WASHINGTON -- As a parade of State Department officials began trooping to Capitol Hill this month to testify in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, officials from the department's employee association dispatched an appeal to its nearly 17,000 members.
Send money, they pleaded.
The ongoing impeachment investigation has set off a scramble across Washington for lawyers to represent witnesses -- and for the money to pay them. Many of the witnesses are career government workers who helped shape or carry out policy toward Ukraine.
On civil-servant salaries, they have racked up bills of $15,000 or more for lawyers who can guide them through the morning-to-dusk sessions before congressional inquisitors. Already caught in a struggle between two branches of government, many are now worried about how to pay for legal advice that can cost $750 to $1,500 an hour.
"We have never faced a comparable situation," said Eric Rubin, a senior U.S. diplomat who runs the organization, the American Foreign Service Association. "Our colleagues are facing unprecedented legal bills."
He said his association has received a steady stream of donations, mostly in small amounts, since asking for them on Oct. 8.
Lawyers seldom profit
The impeachment inquiry has some pluses for lawyers: opportunities to wrestle with high-profile legal issues like the limits of executive privilege and to reap free publicity escorting clients through a gantlet of cameras to the Capitol chambers where depositions are being conducted.
But a moneymaker it is not. Even if a client pays in full, representing a single congressional witness is far less profitable than the corporate work that is the lifeblood of many Washington law firms.
"I don't think anybody takes these cases because they are lucrative. They are not," said Robert Luskin, who represents Gordon Sondland, a wealthy Republican donor-turned-ambassador and one of the inquiry's witnesses.
"You do these cases because you believe in the client or you believe in the cause or you believe in the process, not because they are financially rewarding."
So far, nearly a dozen witnesses have cooperated with the inquiry, most of whom are still in the government.
The witnesses in the impeachment inquiry need a high caliber of legal advice because testifying is fraught with pitfalls. Witnesses still in government service could be risking their jobs by cooperating in defiance of a White House directive declaring the inquiry illegitimate.
None of them can fact-check their testimony against official records of meetings and phone calls because the administration is withholding such documents. But they must be mindful of what they say, because lying to Congress is a crime that carries a punishment of up to five years in prison.
Typically, Luskin said, he would have spent days going through official records to prepare a witness like Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union who testified for nearly nine hours this month.
But the State Department has refused to turn over those documents, so Sondland testified based largely on memory.
Members of Congress publicly criticized him for all the times he said he could not remember. "It is much more difficult in these circumstances," Luskin said.
Andrew Bakaj and Mark Zaid, who represent the CIA officer whose whistleblower complaint touched off the impeachment investigation, are fighting a different battle. Republicans are trying to force their client to testify, hoping it would reveal a bias against Trump. But his lawyers are trying to keep his identity confidential for his protection. They also say investigators no longer need him because a stream of other witnesses, many with firsthand information, have given accounts.
Neither that whistleblower nor a second one is paying them, but a charitable organization established to aid whistleblowers has raised about $220,000 to cover their firm's work.
A Section on 10/26/2019