The leaks had instant impact. One source close to the case described them as “backfires lit in the beltway press and in the states where the five senators were from.” There were nine in all, some correct, some incorrect. Almost all of them—eight to be precise—either exonerated McCain or implicated the other senators.
Just five days after that October leak, McCain appeared on the Senate floor urging the Committee to recuse him from the rest of the hearings. It was an impassioned speech, laced with references to his Vietnam service. “I do not deserve … to be strung out for week after week, month after month,” he said. The Ethics Committee rejected that argument as undue political pressure, for the first time suggesting that there was an “organized campaign of leaks to gain some advantage for some cause or person to which the leakers are partisan.”
“I always thought McCain had by far the worst case facts,” said one senior government official. None of the other Keating Five senators had a close personal relationship with Keating.
Nonetheless, the leaks created “a presumption of guilt” among the others, said one government official.
The report Hall wrote after his investigation is privileged Ethics Committee information and is under permanent restrictions—Hall himself said he did not have a copy of it, having turned all notes and documents to the Committee, including his interview transcripts, which, according to one source, feature dozens of interviews with McCain associates, family members, and in some cases intimate friends. His final report was formally inconclusive but argued for a strong trail of circumstantial evidence that pointed in McCain’s direction. In our interview, he was emphatic on this point. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that McCain made those leaks.”
“It was one of the strangest things I’ve seen,” says Hall. “And as a professional investigator, I’ve interviewed a lot of weird people. … I am a professional investigator and he treated me like some guy off the street. I just came away with a very bad impression.”
Finally, Fleming concluded in his report that partisanship was the motive for the leaks and that they were designed to hurt DeConcini, Riegle, and Cranston. A Republican spokesman, quoted in the Fleming report, explained the politics: If enough people pressured the Committee into releasing McCain—the only Republican—and Glenn, who still had a heroic aura around him from his astronaut days, from the investigation, then the Keating Five would become the “Keating Three,” and the GOP could then use the whole affair against the Democrats.
