New Yorker

July 17, 2001

EXPIRED TRUST PAYING CLINTON'S BILLS Issue of 2001-07-23 Posted 2001-07-16 Two weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, the offices of the Clinton Legal Expense Trust—the fund-raising juggernaut established to pay off the considerable legal bills of the former President and First Lady—quietly closed. Established in February, 1998, just after Hillary Clinton identified a "vast right-wing conspiracy," the trust was headquartered in a nondescript seventh-floor office on Vermont Avenue, in Washington, D.C., high above the display window of Al's Magic Shop, where rubber masks of George W. Bush have replaced the masks of Bill Clinton. The trust's passing went virtually unnoticed. No one from the neighboring offices—a Chinese acupuncturist on one side, a diabetic-supply firm on the other—dropped by to say farewell. It's unlikely that they even knew who worked there. The Clinton trust wasn't listed on the lobby registry, and the shingle outside the office remained blank for the whole of the trust's existence. The anonymity was intentional. "It's to ward off the right-wing loonies," Christopher Healy, the trust's sole employee, said the other day as he stepped over a workman named Smitty, who was disassembling Healy's prefabricated oak desk, a rental from a local office-furniture company. "When I registered our Web site, clintontrust.com, I used my real name and my personal E-mail account," Healy said. Within hours, the information appeared on the conservative Web forum FreeRepublic.com, and the Clinton-hating E-mail started pouring in. The anonymity also discouraged spontaneous visits from shady donors. "At the last trust," Healy said, referring to an earlier incarnation of the Clinton defense fund, "Charlie Trie showed up at the office with a bag of money and plopped it down on the desk." Despite its humble circumstances, the trust raised a great deal for the Clintons—$8,760,620.19, at last count. Even after expenses, that covered much of the eleven or twelve million dollars in legal fees that the Clintons have incurred so far. The trust received more than a hundred and sixteen thousand contrbutions, the bulk of them through direct-mail marketing. The average donation was just seventy-five dollars, and the maximum ten thousand dollars (contributed by Denise Rich and her daughter Daniella, among others). By the time of the Marc Rich pardon, the trust had stopped soliciting donations. At that point, many Clinton supporters may have been struggling to reconcile the Clintons' supposedly crushing legal debt with Hillary's eight-million-dollar book deal and the couple's new homes in Washington and Chappaqua. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in 1998, the trust was bringing in as much as two hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars a day; last month, a hundred dollars was considered a good haul. The trust, though still technically solvent, was no longer generating enough to justify the office's nine-hundred-dollar monthly rent. Now the office was practically empty. The day before, U.P.S. had carted away a hundred and sixty boxes of records bound for the Presidential library, in Arkansas. The phone rang, and Healy stooped to answer it—Smitty was carting away his desk. Smitty was thrilled to learn that the office he'd just cleared out had been used to raise money to pay the former President's legal bills, but it puzzled him that the Clintons were still four million dollars short. It seemed like a lot. Then Smitty looked down at the rental receipt he was holding. "Well, I'm not surprised," he said. "For what they paid to rent this stuff, they could have owned it four times over."

-- Anonymous, July 17, 2001