Judging Terry

Ex-GOP attack dog David Brock charges that Bush judicial nominee Terry Wooten gave him FBI files to discredit a key witness in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Will the Senate investigate?

By Jake Tapper

Sept. 1, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- It was the morning of Oct. 10, 1991, and Terry Wooten, the senior counsel to the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of eight Senate staffers deposing Angela Wright over the telephone after she joined law professor Anita Hill in making allegations against their former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

"Now, the term 'boobs' came up," Wooten asked Wright. "Is that a term that he used when he spoke to you?"

"No, actually that is a term that I am using," Wright replied. "Actually, what he said was, 'What size are your breasts?'" The question came up, she said, while they were attending a seminar for the EEOC.

A decade after the grisly Thomas confirmation circus, Wooten is coming under scrutiny as a federal judge nominee for the U.S. District Court in South Carolina. And his chief accuser is onetime right-wing reporter David Brock, who claims that not only was Wooten busily trying to discredit Wright as a committee lawyer, but to reporters as well -- slipping Wright's FBI files to Brock, who was at work on his 1993 book "The Real Anita Hill."

But while Wooten called Brock's charges "absolutely 100 percent not true" during a Senate hearing this week, and Senate Democratic sources confide that the controversial Brock has enough credibility problems to keep his charges from sticking, Brock is standing by his story and welcomes an investigation into the matter.

In fact, he tells Salon that he's willing to open his files to the Judiciary Committee -- if anyone on the committee, that is, would call him. If the FBI file is there, it's conceivable, he allows, that Wooten's fingerprints could be on it, which may help settle the issue once and for all.

Wooten, like other nominees before him, will not talk to the press before a confirmation vote. The Justice Department did not return a call for comment.

Whether or not the Judiciary Committee decides to take Brock up on his offer or not, Wooten's role in the Thomas confirmation hearings -- the modern TV scandal spectacle that all others, from O.J. to Monica to Chandra, followed -- is surely worth consideration. It's certainly not unprecedented to require former political operatives, even ones with J.D.'s, to answer questions about their various partisan machinations before they assume positions of judicial prominence.

Such was the case in the solicitor-general nomination of conservative attorney Ted Olson, who played some (though murky) role in the American Spectator magazine's war against all things Clinton (even penning under a pseudonym the article "Criminal Laws Implicated by the Clinton Scandals: A Partial List," February 1994). The solicitor general job, meanwhile, supposedly has the grandiose purpose once described as "not to achieve victory, but to establish justice."

During the Thomas scandal, Wooten and Brock were clearly both pursuing victory, not justice. Brock was the Spectator's star reporter, and was all about kicking ass for the GOP, he says now. Wooten, he says, was a big help.

"During the course of my research, I met with Mr. Terry Wooten in a Capitol Hill office," Brock wrote in an affidavit he faxed Aug. 24 to Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. "Mr. Wooten handed me copies of several pages of Ms. Wright's raw FBI files. This material included FBI interviews of Ms. Wright's former employers and former co-workers. With Mr. Wooten's agreement, I removed the FBI material from his office." In his book "The Real Anita Hill," Brock makes references to "an FBI file" in which Wright is referred to as "vengeful, angry and immature."

Asked by Leahy if he gave confidential FBI material to Brock, as alleged both in Brock's affidavit and in a story in the Los Angeles Times, Wooten forcefully asserted "that allegation is absolutely, 100 percent untrue. There is not one scintilla or one iota of truth to that allegation."

But the question now has less to do with which person the committee believes -- the imperfect whistleblower Brock, or Wooten, currently a magistrate judge in Florence, S.C.-- than whether or not they'll take Brock's dare, and try to make sure, beyond any measure of doubt, that Wooten wasn't involved in a dirty tricks campaign against Wright.

Next page: Wooten: Keeping Wright's story quiet