In 1996, George Stephanopoulos, then a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, embroiled at the time in a metastasizing White House scandal, offered some now-prescient words of wisdom to future White House staffers. “I would advise anyone who comes into my job,” he told Vanity Fair’s Judy Bachrach, “to make sure you have a lawyer on retainer from the day you walk in.”
That’s the new reality of the Trump West Wing, with multiple congressional committees issuing subpoenas and a special counsel focusing in. One leading white-collar D.C. lawyer compared special investigations to the Bermuda Triangle, “where you have the media and the press, and you have Congress, when you have criminal investigations—all these crosswinds and cross currents have to be dealt with and what makes sense for one of the legs might not make sense for another,” he explained. “You need someone with a lot of experience to navigate through all this.”
Operating in a White House under investigation is fraught with peril. A counterintelligence probe itself, which is what the Russia investigation began as, will rarely result in criminal charges. But, like Whitewater, this scandal is already snowballing in complex ways. The greatest risk aides face is being accused of obstruction of justice or perjury. “That is the real danger for people,” said William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who represented I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity under George W. Bush. “You see it time and again in these political investigations, that they wind up, whatever happened wasn’t a crime. It may have been a political scandal—but it wasn’t a crime—but they charged somebody with perjury or obstruction. So that is the risk for everybody.” Libby, who was not charged with any crimes related to the leak of Plame’s identity but was prosecuted for perjury and obstruction, is a prime example of this danger.
Jeffress emphasized that a crucial job of an attorney in this phase is to collect information. “Aside from advising his client on their rights and course of action with respect to an investigation, it’s just vital for everybody to have a person that can gather facts for them. I mean, for example, it would be extremely unwise for Jared Kushner and anybody else—[Mike] Flynn or whoever else—to sit down and talk to each other . . . [Any] one of them could be compelled to testify about that conversation and any admissions made by that person in that conversation,” Jeffress explained, adding that the various lawyers should talk with each other to “put together the facts. They will know what the evidence is going to show and they will be able to advise their client.”
Another top D.C. defense lawyer agrees. “Prosecutors are omniscient, they have access to all of the information, but the witness only knows what he knows and that is how you get trapped . . . That applies to anybody who gets subpoenaed, even people who are secretaries or aides or Secret Service detail—anybody.”
A massive amount of wealth is about to be transferred to a certain quadrant of the D.C. bar. According to Jeffress, the most experienced and in-demand white-collar lawyers in Washington typically charge corporate clients and people indemnified by corporations over $1,000 per hour—though it’s not uncommon for them to cut their rates to somewhere between $750 and $900 per hour for clients who are paying for their representation out of their own pockets—which is even true for non-public officials. But Jeffress noted that even if an individual faces only an interview by the F.B.I. and there aren’t gigabytes of information to review, a lawyer would still likely devote 40 to 60 hours on their case. Which at the low end would cost a White House staffer $30,000 and at the high end, $54,000. And if there is a grand jury subpoena, or if the person faces possible criminal exposure, he said the total cost of their legal fees could easily be five times that much.
The blow to many White House staffers’ savings will also be amplified by the number of concurrent investigations the Trump administration is embroiled in, which will likely require witnesses to provide numerous testimonies. “Multiple appearances are a prescription for difficulty because every time you are asked to tell the same story, the risk is that you will tell it differently . . . and that’s a trap for perjury and false statements,” the second D.C. defense lawyer explained. “You have to have somebody prepare you, you have to have somebody monitor to make sure that you are testifying truthfully each time you are asked . . . you have to be ready to make sure that you are being consistent.”
For a president, the sticker price for dealing with an independent counsel runs into the eight figures. Between the various scandals that plagued his presidency, Clinton worked with at least half a dozen high-powered lawyers, including Robert Bennett, Mickey Kantor, Charles Ruff, Gregory Craig, Terry Lenzner, and David Kendall. One estimate had the Clintons spending, all told, $11.3 million. A rule of thumb is that legal fees have increased since then by a factor of two—Bennett, one of Clinton’s highest-priced attorneys, reportedly charged $475 an hour. David Kendall’s fee for representing Clinton was in the three to four hundred dollar-per-hour range, as opposed to current rates of $750 to $900—so Trump could easily spend over $20 million depending on how the investigation proceeds.
But as was the case with Whitewater, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Bush passport scandal, and the Valerie Plame investigation, the financial burden is likely to fall on White House staffers and Trump aides, many of whom are likely to incur legal fees that eclipse their meager government salaries and won’t have the opportunity to ink multimillion-dollar book deals like the Clintons. At the time of his interview with Bachrach in 1996, Stephanopoulos had racked up almost $70,000 in unpaid legal bills, more than half of his $125,000 White House salary. “Watch the parade into the grand jury: every time a White House aide walks into that room, a lawyer is wracking up fees,” the former senior adviser to Clinton said during a later interview with The New York Times in 1998. “A single trip to the grand jury can cost you $10,000.”
Stephanopoulos was far from alone in his financial misery after the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky probes. The financial casualties of the Whitewater and subsequent Lewinsky investigations were extensive, and made more painful because Bill said on numerous occasions that he would seek to help his staffers pay their legal bills, though he was later talked out of doing so by his lawyer. Margaret Williams, who was questioned about Vincent Foster’s death in the Whitewater probes, accumulated $350,000 in fees, almost three times her salary as Hillary’s chief of staff. Roger Altman, who was making $133,600 as deputy treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, faced at least $500,000 in legal fees throughout the proceedings. Lisa Caputo’s $75,000 press secretary salary was quickly eclipsed by legal bills of at least $100,000. Bruce Lindsey, a senior adviser to Clinton, faced between $250,000 and $500,000 in legal bills—a hefty sum when you are making $125,000.
The high cost of serving in a scandal-plagued White House was not unique to the Clinton administration, either. During the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan, Elliott Abrams faced $200,000 in legal fees on his $80,000 assistant secretary of state salary. Similarly, Janet Mullins and Margaret Tutwiler—who served as political director and the White House communications director under the elder Bush, respectively—were both saddled with bills greater than their annual compensation during the 1992 passport scandal. Mullins faced $400,000 in fees, while Tutwiler suffered $180,000 in legal costs. And Libby was reportedly buried in millions of dollars.
When it comes to paying these fees, presidents have resources that their staff members don’t. Much of the Clintons’ legal fees were paid by two separate legal defense funds. Between its launch in June 1994 and its dissolution in December 1997, Bill’s Presidential Legal Expense Trust reportedly accepted $1.3 million in donations, $766,134 of which was paid out to various law firms to cover the Clintons’ mounting legal fees. Then in February 1998, the Clintons started a new legal defense fund, which received $8.7 million in donations by March 2001. Of this sum, $7.4 million went toward paying off the former First Family’s outstanding legal bills—$3.9 million short of the total the couple had amassed.
Trump has more options than the Clintons did. He has claimed to be a multi-billionaire, to start with, although a famously penurious one. He could also set up a legal defense fund, for which he couldn’t solicit donations directly but would likely rake in millions from wealthy third-party donors. And while other politicians have come under fire by the Federal Election Commission for using campaign funds to pay off legal bills—former Idaho senator Larry Craig, who used campaign funds to pay for his legal defense stemming from his infamous 2007 arrest in a sex sting at the Minneapolis Airport, arguably the most notable and notorious among them—Trump will likely be able to use campaign funds to pay his legal bills due to the fact that the F.B.I. probe is focused on his presidential campaign’s Russian ties.
Trump and his staff won’t be able to get their legal fees reimbursed by the government, an option that previous administration staffers were able to exercise under a Nixon-era provision that expired in 1999. According to research compiled by Kathleen Clark, an ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, between 1984 and 1997 a total of $4 million in legal-fee reimbursements was awarded. A staggering $1.54 million stemmed from the Oliver North investigation into the Iran-Contra Affair alone, roughly $562,000 of which was awarded to President Reagan. Mullins and Tutwiler were similarly reimbursed for approximately $223,000 and $136,000, respectively, in the Bush passport scandal under the statute.
Kushner has already hired former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick to represent him, but given his wealth, her retainer won’t cut too deeply. Other Trump aides—who aren’t fortunate enough to be born into a billionaire real-estate family—could launch their own legal defense funds to soften the financial blow—a route Libby and multiple Clinton staffers, including Stephanopoulos, took. But lower-rung staffers are likely to face challenges in raising enough money through such funds, which are also subject to ethical guidelines. “I mean, who are you going to solicit?” the second white-collar lawyer posed. “You can’t solicit people who have an interest in front of the government or government contractors, there is a whole list of people who are sort of ineligible to contribute . . . for higher-ups they can do that, but they have to walk the line.”
Some staffers could also seek out discounted or pro-bono legal advice, but that path, too, is littered with potential ethical pitfalls and conflict-of-interest concerns. “Ethically, they really can’t accept pro-bono legal services because that is probably a gift under the current rules,” he said.
There is, of course, the possibility that the Trump administration could waive such ethical guidelines for its staffers, much like it did for its lobbying ban last week. “The Trump administration seems to impose restrictions with one hand and then remove those restrictions with another hand through exemptions or waivers as they call them,” Clark told me in an interview. “It’s possible that Trump would grant a waiver permitting the ‘donation’ of legal services from law firms that also lobby, which would otherwise be prohibited for his political appointees to accept.”
