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The Liberal on Karl Rove's Case
Robert Luskin, left, with his high-profile client: "Karl didn't do anything wrong."
(By Ron Edmonds -- Associated Press)
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Another part of Luskin lore is a historic fashion breakthrough that occurred in 1995, when he evidently became the first man to wear an earring while arguing before the Supreme Court. The Post at the time described it as a "tasteful silver stud in his left ear" and recounted the hubbub that ensued.
These days Luskin sports a barely noticeable gold hoop. "It takes next to nothing at all to vault you outside the mainstream," he says with some amusement. "It is a very strange profession, indeed."
Divorced seven years ago after a 20-year marriage, Luskin has two sons in college, a townhouse in Georgetown and a home on Martha's Vineyard. He describes himself simply as a bachelor. He's a licensed glider pilot, weightlifter and runner, and plays baseball in an over-30 league.
Predicting Rove's exoneration, he goes with a Fitzgeraldian baseball metaphor: "If Fitzgerald does what he ought to do, and what I think he will do here, it won't be because I threw him a two-strike fastball on the outside corner; it will be because it will be the right outcome on the merits. . . . It isn't the product of my particular skill or cleverness."
Washington is full of capable and loyal Republican white-shoe attorneys whom Rove could have picked. Why Luskin? Rove declined to comment, but he came to Luskin via a referral from Patton Boggs partner Ben Ginsberg, who works on the same floor as Luskin and considers him "wonderfully capable." (Ginsberg was chief outside counsel to President Bush's reelection campaign.)
Rove, according to Luskin, "made it clear that as far as he was concerned, the relevant issue for him was whether or not I had the appropriate experience and not what my politics were."
Some who know Luskin brush off any deeper meaning in Rove's counterintuitive choice. "The important part is the IQ around 200 -- that might be an exaggeration, but it wouldn't shock me if Bob were in Mensa," says W. Kenneth O'Donnell, a Providence attorney who has worked with Luskin. "The guy is brilliant. I can certainly understand why [Rove] would want him to represent him."
Because, sometimes, even Bush's Brain needs a brain.
