Depositions Hid Biting Testimony

WASHINGTON — Here are some highlights from the campaign fund-raising hearings that you definitely missed: One witness cried. Another cracked a sexual joke. A third pulled out an apple during his testimony and started chomping.

You may have yawned through the congressional investigations of financial shenanigans during the 1996 presidential campaign--Senate hearings that droned on for 32 days and sporadic House hearings that promise to continue well into 1998. But as monotonous as such hearings can be, strange--and even amusing--things happen when the doors close.

Depositions, those lengthy Q & A sessions used to extract information from witnesses in private before the TV lights go on, can be surprisingly colorful.

Lawyers for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee have spent thousands of hours conducting more than 250 depositions. Transcripts of the sessions--confidential until lawmakers leak or formally release them--provide unvarnished glimpses of Washington’s obscure aides and prominent power brokers in action.

Here’s a peek inside the deposition room.

Harold M. Ickes, former deputy White House chief of staff, endured three separate Senate depositions, during which his trademark feistiness burst forth.

Asked to summarize his background, Ickes grumbled: “I was born, I grew up, went to school.”

At another point, he appeared to be ignoring chief Senate counsel Michael Madigan, who was asking about questionable contributions to President Clinton’s legal defense fund. “Do you want to take a break?” Madigan asked. “No, no, no,” Ickes responded. “I was just getting an apple to chew on. Go ahead. Where are we?”

With a roomful of loose-lipped lawyers, every word uttered in a deposition could very well appear on the next day’s front pages.

For example, former Clinton advisor Dick Morris revealed the number of the president’s private fax machine, stipulating it not be publicized.

But the number--along with Morris’ car phone number--was inadvertently posted on the House committee’s Internet site (www.house.gov/reform). Both numbers were quickly deleted after an inquiry from a reporter, but White House spokesman Mike McCurry was not amused.

“It’s kind of a lousy thing to do, but it’s not atypical of the ham-handed way the committee does business,” McCurry told Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper. “Given their track record, they probably didn’t do it on purpose. They probably did it because they can’t shoot straight.”

McCurry said the White House would change the fax number. A week after the mix-up, however, a fax sent by the Los Angeles Times asking Clinton what he thought of the snafu appeared to go right through. He did not respond.

Morris made light of his trysts with a high-priced prostitute at the Jefferson Hotel--behavior that forced him to resign as a Clinton-Gore campaign consultant. Asked at the deposition whether he had ever spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, the White House’s home away from home for big donors, Morris said no. “I was having problems enough in my nights at the Jefferson,” he quipped.

David Wang, a San Gabriel Valley used-car salesman, was advised of this before his Oct. 6 deposition. But Wang, who had made improper donations to the Democrats, had something most witnesses don’t--immunity from prosecution.

So Wang revealed details of some of his other questionable activities--fully protected from any legal consequences. Wang explained how he helped a Taiwan-based businessman, Daniel Wu, in a scheme to mislead the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Internal Revenue Service.

An angry Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) wrote Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, asking her to begin a Justice Department review of Wu and two California companies with which he is linked.

The benefit of depositions is that lawyers get to ask their questions and witnesses get to answer them without every misstep witnessed by the world.

Margaret Williams, former chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was completely composed when she testified before the House last month. But the grilling she received by Senate lawyers in May left her in tears.

She told investigators she would deny the crying if they ever made an issue of it. There were no cameras around to capture the tears, but the denial itself was transcribed, word for word, along with everything else she said.