Over lunch in Washington a few weeks ago, attorney Edward Rogers seemed pleased with his new job in the private sector. After six years of seven-day weeks in G.O.P. politics and the White House, he had returned to a normal life. And while he didn't say so then, his new duties were looking extremely profitable. Rogers, who quit his job as executive assistant to chief of staff John Sununu in August, had found a gold-plated client to begin his first law practice with.
But Rogers last week had to kiss that serenity -- and a $600,000 two-year contract -- goodbye. The wealthy client: Sheik Kamal Adham, the former director of Saudi intelligence and a key figure in the Bank of Credit & Commerce International scandal. According to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, the well-connected Adham was a B.C.C.I. front man for the illegal purchase of Washington's First American Bank and B.C.C.I.'s main contact with Clark Clifford, the chairman of First American. Adham also received more than $300 million in B.C.C.I. loans, according to bank documents.
Rogers hastily backed out of the contract to help defend Adham from criminal probes, but not before he embarrassed George Bush. When asked what Rogers might be selling to Adham, Bush replied, "Ask him. I don't know what he's selling. I don't know anything about this man ((Adham)) except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like what I read about him." Though Rogers' contract with Adham was not illegal, it showed extremely poor judgment on the part of the former aide; at any rate, Bush's denunciation destroyed the value of the relationship to Adham, leaving Rogers little choice but to resign the account.
Just why Adham turned to Rogers for help remains a mystery, since Rogers was not an important voice in the White House inner circle and won few friends as Sununu's gatekeeper. But Rogers' title implied that he had significant influence, and that suggests Adham was simply following B.C.C.I.'s universal recipe for success: buy favor as close to the center of power as possible. An official familiar with both men suggested that Adham was merely trying to execute what Arabs call wasta, a sort of well-placed personnel fix, similar to Muammar Gaddafi's hiring of Billy Carter during the 1970s as a foreign trade representative.
But like the Billy Carter episode, the Rogers ploy backfired, dragging the White House into the controversy for the first time. It also raised fresh questions about the Justice Department's plodding investigation of B.C.C.I.'s U.S. affairs. Congressman Charles Schumer, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, promptly called for a formal probe of the Adham-Rogers connection. Both the White House and the Justice Department last week formally cleared Rogers of any ethics-law violations. Still, Schumer persisted in his calls for additional inquiries, in part because he says he believes that the White House may be far more involved in monitoring the B.C.C.I. case than was previously believed.
"There is a plausible case that someone told the prosecutors to slow down, to lay off B.C.C.I.," Schumer says. "I don't know if this is true, but when we've interviewed law-enforcement people in this case, Justice has insisted that someone from the White House sit in."