 29, though with new documents still being released, that deadline is sure to be extended...
...Back then, when the committee was run by the Democrats, only senators were permitted to conduct the questioning...
...Codinha is probably right...
...What was really going on in Arkansas?'' he asks...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
