BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Charles Lewis, what is the Fund for Independence in Journalism?

CHARLES LEWIS, PRESIDENT, FUND FOR INDEPENDENCE IN JOURNALISM: Well, it’s a legal defense endowment fund for the Center for Public Integrity which I found then ran for several years. The idea is to create a fund of money – initially that was the idea behind the Center to protect it. There are a lot of people that hate what the Center writes and there’s a need to have a backstop there.

And so that’s in – that’s occurring as we speak but then the other thing is I – it could be a bit of a platform to talk about what’s happening to journalism, and what’s happening to information, and what’s happening to our society when it comes to knowing about what’s going on and a lot of larger issues.

I hope to do some educational type stuff from the fund itself but the initial impetus was to stand behind – that’s a self-insurance mechanism really for the Center. It’s very unusual. I don’t think anyone has ever done this for a journalism type entity.

The Center had some litigation and fortunately it’s all been at the moment dismissed, three cases brought, three dismissed, but one of them took five years and was brought by Russian oligarchs. And has a way of getting your attention when they have several billion dollars and you don’t and they have major law firms that would like to squish you like a bug. A little scrappy non-profit has got to think creatively and I think – I think we may have done that. I hope, we’ll see.

LAMB: In 1989 you founded the Center for Public Integrity. What does that mean and what is it?

LEWIS: Well, it was basically I was a producer at 60 Minutes for Mike Wallace and I was – I was frustrated then about the level of investigative reporting about those in power and I wanted more time to look at things. And all the good names involving investigative journalism were taken. There was a Center for Investigative Reporting, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and so I thought well all investigative journalism and all discussion about that subject of power all comes down to public integrity one way or another, at least it does to me. So I just called it the Center for Public Integrity.

So it is – it has been and is a 501c3 tax-exempt organization. And the idea is to do long-form investigations. And the 15 years I ran it the Center did about 300 reports and 14 books and had a staff of 40 when I left, and took money from foundations and individuals and didn’t take money from companies, labor unions, governments or advertising, which limits your options.

And so anyway it was a very, very exciting run and it is – there’s actually a group of non-profits all over the world now that are sort of looking at journalism a different way, not worrying about people crying on camera and not worrying about three-paragraph stories and trying to go deep. And, you know, this is another way to do it basically.

And I have a theory of life that Lord Atkins (ph) said "life is a matter of application." Anyone who takes a lot of time and has a bunch of people looking at any subject is going to find some things that no one else found. It’s not in some ways not all that complicated.

So many of the studies the Center did took years, dozens of researchers, and millions of records were combed and studied carefully. And that’s sort of the MO of the Center and so that’s what we did and is what it still does.

LAMB: I read somewhere that you got ticked off because you had done a bunch of research on James Wright, Jim Wright, the former Speaker of the House that increased his wealth over a period of time. What’s that story? Where were you then?

LEWIS: I was a producer with Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes. And I had been to Texas. I had investigated some things about Wright. He had been – at the time he was the Majority Leader about to become Speaker of the House. And I noticed some – and I don’t want to suggest I was the only one who noticed this but I certainly noticed that he – there were some things that made my eyebrows raise. And I had three or four feet thick worth of documents. I sent a researcher down also separately to pull material.

And I thought we should know who the new Speaker of the House is. And there just was no interest whatsoever. And at one point someone said, "Well, you know, Chuck, what’s your problem, you know? So what if his net worth increased by a factor of five while he was the Majority Leader" and "maybe he just made good investments."

And I kept getting these slightly bazaar responses and I just got very angry. But I worked there – I was a line producer. I didn’t have any power. And so two years later after this whole thing blew up, figuratively speaking, and Wright had to resign as the first Speaker to resign since 1800, Mike Wallace came to me and he said, "Chuck, you must really think I’m an ass about that whole Wright thing."

And I said, "Yes, I do, as a matter of fact." I had a problem with what had happened.

And there were several of these that were starting to happen. And I’m not trying to pick on 60 Minutes. I happen to think as a news magazine it set the standard for those things and it’s still the best on – even – you know, it’s been on the air now as you know 37 years I think or something like that.

And – but, you know, I wanted to do a pure investigation. I didn’t want anybody telling me what I could look at and not look at. And I think you can start to see why I felt the need to do something different I guess.

LAMB: As you know, there’s another Texas connection, the Mary Mapes …

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: … 60 Minutes producer …

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: … who found these documents that were found to be fraudulent I guess. What is your take on Mary Mapes? Did you know her, did you work with her?

LEWIS: Well, I didn’t know her except the last year before that scandal CBS called me and they asked me – I mean I was at the Center. At that time there was no relationship with CBS. There was a retainer years ago, a consultant agreement for one year, so I mean I know all those folks. I worked there, of course, years ago.

And they asked me to look into something that was being investigated I guess you’d say. And I went down to Texas and I met her for the first time. And I looked into it and – it’s a long story, a long anecdote, but basically what happened is I didn’t think there was anything to it. The person seemed to have some problems in his credibility, frankly.

LAMB: Talking about the man named Berkett (ph)?

LEWIS: Well, no. It was a different – it was not Berkett (ph) and it was the precise National Guard issue. But it was some of – it was another type of thing about Bush’s past but it was a different part of the past and it was a different person altogether.

You know, she was very – inside CBS very well regarded. She was the most important producer to Dan Rather, which inside CBS when he was the anchor is not unimportant. And she was very nice to me. I had no issues with Mary personally.

I do think one of the pieces about that whole CBS scandal that I personally feel is when you look at a subject 30 years old – which is difficult to put it mildly, to look at any subject 30 years later – and then you only – you have a few weeks and one or two people, and then there’s mistakes that are made that are unquestionably made that, you know, where it’s not done the way it should be done, then everyone is shocked that this happened.

To me it’s not shocking. If you hollow out a news division, if you gut literally the staff – when I was there in the mid ’80s they gut the – gutted the staff 25 percent. I saw Edward R. Murrow’s producer retired somewhat involuntarily. And, you know, when you see that where the soul is being cut out of a great news organization and then you see that they’re having issues putting together a story – and yes, there’s much more to the story on all sides and it was highly politicized, and there were folks on both sides that wanted certain outcomes. I know I’m well aware of all those issues but one fundamental reality is you’re not going to do investigative reporting if you’ve been neutered, if you don’t have anyone to do it or if that person is doing several stories.

I mean, Mary Mapes won a Peabody Award the same year she fell from grace and was fired by CBS over the Memogate thing at CBS. And to go and help to break the Abu Ghraib scandal and to also then have one of the most embarrassing moments a journalist can ever have that we can think of really in the same year within a few months, it’s a really tragic tale of the high-wire act that an investigative producer has to walk.

And if you’re out there by yourself investigating the most powerful folks in our society and you’re there by yourself – people used to think when I was at 60 Minutes that you had a busload of researchers rolling into town with clipboards, and calculators, and computers and it’s absolutely not true. You were there by yourself and you had a few days, and you were on the phone to New York every 20 minutes and they wanted to know what have you got, what have you got, that was investigative, quote/unquote, "investigative reporting."

And so I, you know, my perspective is that I find it all just incredibly sad and tragic and I might also add I think there’s a piece of history we’ll never know the true story about. To spend $5 million investigating what happened with Memogate with an independent commission and not being able at the end of the day to say whether or not the information was true or not true is somewhat mysterious and also disturbing.

LAMB: When you founded the Center back in 1989 where did you get your first check?

LEWIS: Gosh, the first check I think was – you know I – it’s been – that was in ’88 or 89. I got my first check within a few days from different places. I had a foundation in South – I guess North Carolina, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation gave a $25,000 check. I had at the earliest days, the first couple years of the signer I had business and labor money. It never amounted to much, it was eight or 10 percent of the total each year, but there was some money there so there may have been a check.

There was a company from South Carolina, the Milliken Company, that was – I had done a story at 60 Minutes that they were quite – I guess got their attention and I had talked to them and met them.

And then ABC News retained me. Didn’t – I couldn’t – they couldn’t retain me because I had quit television. But they retained the Center to make available information about our investigations, not exclusively but in that we would distribute it to all the media – but they would get a peak at it and they could start to prepare coverage if it interested them.

And all those checks came in around the same time. I don’t know the precise day each one arrived but that’s some of the money that first came in.

LAMB: When you look on your Web site, your new one, the Fund for Independence in Journalism and on the Center for Public Integrity and you look at the people who are working there trying to find any kind of a political affiliation it’s hard. However, people who don’t like the media will see that Roberta Baskin now runs the – has your former job and Catherine Cross (ph), who used to run CNN is what, a vice president there – but you sift through you don’t see very many political jobs that anybody had except you had one time in your life when you were an intern for Bill Roth, Republican from Delaware – how often have you had to live with that as people think you’re a Republican? Is that good or bad?

LEWIS: Well, these days in a – in a town controlled basically by one party, happens to also be Republican, it’s probably useful that I was an intern for Roth. I was very, very fortunate to work in Washington during the Watergate scandal and to work for a Republican senator and then a few years later to work for Carl Bernstein, one of the two reporters that helped break Watergate who was at that time the bureau chief at ABC News. So I felt in a very compressed period of time, in just a few years, I saw the bunker mentality and the siege mentality of the Republican Party was living through if you criticize your president back then, Richard Nixon, you were seen as disloyal in the extreme. And if you were too supportive you looked like you were in the tank. So most Republican lawmakers, figuratively speaking, hid under their desks. They didn’t want any – they didn’t want to discuss it period.

And then the work in journalism and be on the other side always trying to ferret out – so the Center itself, the Center for Public Integrity, has, you know, based – the backgrounds are journalists backgrounds and they’re …

LAMB: Roberta Baskin did what before she came?

LEWIS: Roberta Baskin was in television at various places. She was a correspondent for 48 Hours, she was at PBS for Now (ph) with Del Moyers (ph), she was a mid – well, a senior producer in charge of investigative reporting at ABC News for 20/20 and Primetime Live and she was in television for about 25 years or more. I may be off on the years.

So most of the people at the Center come from the – they’re either young journalists who want to spend their life doing that or they’re mid-career journalists who – we used to call ourselves ex-patriot journalists who had left the major commercial media and were looking for a place to do so-called pure investigative reporting.

My number two when I was running the Center was – you know it was unclear what he was politically but his father was a Republican judge and he was heretical about everything. I could never quite tell what he thought.

But we definitely have had Republicans independents and Democrats on the staff itself because we’re from America and that’s what the culture is. But it was a very, very strong, you know, policy really to not get involved in politics and to – you know, you’re supposed to be a journalist, you’re supposed to stand clear of all that. You may have your own views but keep them to yourself.

And that was sometimes a problem. We had one or two young folks who couldn’t stand it and interns who decided they didn’t want to stay on much more than their internship for that reason that they – the neutrality was getting on their nerves. Which I also understand, the passions run awfully strong these days.

And one of the problems of the journalistic profession is this whole objectivity, impartiality, neutrality issue. And as you know, it’s a deep issue inside the profession itself. And some folks think you should not even vote and other folks think that you – that that’s all silly and you’re a human being and you have feelings and you have observations and experiences and to suggest that you haven’t had any thoughts in your life is disingenuous.

So it’s how you – how you render a fair and accurate picture of any subject or situation. Obviously you need to come across – not just come across but to be as fair and reasonable – and there’s no one more so than C-span I might add. But as we both know, in a polarized Hatfield and McCoy world that we live in today, the most evenly divided country politically since the 1880s, it’s almost masochistic to try to appear to be neutral in some of these things.

I mean – and there is actually – and your responsibility at times I think sometimes when you strive so hard to be evenhanded that you let certain outrageous things pass because that’s what one side is saying and – not you personally but I mean a journalist – it’s just extremely difficult. And I’m studying this very closely now for a book I’m working on. I’m trying to – what is the role of journalism exactly when it comes to truth and at what point is the journalist supposed to be direct and say what they’re seeing upfront and without any holds barred. And that’s not something journalists are supposed to do.

But I also don’t like the role of stenography where you’re just writing down things that are just flat out untrue. And that gets on my nerves in a major way and I think journalists have been complicit too often.

And so what is the right way? It’s very extremely difficult and so I’m still trying to grapple with that.

LAMB: Let me just – you were born in Newark, Delaware?

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: You are about 51 years old?

LEWIS: Unfortunately, I just turned 52.

LAMB: You went to the University of Delaware Political Science?

LEWIS: That’s right.

LAMB: Got a masters degree from Johns Hopkins School of International Studies?

LEWIS: That’s right.

LAMB: Are you married?

LEWIS: I am.

LAMB: Children?

LEWIS: Yes, I have two. One from a previous marriage, a daughter who is 27; and a son – my marriage now is five years old.

LAMB: The Center – you left the Center December 31st 2004 which means you’ve been out of there one year.

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: Why did you give it up?

LEWIS: Well, it was a really hard decision. I mean something that was very personal. I have to say I – you know I noticed that I was taking all these exotic trips and I found myself at the Arctic Circle 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle at the Ice Hotel in Sweden and I was in the bush in South Africa and up near the China-India border in the Himalayas and dinosaur digging out in the Bad Lands, and I started – nothing gets by me. I started realizing there’s something slightly odd about my behavior that …

LAMB: Was this your own elected travel or had to do with … LEWIS: Yes, it was elective travel. I wanted to – in some cases I had to speak in those countries or be in those areas but most of it was – I mean those exotic things were totally my choice.

And I came to realize that I was basically turning 50 and I was having trouble getting my mind around that. And I had never had any issues with birthdays, the other ones never – I mean they were very pleasant celebrations but it didn’t – you know I wasn’t introspective about them. I realized there was a certain amount of sand in that hourglass and I realized that we had – I had run the Center for 15 years, started it from my house, we had won 35 awards, we’d had a bestselling book, we – you know, and I – we had won every award you can win. The Pulitzer doesn’t allow have an online category.

So I …

LAMB: Yet.

LEWIS: Yet. I think they will actually. I hope that they do.

But so I don’t mean to say that I did all that because of awards but what I mean is I didn’t quite know what else I should do. I mean I – we would – the Center would always keep doing reports and I would keep trying to be in charge of them.

But I think – so part of it was myself looking at the hourglass and the other thing was, very directly stated, at some points the founder has to leave the building. I mean if – for me the calculation was would this place live on as an institution with – if I got hit by a truck. And so I – you know, that’s a very difficult thing because if you make the decision you’ve got to make it with the understanding that your timing may be off and it may be a bad time, and that your infrastructure may be inadequate or all the pieces in place may not be in place as much as you thought.

And this is a very, very deep soul-searching decision. I didn’t make it lightly. It was – it was like a bombshell on the board of directors and the staff was in shock I think for weeks. And, you know, I – it was a – I have to say the last year or two – I announced to the board of directors in January of 2004 that I would leave at the end of that year. And the Center board had one whole year to deal with how to handle me leaving the building at the end of the year. And I’ve been helping quietly and behind the scenes this past year. But it’s been a bit of a long goodbye.

And even I’m part time helping with this fund which also is sort of protecting the franchise sort of as a founder thing.

But I left because I thought personally that it was – I don’t know I can’t explain it. But I sort of thought it was time. And we had done some things I was immensely proud of but I also had a restlessness I couldn’t quite explain. And all that added up to a need to do it.

And I knew I was going to set a lot of my very trusted and beloved staff in a turmoil and it wasn’t fun to watch that part, I hated it. But you know that’s what I’ve done so.

LAMB: Two of the sayings that you’ve done and we’ll pick one on one side and one on the other. You were responsible for the Lincoln bedroom unveiling of the kind of people that stayed there during the Clinton administration and then you were responsible for finding that Ken Lay was the largest contributor to George W. Bush.

Talk about both of those. How did you find the Lincoln bedroom story?

LEWIS: Well, actually, it was – it was really fun. I had breakfast with someone, a state senator, who was in town going to a holiday party at the White House for – with Clinton, you know. And you know I had never met this fellow. He was fairly well known in the country and I always thought it would be fun to met him and we just sort of had a friendly get-to-know-each-other meeting.

And he mentioned and I said, "Where – why are you in town?" And he said, "Well I was at this party last night." And he said, "And after dinner we all – they all went in to see a movie in the White House theater with the president. But this one fellow that was in their midst went upstairs into the Lincoln bedroom." And he described – he said it was a fellow in his 50s who was a big donor to the party and he had had a – this is a direct quote, a "bin bet" (ph) with a woman 30 years younger. And he said, "I’m not going to any stupid movie," wink, wink, and he goes upstairs.

And I’m sitting there thinking to myself, oh my, God, that’s so – I mean I tried to act like I just, you know, didn’t really notice it but, of course, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And I went back to the office and I said, you know – and so we started noticing there had been hints that they were having donors stay over here and there but – in some of the media. But no one had records. And we – the records inside the White House – this is before Monica. And by the way, we don’t do sex scandals. I wasn’t interested in that.

I was interested in why would a fat-cat donor be in the White House sleeping over and what was going on over there was my interest.

And so it turns out that there are two sets of records, the White House entry logs of the Secret Service at the gates of the White House; and then upstairs there’s what is known as usher records. They literally have like 10 bedrooms and folks sleep in different rooms and they have different names for the rooms.

And bottom line is that’s not public. Even in the White House libraries that information is not made public. That is a private, personal papers of the president of the United States. We’re not talking treaties here. It’s like who slept in what room what night. That’s considered their personal property.

And bottom line is someone slipped us a one year of everyone who slept – the actual records basically of everyone who slept there. And then we just did what any good reporter would do. We took that list a – not a public document but a very valuable document and we messed – meshed it with the Federal Election Commission records and we could very quickly see a pattern.

And we did a report called Fat-Cat Hotel and we listed 75 men and women who had slept over and how much money they had given. And we interviewed – we tried to reach each of them. Some of them said the bed was lumpy. Some of them told us to go to hell. Depended on the person. Some of them wouldn’t return the call, of course.

So that was the Lincoln bedroom. And the best part of the story is the DNC and the White House and the Clinton campaign all went like this. No one wanted to talk about it, of course. And someone inside the Democratic Party, as a spokesperson, said that this is an urban myth like alligators in the New York sewer system. And I thought boy, that’s a creative non-denial denial. What are they saying here?

And six months later the White House acknowledged begrudgingly that when all those campaign finance scandals were playing out they acknowledged that actually 938 people had slept over over four years, not – and we knew there were 75 because we had and one-year list.

But the funniest part of the story is even funnier. So they admitted basically that we were right. And then eventually a Clinton notation came out in a memo where they said how about if we reward donors with overnight stays and it was written by Terry McAuliffe, then the finance chair for the Democratic Party. And in the margin Clinton wrote, "What a great idea." And so it’s very clear it was a strategy but that was not what they initially said.

Other presidents – then the White House, the Clinton White House, said, "Well other presidents do this. This is no big deal."

And my favorite part of the whole story is within about five days or a week all the living presidents of both parties issued how many people had slept over in their White House. This is all private, previously secret information. Of course I didn’t release the names, just the numbers. Clinton by far had – I think no president had more than 300 in four years and Clinton had 900. So he was doing it systematically and far more elaborately.

LAMB: Go back to that person that slipped it out to you. And I’m assuming you don’t want to tell us who that was – but what’s the motivation and how often is that the way it works in Washington and was somebody unhappy with the Clintons you think?

LEWIS: You know it’s a funny story, I mean, this was a – this was a Democrat who clearly supported Clinton. I mean he was incumbent president. I don’t know – I couldn’t figure out if it was just gossip or if he was deeply offended personally by the smarminess with fat cats or what his motive was. I mean I knew that he was telling me something very, very interesting and potentially useful.

LAMB: Would we know that name if you gave it to us?

LEWIS: You would actually. And I’m tempted to give it. It’s just I haven’t discussed it with the guy and I’ve never discussed it just because I would – it’s not that I’m – I don’t have a lot of secret sources. I don’t want to give the wrong idea. I use parking garages mostly to part my car.

LAMB: Did this fellow tell you he doesn’t want anybody to know who it was?

LEWIS: You know he didn’t. He didn’t say that. I just never disclosed who – where we got it because I thought nothing would matter if we didn’t have documents. I wouldn’t – it wouldn’t work if we said someone said a lot of people sleep there. As you know, you would need corroboration.

LAMB: Was it somebody in the White House?

LEWIS: No, no, no. This fellow lived in another state.

LAMB: How would he had access to the 75 names?

LEWIS: No, he didn’t have the names. He only saw the strange occurrences.

LAMB: Oh, I’m sorry. I was talking about the names …

LEWIS: Yes.

LAMB: … that somebody slipped the names to you.

LEWIS: Oh, the names that were slipped to me – remember there are a lot of investigations. There were five independent counsel investigations and there were probably as many committees on the Hill investigating the Clintons. And so they were getting some material was coming out of the White House up to the Hill. Or the DNC and the White House were begrudgingly having to produce certain documents.

So you can imagine how that then would – one of the best friends journalists have had traditionally is Capitol Hill. Fortunately it leaks like a sieve. There are competing interests and documents are up there fairly abundantly even if they’re not, quote-unquote, "public" or on some Web site doesn’t mean you can’t find them fairly easily and that’s how that occurred.

LAMB: The Enron story and Ken Lay, how did you find out that he was the largest contributor and what do you mean by largest contributor?

LEWIS: Well, we had a thing with our Buying of the President books, it was a little gimmicky, I admit it. It was from the David Letterman Show, the top 10 list.

We – no politician ever admits where their money comes from. In fact, it’s we’re supposed to believe it’s manna that has fallen from the sky, somehow totally pure and with no strings, which I’ve always found highly amusing.

And so we thought – and it was a little mischievous admittedly – if we could just list their 10 best friends in the world who had sponsored their existence as politicians so we came up with a phrase called top 10 career patrons. And we would – looking at presidential candidates we would go back 10, 20, 30 or more years depending on the politician, we would add up every penny they got and we would literally come up with the top 10 people.

And in the case of Bush – now that meant in his case of course as a Texas governor we would have to go to Austin and pull state records. And we did that with any governor who was running. We did it with Alexander in Tennessee, we did it with Clinton in Arkansas.

And so what happened is he had by the time he was running in ’99 – he had been governor for at that point coming up on five full years, something like that. I think he was elected in ’94, took the oath in early ’95, so something like that, four or five years. And so we had two gubernatorial campaigns, he had just been re-elected recently in ’98. So we had those two years of state records.

Now the reason Enron ended up having about $550,000 as his top contributor – for a guy in politics five years $550,000 is a – is a pretty impressive chunk of money. The reason it was so high is Texas has no limits on contributions. And these were Enron executives and employees who have all given and their spouses have given and, you know, that kind of thing and that’s how that was disclosed.

The beauty of – it’s anal retentive work pulling contribution data and then meshing it state and federal. In his case there was some federal because he had at that point announced his campaign prior to the book’s publication. But the advantage of that heavy lifting research is that things tumble out that you – you know, I barely knew how Enron was, frankly. We had actually noticed Enron in – with Ron Brown on his travel, those famous trips that he took as commerce secretary, Enron was on some of those trade missions. And that’s the first time I heard Enron’s name was in the mid ’90s really.

But I didn’t really understand fully how close the relationship was. We later were among those who found the 300 letters between George W. Bush and Ken Lay. When the scandal first hit after Enron declares bankruptcy, the White House and the President began to refer to Lay as Mr. Lay but in all the letters it was Kenny Boy and so – and one …

LAMB: Where are those letters? Are they on your – on the Web site?

LEWIS: They should be on the Web site, they’re not. The Center has them. They’re also down in Texas, there’s some places you can get them down in Texas. They are – Texas actually has a pretty good freedom of information law as a state which is not something I would have predicted, you know, if I didn’t – had it in mind that …

LAMB: 300 letters?

LEWIS: 300 letters, yes.

LAMB: That’s both from the President and from Ken Lay …

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: … back and forth?

What was the gist of those letters? What was examples?

LEWIS: Well, there were different things. Well, they – remember, they went way back. I mean Bush the father had helped Lay back in the late ’80s. And most people don’t probably remember but the Houston convention of the Republican Party, the re-election convention really – Republican Party convention for George Herbert Walker Bush – with a co-chair that was Ken Lay. So there was a very deep personal relationship with the Bush family.

That’s not to say that Lay and Enron didn’t have a close relationship also with Bill Clinton and other leaders. But the party that they were closer to was clearly the Republicans. The politician they were most generous with unquestionably was George W. Bush and that’s borne out 74 percent of Enron’s contributions went to the Republican Party and the person getting the most cash personally was W. – George W. Bush.

LAMB: The Fortune magazine reporter Beth McLean (ph), who has been here – and you’ve got to be careful with this because there’s a lot of different sources for things – but she really boiled it down to the Enron scandal began to unravel because a short seller was on that conference call with one of the top officials at Enron. And the reason I bring this up is that you’re talking about a guy you just happened to have breakfast with that led to the Lincoln bedroom thing.

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: Where – what were some of the other sources for your studies and what are some of the other reports that you’ve made over the years? And you were there for what, 14 years at the Center – 15 years …

LEWIS: Yes.

LAMB: … at the Center?

LEWIS: Well, yes, I mean sometimes you’re just fortunate. I mean someone slipped us the Patriot II Act, the secret draft legislation that the administration had not acknowledged they were even work on. They had …

LAMB: Stop just for a moment. Patriot II was what?

LEWIS: That was …

LAMB: Is that what we have now?

LEWIS: No, no. It was a piece of legislation 120 pages, a draft, and it was called the Domestic Enhancement Security Act of 2003. It was being developed inside the Justice Department by aides to then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

And it was never introduced actually but there’s some evidence the Vice President and the Speaker of the House actually had access to this draft.

And it came out – basically the Center posted it on the Web site against the wishes of the Justice Department. They asked us not to do it. We asked them to spell their name and we put it up on the Web. There were 350,000 unique visitors within five days, 200 stories nationwide.

LAMB: Let me stop you and ask you …

LEWIS: Yes.

LAMB: … the source of that, was it somebody inside the Justice Department?

LEWIS: It was, yes.

LAMB: And what was their motive to slip it to you?

LEWIS: Well, I’m – I think in that case my impression is their motive was they were concerned and frustrated with what they were reading.

This was being – taking the existing already controversial Patriot Act and extending and enlarging the power of the executive so …

LAMB: The reason – the reason I asked that is somebody listening who has never worked in government and …

LEWIS: Right, right.

LAMB: … doesn’t understand this, you have the Justice Department, you have Attorney General Ashcroft – would this more than likely be a career employee who probably doesn’t think like that attorney general who saw this and then slipped it to you?

LEWIS: Yes. I think that that’s a fair assessment. I mean and one of the – again, one of the things that helps I think citizens in this country and helps journalists try to get closer to the truth is there’s a whole layer of political appointees at the top of the entire executive branch. But fortunately – and I say fortunately regardless of who is in power – fortunately there is a professional class of civil servants that is about 95 percent of the federal government that is directly below those political appointees that have their agenda and their talking points and their photo ops and all their agenda items.

And they are in the trenches dealing with these policy issues for literally decades of their careers. And they also some of the more wild and crazy folks on this civil service roles some of them have developed relationships with journalists over the years. One – maybe they were up on the Hill and they moved over to some agency or maybe they got to know a journalist over some issue or sometimes they won’t talk to journalists directly they’ll just talk to a member of Congress. And there’s back channel ways to send information in and out to protect their anonymity. And now with the increased use of polygraphs and leak investigations it’s a little dicier than it used to be.

LAMB: What happened when you published the Patriot II draft?

LEWIS: Well, what happened was the attorney general and the Justice Department issued a statement within 45 minutes saying they have lots of drafts floating around the Justice Department. I don’t think they have many 120-page drafts that you could introduce in the Senate tomorrow morning, but that’s fine. They issued a statement trying to minimize what had gone up there.

The public response was astonishing and conservatives were as angry as liberals. And interestingly Congressional Quarterly did a story that the people that are most angry were committee chairmen who had oversight over the Justice Department and they had not been told of this act and they had not received the draft. And so they had been out of the loop and they were infuriated that they had to defend some additional controversial legislation beyond what had already been enacted. And so they were getting all these press inquiries and they didn’t even had a copy.

So a lot of the people – we almost had our sight crash on the Web because there were so many people. And we think most of the people – not most but a good number of them were on the Hill trying to read the act.

And what happened is that the administration never brought that legislation forward. The reaction was so strong against it.

Now clearly, what we’re seeing now with the Patriot Act, this new – the renewal of it with some modifications – is a, frankly, a smaller, tamer version of what this was.

LAMB: So you’ve had a direct impact from 2003 until today because you were able to publish that draft?

LEWIS: I think – I don’t want – it’s not for me to say. I think that it was helpful. I think it stirred a debate.

I mean the reason – my problem was that the administration wasn’t admitting that they were preparing a sequel to the Patriot Act. They had actually flat out told Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy, on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, that there was no such legislation. They had actually said this in testimony that was – you could get, you know, from, you know, the Web and newspapers and things like that – testimony. And for six months they had been privately developing this thing without telling the world.

And I – the timing of this was February 2003. Everyone knew we were going to war in a few weeks in Iraq. And the first Patriot Act was jammed through Congress within six weeks and there was no debate on it and there was no – there was not a single question asked of the attorney general in his one hour of testimony.

And so what I saw happening – I don’t know if it’s for sure I just know what it seemed like I was seeing was they were readying this and in the middle of the Iraq war they might just throw it – throw it up there and see what happens and see if it jams through to support our troops and support America in a time – I didn’t know if that’s what they were planning but there was something really strange occurring and I thought it was our job to get that thing up there. And I’m very glad we did it.

LAMB: Another source you see in your reports is something – the bureaucratese is called FOIA.

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: What is FOIA?

LEWIS: FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act. It was …

LAMB: How long has it been around?

LEWIS: It’s been around – in ’66 it took the country almost 20 years to enact the Freedom of Information Act. It was signed into law begrudgingly by Lyndon Johnson in ’66.

LAMB: What was the reason for it?

LEWIS: Well, it was to make information about government public and available to citizens to hold our officials accountable really was the idea.

LAMB: Did it come out of the Vietnam war?

LEWIS: I think the Vietnam war certainly helped the public interest in the subject, that’s part of it. But I think there was a need for it that far transcended because there were people angry about this in the late ’40s including journalists who wanted more information access. If you asked for information about campaign contributions you would be told why, why do you want this and what’s your name.

And, you know, so I think there was a general – you know how much the public knew about this and how much it was pushed by the journalistic and academic and other communities that need and use information and study things closely is a subject of conjecture I guess but …

LAMB: How would you all use this? Give us an example of something …

LEWIS: Well, my …

LAMB: … that you couldn’t get.

LEWIS: … favorite example of it is – that we use – and we use it a lot – we had this idea that wouldn’t it be nice to know who is getting rich from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. And how could we find out who was getting contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is taxpayer money. Billions of dollars, lives are being lost. We have every right to know this.

We also knew that no war in U.S. history did we ever know who was getting the contracts while it was being fought. Which when you think about that is outrageous but true.

And so Vietnam, even the first Persian Gulf war we didn’t know who was getting the contracts. This was before the Internet.

And so we thought well, you know what we’re going to try to get these things. It’s crazy, it’s slightly insane but we’re going to give it a shot. We filed 73 Freedom of Information Act requests. We had a team of 20 people – researchers, writers, editors but a little core team of about five-six people that were doing it every minute.

And we received thousands of documents and we posted all of the known contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Pentagon and the State Department including the Agency for International Development.

LAMB: And they’re still on the Centers …

LEWIS: They’re still on the …

LAMB: … for Public Integrity Web site?

LEWIS: … right.

LAMB: And what’s that Web site? What’s the call …

LEWIS: It’s publicintegrity.org – O-R-G – is the homepage for the Center for Public Integrity. And then you can click around on the homepage and find the Iraq contracts.

But the most useful part of it is we were the ones who really you could first – by looking, doing the universe of contracts you could then see very clearly that Halliburton not only had gotten some no-bid contracts, they had actually gotten more dollar amount – the highest – they were the most favored contractor by this administration. By far they received the most money in terms of contracts of any contractor. And all the top 10 recipients of contracts were all campaign contributors in a large serious way and they all had former generals or former folks in the – there was a pattern for the biggest contractors and how things work in Washington.

But the Halliburton thing was – we even had the declassification of the $7 billion infamous no-bid contract. We actually sued the Army. We won. They gave us in court and we got the document and we put it up on the Web. People can actually look at the no-bid Halliburton contract itself and read it.

And all of that was from the Freedom of Information Act. That is – this is one of the most important laws in our society and it’s being used more and more each year. That’s the good news.

The bad news is we’ve seen serious rollbacks, the most serious rollbacks in decades of that law by the current administration. Out and out hostility I would say.

LAMB: Would – had you not filed the Freedom of Information Act for those contracts would we not know what they were now or would somebody else have done it?

LEWIS: Well, we might have – you know, you could have gleaned from PR and other things – everyone knew Halliburton was getting contracts. We would have known who some of the folks were. We would not know the full picture and we wouldn’t know the dimension issue. We wouldn’t be able to flatly state Halliburton got the most money in terms of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. You would not be able to say that because you wouldn’t know. And the Pentagon wasn’t going to put it out.

And so if you think about it that’s absurd. I mean we live, theoretically, in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and you can’t even find out who is getting these big, fat contracts.

So I actually personally object as a citizen that you even have to go through this rigmarole of filing of Freedom of Information Act requests let alone suing them.

But I also think and I’m telling journalists at every turn don’t just file these requests, appeal, appeal, appeal, push, push, push, because you cannot be too aggressive.

LAMB: How – go back to the Center because I know you’re not there directly but you do the legal fund for them …

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: … which you founded in 1989 – 1998. How much money do they need to run the Center?

LEWIS: Well, roughly between $4 and $5 million. Staff when I left was 40 people. I think it’s 35 or – I don’t know the exact number.

LAMB: Is there a limit to who can contribute and how much they can contribute?

LEWIS: You know maybe there should be but there is no limit about how much they can contribute. I mean if anyone ever tried to buy the Center – I’m joking a little bit – but I mean if there was an astonishing situation we would like to – the board would certainly discuss that and make a decision whether it was appropriate.

The Center has received large multi-year grants sometimes that are, you know, serious grants.

LAMB: Who is the biggest contributor in the years that you were there?

LEWIS: I think the – it’s between the McArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. Those two foundations – I think McArthur – the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation Chicago has given – I’m not sure. The exact number is between $3 and $4 million out of the $30 million that I raised in 15 years. They were the top.

LAMB: To back off this for a moment … LEWIS: Yes.

LAMB: … and again, people who sitting here they don’t like that you’re doing this stuff to the Bush administration or for that matter the Clinton administration. Couldn’t the McArthur Foundation or the Knight Foundation, I think the Stewart Mott Foundation’s involved, there’s a long list on there that you can find – be doing this for political reasons?

LEWIS: They could. The board of the McArthur Foundation is pretty non-partisan. I mean for years they had people like Paul Harvey, the famous radio broadcaster on it. And, you know, do they have an agenda? Do they see the world – are there folks there that would like to see certain things in the world? I’m sure that’s the case because they’re human beings.

But, you know, my feeling is if you disclose where the money came from and if they’re not trying to get a precise, palpable goal, if they have programs about accountability and democracy and those kinds of issues, if it feels comfortable – and by the way, no one is like throwing money our way. This is us beating the door down and literally almost for months with our own proposal. So if we disclose it and we look at who they are, and we disclose who they are and then people can go check it out for themselves.

If someone is doing something that is overtly political the board of directors in the Center will stand down and not participate and not actually solicit or accept money – new money from that person. There is some precedent for that at the Center. And so there are fairly strict rules to the extent we can have rules.

LAMB: On your Web site, the Fund for Independence in Journalism, what’s that Web site?

LEWIS: It’s tfij.org, O-R-G.

LAMB: You have resources for citizens and journalists on there and you list the American Journalism Review, American Press Institute, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Asian-American Journalists’ Association, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, there’s a lot of them …

LEWIS: Right.

LAMB: … Freedom of Information …

LEWIS: 30 or 40 ...

LAMB: … Center …

LEWIS: … I think.

LAMB: … Fund for Investigative Journalism. Where does all this money come from and is this a backdoor for people who are very political but don’t want to give to a candidate?

LEWIS: Well, I mean I guess it might – I mean those are all groups. Those things you just read are all non-profit groups. There are 30 or 40 at least, there probably are more, journalistic non-profits that support journalism one way or another. They’re either for freedom of information, they’re there to protect journalists from being killed in different parts of the world, some of them are for training like investigative reporters and editors.

I think most of these are funded by and for journalists – are funding them and they’re the chief beneficiaries. They’re the foundations that think an important part of democracy is a robust discourse and conversation and ventilating the issues of the day. And they believe in the idea of freedom of the press and the First Amendment and they’re not journalists themselves they may be funders of journalism as a foundation. They could also just be citizens who are worried about relying entirely on the government for information regardless of who is in power. And those are the kinds of people that support this kind of a civil society that really clearly exists.

Having started a new thing called the Fund for Independence in Journalism, mostly this is, frankly, a deference to groups that have been there long before my new group. And I’m sort of trying to tip my hat to all of them.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is the best thing the United States has to help journalists around the world who are in harm’s way. Investigative Reporters and Editors has been around about 30 years and they do some of the best training of journalists.

My fund has no interest or ability to do either of those two things with those two groups. But there are folks who care about those issues and to help them as a resource they can go to those groups. That’s what that was listed for, for that reason.

And what exactly the fund does, the Fund for Independence in Journalism, is, frankly, still unfolding. I want to spend time looking at truth and looking at journalism in a truth-to-power way, and looking back over the last half century when were the moments when journalists stood up to power and said and did things that were independent and were not stenographic and at the national level, and to get deep into some of these kinds of subjects and issues.

There are groups like the Center for Public Integrity all over the world. There’s no one that actually has found a way to put them all together or at least have them talk to each other. I actually know who all these groups are because most of them have asked me to come to their countries and speak.

And so I – the fund may become a lot of different things. It’s not quite clear what it will become what it will become as I sit here.

LAMB: A lot of people who sit in that chair have been president of their class or president of their student body and you’re another one of those.

LEWIS: That’s true. I was president of my class in high school and then president of the school. That’s true, I was.

LAMB: Did you ever think about running for office – national office, federal office?

LEWIS: I admit I did.

LAMB: When?

LEWIS: When I was in – when I didn’t know better. No, I’m just kidding. When I was in high school and college I was – you know, I had – I had political aspirations. I was, you know – I believe very strongly in public service. I love the country and I think it can be better and I always have and I always will.

And at some point I took a different turn and sort of went into heavy-duty investigative journalism instead of elective office. But having covered the Abscam trials in 1979 and ’80 and ’81 and, of course, watching all the mess that’s happening now with various scandals which history does seem to repeat itself and we’ve had – these problems are not new problems today. And whether you’re tracking it as a journalists or you’re just suffering through it as a citizen, we’re all victims.

But I thought about – I did think about politics. I think at some point I had done too much in the journalism field. I had traveled too much, I had been – I hadn’t put down sufficient roots. I’m a native Delawarean but I’ve lived in Virginia for, boy, close to 30 years. But, you know, running for office means disrupting your life, stopping everything you do, rolling the dice, and hoping that you are victorious. And it costs a lot of money by the way.

LAMB: Speaking of money I only have two minutes left.

LEWIS: Sure.

LAMB: Is money determining what this town does in politics and what bills they pass?

LEWIS: The short answer is yes. I mean there are exceptions. There are some bills that come up that, you know, when you decide to go to war – obviously there are certain bills and certain subjects where you don’t have the money, ka-ching (ph), you know, color of green.

But you take a state of the union address, I can dissect sentence by sentence and tell you who is winning. The powerful interests in this town are more powerful than ever, they have more money than they ever had, they have more lobbyists than they ever had, and they have fewer controls than they’ve ever had. And it’s completely out of control right now. There’s no over sight, there’s no investigation to speak of, the ethics committees must have cobwebs on their doors and in their offices. I don’t know what they do, frankly.

And it’s very, very – it’s really a fairly serious mess. I mean – and the – it’s going to be very interesting to watch the midterm elections and see in this country what people think about and care about and does this matter at all to them these scandals we’re seeing. They are systemic, they involve dozens of members of Congress, huge sums of – millions and millions of dollars. And power and policy are directly linked to money and anyone who thinks otherwise, in my opinion, is living on Neptune.

I know it’s not what anyone in Washington says. It’s not polite to say it but that is the day-to-day grubby reality.

LAMB: On that note, Charles Lewis, President of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, we have to shut her down. Thank you very much.

LEWIS: Thank you. Thanks.