White House FBI Files Controversy - Judicial Watch Lawsuit

Judicial Watch Lawsuit

Separately from the Independent Counsel investigation, Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, engaged in long-running litigation over the White House personnel file controversy. Judicial Watch's Cara Leslie Alexander et al. vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of several members of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations, alleged that Livingstone, along with Anthony Marceca and William Kennedy, obtained the files and then rifled through them. Judicial Watch founder and Clintons antagonist suprême Larry Klayman attracted enough attention with the case to have the recurring Larry Claypool character modeled after him on the television series The West Wing. As late as January 2000, Judicial Watch was filing affidavits in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia under Judge Royce C. Lamberth related to the case. In their $90 million lawsuit, they claimed that the First Lady did, despite her denials, know Livingstone – indeed, that Livingstone had bragged to associates he was very close to both the president and his wife – and that Clinton had personally hired him for the security job. (White House defenders pointed out that Livingstone had a long history of exaggerating his importance and connections.) Judicial Watch also said they had five sources who claimed Livingstone had been hired by and worked under the First Lady, and also discovered some photographs of Livingstone in the vicinity of the First Lady (but not talking with him). In December 2002 Judicial Watch obtained a ruling from Judge Lamberth that recently uncovered White House e-mails be searched for possible evidence in the lawsuit. Klayman said, "Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of Filegate. She will not escape justice." Klayman and Judicial Watch had a severe falling out in 2003, however, and several years went by with little or nothing happening in the lawsuit.

On March 9, 2010, Judge Lamberth dismissed the case. The judge asserted that the plaintiffs, despite years of opportunity, had failed to provide any evidence that the affair was a grand conspiracy rather than a bureaucratic mistake, and said that "this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" Nussbaum, one of the defendants, derisively said "No kidding" when informed of the dismissal. Media reports concluded that, fourteen years after the initial events were set in motion, Filegate was finally over. However, in May 2010, Judicial Watch filed an appeal of the dismissal with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and the case appears to still be active.