Cisneros Loses Bid to Keep Mistress’ Tapes From Jury

A federal judge said Monday that the government could introduce parts of 22 secretly recorded phone conversations to try to prove that Henry G. Cisneros lied to FBI agents about payments to a former mistress that could have derailed his nomination as President Clinton’s first Housing secretary.

In a written opinion elaborating on his brief oral ruling earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin said that he found no reason to keep jurors from hearing some taped dialogue between Cisneros and the woman, Linda Medlar, at his upcoming trial in September.

The tapes are crucial to an indictment brought two years ago by independent counsel David Barrett that alleged Cisneros lied in telling investigators he paid Medlar, now known as Linda Jones, only about $60,000 after their 1988 breakup. Actually, he paid her more than $250,000 over a period of years. The legality of the payments has never been questioned.

During three weeks of pretrial hearings, lawyers for Cisneros argued that all 88 recordings made by Medlar should be barred from the trial as unreliable and “inauthentic” because she had copied all of them. Testimony by Medlar and a government tape expert showed that the recordings had many deletions.

Sporkin agreed that four of the 26 tapes prosecutors hoped to use were badly flawed and were generally inadmissible. But he declared that “the vast majority of the tapes contain reliable and accurate representations of the conversations that occurred between Medlar and Cisneros [and] intelligible, logically consistent statements by both the witness, Medlar, and the defendant that demonstrate that the tapes are what they purport to be.”

He added that “several of the indictment’s allegations receive probative support from the tapes [and] tend to prove the essence of what the OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] has charged, namely, that the payments may well be hush money.”

Medlar has alleged, and some tapes support her contention, that Cisneros promised to pay her $4,000 a month after their high-profile romance and breakup resulted in her loss of clients as a political fund-raiser and her inability to find other employment. Cisneros at the time was mayor of San Antonio.

After the well-known Texas Democrat was nominated by Clinton in late 1992 to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, some of the taped conversations--according to transcripts--show that Cisneros promised to keep paying Medlar and urged her to conceal the extent of their financial relationship from federal investigators.

Sporkin noted in his opinion that Bruce Koenig, a former FBI agent who is the government’s tape expert, had testified that he found no instances where taped conversations had been spliced together to create false or manufactured comments by Cisneros. In addition, Sporkin said that “Cisneros has presented no direct evidence that the voice on the tapes is not his, nor that the statements attributed to him are inaccurate.”

In assessing the prosecution’s case, Sporkin nonetheless cast doubt on the reliability of its principal witness, Medlar, who conceded at the pretrial hearings that she had lied to FBI agents about her past relationship with Cisneros and later misled them into believing that all her recordings were original ones.

“Ms. Medlar’s credibility is in issue,” the judge wrote, noting that defense attorneys will have an opportunity to test her on the witness stand and argue their view of the tapes to a jury. During the hearings, Sporkin said he was “astounded” by Medlar’s persistent lying under oath.

Defense lawyer Brendan V. Sullivan Jr. argued in court that “tapes, as we all know, are very powerful evidence, but tapes that are altered are powerfully misleading.”

Neither Sullivan nor prosecutors expressed immediate reaction to Sporkin’s written opinion. Cisneros, now president and chief executive officer of Univision, a Spanish-language television programmer based in Los Angeles, has pleaded not guilty to the 18 counts of lying, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.