Down & Dirty (84 page)

Yes, she is exceptional: the first African-American to be named to the bench in the sixth circuit on any level and the only
black female circuit court judge. But so what? And for that matter, how can anyone think that her social conscience means
that she’ll just hand the election over to Gore regardless of the law? Or that her failure to get kicked up to the district
court of appeals will foment such resentment against anyone named Bush that she won’t be able to preside? Most of the DCA
judges have tried two, three, four times before they finally got promoted.

But if the media gives the Bush strategy a free ride, it doesn’t always ignore Clark. Radio host Lowell Ponte calls Clark
Gore’s “Great Black Hope,” “an arrogant African-American Democrat judge in Florida [who] may decide whether to throw out thousands
of ballots cast mostly by whites, thereby tilting the statewide outcome and keeping her political party in the White House.”
Ponte blasts her for “lack of judicial ethics by refusing to step aside in a case where she appears to have ideological as
well as selfish and personal [motives].”

At the same time, Clark is also aware that some African-Americans who don’t perceive the system as being fair are looking
to her courtroom as a place where at least this case might get a fair hearing. Jesse Jackson himself sat to watch a pre-trial
hearing, though Clark didn’t pay him much attention. Still, it is not inconsiderable pressure.

“This could be a real sticky one,” Lewis, her colleague down the hall, says to himself, looking at some of the filings. “You
clearly can’t condone this kind of stuff,” he thinks. “Clearly, you got stuff here that looks like at least they did something
they weren’t supposed to do. Yet you’ve clearly got people who voted, and nobody says that the people who voted weren’t voters
or that they did anything wrong.”

He gets his chance to explore the same issues on Friday, December 1, when the saga of Martin County comes to his courtroom.

In 1925, when Floridians just north of Palm Beach sought to have their area officially incorporated as a county, they had
a clever idea: they proposed that the new county be named after the governor at the time, John Martin. The residents of Martin
County have a long history of playing the angles with the folks in charge.

Democratic electrician Ron Taylor had been outraged to hear that Martin County supervisor of elections Peggy Robbins let the
treasurer of the Martin County Republican Party, Tom Hauck, remove several hundred Republican absentee-ballot applications
from her office, do whatever the
hell Hauck wanted to do to them, and then bring them back. Hauck had also been permitted by Robbins to camp in the elections
office to fix any incomplete or mistaken applications. All in all, Robbins’s cooperation with the GOP brought 673 Republican
votes back into the world. To Taylor, Robbins made even Seminole elections supervisor Sandra Goard look good.

A full 9,773 absentee ballots were cast in the county, and Bush received 6,294 of them to Gore’s 3,479. Taylor wants all 9,773
ballots tossed, which would result in a net gain of 2,815 votes for Gore, and the presidency of the United States.

It’s decided that Lewis and Clark will stagger their trials so that lawyers like Richard can run from courtroom to courtroom
on Wednesday, December 6.

When Daryl Bristow was taken off the Sauls case and put on Seminole, General Baker didn’t sugarcoat it.

“Daryl,” Baker said, “I’ve got something I’m asking you to do where you’ve got no upside.” He told him about the case. “We
oughta win,” Baker said, “but if we lose, it’s premier. And we gotta have someone with white hair to take the heat. Depositions
start in Orlando tomorrow.”

To Bristow, that seems like a year ago, though not even two weeks have passed. By now he’s met with the Seminole County canvassing
board’s attorney, Terry Young, and with both the elections supervisor, Sandra Goard, and Michael Leach, the Republican operative
who had camped out in her office for those fifteen days. Almost immediately Bristow realizes that he doesn’t want either one
of them up on the stand. Goard is scared stiff; also, clearly, she played a little fast and loose with the law, and she showed
her GOP hand a bit. Leach is a nice young man, Bristow thinks, but it would be easy for the Democrats to paint him as a partisan
thug. Bristow decides that if he can, he’d rather enter an agreement with Democratic attorney Gerald Richman stipulating as
to the facts, rather than parading Goard and Leach before the country. To his astonishment, Richman—who wants things to proceed
as quickly as possible so as to meet the December 12 deadline—goes along with it.

Richman agrees because he’s so convinced that the facts in the case are so indicative of a clear, egregious, corrupt abuse
of power by Sandy Goard that he doesn’t even feel the need to cross-examine her or Leach in court. Perhaps he’s not seeing
things clearly; he’s juiced up on eleven-year-old resentments. And he’s been itching to put it to the Bushies from Minute
One. The day after the election, Richman had been working with Berger’s firm on filing a butterfly ballot suit. Richman was
personally fired up about
it all—he himself says that he almost voted for Buchanan because of that damn butterfly ballot. He hates Bush. And he thinks
the Republicans play dirty. Correction: he
knows
the Republicans play dirty—firsthand.

When the late great Rep. Claude Pepper died in May 1989 at the age of eighty-eight, Richman ran against then–state senator
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for his seat in an ugly, ugly race that political mudslinger Lee Atwater helped run out of the Bush White
House.

After Atwater said that electing a Cuban-American to the seat was his top priority, Richman replied, “This isn’t an Anglo
seat. It isn’t a Jewish seat. It isn’t a Cuban-American seat. It’s an American seat. It belongs to all the people.”

Atwater and Ros-Lehtinen took the second-to-last sentence in that graph—“This is an American seat”—and ran with it, making
it seem as though Richman had been insinuating that Cuban-Americans aren’t Americans. “Tell Mr. Richman that we too are Americans,”
read one RosLehtinen brochure.

The day of the election, Radio Mambi and another Spanish-language station equated a vote for Richman with one for Fidel Castro.
Richman lost with 47 percent of the vote. Ros-Lehtinen became the first Cuban-American elected to Congress.

Since that race, Richman had been convinced that there wasn’t anything Republicans wouldn’t do to win. So he was only too
happy to collect butterfly ballot affidavits on behalf of the Gore campaign. And when he received a phone call from Gore lawyer
Joe Sandler on November 20—saying that “we have a major Democratic Party contributor who needs a good lawyer, we can’t get
involved in it but your name has been suggested”—Richman was only too happy to help.

The next morning he flew to Sanford, Florida, to meet with Harry Jacobs and a bunch of lawyers drafted by Jack Corrigan and
other Gorebies trying to help Jacobs’s cause, even though Gore himself continues to have nothing to do with his lawsuit and
knows nothing of his underlings’ actions.

Richman thinks Goard and Leach violated the law, of course. But there is never any question about the fact that he and Jacobs
are motivated primarily by a desire to disqualify Bush votes so Gore will win the presidency.

The Gorebies are gun-shy, wimpy, Richman thinks, while the Bushies are hungrier, more willing to do anything they can to win.
The Gore team’s worried about the inconsistency of trying to get votes counted here, and votes
dis
counted there. They’d been burned on the overseas military absentee ballots and don’t want to get directly involved with Seminole.

Richman and Jacobs didn’t think that way; they didn’t care. Like good Seminole warriors, they recognize that this is a guerilla
war. And they want to win.

On Saturday, December 2, Young deposes Jacobs. He establishes a few interesting facts: Jacobs had given $50,000 to the DNC,
had financed a TV ad against Cheney’s professed ignorance of, and seeming indifference to, human rights abuses in Myanmar,
with whom his oil-related business, Halliburton, knowingly got into bed. He also admits having spoken with both Berger and
Sandler. The Bushies immediately leak this information to the media, so as to prove collusion with Gore.

They should be so lucky, Richman and Jacobs probably think. They’re actually pissed off that the Gorebies aren’t helping their
cause
enough.
Berger wants to help them, of course, but he’s rebuffed at every turn. In fact, Richman’s being helped by the Gorebies, though
surreptitiously, with various Gorebies drumming up attorneys to volunteer to fly down to Florida to help out. Labor lawyers
like Jack Dempsey, general counsel of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and New York attorneys
Eric Seiler, Katherine Pringle, Jonathan Abady, and John Cuti soon arrive in Tallahassee and help Richman any way they can.
Paralegals provided by AFSCME root through absentee-ballot requests. But overall, the Gore team isn’t helping much at all.

In fact, Richman might have had to pack it in already if not for a surprise sugar daddy. Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch had
called him one Sunday, after being stranded when his US Air flight had been cancelled. “I want to help you,” Kirsch said.
He’d sold Infoseek to Disney for $2.5 billion in stock options. So when he said, “What do you need?” he meant it. Richman
soon had a chartered plane to Tallahassee; $150,000 in legal costs came soon after.

Still, Richman is mad. They have no direct support from Gore financially, and Lieberman himself has even publicly distanced
himself from the case. What if Judge Clark were to hear that even Gore didn’t support their actions?

But Kirsch’s involvement does not end here. He hires a PR agent to the tune of $50,000 to pitch the Seminole and Martin stories
to the media—many of whom seem to utilize the same tiresome clichés: “Gore’s ‘Hail Mary’ pass,” for instance. On Sunday, November
26, Kirsch also phones up and retains an attorney, William H. Davis of the Tallahassee law firm Wadsworth & Davis, whom he
regales with theories of statistical extrapolation and proportional allotment of Palm Beach County overvotes. At first,
the programmer’s riffs on votes as data and such strike Davis as a tad eccentric. But soon Kirsch’s theories seem quite brilliant—if
something of a legal stretch.