White House Flack Raises Legal Concerns Over Spinning the Biden Corruption Scandal
By: Jonathan Turley | April 3, 2024
In a city of flacks, Ian Sams is prototypical. Quotable, punchy, and fast on social media, he stays ahead of the news cycle. Those traits are greatly valued by clients in this city where losing control of a narrative can allow a controversy to metastasize into a full fledge scandal. What is different is the client. Sams, a well–known Democratic operative, is not working for a Democratic campaign, but a Democratic president and speaks for the White House Counsel.
That position continues to raise eyebrows, as it did this week when Sams issued insulting and taunting postings after the House Oversight Committee asked the President to answer ten questions from its impeachment inquiry. Sams posted images of signs mocking the inquiry next to his title reading “White House spokesman for oversight and investigations. Deputy Assistant to the President & Senior Advisor to WH Counsel’s Office.”
The White House Counsel’s office has historically avoided engaging in political spin and attacks. It prides itself on representing the office of the Presidency, not the president as a person. President Biden has personal counsel to look after his interests as an individual. What is striking is that his personal counsel has shown far more circumspection and restraint in responding to such inquiries.
Sams has been previously questioned by the White House press corps over the accuracy of his statements and that fact that he is routinely cited as speaking for White House Counsel’s office on a variety of legal questions but lacks any law degree. He was also the subject of a complaint from the head of White House press corps over his giving them “marching orders” on how to control the allegations against the President.
Sams’s statements often are long on sarcasm and short on substance. Even normally favorable outlets like CNN have noted Sams’s refusal to address specific questions while lashing out at the Special Counsel or others.
Sams has a long resume as a political staffer. He graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in political science, where he was president of the College Democrats. He went on to work with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in Washington, D. C. as well as Democratic candidates, including but not limited to Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), Tom Carper (Del.), and Hillary Clinton. He also worked for the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D. C.
That is an impressive resume for any flack, and I do not fault Sams for his aggressive style or his clientele. Indeed, I do not even blame him for his work at the White House. I blame White House Counsel Ed Siskel, who has used Sams to materially change the role and function of his office in this corruption scandal. Siskel previously worked in the Obama Administration and was one of his students at the University of Chicago. His use of Sams has returned the office to an earlier, more partisan operation.
The White House Counsel’s office has been headed by some of Washington’s most revered legal figures from Lloyd Cutler to Boyden Gray. These were lawyers with strong Republican or Democratic alliances who were both aggressive and protective in support of their presidents. However, they maintained strict lines in offering objective (and sometimes unwelcomed) advice to presidents in the interest of their offices. They were adamant in maintaining space between the political and legal operations of the White House.
There have been White House counsels who lost that objectivity and separation to the great peril to themselves and their office. Nixon had John Ehrlichman, Chuck Colson, and John Dean — all of whom were convicted or pleaded guilty to criminal offenses.
The office under Siskel has returned to earlier models of partisan White House Counsel. The first such office holder, then called Special Counsel, was New York Judge Samuel Rosenman who made no pretense of any independent or apolitical role in working for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He trained and was followed by Clark Clifford who was aggressively political.
Presidents have also routinely selected close friends or loyalists for the role. The office could be used as a counterfoil to the Attorney General, who often pursued conflicting institutional interests.
Yet, as the White House Counsel’s office grew, it took on greater ethical and reporting responsibilities. The culture changed to protecting the presidency as much as the president, including giving unwelcomed advice. That was the case in the final days of the Trump Administration when Pat Cipollone confronted the President on election fraud claims and actively pushed back on private counsel like Rudy Giuliani. During the impeachments, Cipollone was circumspect and restrained. He was rarely in the public eye and his office issued comparably few responses to media stories.
In past years, it was often difficult to get a statement on the record from the White House Counsel’s office, which routinely referred anything even remotely political to the Chief of Staff or the Press Secretary.
That has changed with Sams, who has issued statements from the White House Counsel’s office with the speed and the sarcasm of a DNC flack. This is often in response to requests for the legal position of the office to a major filing or legal claim.
He is unrelenting and, by all appearances, entirely unrestrained. Every day, there are Sams-I-am missives that border on the Seussian: “You do not like them. So, you say. Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say.”
I have previously raised concerns over the role of Sams in the impeachment inquiry. In my testimony in the first Biden impeachment hearing, I noted that the Biden White House was approaching a dangerous line in pushing false claims on the corruption scandal, including repeating President Biden’s past denials that he never spoke to his son or had knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings. It can lead to the same blurred lines that led to not just the impeachment articles but the criminal charges in the Nixon Administration.
Those concerns became magnified this month when the House sent the ten questions to the President to address glaring contradictions in his past public statements. Sams immediately responded on behalf of the White House Counsel:
“LOL. Comer knows 20+ witnesses have testified that POTUS did nothing wrong. He knows that the hundreds of thousands of pages of records he’s received have refuted his false allegations. This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment. Call it a day, pal.”
Again, it is the type of posting that one would expect from the DNC, not the WHC. Yet, Siskel clearly approves of this type of taunting, sarcastic response from an office that has fought to maintain its image of professionalism and prudence.
Sams, not Siskel, is now the face of the White House Counsel’s office. That is certainly welcomed by the Biden campaign, but it is often difficult to distinguish postings between the two operations. With an impeachment inquiry in the field, that aggressive media role can produce more than favorable media articles. It can become the basis for actual impeachment articles.
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