Wiggle Room for Hillary?/Post Blows Thompson Scoop

Former Senator John Edwards has been trying darn hard--in between $400 haircuts--to demonstrate he's more antiwar than his two primary rivals: Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Of this pair, Clinton has particularly taken steps to make certain there's little space between her and the other main Democratic contenders on the Iraq issue. (I explained all this after the last Democratic presidential debate here.) And, after all, each of these candidates vow that if elected president he or she will bring the U.S. troops home.

But is there a catch? In an NPR commentary yesterday, veteran newsman Ted Koppel noted that Clinton privately told a senior military official that she knows that American troops will remain in Iraq for decades.

This isn't any newsflash. Even if there were a general pullout of American combat forces ordered today, troops would remain to provide security in the Green Zone and elsewhere, to train Iraqi forces, to patrol the borders, and to chase after al Qaeda in Iraq. Some of these tasks could take years. But will Edwards jump on Clinton's realism and claim HRC is not truly in favor of pulling out the troops? I can see antiwar activists bashing Clinton for this, but will antiwar voters in the Democratic primary demand that the candidates provide specifics (and numbers) regarding their withdrawal plans?

There's still a lot of time before the voting begins, and Edwards is going to keep trying to find a meaningful difference between himself and Clinton on the war. In this ground war, even an inch could count.

FRONT-PAGE MISCUE. I've referred to this quote before, but today I reach for it again: I.F. Stone once said you never know where in The Washington Post you'll find a front-page story. Check out today's paper. Jeffrey Birnbaum has a scorcher of a piece on Fred Thompson. And it's nowhere near the front page.

It's been reported and mentioned (here and elsewhere) that Thompson spent about two decades as a Washington lobbyist. But these reports covered work he did years ago. Birnbaum discovered that Thompson--in between acting gigs--has in the past three years raked in $760,000 for helping a British company that owes billions of dollars in asbestos claims. His mission: obtain inside information on what Congress might do to limit the firm's liabilities. Here's how the piece starts:

By all accounts, Fred D. Thompson will soon be running for president, portraying himself as a Washington outsider on the campaign trail. But over the past three years he showed up every two weeks or so at a lobbying and law firm in downtown D.C. to plot how best to persuade Congress to help a British company.

His main assignment: to use his connections to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to extract information about goings-on inside Congress and use it to benefit his multibillion-dollar client.

In exchange for this insider wisdom he was paid a cool $760,000.

Even casual observers of the presidential race know that in recent years Thompson, a Republican former senator from Tennessee, was a lobbyist between his acting gigs. What is less widely known is what he did in D.C.

According to people he lobbied with, Thompson was an access man. He contacted his old colleagues to learn the latest about bills his client cared about. Thompson was frequently responsible for finding out what Frist was planning for asbestos legislation, his spokesman said -- an easy task, given his eight years in the Senate representing Tennessee alongside Frist (both were first elected in 1994).

Thompson's client, London-based Equitas Ltd., held billions of dollars to pay off claims from people sickened by asbestos, a once-common building material. It wanted Congress to limit how much it had to pay into a trust fund to cover those liabilities.

In an earlier era, the term of art for what Thompson did would have been "foreign agent." But a law change in 1995 allowed lobbyists for foreign companies to register simply as run-of-the-mill lobbyists, which permitted them to sidestep detailed disclosure requirements about their activities and to avoid the politically charged "agent" designation.

Thompson has been preparing to run for president as a "folksy" outside-the Beltway candidate who will decry Washington. Yet this work is about as inside-the-Beltway as it gets. (You think Jay Leno will ask Thompson about his Equitas connection on The Tonight Show this evening?)

A contradiction this big deserves front-page treatment. The story appeared on p. A23, as part of Birnbaum's "On K Street" column. Okay, maybe the editors didn't want to start a column on Page One. But there should have at least been a teaser on the cover page of the paper. This story revealed more about Thompson then any episode of Law & Order.

Posted by David Corn at June 12, 2007 10:47 AM