Free A Vast Conspiracy by Jeffrey Toobin Page B

the start that he was in over his head, but he didn’t even have the resources to know where to look for legal help. Jackson, on the other hand, did. Though he never spoke to Pat Mahoney, they independently came to the same conclusion about what kind of lawyer Jones would need. Jackson called it the “go-left” strategy, and he suggested that Traylor get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Anita Hill, and Gerry Spence. Jackson even sought out a leftist lawyer he knew in Los Angeles. But these approaches came to nothing, and Jackson saw that the May deadline for the three-year statute of limitations was fast approaching. Go-left became go-right. So Jackson went back to Peter Smith, the Chicago financier who had underwritten Brock’s article and then supported the troopers themselves.
    Smith immediately went to work trying to find someone to represent Jones. He called a young lawyer in Chicago named Richard Porter, who had recently joined the firm of Kirkland & Ellis after serving on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle. Porter did mostly corporate work, but he wanted to be helpful, so he called a lawyer in Philadelphia named Jerome Marcus. They had been classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, and they were politically in synch. Marcus was interested, so he and Porter arranged to have a conference call with Jackson to discuss the case. They liked what they heard, and so the two lawyers began speaking regularly with Traylor, offering to pitch in with some of the work that needed to be done if a lawsuit was going to be filed. As a litigator, Marcus had more to offer Traylor, and he even took a stab at a first draft of a sexual harassment complaint against the president. For Traylor, though, their help came with strings attached. The most important condition was absolute secrecy. Porter worked with a large corporate firm, and Marcus’s firm, while smaller, had strong Democratic ties in Pennsylvania.
    The involvement of Porter and Marcus marked the unofficial beginning of what became known much later, in Hillary Clinton’s words, as the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” This phrase lent their activities a more sinistercast than they deserved. There is nothing illegal or improper in one lawyer’s assisting another in the way that Porter and Marcus (and later others) helped Traylor. The issue was not what they did but why they did it. In other words, what separated the actions of these lawyers from, say, those of the private attorneys who assisted Thurgood Marshall in his civil rights battles was the question of motive. Most public interest lawyers volunteer for a case because they believe in a cause—an area of law they want to change. Here, in contrast, Porter, Marcus, and their later recruits had no interest or expertise in sexual harassment law. To the extent they cared at all about the state of the law in this area, they were more sympathetic to defendants than plaintiffs. They joined the cause of this sexual harassment plaintiff because their agenda was to try—in secret—to damage Bill Clinton’s presidency. Their involvement was a classic demonstration of the legal system’s takeover of the political system. Indeed, Porter, Marcus, and their colleagues used this lawsuit like a kind of after-the-fact election, to use briefs, subpoenas, and interrogations to undo in secret what the voters had done in the most public of American proceedings. In time, this secret group of lawyers would call themselves, half-jokingly, “the elves.”
    As Danny Traylor saw it, though, the problem was that Porter and Marcus weren’t doing enough. He valued their private assistance, but he needed a lawyer to stand up and take over the case for him. “When are you gonna stop chicken-shittin’ around and get me a lawyer?” Traylor would ask the pair during their frequent phone calls in the spring of 1994.
    Finally, though, Traylor did get a call from someone who