In November, the State Department announced that it would cover the legal fees of senior staff summoned to testify during the House Intelligence Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of President Trump. After all, none of the diplomats had been accused of doing anything wrong. “The department has proactively established a program to provide financial assistance and legal fees incurred by department employees,” David Hale, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, said, in prepared remarks during his own testimony, on November 20th.
That claim was only partially true—and in very small part. Witnesses have accrued as much as half a million dollars in legal fees that are not being covered by the State Department, according to six witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, lawyers, and others involved in helping with the soaring bills. The diplomats and other senior officials, most of whom have spent a lifetime in government service earning modest government salaries, have had to tap into personal-liability insurance or relied on the generosity of fellow-diplomats and friends who donated to a legal-defense fund. In some cases, major Washington law firms have slashed fees or, in one case, provided largely pro-bono assistance.
“Many of these public servants stand to amass legal bills in the six or seven figures,” Lee Wolosky, who worked in three previous Administrations and now heads the legal team representing Fiona Hill, a former Russia expert at the National Security Council, told me. “Fortunately, a number of experienced lawyers from both parties have stepped forward to help for free, under arrangements with insurance carriers, or otherwise under discounted-rate structures.” One high-profile witness who asked not to be named said that without the discounted rates her fees alone would be in the range of six hundred thousand dollars—so far. “In these difficult times, lawyers have a particularly urgent duty to help defend the rule of law,” David Pressman, a former U.N. Ambassador, told me. Pressman leads the legal team representing Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist at the National Security Council. And lawyers are still tracking the Senate trial and new evidence introduced since the House hearings that may affect their clients.
The State Department’s program will reimburse the lawyers of witnesses for only a fraction—about a quarter—of the charges for a single lawyer versed in constitutional, U.S. foreign-policy, or government issues at a Washington law firm, according to lawyers working on behalf of witnesses. But the key witnesses have each required teams of several lawyers and law-firm associates, who spent months reconstructing how the Trump Administration’s Ukraine policy unfolded relevant to their clients, piecing together a paper trail, collecting evidence, prepping their clients for closed-door depositions and then public testimony, in addition to dealing with security and the press, and keeping up with how the case unfolds daily.
The State Department reimbursement is based on a Department of Justice scale known as the Laffey Matrix, which pays legal fees at three hundred dollars an hour for this category of cases. For the witnesses involved in a high-profile impeachment, a single partner at a major Washington law firm charges up to twelve hundred dollars an hour, with associates making at least half that. Multiple lawyers representing witnesses said the average case would be between four hundred thousand and half a million dollars—so far. The government rule limits payment to a maximum of a hundred and twenty hours of work, or a maximum of thirty-six thousand dollars a month. Neither the State Department nor the Justice Department responded to multiple requests for further information.
The legal bills of witnesses from the White House, Pentagon, or Office of Management and Budget are not covered by the State Department program, according to lawyers and witnesses. The House heard from a dozen officials in public testimony, another five in closed-door depositions. Twelve of the witnesses had worked at the State Department, three at the National Security Council, one at the Pentagon, and one at the Office of Management and Budget. Twelve current or former Administration officials declined to testify, despite subpoenas.
A few witnesses—including one at the State Department, one from the White House, and a third from another department—have tapped into personal-liability insurance to help cover costs. “I can’t imagine my situation if I hadn’t had liability, just because I am sure it could have been tens of thousands of dollars,” one witness, who was deposed behind closed doors but was not called to testify in the open hearings, told me.
Liability insurance has limits, however. Government employees first have to take it out at personal expense. Not all do. And some insurance companies do not assist with legal fees unless the policyholder is charged with a crime or a civil offense, lawyers involved in the impeachment said. Multiple witnesses had claims rejected by their insurance agencies.
Only one State Department witness is receiving modest reimbursement from a liability policy. He, too, was originally rejected; his legal team had to intercede to persuade the insurer to pay. Insurance companies often require their policyholders to use lawyers on a pre-approved list, who may not be well qualified to counsel on congressional investigations, especially a Presidential-impeachment case.
Liability insurance also pays on a scale—typically about four hundred dollars an hour, according to a lawyer for one witness—which is slightly higher than the State Department scale, but still only a fraction of the actual costs. It usually has a cap of around two hundred thousand dollars. If insurance companies were reimbursing at the going legal rates, almost all the witnesses would have exceeded that amount—by a lot, their lawyers said.
Some witnesses are receiving no aid. Kurt Volker, a former career diplomat and Ambassador to NATO during the George W. Bush Administration, served in a volunteer capacity as President Trump’s special representative for Ukraine. He resigned in September as the controversy broke over the White House delaying military aid to Kyiv. Because he is no longer affiliated with the State Department, either as a former diplomat or a volunteer, the State Department would need to reach a special determination to make Volker eligible for even its modest reimbursement, which it has not yet done. And Volker did not have a personal-liability policy that covered legal fees for congressional testimony. His legal bills—from holding a job for which he did not get paid—are about eighty thousand dollars, according to sources familiar with his case.
As the financial challenges mounted for impeachment witnesses, ten former diplomats launched a legal-defense fund in December. “Our admiration for their clarity, courage and competence has been shared by many other current and former colleagues and countless other Americans,” they wrote to fellow-diplomats. “Contributions to their legal fees are a concrete expression of gratitude for their taking on such a personal burden out of an inspiring sense of duty and professional integrity.”
The appeal was drafted by Anthony Lake, a former diplomat who served in both Republican and Democratic Administrations and was national-security adviser in the Clinton Administration. He later headed UNICEF. “I did it out of personal admiration for them and also very much for the sake of encouraging officials in the future to see their duty as clearly as these diplomats did. What they did was extraordinary,” Lake told me. For many diplomats, the stakes go beyond the fate of President Trump or his Administration. “The civil service is under greater assault than at any time since reforms of the eighteen-eighties, and we mustn’t go back to the spoils system back then,” Lake said. If diplomats are not guaranteed the freedom to dissent, he added, any Administration is more likely to make mistakes or bad policy choices with enduring impact on the United States and the world.
The final House report on impeachment criticized Trump’s intimidation and personal attacks on the former Ambassadors to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Bill Taylor, and on Vindman on the National Security Council and Jennifer Williams on Vice-President Mike Pence’s staff. The President “issued threats, openly discussed possible retaliation, made insinuations about their character and patriotism, and subjected them to mockery and derision—when they deserved the opposite,” the House report said.
The appeal for donations was first made through the American Foreign Service Association, a professional union with more than sixteen thousand active-duty and retired members of the State Department and five other agencies. “The amounts of legal fees are staggering,” Eric Rubin, a former Ambassador and the current president of A.F.S.A., told me. “Our people were caught in a terrible dilemma. What do you do if the President says, ‘Don’t do it,’ and then you’re subpoenaed? You’d be in contempt. It was very painful.”
The American Academy of Diplomacy and the Association of Black American Ambassadors also sent out the A.F.S.A. appeal. “The black American ambassadors realize that they could have been in the same situation during their careers,” Ruth Davis, the group’s vice-president and a former director general of the Foreign Service, told me. “Those of us who have served understand the pressures that current Foreign Service officers are under and supporting them is a way of supporting an institution that is important to the country.”
With support from the array of diplomatic associations, A.F.S.A. has so far raised three quarters of a million dollars, Rubin said. The funds are helping defray the legal fees of seven witnesses, covering in full charges that were not paid by the State Department or waived through pro-bono assistance. “It’s very moving that current and former Foreign Service officers, most of whom don’t have much money, have contributed to help their colleagues,” John Bellinger, who served as a legal adviser to the State Department and National Security Council during the George W. Bush Administration, told me. He and a former C.I.A. general counsel, Jeff Smith, represented Ambassador Taylor and Ambassador Mike McKinley. But Taylor, who was not a member of the Foreign Service and was pulled out of retirement to return to Ukraine after Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was recalled, is not a member of A.F.S.A.—and thus not eligible for its financial aid. He was in Ukraine for only six months. Volker is also not a member of A.F.S.A. And none of the witnesses from the White House, Department of Defense, or the Office of Management and Budget qualifies for its aid, either.
Historically, U.S. government officials were blocked from accepting pro-bono legal aid, because, by regulation, they are not able to accept anything of value—in gifts or in kind—above twenty-five dollars. For the Trump impeachment hearings, A.F.S.A. was able to negotiate partial or full pro-bono assistance after the House Intelligence Committee stipulated that government lawyers could not represent witnesses because of the potential conflict of interest. Only one of the six witnesses I interviewed received pro-bono legal aid for most but not all fees; others hoped or expected to get discounted legal bills.
“Unless you’re a full-time public-interest lawyer, you get only a few chances to take cases that you strongly believe in,” Larry Robbins, the lead lawyer for Yovanovitch, told me. “I took the case because this is why I went to law school.”
As Trump’s Senate trial begins, the impeachment process is not yet over for the witnesses. And neither are the legal bills.
