Harold Ickes, the deputy White House chief of staff, reportedly got asked about his cats. George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, fielded questions about his use of a pen on the set of the ABC News program he now hosts, “This Week.” After Klayman queried Stephanopoulos about the contents of a course he was teaching at Columbia University, the political strategist and his attorney walked out of the deposition, in a scene reminiscent of several from the Stone videos.
Klayman’s aggressive use of the legal system for political ends seems like the kind of tactic Stone, known for his bare-kunckled brand of politics, might have eagerly endorsed before he became an unwitting target.
How big a fan Stone was of Klayman’s anti-Clinton crusades is unclear, but the two men did work together briefly in 2003 and 2004 as Klayman mounted a longshot bid for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat. The brief collaboration doesn’t seem to have gone well.
During the deposition earlier this month, Stone complained that Klayman repeatedly lied to him about his ability to raise money for that race.
That prompted Klayman to shoot back: “Money is all that’s important to you, right?”
“Money is important in terms of getting you elected to the Senate, yes,” replied Stone.
“And it’s important to fill your pockets,” Klayman countered.
“You never paid me a dime,” Stone said.
While most of the deposition evoked schoolyard combat and Stone generally refused to discuss matters related to his criminal trial, Klayman did elicit one claim that Stone didn’t make during his D.C. trial, at which he declined to testify. In the sworn questioning in the civil cases, Stone denied he ever talked to then-candidate Trump about WikiLeaks and its publication of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton supporters and the Democratic National Committee.
“I’ve never spoken to him about WikiLeaks,” Stone said. He added of his conversations with Trump: “None of them regard WikiLeaks. There was no evidence of that presented during the trial. It was an assertion by the government, but that does not make it true.”
Many of the most heated exchanges during the deposition came as the two combatants probed what they perceived as each other’s chief weaknesses.
Klayman repeatedly needled Stone over the guilty verdict in his D.C. trial, which stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The conservative lawyer also taunted Stone over an episode in 1996 when the National Enquirer got a hold of a swingers’ magazine that appeared to contain an ad taken out by Stone. That prompted Stone’s firing from Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.
Stone, in turn, regularly invoked Klayman’s long history of run-ins with judges and bar discipline authorities.
In 1997, a federal judge in Manhattan banished Klayman after finding the attorney conducted “abusive and obnoxious” questioning, gratuitously invoked the judge’s Chinese origins and pursued “preposterous” arguments.
In 2011, Klayman was formally reprimanded in Florida for taking a woman’s retainer fee, doing no work and refusing to return it.
Two bar discipline cases are currently pending against Klayman in Washington, D.C. In one, a hearing committee recommended a 90-day suspension over conflict-of-interest claims involving suits against his former employer, Judicial Watch. In the other, a panel urged that Klayman be suspended from practicing law for nearly three years over his conduct towards a female client who spurned his romantic advances. Klayman is fighting the charges and contends he is the victim of a political vendetta.
At one point during the Fort Lauderdale deposition, Stone invoked an even more disturbing episode in Klayman’s past: a magistrate handling a custody dispute a decade ago found that Klayman engaged in “grossly inappropriate” touching of his own children. Klayman denied any sexual contact with the children and submitted a lie detector test he said backed up his claim.
Despite the alarming allegations Stone leveled at him, Klayman posted the full-length videos of the deposition online. He told POLITICO the recordings are unedited.
“He showed his true colors,” Klayman said of Stone. “A lot of the things he said are false.”
Klayman specifically denied claims of sexual harassment and molestation. “Those are false,” he said. “I didn’t sexually harass anybody. … I’ve never been found to have molested anybody.”
Asked about the pending bar complaints, Klayman said: “There’s been no final decision and they’re on appeal. … I’m confident of ultimately succeeding.”
Buschel, a lawyer for Stone, declined to comment on the contentious exchange.
In an email, Stone declined to comment on the deposition, instead attacking POLITICO’s credibility.
„While commenting on these frivolous and baseless civil suits would not fall under my current gag order I have a firm policy of only responding to inquiries from legitimate news organizations of which POLITICO is no longer one,“ he wrote.
A look back at Klayman’s professional career indicates Stone’s claim that Klayman hadn’t ever won a case is an overstatement. But it is fair to say that in many cases winning seems to have taken a back seat to using the legal process to inflict maximum pain on his adversaries.
His highest-profile courtroom triumph proved to be short-lived. In 2013, a federal judge in Washington, acting on a suit brought by Klayman, ruled that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of details about American’s telephone calls was likely unconstitutional.
The judge’s preliminary injunction against the controversial surveillance program triggered shock waves across Washington, but that order was never enforced and was ultimately overturned by an appeals court in 2015. Congress also passed a law that restructured the program and effectively mooted the lawsuit.
After leaving Judicial Watch in 2003, Klayman founded a new organization: Freedom Watch. He borrowed the name from a thinly-fictionalized version of Judicial Watch immortalized in “The West Wing.”
In the heated deposition that stretched over two days, the real-world characters Stone and Klayman duked it out over which of them would be felled first by the legal system.
After Stone said he was looking forward to turning the tables and deposing Klayman in the pending suits, Klayman shot back: “You may be in prison by then.”
“You’ll be disbarred by then,” Stone replied.
“They’ll let you out,” Klayman offered.
That prompted Stone to declare confidently: “The clock’s ticking faster on you than me, pal.”
Source: politico.com
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