Clinton Finance Chief Acquitted

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The New York Sun

LOS ANGELES — After less than five hours of deliberations, a federal jury acquitted the national finance director of Senator Clinton’s 2000 campaign Friday on charges that he deliberately understated the amount of money spent on a star-studded concert held to raise money for Mrs. Clinton’s Senate race.


David Rosen, 38, a Chicago-based fund-raising consultant, was found not guilty on two felony counts that alleged he caused the filing of false campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission. If convicted, he faced the possibility of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $500,000.


Upon hearing the verdict Friday morning, Mr. Rosen forcefully embraced his lead defense lawyer, Paul Mark Sandler, slapping him on the back. Several of Mr. Rosen’s family members sitting in the front row of the gallery cried out with joy. Mr. Rosen’s wife, Melissa, and her father sobbed. Even Mr. Sandler, a veteran trial lawyer from Baltimore, briefly fought back tears.


“Holy cow,” Mr. Rosen said as he turned to his family.


Moments later, he told reporters he is eager to get back to his fund-raising business, which was all but shuttered while the legal saga unfolded. “It’s been five years this has been going on,” he said. “I have closure in my life.”


The defendant’s mother, Roberta Rosen, said the prosecution was driven by politics. “I think it was totally, 100% political from the onset,” she said. She described her son as a “little minnow” caught up in a saga involving much bigger fish.


Prosecutors, who wore long faces after the verdict, said little. “We wouldn’t have brought the case if we didn’t think there was reason to bring it,” the lead prosecutor, Peter Zeidenberg, told reporters.


The Justice Department has denied that political considerations played any role in the prosecution. “We respect the jury’s verdict,” a department spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said. “We continue to believe that honest, truthful, and legal reporting to the Federal Election Commission is a fundamental and important principle of the election system. We will continue our effort to prosecute those who violate the law.”


In a statement, an attorney for Senator Clinton, David Kendall, hailed the verdict. “”We have said from the beginning that, when all the evidence is in, David would be vindicated. That has come to pass, and Senator Clinton is very happy for David and his family,” the senator’s lawyer said.


Jurors who spoke with reporters after yesterday’s proceedings said the evidence and witnesses left too many questions unanswered about the August 12, 2000, gala, which featured Cher, Dylan McDermott, and others. The jurors cited, in particular, the government’s failure to call as witnesses the main financial backer of the concert, Peter Paul, and the lead organizer of the event, Aaron Tonken.


“Reasonable doubt was the huge key here,” the jury foreman, Michael Johnson, said. Mr. Johnson, a radiological equipment technician, said the prosecution’s case left him with “lots of question marks.”


Mr. Johnson, 40, said the jury of seven men and five women was split fairly evenly when it took its first vote after deliberations began Thursday. The jurors gradually swung toward a not guilty verdict, he said.


Prosecutors never told the jury why Paul and Tonken weren’t called, but legal analysts said it was likely due to the serious credibility problems of both men. Paul has four felony convictions and is awaiting sentencing on a stock fraud charge. Tonken is serving a five-year prison sentence for mail and wire fraud related to charity fund-raisers he ran.


Several jurors also said they were troubled that one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides on the 2000 campaign, Kelly Craighead, did not testify. One prosecution witness said that in a hotel lounge the night before the gala Mr. Rosen and Ms. Craighead had a heated argument about the cost and scope of the event. Mr. Rosen denied that.


Mr. Zeidenberg mentioned Ms. Craighead in his closing to the jury, implying that the defense should have called her if she would have backed up Mr. Rosen’s version of events. However, the jurors appeared to hold her absence against the prosecution.


The jurors also were not impressed by many of the witnesses who did appear for the prosecution. Two of those who implicated Mr. Rosen in knowing about the cost overruns, Raymond Reggie and James Levin, were admitted criminals.


One juror, Angelo Sanders, said he disregarded Reggie’s testimony after it emerged that Reggie carried a blue police light in his car and had been accused of impersonating an officer. Reggie said he had an honorary police commission and used the light to escort dignitaries. The impersonation case was recently dropped, though Reggie did plead guilty to two unrelated bank fraud charges.


“The blue light on the car, that kind of closed the deal,” said Mr. Sanders, 29, who works for a hip-hop record label.


Mr. Johnson said he wasn’t sure what to make of Mr. Levin, a Chicago businessman who recently admitted to contracting fraud and offering kickbacks, but who also told the court he is a “dear friend” of President Clinton. The jury foreman said he thought Mr. Levin was embellishing, until defense lawyers played an ABC News “20/20” story about Paul that showed pictures of Mr. Levin side-by-side with Mr. Clinton in various settings.


During the trial, prosecutors struggled to explain to jurors why Mr. Rosen would have thought that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would benefit financially by under-reporting the expenses, most of which were paid by Paul through various companies he controlled.


In his defense, Mr. Rosen maintained he didn’t know that Paul and Tonken spent $700,000 more than the roughly $525,000 in concert expenses reported to the FEC.


Toward the end of the case, prosecutors honed in on two specific items Mr. Rosen didn’t report: his $9,300, three-week stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, paid for by Tonken, and the use of Tonken’s Porsche 911 convertible during that period. Mr. Rosen said he didn’t report those items because he considered them personal gifts unrelated to the gala.


Jurors largely ignored that issue. “They spent too much time on that,” Mr. Sanders said, pointing out that the indictment said Mr. Rosen knew that spending for the gala was “substantially more” than what was reported. “A $5,000 or $10,000 hotel bill isn’t substantial when you’re talking about $1.2 million,” the juror said.


Another juror, Stacy Spencer, griped about the tedium of some evidence, particularly relating to a now-defunct legal distinction between “hard” and “soft” money in political campaigns.


“I really don’t ever want to hear those terms again,” Ms. Spencer said


Mr. Sandler told reporters that Mr. Rosen deserves accolades for taking the stand in his own defense. “Like I told the jury, I think he’s an American hero,” Mr. Sandler said. “He was being surrounded for so many years by such responsible people telling him that he had done wrong and he stood up and he had the courage to come to court and to testify and to face the jury and tell them the truth.”


While the worst is now over for Mr. Rosen, the legal aftershocks from the August 2000 concert are likely to continue. The Federal Election Commission is considering whether to fine the fund-raising committee that ran the gala, New York Senate 2000, for the allegedly false reports. In addition, a lawsuit Paul brought against President and Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Rosen, Mr. Tonken, Mr. Levin, and others remains pending in a California court.


A conservative group that helped Paul file the lawsuit said yesterday that the case against Mr. Rosen was damaged when prosecutors declared at the outset that the Clintons were not involved.


“It’s a political hot potato that (prosecutors) didn’t want to handle,” a spokesman for Judicial Watch, Brandon Millett, said. “Government lawyers presented a watered-down, impotent case. They ignored key evidence to keep Bill and Hillary Clinton out of the trial.”


In a tape secretly recorded by Reggie in 2002 but never introduced at trial, Mr. Rosen reportedly complained that he was being used by the Clintons as a “guinea pig” in the civil lawsuit.


Yesterday, the former fund-raising chief said he harbors no ill will towards Mrs. Clinton. “I’ve always thought very highly of the senator,” he said.


One of Mr. Rosen’s first public comments yesterday was an offer of thanks to “the people who helped me pay for the finest legal team.” He declined to name the benefactors.


Mr. Sandler said Mr. Rosen borrowed money from friends to pay his legal bills. During the trial, which lasted over two weeks, Mr. Rosen was also represented by a former Democratic National Committee lawyer who is the lead attorney’s cousin, Joseph Sandler of Washington, D.C., and by a Los Angeles attorney, Michael Doyen.


Mr. Zeidenberg, and the other prosecutor on the case, Daniel Schwager, are based in Washington, D.C. at the Justice Department’s public integrity section.


The New York Sun

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