John M. Dowd Interview 5

86
Oral History of John M. Dowd, Esq.
Fifth Interview
July 19, 2024
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is David Tobin, and the
interviewee is John M. Dowd. The interview took place via Zoom on Friday, July 19, 2024.
This is the fifth interview.
MR. TOBIN: John, we need to pick up with the Symington appeal. We had finished the trial,
and I think we had the Symington appeal. You had discussed how the judge had
kicked the one juror off and then the jury went forward.
MR. DOWD: The jury went forward. We moved for mistrial. Actually, I moved three times. The
judge denied it, so we went forward, and the jury convicted him of 17 out of 23
counts. No. I’m sorry. He was acquitted or no verdict, no unanimous verdict on 17
to 23. At the press conference afterwards, I said we won 23 to 17. In any event,
the big decision after the jury verdict was whether Fife stayed in office. My
advice was that he did. He decided not to. It turned out he was right. It was an
incredibly popular decision. Being with him in Phoenix and elsewhere afterwards,
people just really appreciated what he did.
So that was interesting. And then we got the sentencing, and that was just
a nightmare because they had changed the sentencing guidelines, and the judge
didn’t know what to do with the governor because he had so much on the plus
side. Remember back then they had the Sentencing Commission? So he met with
them. We went up on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. What’s interesting is that the
panel we drew was the most liberal panel. There was an elderly woman. I can’t
remember her name. She was a tiny lady, and her son had just been named to the87
Ninth Circuit. The panel we drew, here we had one of the most conservative
governors. Terry Lynam, who as you know is a great oral advocate, argued the
appeal. All throughout the trial he argued the motions. He handled the appeal and
took the lead. He just did a super job. The elderly lady, she’s getting close to
retirement, she was essentially the chief judge of the panel. She took a hold of that
thing. She loved Terry’s opening, but when the prosecutor got up, she was
concerned about the dismissed juror and the way the court below had handled her,
and there was no question how that appeal was going to come out.
MR. TOBIN: To make it clear, the juror had been for acquittal, right?
MR. DOWD: Yes. She had been for acquittal, and she had been very active, but it was over a
period of my recollection is seven or eight days. They just beat her up.
MR. TOBIN: The other jurors complained, right? Because they wanted to convict?
MR. DOWD: That’s right. they complained. We had an in camera hearing where the judge, it
was very unusual, interviewed all the jurors. We had a good record. She was a
former court clerk from Chicago in the courts there. After eight days of
deliberation, that was enough for me. Everyone started complaining. That’s how it
came to our attention. Someone sent a note saying we’ve got a juror out of control
or something like that. The Ninth Circuit was just furious and the thing is you
know the judge really had done a pretty good job on a very long fourteen-week
trial, but they just weren’t going to have it. The government just could not handle
it. Terry was like a great Irish tenor. He just had the sense of the court, and he just
slid right in there. I can’t remember how soon thereafter, but they reversed and88
remanded the conviction, and it was stunning. There were only six counts left as
to the foreign bank accounts. The other stuff they couldn’t reach the whole thing.
After that, Alejandro Mayorkas, who’s now the head of Homeland
Security, was the United States Attorney in Los Angeles. You’ll recall this case
was being handled by the LA US Attorney because the Arizona US Attorney had
recused herself. I was trying to figure out why. They sort of ducked the
assignment. That’s where we got these fast talkers from Los Angeles to try the
case. Mayorkas treated us well.
On the sidelines there was another thing Terry had done. During the trial,
and he loves to do this, he loves to cross-examine with accounting and stuff like
that. He cross-examined Fife’s accountants, mainly Coopers & Lybrand. They
were the main witnesses against Fife, and Terry did a terrific job. He kept telling
me, he said, “you know these guys are lying.” So, when the trial was over, he
filed a complaint with the Board of Accountancy in Arizona against the
accountants. And by God they took the case. It was after we took the appeal and
argued it, the Board of Accountancy ruled in Fife’s favor and found that the
accountants had lied in the trial. So, we presented that. Fife was a witness in that
case, and he was a good witness. He admitted the mistakes he made. He said I
just did it like most construction guys did. That was a big deal. We had several
meetings with Mayorkas. He couldn’t have been classier.89
It was interesting. We felt so good at oral argument. So that came
through. It was a big deal, a pardon issued, and Fife was a free man. Again, he
handled it so well. You know what I’m saying? He didn’t do cartwheels or
anything like that. He was very classy, which was the way he handled himself
during trial.
MR. TOBIN: Let’s talk about Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. You represented him with
respect to some Federal Election Commission issues?
MR. DOWD: I did. He had some FEC issues, and I got someone in the firm to help me out. He
had a wonderful lobbyist friend from Mississippi who I knew quite well. They
lived out in the country in Virginia. The interesting part of that is I had also
represented McCain, and McCain was very tough on Trent Lott as the majority
leader and so I asked Lott do you have any issues with that. He said maybe you
could help control. In any event, we got a good resolution out of that. It was
interesting. We were getting all these referrals of people in the Senate, so that was
it. We got a good resolution out of the Federal Election Commission. I didn’t
know Lott but got to know him. It was a pleasure. He was very grateful, but it was
not a big deal. It was just interesting to be representing all these people at the
same time.
Next was the Secretary of Treasury, Bentson from Texas. As you’ll
remember, Dave, we had a partner named Ed Knight who had been chief of staff
to Bentson when he was in the Senate and then came to Akin Gump, and then he
went on to be general counsel at the Treasury Department, and that’s how that
referral came in. I had helped Ed out when he first took that over. He called and90
said would you represent Secretary Bentson. Again, I had Amy Overton who
really did the laboring oar on it. Michael Chertoff was the chief counsel of the
committee, and he wanted Bentson’s testimony. He found a youngster to do it,
and the guy didn’t know what to do. I said, “Let me tell you. I’ll give you the
questions, you ask him, and we’ll get through this.” He did it, and Bentson was
terrific.
Bentson was a B17 pilot. He was a remarkable guy. He was known for his
intelligence and candor. He was a great senator and a good Secretary of the
Treasury. He loved visiting with us, but particularly Amy really did the work. So,
we went up to the Hill. They called them to testify at 10:00 on a certain day. I
called Chertoff, and I said look, he’s got to go, we’re out of there at 11:00, so
we’ll be there early but he’s got to go to a G20, and the bird is going to be waiting
at Andrews. So, we went up, and you know what those hearings are like. They all
want to speechify. So about 10:10, I stood up. The chairman was a senator from
New York, sort of a crazy guy. I stood up and I said Mr. Chairman, the Secretary
is leaving at 11:00. He’s going to the G20, and we told Michael Chertoff that and
Chertoff acknowledged. He’s ready to answer questions. Well, I got a big speech
and a blast from the chairman and other blowhards. At 10:30 they finally asked
questions. Bentson loved it. He kept patting me on the back saying way to go. I
said look, sir, at 11:00, we’re standing up and we’re walking out of here. There
was TV coverage. So sure enough. They were right in the middle of questions and
11:00 came. I said okay, let’s go. We stood up, and we walked right out of there.
They’re screaming at us. He got his flight to the G20, et cetera. It was a lot of fun.
The questions weren’t that great. I kept saying there’s already a transcript of his91
answers. There’s been no issue about whether they’re correct or not, but they
always like to pose in front of the cameras. So that was Secretary Bentson.
MR. TOBIN: I think around that time, and I believe I was involved in this, you got involved in
representing the Guidant Corporation in connection with an investigation of their
defibrillators.
DOWD: Yes. The FDA and the Department of Justice. King & Spalding represented them
on the medical issues. Wilson Sonsini had the securities side. They had more
investigations going on. I was asked to manage, which I’d never done, all the
lawyers but take the lead on the Justice case, which we did. As you, Dave,
experienced during these cases, we had a pretty good team going to Indianapolis a
lot. Guidant had come out of Eli Lilly. Ron Dollens built and ran the company,
and they were a really good company. The issues with the devices, it’s again all
paper that these regulatory agencies are complaining about. What we discovered
as we had in other cases is that the FDA, despite approving them, really didn’t
understand how they worked.
About a quarter of the way in, we figured that out. I just told Ron, I said
Ron, we’re going to spend a little more educating these guys. Inspectors had been
in, they’d been doing all kinds of stuff, but we decided to grab ahold of it. We
pulled the talent together. King & Spalding were quite good. They knew the
technical issues. So, we pulled that together. It was not only defibrillators, but
some of the other devices that they made. It was a fascinating case. We dug in and
did a lot of work internally. It was a huge assignment. I think we represented them
for years. I reported directly to Ron as the CEO who was one of the most able92
executives that I ever dealt with. He got a hard look at his own company and
eventually made some changes.
Then we got the FDA pretty well squared away in Indianapolis then we
had to go to Minneapolis because they had, I think it was in St. Paul, a big plant, a
big operation. They had local counsel, a guy named Kelly, who was a pretty good
guy and knew his way around the US Attorney’s Office. Once again because of
the amount of paper, the inspections, the information on the devices and how they
worked, and then we got a request for a subpoena, and unfortunately, we had to go
to Ireland for two weeks at the plant there. It was just an awful lot of heavy
lifting.
I reported every week to the executive committee and Ron Dollens, either
in person or on the phone, and that was a pleasure. Then somehow the United
States Attorney in San Francisco got in the picture, and they decided they had a
grand jury going on in San Francisco because there had been a lot of business out
there so that’s the connection to the venue. Well, they called Ron Dollens as a
witness, which was quite remarkable. Dave, were you on that case?
MR. TOBIN: Yes. I represented Fred, who was the head of Guidant. A wonderful guy. His name
will come to me.
MR. DOWD: He was running main division I think. So, Jeff King was on the case. Dollens said
look, I’m happy to answer your questions. The nice thing about Dollens is he was
really conversant with details and his company, etcetera. That’s the first time I
ever went coast to coast in a corporate jet that picked us up at Dulles early in the
morning. We flew to San Francisco. They had all the heavy hitters from the US93
Attorney’s Office, and we had Dollens, and King did a really good job. Ron sat at
the table and answered questions for four hours.
There was one guy who was sort of the lead criminal prosecutor. He was
like a gorilla. He was always growling, but we got through and took a break. He
grabbed me in the hallway and said, “Thanks. We have no interest in this guy.” It
was unusual, as you can imagine, to have the CEO testify. I wouldn’t have let
him go to the grand jury, but he did a magnificent job. He reminded me of the
guy at Coca-Cola who I represented. He just had a wonderful command, and he
was a real good leader in the company. He was a pleasure to represent. When he
got back, he made some changes in the company. I think he was a supporter of
your guy.
MR. TOBIN: Yes. I think Fred ultimately resigned, but yes. There were some issues I guess
with the Venta Prism 3 device.
MR. DOWD: Guidant had a big team on it. and then Dollens asked us to consult on the sale of
the company to Boston Scientific. I think the stock price at the time was at $46,
and he sold it to these geniuses up here at $88 a share. It was amazing. Of course,
we had a lot of meetings up here in Boston and reviewed all the background, et
cetera. Watching Dollens handle that was interesting. J&J wanted to buy them too,
but that didn’t go anywhere. I’m just trying to summarize because it’s so
technical, but it was huge, and it wasn’t just one investigation. The FDA, a lot of
manpower, and Justice did too. The US attorney in Minneapolis didn’t do
anything. Kelly did a good job. We had a good team all the way around, but it was
a cast of thousands.94
MR. TOBIN: It was a large team.
MR. DOWD: I think Osborne was on that case. King was on the case. By the way, I mentioned
that, and Tanenbaum too, there was a mountain of paper.
In any event, that’s that one, and then I got Howard Cannon. He was a
very senior member of the Senate from Nevada. The Organized Crime and
Racketeering Section had an investigation going on involving the mob in
Chicago. There was a hit guy, I called him Tony the Tuna or something like that.
He had one of those wise guy names. Well, they picked up on a wire on a phone
call on a Sunday between Tony the Tuna and Howard Cannon. I think Tony had
called the senator and asked him when he was going to be in Vegas or something.
It had to do with a casino out there. Howard just answered he wasn’t sure, maybe
some weekend or something like that. It was just an innocuous conversation, but
because of it, they wanted to interview Senator Cannon, and they had told the
Ethics Committee. So, we had the Ethics Committee and the Department looking
at him.
Cannon was an F16 pilot and a good one. He had been in the Air Force
forever, and he still flew when I represented him. He was a very powerful
member of the Senate, one of the most senior members of the Senate and a
pleasure to represent. He had a good chief of staff who I worked with. There was
either hearing or trial in Chicago and they wanted him to be a witness. I said we’ll
come out there, but I haven’t decided whether we’ll let him testify. So, you know
of course stuff got leaked to the press, but he handled it. He was like a rock. We
had just a wonderful relationship. I can’t remember, but someone who worked95
with me on that case. There was another senator from Nevada, a very popular
Republican.
MR. TOBIN: That was Paul Laxalt. I knew his son.
MR. DOWD: I knew Laxalt from the McCain era. He used to grab me and say, he laughed like
hell, he said they got the wrong senator. The issue was Cannon’s achievement had
to do with trucking deregulation, which had a huge impact on the Teamsters
union. The Teamsters were none too happy with Cannon. He was an expert. He
was chairman of the Transportation Committee, whatever that was in the Senate.
He fashioned it with, and I think it was the Carter administration, I can’t
remember. It was a Democrat legislation, but it was to reform trucking
regulations. The ICC was involved. I had a couple cases with the ICC. I’m not
sure how, but I guess the phone call did it. It was in the midst of that, and his bill
had passed the Senate, and the president was going to sign the bill so there was a
big hubbub about that. I had no problem with him testifying about it. I told the
Ethics Committee we’ll get back to you but we’re going to deal with the
Department of Justice.
The chief of the strike force was an old friend of mine because I had been
chief of the strike force, so I was dealing with my old colleagues in the Organized
Crime Section. That may be why I got selected to represent him. I had no doubt
that he would be a good witness, but my question was to the US Attorney, and that
was a very notorious Sam something. He was a good US attorney from Chicago,
cleaned up a lot of corruption, and I knew him, and we got along really well. So
when I got out to Chicago with the Senator, they were very good about moving us96
in and out without any press. We went in under the building. My conversations
with him were you know what is this, what do you want him to testify about so I
can make a conscious decision. Well, it was sort of marginal. I told him what his
position was. We sort of educated them on the trucking deregulation bill, that
Nolan was trying to pay them off, and he had no relationship with Tony the Tuna
and some other guys out there, but he was not in the sort of the mix with the
casinos and the wise guys. He knew everybody. A real kind of straight guy and
like Don Young, a pleasure to represent.
I got Sam Skinner, a great US attorney, so we met and talked, and I met
with the chief of the strike force. I think what we agreed to was some minimal
testimony just to get him in and out, and it had nothing to do with the phone call
or anything like that, but it was not fun. The courthouse and the crowd of
reporters, the mob was everywhere. This was a major case. We got it done, and he
was grateful. We were treated very well by the US Attorney. And then we were
back, and I met with the Ethics Committee, and there was no there there, and that
ended that. He was an interesting man and a pleasure to represent, and he treated
us very well. So that’s Howard Cannon.
MR. TOBIN: How about Don Young? He was being investigated by the House Ethics
Committee?
MR. DOWD: It was a case in Alaska where allegations that some legislators of the Alaskan
delegation had taken some money. I must say it wasn’t a lot of money. The FBI at
that time was doing a lot of work on state legislators and corruption. They thought
they had a big one, so they started chasing Young and Stevens, particularly97
Stevens. Brendan Sullivan represented Stevens. Stevens had a chief of staff
named Bill Phillips, a great big guy who was well known on the Hill. I think it
was Cannon who recommended to Stevens and Young that they hire me, and a
guy named David Tobin represented the Young campaign.
MR. TOBIN: That’s right. I did.
MR. DOWD: That was really an important assignment because the FBI just got ahead of itself.
They were investigating twenty years of Don Young, and he had nothing more
than the Alaska thing. It was also a great education on how the House works and
the fundraisings that these guys do. Now Don was the, if not the most, senior
member of the House, and he was chairman of the Transportation Committee,
which is the biggest and largest. That means every road, every airport, every
federal project in America had to be approved by this committee. He had a very
good reputation for being thorough. I never met another man who knew
everything the House was doing. It was remarkable and sort of a pleasure. In any
event, we represented him and had a lot of acreage to cover, a lot of documents,
and the campaign, etcetera. The campaign was paying us. We were running up a
bill. He became the Dean of the House afterwards. The House had an Ethics
Committee. It was chaired by Zoe Lofgren of California who I had never met but I
did meet, and my first meeting, I was very impressed with her, and she knew Don.
Don wanted to cooperate with everybody. The agents showed up at his house
without contacting me. Don always had this little electronic recorder so every
conversation he had we had a tape, and he told them. They knock on his door, and
he said, “What are you doing here?” The Bureau was playing their games. They98
were looking at twenty years of activity. We dug into the raising of funds. Dave,
you must have been involved in that.
MR. TOBIN: Yes. We were looking at all their records, all their donations.
MR. DOWD: There were like three pots I think. One was as chairman, one as congressman, and
then personal, wherever he went, and he traveled a lot. He went hunting, played
golf, and he went fishing. Those were personal expenses. He had someone in his
office who was in charge of keeping an eye on that and accounting and doing all
the paperwork, et cetera. Don didn’t get involved. Sometimes these meetings were
complicated because they involved election fundraising and raising funds as
committee chairman, that sort of mixture, and that needed a lot of sorting. The
“road to nowhere,” well that’s right, and McCain was pounding that. It did
involve the road to nowhere.
As it turned out, Don showed me that McCain was just full of it. The road
did go to someplace, and it was very important to the Alaskan economy. He knew
it like the back of his hand. There were various projects. There was one down in
Florida and others that the press was chasing. Don hated the press. He was
famous for giving
The New York Times the finger and telling them where to pack
it. He was a fearless guy.
A little background. He had started out as a teacher in native Alaskan
schools in Yukon, Alaska. Look up Yukon some time. And then he operated his
own barge, and he would drive it up and down the Yukon River 2,300 miles from
Yukon to the sea. This guy went on safaris. Everybody wanted to hunt and fish
with him because he was a very engaging and a big powerful guy, very engaging.99
He was easy to represent. He was always ready to answer questions. He didn’t
come close to pulling a fastball on me or anybody. The investigation went on for a
long time.
MR. TOBIN: It was years, but they finally cleared him, didn’t they?
MR. DOWD: There came a time when I couldn’t bill him anymore. We were over a couple
million dollars easy in fees. I don’t know what happened, but Jack Smith became
head of Public Integrity, it was after the nonsense in the Stevens case where they
caught the prosecutors misleading the judge and the jury, and that old judge had
the case and Brendan raised hell. Eric Holder got involved and supposedly had an
internal investigation which was nonsense. That caused Holder to change chiefs in
the Public Integrity Section. They called Jack Smith in from Brooklyn. I didn’t
know the guy, but he had a hell of a reputation, so I let him get down there for a
couple weeks and then I called him. I said look, because we had determined
everything we looked at there was just no case. There might be some disputes
about money for one trip or another or what was expended, but this was not a
criminal case, and there was no bribery anywhere. So, Jack called me back, and I
said to him look, we can’t bill the guy anymore. We’ve spent so much money on a
waste of time. Twenty years of records. I said your FBI doesn’t understand that
the rules change every two years. They don’t understand how the House works.
They ought to go back to Government 101 class. And I said I’d appreciate it if
you’d look at the file because I know you’ve got a lot of cases, and I’d like to
meet with you and will tell you whatever, and depending on how it goes now, I’ll100
let Don answer some questions. I said we’ve got to end this thing. It was a
nightmare. He said I’ll call you back.
A week or so later I got a call, can you come down? So, I went down and
spent 3 1/2 hours, and I told him everything we knew. He had all the agents in
there, and they were all acting like teenagers and throwing tantrums. Jack had to
calm them. Jack was just this really straight shooter, cool, smart guy. He had
obviously read everything. His questions were very good. We answered them. I
can’t remember who worked with me on the case, but we did that, and when we
got through, he said thank you. He had nothing as we had determined, so he
agreed with our assessment of his case. We went home, and three days later he
called, and he said on behalf of everyone, I want to thank you for coming and
sharing what you have. Please tell the Congressman we declined prosecution. He
said I’ll send you a note. He said I would send the balance to the Ethics
Committee, and you can deal with her. I said that we had dealt with Zoe Lofgren.
So that was huge, and it was a great result. I was always grateful for Brendan’s
defense of Stevens and raising hell and catching those guys.
So after that I dealt with counsel from the committee, but I told him I want
to deal with the chair lady, and I got a call and she said can you and Don come on
up and visit. The place we met was a little hideaway in the House down on some
lower floors and these tiny windows that you look out and you’re looking right at
the Mall. It’s this tiny room. We barely fit four people in there. That’s where she
held our meeting for Don. We had to go through the bowels of the House to get to
it. The press could never discover this place. So we went, and I’ve always101
complimented her. She was so fair. She loved Don. People liked Don. He got
along with the Democrats. Everything was let’s do it together.
He testified for three or four hours. The secret weapon I had back with
Jack Smith was in the House Ethics Committee file were nine letters to the Ethics
Committee saying we don’t know how to make the call on this one. The FBI had
never seen those letters. I remember giving them to Jack like this is a criminal
case, and you guys are looking for advice. The agents said they had told Jack,
they don’t know that the rules had changed. Over twenty years, there were ten
rule changes. It’s hard to keep track of all that.
There was some trip up to New York that involved hunting, fishing, and
some big construction project and I think we were off by like 50 grand and Don
said what do you think, and I said pay the 50 grand. He did. He wrote them a
check. He called Laughlin and said look I’ve got to check for $50,000 and let’s
resolve this now, and they did. That was the end of it.
The other thing about Don is we were friends until he died. He was such a
wonderful man. He would call. How are you doing? He had a nickname for me. I
can’t remember what it was. I talked to him the day before he died. He just
expired. A big, rugged guy. I think he was 87.
MR. TOBIN: John, you handled a number of pro bono cases for folks in the military.
MR. DOWD: I want to generalize. The firm had just a wonderful pro-bono program, and I
would refer matters, but rarely did I handle them. But I was involved with General
Kelly in visiting the wounded at Bethesda Naval. He’d come by and pick me up
and we’d go up there. In any event, he’d come in on a flight. We had a guy out of102
the basement at Bethesda where they unloaded these guys from Iraq. We were
visiting with him and his parents. He needed a lot of help and a lot of attention.
We had a long-range plan, but it was going to take some resources and some
litigation, all kinds of issues. Kelly said can you guys take care of it? I said you
bet. Thus started our military pro bono program, to great credit to Kelly. The guy
survived and went to a veteran’s home and eventually went home all put back
together again.
We had lawsuits in Virginia, Minnesota, Texas, et cetera, and the firm just
did a first-rate job. They did take a long time, but you’ve got to have the
manpower. We had lawyers we dealt with all the time, and we got that done. From
thereon, and particularly after I retired. I can’t remember when I retired. After
that, I represented soldiers, airmen, Marines, families, et cetera. One that’s public
is the Hackett case. It’s written up in
The Washington Post, and that’s where
Major Hackett had been head of the IED unit in Iraq and he kept losing men. He
was just personally crushed, PTSD from the grief and the horror of it all, came
home, retired, and moved his family out to the boondocks of Wyoming and
worked at an oil refinery and committed suicide. The government was telling us
tough luck. There’s no Purple Heart, there’s no benefits, he took his life. So, we
put together a package for the insurance guy, the VA in Philadelphia. A terrific
guy. We got up in front of them, and that case, called a seminal case, which
changed the rule. And by the way, it was a commandant that asked us to handle it,
and we had a commander in the U.S. Navy, Heidi Kraft, who suffered from PTSD
from her time in combat. She was assigned to guide us because all we had was103
one service record showing lack of sleep. We had nothing else, so we interviewed
sixty people around the world in no time. We had a huge team and got all the
facts on our client. The key was the affliction was a result of combat. Hackett had
been a former IED unit commander, and some of the men who were killed in
action were people that remained enlisted men that he had had raised in the
Marine Corps from private to corporal. It was one of the most wrenching cases
I’ve ever seen because the VA had turned down, the family was in a state of
depression. That’s the one case I can talk about.
The others have just been the most remarkable experience we’ve had.
Thanks to the firm for providing the resources, we have prevailed. And by the
way, I am happy to report that under the Biden administration, the VA is ten times
more responsive and helpful in getting benefits and care for people who are
wounded. And these are old wounds. We had Vietnam, et cetera.
I had another suicide case. It took combat marines. I had a Navy doc who
was blinded by a bomb that hit the Haditha Dam. These are remarkable people. I
just want to sum it that way. I don’t want to go any further. The Hackett case is in
The Washington Post. That publicity really helped because it sort of put the heat
on the VAs and what we are doing here. It turns out the Hackett case there were I
don’t know how many dozens of cases filed in the US District Court in New
Jersey seeking the same relief, maintaining that look this guy has collapsed, if you
will, or spiraled as a result of his experience in combat. Thanks to Larry
Tanenbaum and so many other people who did a great job. Akin Gump. We spent
millions in hours and time helping these people out. To me, that’s the proudest104
thing I have. My legacy at Akin Gump was that effort. It was tremendous.
Everyone we represented, to this day we get notes and cards of thanks, and by the
way, they’re all doing well. So, it’s very moving.
I had another case. I didn’t need Akin Gump on that one. We had that one
pretty well fixed. And great help from Dr. Heidi Kraft. She’s a psychiatrist who
runs her own foundation out of San Diego. She had a connection to the VA
Center at La Jolla. It turns out it is the finest VA hospital. My guy’s wounds went
back, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years, and they did an incredible job for this guy.
He’s all buttoned up and taken care of thanks to the VA and other people out
there.
MR. TOBIN: John, let’s cut here, and we’ll pick up next week with retiring and then getting
called back into the fray with the Mueller investigation. How’s that sound?
MR. DOWD: Good.