Word: ruff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bennett hung up and immediately called White House counsel Charles Ruff. Ruff transferred him to the military operator so that Bennett could tell the President himself. And while Bennett was waiting for a line to the President in Senegal, it occurred to him that he had better check and make sure someone wasn't pretending to be Wright's clerk for an April Fools' joke. He put his hand over the phone and asked his associate Amy Sabrin to call the judge's chambers and make sure about the ruling. She did, and by the time Bruce Lindsey answered...
...McCurry is finding himself undercut by free-lance spinmeisters and by the President's legal teams, some of whom are engaging in their own leaks and covert counterattacks. One session last Wednesday involving McCurry's team and the lawyers exposed the difficulty of his predicament. White House counsel Charles Ruff, citing the fact that the matter was under court seal, refused to offer the press handlers any guidance on whether the President was invoking Executive privilege--even though someone among the lawyers had apparently leaked the news to the New York Times, which had played it on Page One that...
Twice a day--at 8:45 a.m. and 6:45 p.m.--the worlds collide. The spinners meet with the lawyers in Ruff's second-floor office in the West Wing. Here the legal strategies hatched at the first sessions become p.r. strategies in the second. "We don't deal with facts," said a participant. "We deal with spin." The cast varies from day to day, but the communications team generally consists of McCurry, Emanuel, adviser Paul Begala and various other image makers...
...Ruff is the link between the two groups. The bookish lawyer is a classic Clinton White House counsel--upright, well respected. Ruff took the job no one else wanted, and Clinton embraced Ruff chiefly because he's a solid, by-the-book lawyer whose advice is regarded around town as some of Washington's best and whose political motives cannot be questioned...
...here," McCurry said privately. Many in the White House had the air of experienced plane-crash investigators going about their business with grim efficiency. As with past scandals like Whitewater and Travelgate, the White House operation divided cleanly between the President's legal team--Charles Ruff, David Kendall, Bob Bennett--who didn't want Clinton to talk, period, and his political strategists, who wanted to send him out to calm the waters. And so, true to form, the President did both: gave his interviews but didn't say anything. And that only made matters worse...