Judges Panel Orders Meese Attorneys to Supply More Information in Fee Request

A special three-judge panel Friday ordered lawyers for Atty. Gen.-designate Edwin Meese III to provide extensive new information to justify his request for reimbursement of $720,924 in legal fees incurred during a 5 1/2-month investigation by an independent counsel.

Although the judges gave Meese’s lawyers until Feb. 7 to add to the 800 pages of documents already submitted, the fee question should not prolong Meese’s confirmation hearings, according to a spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). Those hearings, set to open Tuesday, are expected to be completed in one or two days.

“The chairman said it’s not a relevant issue and that it has not altered his plans at all,” Thurmond aide Mark W. Goodin said. Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), Meese’s chief critic on the committee, said he does not plan to raise the issue, calling it “a matter before the court.”

Questions Raised

Both the Justice Department and independent counsel Jacob A. Stein, who concluded last September that there was no basis for criminal charges against Meese, had raised questions about how Meese’s lawyers calculated their fees.

The attorneys, Leonard Garment of Washington and E. Robert Wallach of San Francisco, used a fee scale that ranged from $75 to $250 per hour--rates that they contended “are similar to or somewhat below the prevailing rates in Washington, D.C., for similar work.”

But the Justice Department said that Meese’s lawyers had cited only three Washington law firms with hourly rates as high as $250, adding that the court record suggests that “the majority of even the most prominent Washington firms bills at an hourly rate much less than $250.”

Stein, while emphasizing to the court that it would not be appropriate for him to take any position on the fee, noted that he and his staff of five lawyers had run up bills of $222,000 during the investigation. Moreover, he said, the federal Criminal Justice Act compensates court-appointed criminal attorneys at a rate of $40 per hour and current Justice Department policy limits fees for outside attorneys in civil matters to no more than $75 per hour.

The three-judge panel, which appoints independent counsels and receives their reports, appeared to respond to the Justice Department and Stein by asking Garment and Wallach for “a detailed statement, which documents and explains all time spent and all expenditures incurred by all counsel. . . .”

The judges also asked Meese’s lawyers to distinguish between costs incurred before the Stein investigation, when Meese was under scrutiny by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and those charged for work during the investigation. Wallach, a longtime friend of Meese, assisted him throughout the Senate hearings, which were cut off because of the Stein probe.

In a related development, Meese, whose sensitivity to questions of ethics and propriety has been a major focus of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he and his wife, Ursula, would sell all of their stock and bond holdings in 13 telephone and oil companies, if he is confirmed. He said Assistant Atty. Gen. Anthony C. Liotta, the Justice Department’s chief ethics official, had advised him to do so.

Meese, in a letter to David H. Martin, director of the Office of Government Ethics, also outlined a broad “recusal” policy of not participating “in any matter in which, in my judgment, it is desirable for me to do so in order to avoid an appearance of impropriety.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee released Meese’s financial statement, in which he listed assets of $531,908 and liabilities of $238,237, giving him a net worth of $293,671. Meese said that he did not list the legal fees as a liability because of the reimbursement request pending with the court.