'It was the biggest decision in the context of the government in my lifetime.' Klayman: 'We hit the mother lode'

Larry Klayman’s long journey in the legal wilderness appears to be over.

Klayman, the conservative legal activist well-known in Washington political circles a decade ago for his no-holds-barred court battles against the Clinton administration, was thrust back into the spotlight Monday after he obtained the first major ruling from a federal judge that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was constitutionally flawed.


“We hit the mother lode,” an elated Klayman said Monday, indulging in some of the hyperbole he became known for during his 1990s crusades. “It was the biggest decision in the context of the government in my lifetime. This is the most outrageous invasion of constitutional rights I’ve seen in my life.”

In recent years, the once-prominent Klayman has been associated with a series of causes at the fringe of the conservative movement, arguing that President Barack Obama is a closet Muslim and likely was born in Kenya. The legal gadfly has also struggled personally, drawing a public reprimand by the Florida Bar for his slowness in repaying a client after declaring himself flat broke just three years ago.

( Also on POLITICO: Judge: NSA phone program likely unconstitutional)

However, in winning the ruling Monday from U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon in Washington, the eccentric Klayman and his often comically shoestring conservative organization Freedom Watch effectively beat to the punch — and the headlines — a slew of better known civil liberties groups who have spent years fighting the NSA’s surveillance efforts.

“You got to keep punching. You never give up,” Klayman said when asked about the string of defeats he suffered before connecting on Monday.

NSA surveillance efforts have been the target of litigation for years, well before details of the operations of the programs became public and long before Klayman jumped into the legal fray over the issue.

( Also on POLITICO: NSA ruling fallout hits White House)

A lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed on behalf of Amnesty International and others in 2008 made it all the way to the Supreme Court last year, but was thrown out in February in a 5-4 decision that found the plaintiffs lacked adequate proof their communications had been tracked or monitored by the government.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden changed that landscape a few months later by leaking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document confirming that Verizon was ordered to turn over to the government a huge volume of so-called metadata on calls placed through its network.

That leak, which appeared via the Guardian newspaper of Britain on June 5, sent NSA critics back to court.

On June 11, the ACLU — a Verizon customer — filed a lawsuit in Manhattan on the group’s own behalf.

( Also on POLITICO: NSA ruling wins cheers on Hill)

On July 16, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit in San Francisco on behalf of an agglomeration of groups, including anti-drug and gun rights organizations, as well as Greenpeace and Unitarian church groups.

But the indefatigable Klayman had already won the race to the courthouse. On June 6, just a day after the Guardian report, Klayman filed suit in Washington on his own behalf and on behalf of two clients — Charles and Mary Ann Strange, parents of a Navy cryptologist killed with a SEAL team in a disastrous helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2011.

The suit led to a Nov. 18 hearing in front of Leon. Some reporters showed up expecting a perfunctory court session peppered with some outlandish claims by the always-colorful Klayman. Indeed, there were plenty of those.

( PHOTOS: NSA spying: 15 great quotes)

Klayman said he and Charles Strange were being targeted by the government because of their claims relating to Strange’s son Michael’s death, which include a complaint that a Muslim imam cursed the dead SEAL team members during a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base.

“My colleagues have received text messages I never sent,” Klayman told the judge. “I think they’re messing with me,” he said, referring to the government.

Klayman implored the judge to rule against the NSA program not only on legal grounds but to avert what the conservative gadfly said was a violent revolution on the verge of breaking out due to the federal government’s unbridled use of power.

“We live in an Orwellian state,” Klayman said, warning that citizens angry about surveillance were about to “rise up.”

( Also on POLITICO: NSA probe: Snowden can still do damage)

If litigation fails, “the only alternative is for people to take matters into their own hands,” he told Leon.

At another point, Klayman said he understood Snowden’s reluctance to return to the United States — the former contractor, he said, was likely to be killed if he came back.

Leon didn’t speak about a revolution in his ruling Monday, but he may have echoed Klayman at one juncture by calling the NSA’s technological capabilities “almost-Orwellian.”

While Klayman’s more provocative comments at the hearing prompted eye-rolling among some in the audience — and certainly differed from the way an ACLU lawyer would have presented the case — the conservative attorney did tick through the legal precedents.

( Also on POLITICO: Krauthammer: Snowden not vindicated)

And both the judge and the Justice Department seemed to take the case seriously, though Leon gave few signs he was mulling a major public blow to the surveillance effort. In fact, the judge spent much of the hearing suggesting he had no authority to step into the case.

Klayman emerged in the 1990s as a kind of conservative legal foil to the Clinton administration, filing a series of lawsuits through his group Judicial Watch over what he deemed corruption. The group’s cases focused on issues like the White House’s receipt of FBI background files on the previous administration’s appointees and the role politics played in selecting participants in trade missions.

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Klayman’s legal fusillade often seemed less focused on winning than on making the cases as painful as possible for the administration, usually by seeking broad discovery of administration records and by forcing current and former administration officials to appear in depositions. Clinton aides like Harold Ickes and George Stephanopoulos spent hours in videotaped sessions in front of Klayman, with one involving questions about whether Stephanopoulos used a pen to take notes on set in his subsequent job at ABC News.

Klayman’s techniques were immortalized in the TV drama “The West Wing.” In the show, based on the Clinton White House, a lawyer named Harry Klaypool from a group called Freedom Watch uses a deposition to grill White House officials about drug use.

Klayman signaled Monday that as a result of Leon’s ruling prying inquiries will soon get under way in the NSA case.

“We’re heading to discovery. We’ve got an entree into the NSA,” he said.

In 2003, Klayman split with Judicial Watch. The breakup was acrimonious and, entirely unsurprisingly, wound up in contentious litigation.

After leaving the group, Klayman himself struggled to find traction. In 2004, he ran for the Republican nomination to a U.S. Senate seat in Florida. He came in seventh, with 1 percent of the vote. (Former Housing Secretary Mel Martinez scored the GOP nod with 45 percent of the vote, and ultimately won the seat.)

After the unsuccessful Senate bid, Klayman founded Freedom Watch, adopting the fictional name used by his “West Wing” character.

But he wound up taking run-of-the-mill criminal cases as well as unusual civil ones, like a former Washington Times editorial page editor’s suit against the paper over claims he was coerced to attend Unification Church services.

In 2007, Florida woman Natalia Humm alleged that Klayman took a $25,000 retainer and failed to work on her criminal case. He claimed the complaint was without merit but offered to settle with the woman for $5000. He was slow to pay the money, however, claiming “dire” financial distress caused by the economic downturn — money trouble that he contended forced him to live out of his office at one point.

In 2011, the Florida Supreme Court publicly reprimanded Klayman for his delay in paying the ex-client back. The result, reached via a consent judgment, preserved his law license.

Still, through Freedom Watch, Klayman has filed a series of cases against the Obama administration. One suit filed in 2009 charged that the White House had a “de facto” advisory committee of outsiders on health reform which met in secret in violation of federal law. A judge rejected the administration’s initial effort to have the case thrown out but finally nixed the suit in March of this year.

Klayman filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of Freedom Watchin January, challenging the Obama administration’s outreach in connection with the gun-related policy proposals crafted in the wake of the deadly 2012 shooting spree at a Connecticut elementary school. That suit ran into trouble after government lawyers questioned why it was filed in federal court in central Florida.

Klayman told the court that Freedom Watch had moved its “national headquarters” from Washington, D.C. to Ocala, Fla. However, a Justice Department filing in May said the new headquarters “is evidently a P.O. Box in [a] UPS store” in that city. A judge tossed the case in June, citing “improper venue,” and just last month rejected a request to reinstate the case.

Klayman’s foray into NSA litigation almost encountered a similar fate before its success on Monday. In October, Leon scheduled a scheduling conference in the case on two days notice, prompting Klayman — who said vaguely that he had “preexisting obligations in Los Angeles”— to ask to appear by phone. Leon denied the request.

Klayman then asked for a few days delay, which the judge also denied without comment. The conference went forward on Halloween without Klayman or anyone representing the plaintiffs, but — based on Monday’s ruling — his case apparently didn’t suffer for it.

“This is a fantastic decision,” Klayman said. “Our hats go off to Judge Leon, who did a courageous thing…This wasn’t on behalf of Larry Klayman. This was on behalf of the American people. I feel we’re in a revolutionary state. If the courts step in and start protecting people, hopefully, we can avoid that.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story inaccurately described Michael Strange’s Navy work.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Kourtney Geers @ 12/18/2013 09:05 AM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story inaccurately described Michael Strange’s Navy work.