Boehner prevails in 10-year legal dispute with McDermott

From politico.com

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) finally prevailed Tuesday in his decade-long legal dispute with Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington over illegally taped conversations McDermott leaked to the press.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed previous court rulings that McDermott “had not lawfully obtained the tape recording” of Boehner discussing an ethics ruling against then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) with the former speaker and other members of the Republican leadership.

A Florida couple recorded the December 1996 conference call by using a police scanner to eavesdrop on Boehner’s cell phone. The Ohio Republican, who was then serving as conference chairman, was in Florida when they recorded the conversation.

After conferring with their local member of Congress, the Florida couple sent the tapes to McDermott, who leaked the contents of the recordings to the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where justices on the high court voided the appeals court’s initial decision on the grounds that McDermott had the First Amendment right to publicize the tapes however the recordings were obtained.

With that decision, the case then went back to the district court, which granted Boehner $60,000 in damages and forced McDermott to pick up his legal fees.

The appeals court ruled, in a divided decision, that McDermott both obtained the tapes unlawfully and violated the confidentiality agreement he accepted by voluntarily joining the ethics panel. The dissenting justices disagreed with the majority decision on the grounds that the leak itself did not violate the First Amendment.