Hillary's Lawyer Denies Pellicano Link

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's Washington scandal attorney David Kendall is denying that recently jailed tough guy-investigator Anthony Pellicano ever worked for the Clintons, a claim directly contradicted by senior Bush White House advisor Mary Matalin - and not even denied by Pellicano himself.

Kendall told the New York Daily News on Friday that reports linking the former first lady with the controversial gumshoe, who was jailed last Monday on weapons and explosives charges, are "politically motivated and utterly false."

What's more, the News suggests that "right wing watchdog groups" like NewsMax and Judicial Watch manufactured the link, since Clinton defenders say it's not true.

While we wish we could take credit, it just isn't so.

Here's how Mary Matalin, now a senior advisor to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, remembers stumbling across the Clinton-Pellicano link while she was political director for President Bush 41's 1992 reelection campaign.

"I got the letters from Pellicano to [various women linked to Bill Clinton] intimidating them," Matalin said in 1997, when she was the host of her own nationally syndicated talk show on the CBS Radio network. "I had tapes of conversations from Pellicano to the women. I got handwritten letters from the women."

"I got one letter from one of the women's dad's saying, 'This is so horrible. Here's what they're going to do to us,'" Matalin explained.

The senior Bush advisor isn't the only one who knew about the former first couples' Pellicano problem. In fact, before his name became politically toxic, the identity of the LA gumshoe's most powerful client had been widely reported.

"Shortly after the [Monica Lewinsky] scandal broke, Lucianne Goldberg was in her office in New York when, she says, she got a call from David Kendall, Clinton's lawyer on Whitewater matters," reported Newsweek's Michael Isikoff in 1998.

"Kendall, a gentlemanly lawyer, politely asked Goldberg if he could send someone by her New York apartment to pick up her tapes of her conversations with Linda Tripp.

"Goldberg was furious. A few days earlier, one of her famous clients had already been approached by Anthony Pellicano, a flamboyant detective who had been involved in the O. J. Simpson case, seeking information about the tapes. The detective had said that he was 'working for Clinton.'"

When Newsweek asked Pellicano directly whether he was working for the Clinton White House, his denial was significantly less forceful than Mr. Kendall's.

"I have no comment," he told the newsmagazine.

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Clinton Scandals
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