Follow The Money

By John Anderson

In the world of DeLay Inc., Ed Buckham was unique. For besides being chief of staff to the majority whip, he was also Tom DeLay’s personal minister. DeLay liked to tell visiting coreligionists that his day began with morning prayers—in company of the balding, bespectacled Tennessean Ed Buckham. A licensed nondenominational minister, Buckham was not only DeLay’s closest political confidant, but also, as it were, his private confessor.

As we have seen, others in the close-knit DeLay political family included wife Christine and fund-raiser daughter Dani, but also deputy chiefs of staff Tony Rudy and Susan Hirschmann.

Another key figure was Michael Scanlon, who joined the team as press secretary in 1997, when Rudy was promoted. Scanlon had worked on and off for Republican congressmen on Capitol Hill since the mid-1990s. His big break, though, came when he joined the office of the majority whip and teamed up with Tony Rudy.

Like Rudy, Scanlon was a competitive athlete, a runner who could do five miles in less than thirty minutes. Rudy and Scanlon had, however, more in common than just athleticism. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, “The two shared a pit-bull political style.” The problem, as his immediate boss, Communications Director John Feehery discovered, was that Mike Scanlon “was the spinner who was always spinning for himself.” That ­wasn’t the half of it though. Eventually, Feehery says, he came to regard Scanlon as “a first-class rogue and a master of deception.” Eventually Scanlon and Rudy would focus their pit-bull energies on unseating the president of the United States.

The convoluted tale leading up to the impeachment and trial of President William Jefferson Clinton has been told many times. Only the merest outline of the events will be sufficient for our needs.

Following the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster in January 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a prominent Republican trial lawyer, Robert B. Fiske, as “special counsel” to investigate his death as well as the Clintons’ Arkansas financial dealings, known to the public as Whitewater.

But when Congress abolished the office of special counsel in passing the Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act of 1994, a three-judge special panel led by conservative D.C. court of appeals judge David B. Sentelle—a protégé of right-wing Republican North Carolina senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth—removed the nonpartisan Fiske and replaced him with the zealous former federal judge and Bush I solicitor general Kenneth Starr.

President Clinton soon compounded his problems, first by famously saying, in a January 1998 press conference, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” then by making misleading statements under oath to Starr’s team of prosecutors.

By late 1998, with Tom DeLay driving his party onward, House Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, voted 228—206 to impeach Clinton on grounds of perjury and 221—212 to impeach him on grounds of obstruction of justice.* Rudy and Scanlon would, in particular, prove a formidable team during the impeachment.

As Communications Director John Feehery later observed, “Bill Clinton was impeached for three reasons: DeLay, Rudy, and Scanlon.” While the rest of the Republican House leadership—Speaker Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey, and Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde—quickly went soft on the idea of impeachment, Whip DeLay not only held out for the plan, but pushed aggressively forward with it.

The two DeLay operatives, Feehery recalls, were, meanwhile, “everywhere, doing the briefing books, leaking to reporters, doing the legal research, and whipping the members.” There was nothing they ­wouldn’t stop at either. According to Feehery, Rudy and Scanlon even went so far as “to spread rumors that there was evidence that Clinton had raped a woman.”

By the fall of 1998, Feehery was an unhappy camper, thanks largely to DeLay’s unrequited bloodlust for William Jefferson Clinton. “My stomach ­wasn’t in this effort,” Feehery says today, speaking of the impeachment.†

Rudy and Scanlon obviously felt otherwise. Writing in The Breach, his account of the impeachment and trial of President Clinton, Washington Post reporter Peter Baker quoted Rudy and Scanlon impatiently e-mailing one another while waiting to find out how Clinton had fared with Kenneth Starr and the grand jury. “The waiting,” Baker wrote, “was killing them.”

“Still no word?” asked Rudy.

“He’s going to admit it,” Scanlon replied. “The big q is on what level—I still say we need to attack!”

Rudy wrote back, “We need to force dems to distance themselves from theliar [sic]. He looked into [A]merica’s eyes and lied.”

For his part, Mike Scanlon knew an American hero when he saw one, and he saw one in Tony Rudy—and another in himself: “God bless you Tony Rudy—Are we the only ones with political instincts—This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS—Not only do you kick him—you kick him until he passes out—then beat him over the head with a baseball bat—then roll him up in an old rug—and throw him off a cliff into the pound [sic] surf below!!!!!”

Tom DeLay and his henchmen had plotted their impeachment strategy from the second-floor master suite of a Capitol Hill town house located a mere three blocks from DeLay’s congressional office. Members of DeLay Inc. had a name for it: the Safe House. The house, which DeLay made the scene of his fund-raising pitches, was owned by the USFN. Other rooms in the house were occupied by ARMPAC and, beginning in late 1998, Buckham’s new lobby shop, the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG).

Having helped shepherd the impeachment of Bill Clinton through the House of Representatives in 1998, Buckham resigned from DeLay’s staff. It was time to cash in.

Time to cash in, yes; but not time to leave the fold. A former aide explained, “If an individual called DeLay’s appointment secretary saying they wanted to talk to DeLay about overregulation, the appointment secretary would say go speak to Buckham.” Whatever his title, Ed Buckham, it was clear to just about everyone, was still DeLay’s chief political adviser.

House majority leader Dick Armey was no fan of his fellow Texan Tom DeLay, but he had a well-earned reputation as an observer of the Washington scene. When a reporter from the New York Times asked Armey what he made of Ed Buckham’s entrance into the world of Washington lobbying, the former majority leader, as usual, was not at a loss for words.

Tom DeLay, Armey said, had sent his man Buckham downtown “to set up shop and start a branch office on K Street. The whole idea was ‘What’s in it for us?’ That’s what I thought at the time, and I’ve seen nothing in the way ­they’ve conducted themselves since then to dissuade me from that point of view.”

A senior policy adviser—read lobbyist—at Washington’s DLA Piper law firm, Armey “invoked Charles Dickens, likening Mr. DeLay to Fagin and Mr. Buckham to the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist.”

Excerpt from: Follow The Money by John Anderson (Scribner, September 2007). Chapter 3, The Fabulous Rise of Casino Jack and DeLay Inc. pages 39-43. Copyright © 2007 by John Anderson