By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 4, 2006; D01
Washington whispers. Colleagues gossip. The scandal machine has affixed a bull's-eye on someone's back and the town is abuzz, voyeuristic, cruel.
Acquaintances step away, eyebrows raised behind ice clinking in glasses at cocktails once so cozy. Or they surround you, tongues clucking, heads shaking, offering their sympathy about the subpoenas, the raids, the leaks, the bad press.
Your reputation faces ruination. There may be jail time. But you've got to suck it up. Got to soldier on, move forward, like Franklin D. Raines.
Nearly two years ago, Raines's voice choked, his emotions rose, as he told a congressional hearing of his difficulty in explaining to his daughter why the newspapers were saying bad things about her daddy.
But even as the ousted Fannie Mae chief executive awaited the outcome of civil and criminal probes into alleged financial fraud at the mortgage funding agency, Raines moved on to other high-profile and potentially lucrative ventures. He partnered with Frederic Malek, Colin Powell and Vernon Jordan in a failed bid to win ownership of the Nationals baseball team. And he partnered with Steve Case, the founder of AOL who has started a new holding company, Revolution. Raines, an investor and board member of Revolution Health Group, is not a man slinking away in disgrace, at least not now.
Nor is Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio). He's out stumping in his district, keeping his reelection campaign stoked. Ney is among several targets being investigated in the scandals surrounding dirty lobbyist Jack Abramoff; a former Bush White House official, David Safavian, is on trial in that sprawling public corruption case. Just after Ney's former chief of staff, Neil Volz, pleaded guilty to conspiracy last month in the Abramoff-related probe, Ney stood before the House Republican Conference and addressed the situation head-on, saying, of course, he had done nothing wrong.
Says Ney spokesman Brian Walsh, "You can't ignore the elephant in the room." He's not talking about Republicans; he's talking about the stain of scandal.
"People in Washington talk. I mean, that's what we do for a living. . . . [Ney] unfailingly will bring it up. It's in the headlines. People are aware of it. People are talking about it. You can either pretend it's not there or you can acknowledge it and address it."
Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) spoke at the inauguration of Mayor Ray Nagin down in New Orleans just days after the feds raided Jefferson's Capitol Hill office as part of a bribery probe, following the public revelation of $90,000 found stuffed inside his freezer. Jay Leno may have dubbed that frozen cash a "bribe-sicle," but life goes on. Jefferson even attended an event with first lady Laura Bush on historic preservation in New Orleans.
Melanie Roussell, Jefferson's spokeswoman, says her congressman is just doing what he's supposed to do: be a lawmaker, represent his constituents.
"It's not a strategy," she said of Jefferson's very public and high-profile schedule.
But what he's doing does have a name.
"That would be what I call the 'head-held-high strategy,' " says Jane Sherburne, a veteran of the Clinton scandal wars as one of his White House lawyers.
"It's extremely hard, but it's got to be head-held-high. You can't go into hiding. You have to keep circulating, keep focused. . . . You're less effective if you're defensive or if you look like you're hiding. It's sort of a shoulder to the wind, that kind of notion where you are just trying to carry on with some dignity and let people know that you're perfectly capable of weathering the storm."
They are in limbo, those three -- Raines, Ney and Jefferson -- not charged, not (yet) defendants, innocent until proven guilty.
But the scandal machine -- that nexus of prosecutors and FBI agents and news stories and gossip -- renders these folks guilty, if only of being suspects.
Though we don't know for sure how this trio has reacted privately, we do know that some figures in similarly tough spots are known to kick and scream and cry and rant.
"Most of my experience has been with screamers," says Michele Roberts, a white-collar criminal defense attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. "That's better than people who cry. Screaming is good. There's a certain amount of frustration. . . . It's a very stressful situation when you have a federal prosecutor impaneling a grand jury to indict you. Sometimes it means getting drunk with them or yelling at them or shaking them."
But in public, politicians caught in scandal tend to stay on-message. It goes like this: I have done nothing wrong and will just go about my duties with the dignity and integrity that is my trademark. Or some such paradigm of innocence.
Lanny Davis, another Clinton-era lawyer, has written a book about facing scandal. Its title speaks volumes: "Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself."
He advises clients -- he does legal crisis management these days -- to do "a Geraldine Ferraro" by answering as many questions about the alleged scandal as they can safely answer without digging themselves into a deeper legal hole. That's what Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate, did in 1984 to try to put to rest questions about her husband's alleged financial impropriety.
The trouble with talking, though, is that it's hell for defense attorneys.
"It's criminal law 101 that you always advise the client to shut up," says Roberts. But politicians feel they have to talk publicly, have to explain their predicament, at least to their constituents.
As political scandals go, today's seem less seamy than those of yesteryear, such as the 1974 spectacle of Rep. Wilbur Mills's companion, a stripper, leaping into the Tidal Basin as police stopped their car, and the 1987 photos of Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate, caught in an extramarital liaison aboard a boat called Monkey Business. And who could forget the 1990 episode involving a crack-smoking Mayor Marion Barry (now a D.C. Council member), caught on videotape?
The famous Abscam scandal of the late 1970s and early 1980s was not as tawdry. It was all about money, not unlike some of the scandals of today.
White House scandals have unfolded around libidos run amok, like the Monica Lewinsky affair; or politics, as in Watergate; or geopolitics, such as Iran-contra; or a combination of politics and national security, such as the still-unfolding Plamegate scandal and related debates about the Iraq war.
It's a tough time, wearing that scandal bull's-eye. You become an embarrassment in the eyes of some. Caught in the scandal machine's cross hairs, some folks have resigned and walked away. Former House speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) and former representative Tony Coelho (D-Calif.) both resigned from the House in 1989 amid ethics scandals in which they had not even been indicted. In 1995, Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) resigned after an ethics probe into his alleged serial sexual harassment of women on the Hill.
Your integrity -- the thing on which you've traded for so long -- gets stripped. Your self-respect gets battered. And if only one side of the story has made its way into the news media -- usually the prosecutor's side -- then you're virtually convicted in the court of public opinion.
Scandal stories "mutate," says John Payton, a senior partner at WilmerHale. Especially when only one side of a scandal can be told, "it's quite poisonous," he says, leading to "runaway stories" that recycle one set of facts over and over.
Jefferson alluded to this phenomenon in a May 15 statement in which he asked the government to "refrain from this process of death by a thousand cuts that generates salacious headlines and bad press for my family."
Says Davis: "There is a whisper or a buzz when somebody is a figure of controversy in the media regarding or associated with the word 'scandal.' And the minute that association is made and repeated over and over again, by its repetition people start to assume that it's true. And then the social embarrassment sets in where somebody walks into the room who has been the subject of headline accusations and becomes -- it maybe slightly excessive to say this -- untouchable. Don't be seen too close. Don't be photographed with [the scandalized]. Look away if he or she is approaching. I am not exaggerating. . . . I think this is a terrible thing."
Roberts recalls a fellow lawyer whose client, a public figure, complained "that he felt like a pariah and used the specific reference to the sighting of a camera. People would immediately walk away from him, did not want to be seen in shooting distance."
But it all depends on the kind of good or ill will you've built up before the bad times come, says Malek, chairman of Thayer Capital Partners.
"If you're the kind of person who was resented before the fact, somebody who swaggered and threw your weight around before you had some problems and you built up a cadre of people just waiting for you get to get your comeuppance, that's one thing," says Malek, who is a friend of Raines's.
"If you're a good person, well-respected, self-effacing, contributing to the community and those around you, if you're that kind of person, the real people continue to respect you and continue to want to be around you," he says. Raines, he adds, falls into this latter category.
Federal regulators reported last month that under Raines's leadership, Fannie Mae's earnings had been misstated by about $10 billion and that the company engaged in "extensive financial fraud." The questionable accounting, the regulators' report said, "made a significant contribution" to Raines's pay, which ran into the tens of millions.
What will become of them, these prominent men (and they do tend to be men) who have become suspects? There may be indictments. There may be trials. The hard times may get harder, for them and their loved ones.
It is unlikely, though, that any will fade away. Public figures rarely do, especially not elected ones. They can't just quit. Politics in is their blood. The adrenaline of it. The sense of service. Yes, do tell, even the egotism of it.
Leon Panetta, a former Washington politico on both the legislative and executive sides of government, has seen it happen time and time again: the aftermath of scandal.
"Most of these guys are bred to try to stay in," he says of battered politicians and the game of politics. "Unlike Barbaro, they try to continue to limp along in the race."
Of course, it all depends on the outcome of their cases. For as former Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham tearfully learned at his sentencing, scandalous bribe-taking can send you straight to jail.
