House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) spent $820,000 in just four months to defend himself in the ongoing probe into his connections to a lobbying firm that received hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks from the Californian’s panel.
The amount spent and pace of the legal bills, from early June to mid-October and mostly from a bicoastal team of lawyers retained by Lewis from the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, far exceeds the sums dished out by most other Members of the 110th Congress who have come under investigative scrutiny.
With another $52,000 paid to the firm on Oct. 11, Lewis’ total of $820,000 dwarfs the combined totals of legal bills paid out by three GOP Members caught up in the ongoing Jack Abramoff probe: Sen. Conrad Burns (Mont.) and Reps. John Doolittle (Calif.) and Bob Ney (Ohio), who collectively have spent less than $600,000 on attorney’s fees defending themselves over the past year.
All told, Lewis has spent fully two-thirds of the $1.2 million raised by his campaign committee in the 2006 election cycle on legal bills related to the investigation into his relationship with ex-Rep. Bill Lowery (R-Calif.), a close friend who founded a now-defunct lobbying firm that specialized in obtaining earmarks from the Appropriations subcommittee on Defense while Lewis chaired that panel, as well as earning grants for local municipalities in and around Lewis’ district.
Because he has not had difficult re-election races in the past, Lewis had the luxury of a large stockpile of campaign cash left over from previous bids, leaving him with $1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 18, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The only recent lawmaker to spend more on legal defense fees was former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who had spent more than $1.7 million in a two-year period from mid-2004 to mid-2006. DeLay, however, maintained a trio of legal teams to battle several different investigations: an indictment in Austin, Texas, on alleged violations of state campaign finance laws, another to deal with a House ethics committee probe, and one related to the Abramoff inquiry that so far has resulted in two ex-aides pleading guilty to felonies.
At this point, Lewis has not been subpoenaed, and it’s unclear if he has given any information or documents to the Justice Department. Several of the municipalities and local authorities that had Copeland Lowery Jacquez Denton & White as their lobbying firm have been subpoenaed. Roll Call has reported the FBI has examined the financial disclosure statements of Lewis, his wife, one current staffer and one former staffer.
But those subpoenas were issued in the spring and the financial records were examined in mid-May, pushing the investigation out of the spotlight in the months since.
The chairman’s legal team, in a statement, defended the soaring costs of their defense work by noting that Lewis has some of the best — and therefore best compensated — attorneys in the nation defending him.
“Congressman Lewis has availed himself of excellent legal representation so that this matter may be resolved expeditiously while he focuses his efforts on doing the work of the people of the 41st district of California. We are confident that Congressman Lewis has honorably served his constituents and that he will be fully exonerated once this investigation is completed,” said Barbara Comstock of the firm Blank Rome.
In the division of legal labor for Lewis, Comstock — whose firm has received nearly $20,000 for her work — serves as the spokeswoman for questions related to the probe. The lead attorney from Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher is Robert Bonner, a former U.S. attorney from Los Angeles, the office leading the Lewis investigation.
But in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, Joseph Warin is leading another team of lawyers who are helping with the probe. The first payments to the firm went out from Lewis’ campaign committee on June 7, for $250,000.
In addition to Bonner, who served as the first commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection after the reorganization of domestic security agencies in late 2002, former Solicitor General Ted Olson is another high-priced, well-known attorney from the firm helping out with the Lewis probe.
Gibson Dunn also recently landed outgoing U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang, who has been overseeing the launch of the Lewis investigation from her Los Angeles office. By law, Yang is forbidden from working on the Lewis case and must completely wall herself off from any of the work that Bonner, Warin, Olson or other firm employees are doing on behalf of Lewis — even as she serves with Bonner and Olson in the firm’s crisis management practice.
To date, Lewis has not opened up a separate legal defense fund as other lawmakers have done. If he does open a defense fund, Lewis would be able to raise money in chunks of up to $5,000 per year from donors, and those donations would not count toward campaign contribution limits on donors.
In hiring Gibson Dunn, Lewis has taken a different route than some lawmakers caught up in corruption probes by assembling such high-powered lawyers from one massive firm. DeLay and Ney, for example, hired smaller firms and had usually just one lead attorney focusing intensely on the case, while also not hiring an additional legal PR adviser such as Comstock.
Ney spent almost $433,000 from his campaign committee on legal bills from the firm Vinson & Elkins for almost two years worth of legal work before he pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy of accepting gifts for official favors earlier this month.
In four months, Lewis has nearly doubled Ney’s legal tab, with more than $803,000 to Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher and the rest to Blank Rome.
In addition, the Lewis legal fees are only for his own defense and don’t include the fees that are being privately paid by Lowery and other firm partners, who have their own set of lawyers, with public relations specialist Patrick Dorton handling press duties. And Jeff Shockey, the former partner at Copeland Lowery who returned to Lewis’ side when he became full committee chairman in January 2005, is being represented by William Oldaker and William Farah from Oldaker, Biden and Belair, as well as ex-White House press aide Trent Duffy handling PR work.
