June 19, 2000
Vol 5, Number 38
Absolutely Fabiani
The Gore campaign hires the Democratic Master of Disaster, Mark Fabiani.
By Matthew Rees
Al Gore and the reporters who tail him have a strained
relationship. He feels the coverage of his campaign has been
excessively negative; they resent his seldom making himself
available for their questions. The solution may be Gore's new
deputy campaign manager for communications, Mark Fabiani, who is
unique in the fraternity of political flacks: He's liked and
respected by the people he works for—and by the reporters he
spins.
Fabiani's reputation stems primarily from his work in 1995-96 as
the White House's spokesman on ethics. Spending the vast majority
of his time on Whitewater and Vince Foster, he quickly
established himself as honest, cooperative, and forthright in
responding to reporters' questions (a striking contrast with his
predecessor, John Podesta, and his successor, Lanny Davis). From
his first day on the job, he called for a break with the White
House's practice of withholding documents from Congress and the
public, pushing instead for full disclosure.
At the time, his strategy was counterintuitive. Why, wondered
many White House officials—including Hillary Clinton—would we
voluntarily air our dirty linen? Because, reasoned Fabiani, the
appearance of a coverup was more damaging than the facts of each
individual case.
But there was more to Fabiani's disclosure strategy than just
dumping thousands of pages of documents on reporters' desks.
Having handled the press for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, he
knew a few tricks of the trade. One is to release embarrassing
documents on Friday evenings going into holiday weekends so the
material gets out when fewer people are attending to the news.
Another is to selectively provide reporters with information
unflattering to the White House. Since congressional Republicans
would eventually publicize such information anyway, why not put
it out on the White House's terms, then downplay it as old news
when the GOP got it?
Thus, it was Fabiani, according to the Los Angeles Times, who
first gave the Associated Press a memo written by a onetime White
House aide, David Watkins, that claimed Hillary Clinton had been
deeply involved in the sacking of White House travel office
employees. And it was Fabiani who first shared with reporters
Mrs. Clinton's long-sought billing records from the Rose Law
Firm.
For disclosures like these, and for his candor generally, Fabiani
is still winning plaudits from the press. "He would answer my
questions without misleading me, make documents available, and
didn't seem to hold my newspaper against me," says Jerry Seper, a
reporter with the conservative Washington Times.
Another Whitewater reporter, not known for being a Clinton shill,
recalls Fabiani as a "straight shooter" who was "willing to
concede the obvious" and wouldn't give "robotic answers straight
from the talking points." Chris Vlasto, an investigative producer
with ABC News who is loathed by Clintonites, pays Fabiani this
compliment: "He is one of the only White House officials I'd like
to go out and have a drink with."
Those who know Fabiani are not surprised by his success. The son
of a policeman, he grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania—Joe
Namath's hometown—then moved to Ontario, California, as a
teenager. In high school, he was a champion debater and twice
came to Georgetown for debate camps. He had the good sense to
befriend a guest lecturer at these camps, a rising star in
Democratic politics named Robert Shrum. He and Shrum have
remained close, and today Shrum, Gore's chief media strategist,
is Fabiani's invaluable ally in the campaign's inner circle.
After college at the University of Redlands, Fabiani went to
Harvard Law School, where he made law review and won the good
opinion of professor Alan Dershowitz, who places him "among the
handful of smartest students [he's] ever had." When Dershowitz
was retained to assist in the defense of Claus von Bülow, a
Danish socialite accused of attempted murder, Fabiani (then on
leave from a clerkship with judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) was the first person he asked to
join him.
Fabiani's eight-year stint with Tom Bradley came next; in 1989,
at the age of 32, he was promoted to chief of staff and became
one of two deputy mayors. During his tenure, he tackled
everything from the Los Angeles riots to the move of the Los
Angeles Raiders, and skillfully navigated the city's political
minefields. (The Los Angeles Times once wrote that he was "widely
regarded as a brash, sharp-witted ‘boy wonder.'") As Bradley was
the subject of numerous ethics investigations, the work was
invaluable training for his White House post.
When Bradley left office in mid-1993, choosing not to run for
reelection, Fabiani could have cashed in by staying in Los
Angeles. Instead, he moved to Washington to take an anonymous
position in the Justice Department, handling speechwriting and
policy development for Janet Reno (Ricki Seidman, a Democratic
operative whom he'd met on the Dukakis campaign, recruited him
for the position). Nine months later, he moved to the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, where he worked with Andrew
Cuomo on enterprise zones.
Perfectly content at HUD, Fabiani received a call from Harold
Ickes, the White House deputy chief of staff, in the spring of
1995. Ickes was looking for ideas on how best to handle
Whitewater, and Fabiani told him full disclosure of documents
would work best.
At their second meeting, according to Bob Woodward's book Shadow,
Ickes didn't mince words: "I've told the president and the first
lady you're going to take this job" as spokesman on Whitewater
and related issues. Fabiani, who'd recently gotten married, said
he didn't want such an all-consuming position, prompting Ickes to
fly into a rage: "You're part of a team in this administration,
and if we need you to move from one position to another, you
ought to do it."
Fabiani relented, and with Al D'Amato's Whitewater hearings set
to begin, he quickly tried to shift the White House from defense
to offense. He gave an exclusive briefing to Newsweek's Michael
Isikoff on the Vince Foster suicide, providing him with reams of
documents. The article that ensued, while not entirely
flattering, did undermine many Republican claims about a White
House coverup. Fabiani also began deriding the hearings as a
partisan charade—D'Amato was an active supporter of Bob Dole's
presidential bid—further compromised by D'Amato's own ethical
transgressions. Before long, he also turned his guns on Ken
Starr, yielding the first set of stories on the independent
counsel's supposed conflicts of interest. For all his pit-bull
instincts, though, Fabiani resisted the efforts of Hillary
Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal to mount a campaign against
reporter Susan Schmidt, who was covering the Clinton scandals for
the Washington Post.
Fabiani's partner at the White House was Chris Lehane, a scrappy
twentysomething just out of Harvard Law. These self-proclaimed
"Masters of Disaster" quickly distinguished themselves with their
command of Whitewater's mind-bending arcana, their success in
turning press coverage from hostile to neutral (or non-existent),
and their flashy clothes (Fabiani is given to four-button suits;
Lehane likes Armani). They were also responsible for cobbling
together a report suggesting how baseless rumors entered the
political debate. This provoked a storm of controversy with the
insinuation of a vast right-wing conspiracy (a collection of New
York City conservatives soon christened themselves "the Fabiani
Society"). In the end, though, the duo proved so effective that
Gore hired not only Fabiani to field press inquiries and bring
more discipline to Gore's schedule and message, but also Lehane,
who is now the campaign's chief spokesman.
Fabiani will, inevitably, be responding to scandal questions.
Gore's fund-raising at the White House and the Buddhist temple
hasn't been entirely laid to rest, nor have campaign chairman
Tony Coelho's unsavory activities. It wasn't a good omen that
Fabiani spent his first day on the job in Nashville, June 1,
responding to charges that Gore, who rents out a house on his
property in Carthage, Tennessee, is a slumlord.
That said, there's a wide consensus, in media and political
circles, that Gore is lucky to have Fabiani on his side. Few
people, however, know of Fabiani's most impressive achievement of
all.
On January 26, 1996—the day of Hillary Clinton's grand-jury
testimony—two men kidnapped him at gunpoint while he was walking
from the subway to his home in Alexandria, Virginia. For three
hours, they drove him from one ATM to another, forcing him to
withdraw a total of $1,600 (they knew nothing of his White House
employment). But Fabiani, a first-rate schmoozer, established
such rapport with his abductors that they chose not to keep him
overnight (he scotched their plan to have him cash a big check
the next morning by telling them most banks are closed on
Saturdays).
He even persuaded them to return the Rolex watch his late uncle
had given him, as well as his cell phone and briefcase—and he got
them to give him $10 for a taxi home. Had he been with them an
hour longer, no doubt they would have returned all his money. ®
by Matthew Rees
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
=================================================================
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
<A HREF="http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
