Judge Dismisses Last of 'Filegate' Suits Against Clinton White House
A federal district judge ruled today that there was no intentional misconduct on the Clinton administration’s part in its acqusition of hundreds of FBI background files on former White House staffers and dismissed the last two “Filegate” cases.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the plaintiffs failed to prove that the files obtained were a part of a White House conspiracy, the Blog of Legal Times reported.
The case was spearheaded by Larry Klayman and his conservative Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group Judicial Watch back in 1996. Politico notes that Klayman was “loosely reimagined” on the West Wing as a character named Harry Klaypool who headed a group called Freedom Watch, and Lamberth referenced this in his opinion (PDF provided by the Blog of Legal Times):
“After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, ‘there’s no there there.’ ”
