Hit Piece on Fred Thompson

The New York Times must be getting nervous about Fred Thompson's chances to win the presidency. Yesterday they published an article (below) clearly intended to be a hit piece. Perhaps they don't understand that most people DO understand that lawyers take clients and argue positions all the time that they (the lawyers) don't agree with. Actually I do hope that Fred Thompson wants Roe v. Wade overturned, but also wants abortion legal in the first three months, since it's identical to my own position.

Records Show Ex-Senator’s Work for Family Planning Unit

By JO BECKER, New York Times, July 19, 2007

Billing records show that former Senator Fred Thompson spent nearly 20 hours working as a lobbyist on behalf of a group seeking to ease restrictive federal rules on abortion counseling in the 1990s, even though he recently said he did not recall doing any work for the organization.

According to records from Arent Fox, the law firm based in Washington where Mr. Thompson worked part-time from 1991 to 1994, he charged the organization, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, about $5,000 for work he did in 1991 and 1992. The records show that Mr. Thompson, a probable Republican candidate for president in 2008, spent much of that time in telephone conferences with the president of the group, and on three occasions he reported lobbying administration officials on its behalf.

Mr. Thompson’s work for the family planning agency has become an issue because he is positioning himself as a faithful conservative who is opposed to abortion.

Earlier this month, Mr. Thompson disputed accounts by the group’s former president and others, saying through a spokesman that he had “no recollection” of doing anything to aid the group’s efforts to overturn a rule banning federally financed clinics from dispensing information about abortion to pregnant women. At most, said Mr. Thompson’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, he “may have been consulted by one of the firm’s partners who represented this group.”

Yesterday, Mr. Corallo said the family planning group was an Arent Fox client.
“The firm consulted with Fred Thompson,” he said. “It is not unusual for a lawyer to give counsel at the request of colleagues, even when they personally disagree with the issue.”

From the time he was elected to the Senate from Tennessee in 1994 until he left office in early 2003, Mr. Thompson voted for every abortion restriction measure as well as a ban on government financed abortion for Defense Department personnel. He has also said that he opposes the Roe v. Wade decision because it establishes a federal right to abortion, an issue that he says should be left to the states.

But his record on abortion has not always been as clear cut. In questionnaires Mr. Thompson answered during his 1994 Senate campaign, for instance, he checked a box stating that he believed abortion should be legal under any circumstances during the first three months of pregnancy and said, “I do not believe that abortion should be criminalized.” He has also opposed a constitutional amendment banning all abortion, also on the grounds of states’ rights.

But in answering questions by the conservative Tennessee group Flare during the 1994 campaign, Mr. Thompson promised not to support tax-financed clinics that recommend “abortion as a method of birth control.”

His representation of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which was trying to overturn the ban on abortion counseling, put him at odds with the anti-abortion movement, which considered the ban a crucial victory.

The billing records from Arent Fox show that Mr. Thompson, who charged about $250 an hour, spoke 22 times with Judith DeSarno, who was then president of the family planning group. In addition, he lobbied “administration officials” for a total of 3.3 hours, the records show, although they do not specify which officials he met with or what was said.

The billing records, along with meeting minutes from the association, show that Arent Fox was hired to help overturn the ban.

The family planning association became a client of Arent Fox through Michael Barnes, a former Democratic congressman who was then a partner at the firm. The firm’s current chairman, Marc Fleischaker, said, “Regardless of whatever the political ramifications are, Fred was being a good colleague by helping out one of the firm’s partner.”

After his work for the family planning group was made public earlier this month, Mr. Thompson sought to distance his own positions from those that he took on behalf of clients he represented as a lobbyist and a lawyer.

In a column published on the conservative blog Powerline, Mr. Thompson wrote that in light of lawyer-client confidentiality, it would not be appropriate for him to respond to those who are “dredging up clients — or another lawyer’s clients — that I may have represented or consulted with” 15 or 20 years ago.

If “a client has a legal and ethical right to take a position, then you may appropriately represent him as long as he does not lie or otherwise conduct himself improperly while you are representing him,” he wrote.

He continued, “In almost 30 years of practicing law I must have had hundreds of clients and thousands of conversations about legal matters. Like any good lawyer, I would always try to give my best, objective, and professional opinion on any legal question presented to me.”