Deaver Fined, Gets 3 Years’ Probation : Ex-Reagan Aide to Pay $100,000 in Perjury Case, Do Community Service

Former White House aide Michael K. Deaver, convicted of three counts of perjury last December for lying under oath about his post-government lobbying activities, was sentenced to three years of probation and fined $100,000 Friday by a federal judge.

A prison term would not help to rehabilitate Deaver, said U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who ordered also that President and Mrs. Reagan’s former confidant do 1,500 hours of community service work.

Moments later, Deaver, his eyes moist with tears of gratitude, hugged his smiling wife, Carolyn, and daughter, Amanda, and several friends in the courtroom.

“It was a very fair sentence, if I’d been guilty,” he told reporters outside the courthouse. But he reiterated that he had never deliberately lied about his activities and blamed alcoholism for memory lapses that he said had led to his troubles.

Can’t Recall Phone Calls

“To this day, I don’t recall making some of those phone calls when I was in the hospital sedated” for treatment of alcoholism, Deaver said. He was referring to charges that he had lied two years ago to a congressional investigating committee and a federal grand jury in denying making several lobbying contacts for clients of his public relations firm.

Deaver said he has not decided whether to appeal the conviction. Deaver, an aide to Reagan for nearly 20 years, starting with Reagan’s first term as governor of California, was the deputy White House chief of staff from January, 1981, until May, 1985. He then became a lobbyist for a dozen large corporations and foreign interests, earning a reported $4.5 million in his first year.

Because former top government aides are prohibited from lobbying their former colleagues on certain matters for one year, allegations that Deaver was contacting people in the executive branch were investigated by a House subcommittee and a grand jury. Deaver ultimately was charged--and convicted--of perjury but not of illegal lobbying.

Reagan, campaigning in Florida for Republican presidential nominee George Bush, said in a statement: “This is a sad day. Mike Deaver has been our friend for more than 20 years and has served us and his country with uncommon dedication.”

Deaver, in a personal plea to the judge for leniency, said that his legal troubles had taken “a terrible toll on me and my family, as well as my friends and my business.”

But he told the judge, “I can take comfort in the fact that I have had the support of friends and family in coming to grips with the worst demon that I faced, and that was alcoholism.”

Before imposing sentence, Jackson, who presided over Deaver’s seven-week trial last year, praised the former official for having “loyally, ably and honorably served the President of the United States” and for having “also served his country.”

But Jackson professed “a distaste” for some of the corporate and foreign clients Deaver lobbied for after leaving the government.

“Michael Deaver was used by such people, although not without his willing and well-paid assent,” said the judge, who was appointed to the bench by Reagan in 1982.

Although Deaver “knew his answers were false” and was rightly convicted of perjury, Jackson said, his struggle with alcoholism may have preoccupied him in the midst of the investigations and thus should mitigate his punishment.

Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, before which Deaver delivered perjured testimony, criticized the sentence as too lenient, declaring that it “sends the wrong message.”

“The message is (that) the powerful can get away with things most people can’t,” Dingell said in a statement. “That’s the standard to which this Administration has lowered the country.”

The prosecution in the case, conducted by independent counsel Whitney North Seymour Jr., had urged the judge to give Deaver a prison term.

Deaver, who could have received a maximum five-year sentence on each of three perjury counts, told reporters that he might work with alcoholics as part of his 1,500 hours of community service. He said his plans are uncertain, but Jackson specified that he must give up lobbying the federal government, an occupation Deaver virtually has had to abandon anyway.

Deaver is the second former White House aide to be sentenced this year. In April, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s former political director, received 90 days in prison and was fined $30,000 for ethics law violations in connection with his lobbying activities on behalf of the scandal-scarred Wedtech Corp. and two other clients.

Nofziger has not begun serving his sentence pending disposition of his appeal.

Deaver’s sentencing, originally scheduled for last February, was delayed after he challenged his conviction on grounds that the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, under which the independent prosecutor had been appointed, was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court later upheld the constitutionality of that law.