Fiedler Aide, GOP Attorney at Odds on Details of Talk

Paul Clarke, indicted aide to Rep. Bobbi Fiedler, confirmed Friday that it was Washington lawyer Ben Ginsberg with whom he discussed the subject of retiring a rival candidate’s debt. But Ginsberg, legal counsel to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, disputed Clarke’s account of part of the conversation.

“Paul Clarke asked me, hypothetically, if candidates ever help other candidates pay off campaign debts,” Ginsberg said in a telephone interview from his Washington office. “I said, Yes, there is no prohibition under federal law.”

But Ginsberg said he does not remember discussing with Clarke the legalities of written arrangements for retiring a rival’s campaign debt, a central issue in the indictment of Clarke and Fiedler.

Jury Indicts Pair

Clarke and Fiedler were charged last week by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury with attempting to lure state Sen. Ed Davis to withdraw from the U. S. Senate race by offering him $100,000 to erase his campaign debt. Fiedler and Clarke contend that any discussion of retiring the Davis debt was based on the assumption that Davis already was planning to quit.

Clarke said Friday that it was Ginsberg he referred to when he brushed aside a warning by Davis’ campaign manager, Martha Zilm, that their discussions about retiring Davis’ debt might be illegal.

Zilm was told to voice her concern about legality by Los Angeles County prosecutors, who had wired her for sound before her meeting with Clarke in early January. Her warning was based on a California statute that makes it a felony to pay or offer to pay a candidate to leave a political race.

Clarke confirmed Friday that he told Zilm not to worry because a lawyer had told him that it was not illegal if it was not on paper. But Clarke now contends that what he had meant to say was that Ginsberg told him “not to make any written arrangements on that kind of fund-raising (retiring a rival candidate’s debt) because it can be just a mess.”

Has No Recollection

Ginsberg said Friday he has no recollection of that discussion. He said that when Clarke talked to him, he assumed that Clarke was asking if such fund-raising was legal under federal law, but that Clarke never stated it in so many words.

“I give advice on the federal election law to members of Congress, that is my job,” Ginsberg said. He said he thought the conversation with Clarke took place late last year.

Ginsberg said he was not familiar with the state law used to indict Fiedler and Clarke. He also said that Davis’ name never came up in his meeting with Clarke.

Davis has become increasingly angry over suggestions by some reporters and politicians that he may have overreacted when it appeared that the Fiedler campaign wanted to induce him to leave the Senate race. He has also expressed irritation at suggestions that the state law being applied in the Fiedler case is somehow questionable.

So on Friday, Davis stepped up his offensive in Los Angeles, visiting a radio station and granting several television interviews. Fiedler is also in Los Angeles for the weekend and will make many of the same rounds.

KABC Talk Radio’s Michael Jackson asked why Davis had not simply told the Fiedler campaign that he was not interested in quitting the race and let it go at that. Why bring the state law into play?.

“What you have to think of when you are dealing with laws is, ‘Why do we have such a law?’ ” Davis replied. “Where would this country be without election laws? Now this law . . . is a very important law. What it does really in California is protect the people of the state from very wealthy people or political bosses from buying elections.”

Laws ‘Extremely Important’

Davis, a former Los Angeles police chief, recalled the corruption in Los Angeles city government earlier in this century and added: “We fought to keep this city clean . . . and I think election laws are extremely important.”

Later, on KTTV’s midday news, Davis was asked why he did not pick up the phone and call Fiedler and clear things up when he first heard of an apparent attempt to lure him out of the race.

He was in no mood to do that, Davis said, “because starting about the first of October, Mr. Clarke has been calling political reporters planting stories that we had a great (campaign) deficit.”

But in any case, Davis said, he would not have called Fiedler because he believed that a felony had been committed and that it had to be addressed by the authorities.

Judge Holds Tapes

At a brief court session Friday afternoon, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz ruled that copies of secret tape recordings made during the investigation by Zilm should not be turned over to the defense until Monday.

Munoz ordered that the tapes and other evidence be delivered by authorities at the same time as the transcript of the grand jury hearing.

Meanwhile, prosecutors maintained their faith in the validity of the grand jury indictment in the face of continuing allegations that at least one juror, former Los Angeles school board member Richard Ferraro, may have been unable to render an objective judgment about Fiedler and Clarke.

All week, Fiedler and her supporters have complained that Ferraro should have removed himself from the grand jury process because he once served with Fiedler on the school board and has had an antagonistic relationship with her in recent years.

Clarke, for example, has told the news media that Davis contributed $1,000 to a Ferraro campaign for the school board. Davis confirmed that on Friday but said he did not see how that had any effect on the grand jury deliberations in the Fiedler case.

District Attorney Agrees

The district attorney’s office agreed with that assessment.

“Nothing at all indicates that, assuming there was an apparent conflict of interest, that it would necessitate the dismissal of the indictment,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti.

“If that’s the basis upon which they are going to try and act,” said Garcetti, the No. 2 man in the district attorney’s office, “well, then they are really desperate because it takes a certain number, 14 (jurors) to indict.”

In addition, prosecutors said, grand jurors are customarily admonished from undertaking criminal cases if they have “a state of mind . . . which will prevent them from acting impartially and without prejudice.”

Ferraro, they noted, gave no indication that he was prejudiced in the Fiedler case. Ferraro serves as chairman of the jury’s Criminal Justice Committee, which recommended that the full grand jury hold hearings on the Fiedler case. He has repeatedly refused to comment on the case.

D.A.’s Recommendation

According to sources close to the case, the grand jury indicted Fiedler even though the district attorney’s office recommended against such action. The prosecution did, however, recommend the indictment of Clarke, the sources told The Times.

Fiedler announced Wednesday that she and Clarke planned to marry “after the election,” thus raising the question of whether they could avoid testifying against each other if the case does not come to trial until after their marriage.

A 1984 state law, however, says marriage partners cannot cite marital privilege to avoid testifying about alleged crimes that occurred before their union. The law, ironically, was sponsored by Davis in the state Senate in 1983.

In any case, prosecutors said, they are not intending to call Fiedler and Clarke to testify against each other because both are defendants, not witnesses.