L.A.'s Lawyer to the Stars -- and the Majority Leader

By Al Kamen
Friday, February 9, 2007

What do Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Britney Spears, Bruce Willis, Paris Hilton's ex-boyfriend/videographer Rick Salomon and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have in common?

They've all hired Los Angeles celebrity lawyer Martin Singer, known for his take-no-prisoners style and investigative prowess, to be their attorney.

Seems Reid paid Singer $25,000 on Dec. 14 from his senatorial campaign account for unspecified "legal fees," according to his most recent Federal Election Commission report.

So what prompted Reid to join this prestigious group of clients?

His spokesman, Jon Summers, told our colleague Howard Kurtz that Reid "sought outside counsel regarding his response to the AP story written by John Solomon," now at The Washington Post. The story was about how Reid reported the 2004 sale of land he once owned -- he made a profit of $700,000 on the property, which he had not owned for three years.

Summers said the story was "misleading" and had "inaccuracies." The AP stood by the story, and Reid amended his financial disclosure forms after the report. Reid's amendments are being reviewed by the ethics panel, Summers said.

He said Reid "obtained approval from the ethics committee for this expenditure."

Someone's Getting Bumped

It's always a pain to take your vehicle into the shop for repairs, be told it will take weeks to fix and then get some cheesy loaner in the meantime.

It's even worse when your vehicle is Air Force One. Seems President Bush's 747 is in the shop for an extensive overhaul, a job that could take many months.

The president is always required to have a plane and a standby, in case of emergencies. There's a second 747 ready to go as Air Force One, but his backup now is one of the 757s out of the government fleet of only four such planes. These are used by, among others, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Problem is that two of those four 757s also are undergoing long-term maintenance overhauls. So that leaves only one of the big planes available. Cheney has dibs over Rice, unless he's flying domestic and she's going overseas.

But next week they're both going overseas, Cheney to Asia and Rice on her latest major trip to the Mideast. She is to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and then go on to Berlin for a session with the "Quartet" of would-be peacemakers: the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.

So Rice gets bumped to a smaller plane. It's still quite nice, but it has room for only three reporters, instead of her usual complement of 13 or 14.

Unclear how many press are going with the loquacious vice president.

Gonzales Travels to Balmier Climes

Speaking of trips, while folks in this area are freezing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is off this week to Central and South America for a series of chats with various officials about drugs, copyright laws and other exciting topics. On Monday, he talked about gangs with El Salvador's president.

Tuesday he flew to Buenos Aires and on Wednesday (sunny and 84 degrees) toured the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, where a terrorist bomb killed 85 people in 1994. Yesterday it was off to Brasilia (temps in the 80s but partly cloudy) for meetings with various folks there. He had "a fruitful discussion on a number of topics of mutual importance to Brazil and the United States" with his Brazilian counterpart, he announced.

Today, it's to be Rio -- no carnival action, we're told -- to speak at an exciting conference about copyright laws.

The department says the curiously unimportant trip was planned long before anyone predicted the current cold snap -- or that increasingly nasty spat over the firings of those U.S. attorneys.

Punching Not Among Obama's Strengths

Conservative news organizations got it half right when they reported recently that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was once schooled in a foreign-sounding place that may have promoted violent techniques. But it turns out it wasn't a madrassah he attended but rather a "dojang," where he learned taekwondo.

Obama, who studied the Korean martial art in the early 2000s, was "not the best kicker, not the best puncher," his former teacher, Chicago financial capital planner David Posner, told our colleague Mary Ann Akers-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/thesleuth.

On the other hand, Obama was "very disciplined, very diligent" and had "phenomenal balance, very good footwork" -- critical in a presidential campaign -- and "really good, solid stances" -- less important these days.