by Randy Singer
“Let’s put her in our top six,” the president said. “I’d like to see a couple of her best opinions—see what kind of writer she is.”
“Done,” Kilpatrick said. He was already thinking about the impact on the African American turnout in November.
“But just so you know,” the president said, “I still like Seth Wachsmann for now.”
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Three days later, President Hamilton stood next to Taj Deegan and made history by nominating the first African American woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. They cut a striking pose, both tall women who had overcome so much, and the president couldn’t resist regaling some of the high points of Deegan’s unlikely story. Her kids stood off to the side, dressed in their Sunday best, and even the Republicans must have known there was no way they could keep Deegan off the bench.
The president urged the Senate, controlled by Democrats, to confirm the appointment during its July session, before it adjourned for the month of August. The Court would start hearing cases again in the fall, and Deegan needed time to get familiar with her new job.
Now approaching eighty, Chief Justice Leonard had been appointed to the Court during Bill Clinton’s first term and ended up being a Clinton clone on the issues. He was pro-abortion, pro–affirmative action, okay with big money in politics, and wishy-washy on LGBT issues. As far as Paige could tell, he had no discernible judicial philosophy other than his deep love for the institution of the Court itself.
Leonard was a Southern gentleman from the Palmetto State who wore seersucker suits and white shoes from Memorial Day until Labor Day every year. He was unfailingly polite, gregariously witty, and the only unifying influence on the Court. He looked the part of a Supreme Court justice—neatly combed gray hair, a thin face lined with wrinkles, and thick glasses that gave him an aura of intelligence despite a reported IQ that wasn’t going to threaten anyone else on the bench.
His opinions were never quoted as the kind of soaring prose that characterized Justice Augusta Augustini’s opinions. But then again, Augustini was a former Harvard law professor and acclaimed fiction author whose opinions sometimes read more like a Steinbeck novel than legal prose. Nor did Leonard’s opinions contain the type of biting commentary that came from David Sikes, former White House counsel for George W. Bush, who loved taking shots at the liberals like Augustini. Instead, Leonard’s opinions were polite and workmanlike, designed to soften blows and avoid alienation. He was the glue that held the Court together, and it was generally agreed that he was the reason that justices Augustini and Sikes had not yet come to physical blows as opposed to just verbal ones.
The chief justice weighed in on Anderson the afternoon before the deposition of Philip Kilpatrick. Paige read the order with a mixture of relief and disappointment. She knew that Kilpatrick’s deposition would have been every bit as combative as Marcano’s. But she was fully prepared and, in some ways, actually looking forward to it.
Now her questions might never see the light of day.
The three-paragraph order from Leonard was narrowly drafted. It recognized the importance of the case and the need for a speedy resolution. This case raises constitutional issues of the highest order, Leonard wrote, including the role that the courts should play in reviewing foreign-policy decisions made by the executive branch. The president’s top-level advisers claim that even the limited discovery authorized by the trial court imposes an undue burden and represents an unconstitutional infringement into state secrets and executive authority.
Accordingly, Leonard halted the deposition of Philip Kilpatrick and any other government witnesses, as well as requests for any documents that might contain state secrets, while the Court conducted a truncated review of the case. Other discovery could proceed, as long as state secrets were not implicated.
Leonard established an expedited briefing schedule and a hearing that would take place on the first Monday in October. Though the order didn’t say so, it was clear that the Court wanted to resolve the issues well in advance of the November elections.
It took Paige a few minutes to absorb the implications. She wasn’t even admitted to the Supreme Court bar yet and didn’t think Wellington was either. But within forty-five days, her team would be filing a brief, and a month or so later Wyatt would be arguing in front of the highest court in the land.
She quickly researched the requirements for admission and determined that she had been practicing law long enough to be admitted by motion. If Wyatt wasn’t already a part of the Supreme Court bar, he could gain admission the same way, assuming that he didn’t have any currently pending bar disciplinary issues.
That thought nearly paralyzed her. If Wyatt had disciplinary issues that would keep him from being admitted to the Court, they would need to associate an experienced practitioner to argue the case. No way was Paige ready to be lead lawyer on a complicated case like this.
She got on the phone with Wellington, and they talked about the order and everything that had to be done in the next two-and-a-half months. She could hear the excitement in Wellington’s giddy voice. Every lawyer dreamed about appearing before the Supreme Court, and now the two of them would be sitting at counsel table next to Wyatt for one of the most anticipated cases of the term.
But it didn’t take long for the euphoria to give way to concern and a building anxiety. It wasn’t a good sign that the Court had granted the stay and decided to review the case. Only a minuscule fraction of petitions for review were actually granted by the Court. And it was even more rare for the Court to expedite a briefing schedule and fully resolve a motion for stay on such a short turnaround. What did that say about their chances?
Wellington was prone to worry, but Paige tried to look at the optimistic side. Maybe the Court was ready to rethink its decision in United States v. Reynolds, a decision that was over sixty years old. Sooner or later, the Anderson case was bound to end up at the Supreme Court anyway. Might as well find out now what the justices were thinking.
Later that day, Paige talked to Wyatt, who didn’t seem at all concerned about the legal aspects of the case. “This is gonna be a blast,” he said.
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With the lull created when the depositions of both Philip Kilpatrick and Daniel Reese were put on hold, it was time for the plaintiff’s team to pay a visit to Gazala Holloman. The Amtrak train left Norfolk for Washington at 6:10 Monday morning, and both Paige and Wellington were thirty minutes early. Wyatt, of course, showed up at the last possible moment. He slept for the first two hours and spent the last two on the phone, spreading out his stuff in the seat next to him so that nobody else would sit in his row. Once they stepped outside Union Station in D.C., Wyatt lit up a cigar that he puffed on during their walk to the Mediterranean restaurant a few blocks away.
Paige wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting from Gazala Holloman, but it wasn’t the woman who showed up about ten minutes late and joined the team at their table. She knew Gazala was a Muslim and half expected her to show up in a full-length black abaya. Instead, the woman wore jeans, sandals, and a tight-fitting blouse, with plenty of makeup to accentuate her striking Lebanese features.
Her personality surprised Paige as well. She’d expected quiet and submissive, but Gazala was engaging, bold, and loud. She prodded Wyatt to order something more “interesting” than the steak roti and pita bread he had his eyes on. It took her less than five minutes to begin trading barbs with the old lawyer, matching him wit for wit, sarcasm for sarcasm.
Gazala, like her husband, was a journalist. She wrote for Islamic periodicals and online publications. She was a crusader for women’s rights, especially in Saudi Arabia, where women couldn’t go out in public without an escort and were not allowed to drive.
“As it should be,” interjected Wyatt.
“How do you put up with this?” Gazala asked Paige.
“In small doses,” Paige said. She was the only one who wasn’t kidding.
When the meal arrived, Gazala turned ser
ious. She talked about U.S. policies in the Mideast and how she and Cameron had wanted to pull back the veil on the shadow war that was alienating so many Muslims. “Yemen is the perfect example,” Gazala said. “Saudi Arabia has killed thousands of civilians. The U.S. and its drone campaign have taken out entire wedding parties. The average American citizen has no idea. We should be supporting the Houthis, not trying to restore a discredited dictator.”
The members of SEAL Team Nine all resisted the bait, no small feat for Wyatt. This wasn’t about defending America’s Mideast policies; it was about getting her on board as a witness. Nevertheless, Paige had never expected Gazala to be sympathetic to the Houthis. They had executed her husband and left his body to rot.
“The Houthis said your husband was working for the CIA,” Wyatt noted.
Gazala scoffed at the idea. “Cam hated the CIA. He compared it to the Nazi SS—the president’s own private army that can kill without any congressional oversight. His dream was to expose the CIA. Trust me, he was not working for them.”
She was convincing, but her protestations didn’t dispel all of Paige’s lingering doubts. The CIA chose its agents carefully. A journalist like Cameron Holloman, who let everyone know how much he detested the CIA, would provide excellent cover.
Wyatt quizzed Gazala at some length about communications she’d had with her husband during his last weeks in the Mideast. Gazala said she had anticipated the questions and had put together a copy of Cameron’s e-mails and Facebook DMs that she would forward to Wyatt. “I wanted to make sure I could trust you first,” she added.
Cam had called a few times, she said, but he was basically speaking in code because he had snuck across the border into Yemen. He was with a Muslim imam who was arranging meetings with the Houthi leaders.
“Do you know the imam’s name?” Wyatt asked.
Wellington was taking notes. He had hardly touched any of his food.
“Saleet Zafar. I met him at a conference a few years before Cam’s trip. He and Cam began exchanging e-mails. They shared a mutual loathing of Saudi Arabia and the CIA.”
“Do you know how we can contact him?” Wyatt asked.
“Ask the CIA,” Gazala said. “But if they find him first, he won’t be of much help.”
“He’s in hiding?”
“For his life.”
“Do you know any way to contact him?” Wyatt pressed.
Gazala thought about this for a moment and took a bite of her lunch. “Perhaps. But I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. You can’t just pick up the phone and call a guy like this or send him an e-mail. The CIA is trying to kill him.”
For Paige, the comment was chilling. If Gazala was right, Paige was neck-deep in a case where a critical witness was on the CIA’s designated kill list. They didn’t go over this kind of stuff in law school.
“I would like to talk with him,” Wyatt said. “I’ll fly anywhere and meet him anyplace he chooses. His testimony is critical.”
Gazala studied the three of them at length. “Your client’s husband was part of the military establishment, and at first I had no desire to help you,” Gazala said. Her voice had lost some its vibrancy, and her eyes darkened with sadness. “That’s why I didn’t return your calls or e-mails. But when Patrick Quillen’s grandfather stopped by just to pay his condolences, I realized that the SEALs’ families were hurting just as much as me. The men were only doing their job—trying to bring Cam home alive.”
Gazala turned to Wyatt, and Paige was surprised at how the two of them, so very different, had seemed to form a connection. “From the start, I thought this case was just tilting at windmills,” Gazala said. “But to be honest, Wyatt—and don’t let this go to your head—you’ve made some pretty big waves. I don’t think you can win, but you’re dredging up issues that Cam cared about, and now the American people are talking about them.”
“We can win, but we need your help,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t think you know what you’re dealing with,” Gazala cautioned. The banter was gone, her tone now subdued. “There are real lives at stake. We can’t afford to be reckless.”
Wyatt chose not to respond. The charge of him being reckless was self-authenticating.
“We know how to be careful,” Paige interjected. “And we are well aware of the stakes.”
A long silence followed while Gazala considered her options. “I’ll see what I can do to connect with some of the people Cam spent his final weeks around,” Gazala said. “And I’ll send you copies of his e-mails and DMs.”
On the way back to Norfolk, the three lawyers discussed their takeaways from the meeting. If Cameron Holloman was working for the CIA, his wife surely didn’t know it. Wellington speculated that the CIA had been monitoring the e-mail and text communications between Cameron and his wife. That’s how they’d learned about his meeting with the Houthi leaders.
Not surprisingly, Wyatt took a darker view. “They knew he was going to pull the curtain back on the CIA’s secret war in Yemen. They probably followed him around and then bombed the Houthi leaders he had met with. Then they leaked information to the Houthis to make it look like Cameron was working for the CIA. Then, after he was in prison, they probably leaked information about the upcoming raid so that the Houthis would move him before the SEALs went in. That way, the Houthis would execute Holloman so he wouldn’t be talking, and our government would look like they had tried to rescue him.”
There were a lot of holes in Wyatt’s analysis, but Paige didn’t bother pointing them out. When it came to conspiracy theorists, Wyatt Jackson could spin shadowy plots with the best of them. After all, he had plenty of practice as a criminal defense attorney. The cops planted evidence. The prosecutors rushed to judgment. The snitches just wanted a better deal. Other paranoid defense lawyers might have graduated from Conspiracy University, but Wyatt Jackson was the dean.
57
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The confirmation hearings for Taj Deegan got off to a rocky start. Republicans complained about the Democrats convening the judiciary panel just four days before the August recess. This was no emergency, they said. They needed time to vet the candidate. Taj Deegan could be confirmed on a normal timeline, just like every other justice.
They accused the president of trying to rush the proceedings to help win the Anderson case. Though they didn’t have the votes to stop the proceedings, they decided to make a spectacle of it and boycott. Thus, when Taj Deegan sat down to be questioned by the senators, she stared at a number of empty seats on the dais, all behind the name tags of Republicans.
Undeterred, the chairman of the committee made a nice little speech. He claimed that the Republicans knew Taj Deegan was eminently qualified and so, instead of asking questions, “just took their ball and went home.” He excoriated them for playing politics with such an important matter. He asked Taj Deegan if she had an opening statement.
She did, and by the time she was done, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. She talked about her struggles as a single mom. She assured them of her commitment to law and order. She couldn’t believe that an African American woman like her who had grown up poor would one day be wearing the robe of a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
She told the story of the honor killing case she had prosecuted and how a terrorist had opened fire in the courtroom. Taj was hit but, “by the grace of God,” she had been wearing a bulletproof vest. She always carried a gun in her briefcase. Later, when the coroner performed the autopsy on the shooter, he found one of her bullets in the terrorist’s chest.
“I was hoping your Republican colleagues might be here to hear that part of my story,” she quipped, and the room erupted in laughter.
Having a brush with death changes a person, Taj said. It had her more committed than ever to her family and more thankful to God for the gift of each new day. She cared about the people who brought their cases in front of her, and she would do her best to help the high court live up to its motto
: “Equal justice under law.”
When Taj was finished, the chairman sat back, satisfied that there would be a lot of video clips of Justice Deegan’s eloquent remarks on the news that night. And just to be sure there were no lingering doubts, he took the privilege of the chair to ask the first set of questions. Justice Deegan was direct and convincing in her answers.
No, the president had never discussed specific issues with her. In fact, she had not even met the president before being nominated for this position. Justice Deegan insisted that she had as yet formed no opinions on the Anderson case and the issue of state secrets.
The proceedings could have been over by lunch, but the Democrats dragged them out so that nobody could claim they had failed to perform due diligence. By 5 p.m., Taj Deegan was unanimously recommended by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The full Senate took up the nomination four days later, on the last day of the July term. The vote split along party lines with only three Republicans joining the Democrats, who put Deegan over the top.
Paige thought it was bad news for the Anderson case. “It’s why the president nominated her in the first place,” Paige said to Wellington.
“You’re just being paranoid,” Wellington told her.
The program was one of John Marcano’s favorite initiatives. The CIA had hired a number of Yemeni doctors to travel around the country and immunize school-age and preschool children. There was no shortage of diseases that required immunizations, and the parents anxiously brought their kids to the doctors in every village. Unknown to the villagers, the doctors were paid handsomely by a “humanitarian organization” that was in turn funded by the CIA. And as part of the immunization process, the doctors collected DNA samples from several million Yemeni children.