Scandal Without End : How Much Is ‘Minimal’?

Can 60 hours of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legal work for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan be called “minimal,” as she said in her April 1994, news conference? Do they make the first lady a liar? Maybe. Right now, we don’t know enough. It may turn out that the issue is one of semantics, rather than mendacity.

First, we don’t know which statement about Clinton’s legal work is supposed to be the “lie.” Every publication has reported she said something different. Was it that she did “limited work” for Madison? Or that she didn’t do “the day-to-day work,” or that she did only “minimal” work? Did she say she has “no memory of working on Castle Grande” or that she doesn’t “believe” she “knows anything” about that project?

Take the assertion that Clinton did “limited work” for Madison. Newly discovered time records of the Rose Law Firm show she billed 60 hours on Madison business over a 15-month period--including some work on a securities offering and a project called Castle Grande, now claimed to have been fraudulent.

Sixty hours sounds like a lot. But other Rose lawyers did most of the work on the Madison transactions. The firm, as a whole, billed Madison for 240 hours over the same period. Given those facts, characterizing Clinton’s work as “limited” might be justified--especially if the bulk of her work was on one or two discrete matters out of the various projects handled by the firm.

Of course, “minimal” is something else again. Sixty hours doesn’t sound minimal. But, expressed as only an hour a week, even that word may not be too much of a stretch.

A hard-working lawyer might bill 50 to 60 hours a week. If that was true of Hillary Clinton, the Madison work was a small fraction

of her time. She could well consider it “minimal.”

Was it a lie for Clinton to say she didn’t do the “day-to-day work”? Seemingly not. “Day to day” work for a corporate client implies the regular handling of the client’s routine legal business. This does not appear to have been the nature of Hillary Clinton’s work for Madison. Her services seem to have been devoted to one or two significant matters, plus some briefings by other lawyers. Those others appear to have handled the client’s more routine work, and to have done the research and most of the drafting.

Concerning the securities offering, Clinton said she did not practice in that area of law, that it was not a field she knew “anything to speak of.” The billing records show her having conferences with a firm attorney presumably on that subject and phoning the state securities commissioner, who had been appointed by her husband. Her professed ignorance of the intricacies of securities law is not inconsistent with her recorded activities. As the “billing attorney” for Madison, it would not be unusual for her to want to be briefed on a matter as important as a securities offering. And, while her calling the commissioner may raise ethical and legal questions, it would not be inconsistent with her asserted lack of expertise.

So, where was the lie? Was it “I have no memory of working on Castle Grande” or “I don’t believe I know anything about Castle Grande”? The Rose firm billing records show Clinton had 12 telephone conversations with Seth Ward. He is now accused of acting as a “straw man” to acquire Castle Grande in his name and hold it for Madison, because that institution could not legally acquire it. Hillary Clinton also supposedly prepared an agreement between Ward and Madison that apparently gave Madison an option to acquire the property, potentially yielding Ward a substantial profit.

Could the first lady have forgotten about this? Maybe. It happened 10 years ago. Years after doing “limited” work for a client, a busy lawyer might not remember working on a particular matter for that client.

Could she be lying? Is it possible she remembers the Castle Grande transaction and her part in it? Of course. But we have to know more facts to reach an informed conclusion. We have to know the nature of the work she performed. Suppose her 12 conversations with Ward were to set up a plan enabling Madison Guaranty to evade the law by having Ward nominally acquire the property with the understanding that he would then deed it over to Madison Guaranty. Suppose the option Hillary Clinton prepared was designed to carry out that scheme. Most lawyers would remember facing that kind of legal and ethical issue. If those were the facts, it would be much less believable that the first lady has “no memory” of her participation.

Of course, we have no idea of the content of those 12 phone calls. We know they pertained to Madison Guaranty, because they were billed to that company. But we have no idea what was said. Nor do we know the precise nature of the documents Clinton prepared.

Hillary Clinton is also charged with saying she has no knowledge about a sewer project--though her billing records show she reviewed a 12-page memo on it prepared by an associate. Could she have forgotten the project? Absolutely. It sounds like the kind of thing a busy lawyer could easily forget. If, 10 years ago, I scanned an associate’s 12-page memo about some sewer project, there would be little chance I’d remember it today.

All things considered, comparing Hillary Clinton’s statements with the billing records does not, in itself, support a charge of lying. We need more facts.

But Hillary Clinton has a bigger problem than just that one comparison. Her problem is with a time-honored legal maxim, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Roughly translated, this means, if the lady is lying about one thing, it’s a fair inference she’s lying about everything else. Without knowing the Latin, the public tends to apply this precept by instinct. Apparently, the media does, too.

The press is not just focusing on statements about Madison legal work. There is her statement that a new young lawyer was responsible for bringing the Madison account to the firm, rather than the governor’s wife. There is her denial of responsibility for the travel-office firings.

Perhaps, on careful analysis, each of these statements can be reconciled with the facts. But, in cases of prominent people, the media sometimes prefer the inference that accusations are true and wrongdoing occurred. This could be because the public seems to get an ever greater thrill from watching a famous person brought low. Unfortunately for the White House, when all Hillary Clinton’s questionable statements are taken together, they may create an acceptable foundation for such an inference--and a potential basis for such a result.