Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
McDermott should try the truth

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When that didn't work, he tried the silent treatment.

That didn't hold up. Now, 7-1/2-years after the Seattle congressman leaked a tape featuring Newt Gingrich plotting political strategy, court papers show his behavior has evolved again.

His new tactic: When in doubt, plead bad memory.

That isn't working either. A federal judge ruled last week that McDermott knew from the start he was up to something illegal and may have to pay damages for violating the privacy of another congressman.

The judge chided McDermott for claiming not to remember key details, saying the congressman showed a "repeated reliance on faulty memory in the face of direct contrary evidence."

This brings to four the number of federal judges who have slammed McDermott's behavior, even as they have split on whether he broke the law.

Which sums up my own view. It's debatable whether leaking the tape was wrong. You can even make a case it served the public interest. But his actions since have been unseemly.

A quick recap: McDermott was on a House ethics committee investigating then-Speaker Gingrich. A Florida couple recorded a private cellphone call featuring Gingrich discussing how to spin the committee's findings, which Gingrich had promised he would not do.

The couple gave the tape to McDermott. Rather than turn it over to a GOP-run committee McDermott felt was biased, he leaked it to three newspapers.

The couple later confessed and paid a $500 fine for breaking an eavesdropping law.
 
McDermott, though, first said he "didn't know anything about it." After he was sued by a GOP congressman, McDermott argued in court he had a free-speech right to leak the tape even as he refused to admit he did it. Not until 2002 did McDermott acknowledge his role.

Whether ruling for or against him, judges have found McDermott infuriating. One blasted him for playing the "innocent," another for his "pursuit of the politics of personal destruction." And now another judge says McDermott has employed "faulty recollection" to try to obscure what happened.

I've never understood why he didn't tell the truth from the beginning. Something like: "I released the tape because I no longer trusted the House to investigate its own. I compromised my job as an ethics officer, and for that I apologize."

Wouldn't that have been the end of it? He could have faced censure by the House, but now he faces more than $400,000 in legal costs, not counting damages that may be assessed by the judge in September.

In 1997, shortly after he leaked the tape, McDermott sat with me for an awkward interview. I asked questions about the case for an hour and he refused to answer them. Finally he said: "The important thing now is how we all behave from here on out."

That was wise counsel. He should have followed it.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.