In my new Confirmation Tales post—“Peter Edelman Leaks the News of His Impending D.C. Circuit Nomination: And ignites a campaign against himself”—I recount Bill Clinton’s abortive nomination of his longtime friend, Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, to a seat on the D.C. Circuit. Among the lessons: Don’t leak word of your own controversial nomination.
An excerpt:
Mikva’s departure from the D.C. Circuit gave Clinton and Mikva a D.C. Circuit seat to fill. On October 28, 1994—just eleven days before the elections that would flip control of the Senate and the House—the Washington Post reported that “the White House has signed off on a nominee”:
The pick is said to be former Georgetown University Law School professor Peter Edelman, now counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala.
The 56-year-old Edelman, a former Supreme Court clerk and Senate aide to the late Robert F. Kennedy, has also been vice president of the University of Massachusetts. Edelman and his wife, Children’s Defense Fund head Marian Wright Edelman, are longtime friends of the Clintons. Edelman, who co-chaired the justice transition team effort after the 1992 election, would be filling the last vacancy on the 12-member appeals court, often said to be the second most important court in the country.
This was a surprisingly premature leak: The Senate had gone into recess until November 30, so no nomination could be made before then. What good purpose did the White House see in leaking the news?
The answer to that question, I’ve discovered, is found in a very long interview of Peter Edelman a decade later, in 2004, as part of an oral history of Clinton’s presidency. In that interview, Edelman recounts the “very emotional moment” in September 1994 when outgoing White House counsel Lloyd Cutler informed him that he would be nominated to the seat:
I was ecstatic.
Hillary called us [his wife Marian Wright Edelman and him] at home that evening. We both got on the phone, and she was really, really, really excited that it was going to happen. She said, We’ve just got to get the FBI going, get you appointed and get the hearings held and do this all fast, really, really, really fast. I said, I wish that that could be done and I’ll certainly do my part, but don’t hold your breath. It just takes longer than that. She said, I know, I know, I know. But it was very sweet. She was very excited about it.
Edelman goes on to explain that “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff”—i.e., a not-yet-announced nomination—”but I just couldn’t contain myself.” Edelman himself spread the word to his colleagues at HHS—“I did tell them and maybe I shouldn’t have”—and “Everybody in HHS, Harriet Rabb, the General Counsel, and [HHS Secretary] Donna [Shalala] herself, everybody was really excited about it.”
So it wasn’t the White House that leaked news of the impending nomination. It was Edelman himself.
I also explore what Edelman mislabels a “very serious campaign of besmirchment and character assassination” against him, and I address his weird charge that a damning column by George Will was written by somebody else.
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