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Date: 25 Jan 1996 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 first crack at the Clinton inner circle in the matter of the death of Vincent Foster, deputy White House counsel, two years before. 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. She explains that the president was out of town. Most lawyers would follow up by asking why the president's being away presented a problem. But Chertoff commands a more expeditious means of torpedoing her explanation: He points out that Thomases herself was out of town.
Amidst all the minutiae of Foster's death, not every lawyer would have recalled the whereabouts of Susan Thomases at a moment's notice. But Chertoff is a lawyer of rare skill. A 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, he studied under Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and worked on the law review. 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." Later, Chertoff had a meteoric rise through the ranks as a U.S. 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.
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. (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.") When President Clinton, shortly after assuming office, took the unprecedented step of firing all the U.S. attorneys, Senator Bill Bradley, a New Jersey Democrat, requested that Chertoff be retained. He was, and he went on to develop a good working relationship with Attorney General Janet Reno.
In the spring of 1994, however, Chertoff moved to the private sector. 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. "Senator D'Amato told me he wanted to get the facts out and to do it professionally," Chertoff says. 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.
Will Chertoff have the same success at unraveling Whitewater that he had at prosecuting crooks? 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.
Codinha is probably right. Quite apart from his talent, Chertoff is motivated by an almost Puritan desire to root out political corruption. 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." He wasn't talking about Arkansas, but he might as well have been. Asked on Larry King Live to name the single most important issue in the Whitewater probe, he answered: "What did Mrs. Clinton and what did Governor Clinton know about the activities of their business partner and Mrs. Clinton's client, Jim McDougal"-the same McDougal who is under a 14- count indictment for assorted business schemes in Clinton's Arkansas.
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. Plainly, he possesses a more thorough understanding of some once-confidential White House meetings than people who were actually there. 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. 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.
Back then, when the committee was run by the Democrats, only senators were permitted to conduct the questioning. After control of Congress changed hands, D'Amato chaired the reconstituted Whitewater Committee, and he persuaded Chertoff to return. This time Chertoff could assume a higher profile. Critics in the press and many Democrats dismissed the hearings in the summer of 1995 as a thinly disguised attack on the Clinton administration. 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.
Under D'Amato, the committee's approach has been plodding. "This is a case that's going to be built one step at a time," Chertoff says. That suits D'Amato, who doesn‚t want to be seen as conducting a witch hunt. But it is also a matter of necessity, as important documents continue to dribble out of the White House. Chertoff calls the delays "very disturbing" and says they have gotten worse. He cites the administrations refusal to turn over e-mail records and says, "I doubt we have everything we need."
It is unclear what's next on the agenda, but Chertoff remains intrigued by Arkansas mores and the death of Vince Foster. "What was really going on in Arkansas?" he asks. "What did Jim McDougal give to the Clintons? And what did he expect in return?" With reference to Foster, he says: "I still find myself baffled by the memory lapses on key days in July 1993."
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. 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. And Chertoff says he expects to stay with the committee until the end: "My attitude is, if you begin something, you should finish it." That's the worst news the Clinton administration, and Susan Thomases, are likely to hear for some time.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD JANUARY 29, 1996
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