Lawyer for Bush Quits Over Links to Kerry's Foes

NY Times
August 26, 2004
Lawyer for Bush Quits Over Links to Kerry's Foes
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 25 - The national counsel for President Bush's re-election campaign resigned on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after he acknowledged that he had provided legal advice to a veterans group that has leveled unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record in a book and on the air.

Hours later, Senator John McCain, a Republican who is both a friend of Mr. Kerry's and an increasingly vigorous supporter of President Bush's, said in an interview that he was so annoyed over the veterans' television advertisements attacking Mr. Kerry's war record that he intended to personally "express my displeasure'' to the president when they campaign together next week.

Mr. McCain said that he was taking the president at his word that he was not responsible for the ads, which were initially largely financed by Texas Republicans, but that he did not think Mr. Bush had gone far enough in condemning them. He also said he wanted the Kerry campaign to stop using images of his own 2000 primary fight against Mr. Bush in its advertising. [Page A24.]

The resignation of the counsel, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, was announced in the morning by the Bush campaign, which released a letter Mr. Ginsberg had written to the president saying he had done nothing wrong but did not want to hamper the president's re-election effort.

"I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election,'' Mr. Ginsberg said in his letter.

The quick resignation suggests that the Bush campaign, which has repeatedly said it has no ties to the Swift boat veterans group attacking Mr. Kerry, is eager to put the issue behind it as it heads into the Republican National Convention.

Republicans, who only a few days ago were saying that the Swift boat controversy was a problem for Mr. Kerry's campaign because it raised questions about Mr. Kerry's war credentials, began to say Wednesday that the issue was not helpful for Mr. Bush.

The Kerry campaign continued to try to keep the issue alive, using Mr. Ginsberg's resignation to push forward its charges that the president was using the veterans as a front for negative campaigning.

Democrats put up a new 60-second ad on the issue, asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to open a criminal investigation into links between the Bush camp and the anti-Kerry veterans group and dispatched to Texas former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee from wounds received in the Vietnam War.

In the most theatrical event of the president's weeklong Texas vacation, Mr. Cleland turned up at the remote first checkpoint on Prairie Chapel Road outside Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre ranch on Wednesday afternoon, and then tried to deliver a letter asking the president to condemn the television commercials against Mr. Kerry by the Swift boat group. He first approached a Secret Service agent, then a Texas state policeman, but both refused to accept the letter.

Then Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner and a Vietnam veteran who had been asked by the Bush campaign to accept the letter, told Mr. Cleland that he would take it, but Mr. Cleland refused to give it to him.

Later, in a news conference in the hot sun outside the Crawford Middle School gymnasium, Mr. Cleland, a Democrat, said that Mr. Bush was behind the Swift boat group.

"These scurrilous ads are false, and George Bush is behind it,'' he said. "The question is, where is George Bush's honor? Where is his shame?''

Jim Rassmann, a Green Beret in the Vietnam War, accompanied Mr. Cleland. Mr. Kerry had saved Mr. Rassmann's life by pulling him from a river in the Mekong Delta.

The White House fired back that Mr. Cleland's visit to Crawford was nothing more than an effort to grab headlines.

"Senator Kerry says he wants to talk about the issues,'' said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, after Mr. Cleland had left Crawford. "Today's political stunt is an interesting way of showing it.''

Mr. McClellan called again for Mr. Kerry to join Mr. Bush in denouncing all campaign advertising by outside groups, called 527's committees for the section of the tax code that created them. And Mr. McClellan stood by the assessment of Marc Racicot, the Bush campaign chairman, who insisted last week that "there is no connection of any kind whatsoever'' between the campaign and the Swift boat group.

Mr. Ginsberg's work for the veterans group was just the latest Republican tie to emerge, and the most politically significant. Records show that the veterans received most of their initial financing from prominent Texas Republicans close to the Bush family and to Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist. They have received strategic advice from consultants who have worked with national Republican groups.

Bush campaign officials said they had been unaware that Mr. Ginsberg had been playing dual roles as a lawyer for them and for the veterans group.

The Republicans, in an e-mail message to reporters, listed several Democrats who they said showed connections between Democratic 527 groups, Mr. Kerry's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Among them were Zack Exley, the former organizing director for MoveOn.org's political action committee who now works for Mr. Kerry's campaign; Jim Jordan, the former campaign manager for Mr. Kerry who now works as a consultant for the liberal groups America Coming Together and the Media Fund; and Joe Sandler, who is a lawyer for both the Democratic National Committee and MoveOn.org.

Democrats said all of their activities were legal and that the groups are not leveling similarly personal and unsubstantiated charges against the president.

Kerry campaign officials, who said they now saw the Swift boat controversy working to their advantage, took additional steps on Wednesday to keep it burning.

Their 60-second spot, which the campaign said would run on national cable stations and in closely contested states, shows Mr. McCain confronting the president when he was his rival for the Republican nomination in 2000. In a debate, Mr. McCain is shown scolding the president for standing with a member of a "fringe veterans group" that had accused Mr. McCain of abandoning veterans.

"George Bush is up to his old tricks," reads the caption on the screen. "Four years ago it was John McCain. This year, they're smearing John Kerry. George Bush, denounce the smear. Get back to the issues."

Much of the debate set off by the veterans has been over whether Mr. Kerry earned his three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. The critics have also questioned his occasional statements that he was in Cambodia over Christmas 1968, which he made to argue that Vietnam had been in part a secret war.

The Kerry campaign this week released long-ago recordings of statements that John E. O'Neill, a leader of the anti-Kerry Swift boat group, made to President Richard Nixon, in which he put himself in Cambodia. "I was in Cambodia, sir, I worked along the border on the water," Mr. O'Neill told Nixon.

Asked in an interview about those statements, Mr. O'Neill said: "What I was trying to say is, and I believe he understood me, was that I was on the border." He added that Mr. Kerry was assigned to a different region, which he argued made it less likely that Mr. Kerry could have sailed to the same watery border.

In a rare television interview with the anchor Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday, Mr. Rove said that Mr. Ginsberg, whom he described as "a great friend of this president," resigned "in order to remove any possibility of being a distraction to his friend."

Pressed on his relationship with Bob J. Perry, the Texas house builder who gave the Swift group most of its initial funding, Mr. Rove said: "I've known him for 25 years. When I moved to Texas, you can count the wealthy Republicans who are willing to write checks to support Republican candidates on the hand - on the fingers of one hand. It would be unusual if I didn't know him, having been active for 25 years in Texas."

Describing Mr. Perry as "a good friend," he said he had seen Mr. Perry within the last year but that the two had only exchanged pleasantries and "certainly did not discuss with him or anybody else in the Swift boat leadership what they're doing."