Spokesmen for the firm say it began shredding to protect confidential client information during the 1992 primary campaigns, when reporters were discovered rummaging through office garbage. The only lawyer at the firm with those initials was Vince W. Foster. At a meeting with managing partner Ronald Clark and others a few weeks later, they were informed that they would have to answer FBI questions and testify before the Whitewater grand jury. Rose partners shrug off the story, insisting, plausibly, that if they had anything to hide, they would not have gotten two lower-rung employees to do their dirty work. Hedges says senior partners would be just as unlikely to risk attracting suspicion by doing something out of the ordinary - like their own shredding.
People get suspicious.
Some members of the firm have knives out for the big names whose troubles have come back to haunt the firm. They leaked word that Rose was conducting an internal review of Hubbell to determine whether he had overbilled clients and misused his expense account. And politically conservative partners are also said to be itching to undercut Rose alumni attached to the Democratic White House. The Washington Times reported last week that in connection with the expense-account questions, an unidentified group of partners is thinking of filing an ethics complaint against Hubbell with the Arkansas Supreme Court. It's hard to know how much comfort to take from that.