ACLU v. ACLU (Page 2)

Anthony Romero, 41, grew up in a crime-ridden housing project in the Bronx and received scholarships to attend Princeton and Stanford Law School. He eventually became a senior executive at the Ford Foundation, where he signed off on more than $100 million in grants annually, including a number of large grants to the ACLU. Romero was hired by the ACLU after a competitive search in 2001, and the press release announcing his appointment highlighted the fact that he was Puerto Rican and openly gay. He started a week before 9/11.

When I had lunch with Romero in early November, he was somber. "I've made some mistakes," he told me, "but those mistakes are minor compared with my achievements." We met again a few weeks later at a location of his choosing: the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan, where his father worked for thirty-nine years, first as a janitor and then as a banquet waiter. Romero was in a better mood: He had just returned from Virginia, where the ACLU was representing Khaled el-Masri, who maintains that he was arrested in 2003 and flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan; the ACLU had argued for the reinstatement of his lawsuit against the CIA.

Sipping a glass of red wine, Romero insisted that the current battle will not distract him from his objectives: "I'm focused on what I want to get accomplished. And that focus has nothing to do with the opinions of a couple of hundred critics and their leaders." (More than 600 people have signed a petition against Romero at savetheaclu.org.) Maintaining his focus hasn't been easy; he has had to navigate a perilous minefield in his own backyard. Four times a year Romero appears before the ACLU's eighty-three-member national board, which is famously disputatious. Says Aryeh Neier, the ACLU's executive director from 1970 to 1978, a co-founder of Human Rights Watch and now the president of the Open Society Institute, "I've never seen anything remotely as contentious."

Romero's difficulties can be traced back to 2002, when he signed a consent decree with the New York Attorney General at the time, Eliot Spitzer, to settle a privacy breach that had been discovered on the ACLU website. A company called Virtual Sprockets was responsible for the breach, but Spitzer's office demanded a $10,000 fine from the ACLU. The terms of the decree required Romero to distribute it to the national ACLU board within thirty days, but he waited six months to do so. Glasser and Kaminer have written that Romero "offered vague and inconsistent explanations of the circumstances surrounding the negotiation, execution, and eventual distribution of the agreement." They further allege that ACLU president Nadine Strossen and the eleven-member executive committee, the leadership body of the board that oversees the executive director, "declined to reprimand Romero, even though a number of them privately conceded that they believed he had been less than honest with them." At the Warwick Hotel Romero told me, "I probably was a bit cavalier about it. But $10,000 is not a huge sum of money, and it was fully reimbursed [by Virtual Sprockets] to the ACLU. Had it been a million-dollar fine coming from our bottom line, I would have paid a lot more attention to it."

Then, in April 2004, Romero quietly put his signature on a Ford Foundation grant letter that contained a dubious clause: "By countersigning this grant letter, you agree that your organization will not promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state." Dissident board members Kaminer and Michael Meyers viewed that language as disgraceful, and believe that Romero and the ACLU should have vigorously opposed it [see Sherman, "Target Ford," June 5, 2006]. Upon questioning Romero, the critics learned that he had done more than sign the grant letter: He had privately advised Ford on how to craft it. After vigorous debate, the ACLU ultimately refused more than $1 million in Ford money, which Romero wanted for the organization. "The mistake I made," Romero told me, "was in not appreciating the civil liberties implications" of Ford's grant language; he also says that he should not have signed the Ford document without first consulting his board.

In July 2004, after the board concluded a four-hour debate on the Ford controversy, Romero, in the face of explicit questions from Kaminer and Meyers, revealed that he had previously signed another questionable agreement, this one from the Combined Federal Campaign, a government program that allows federal employees to allocate funds to charities and nonprofits. After 9/11, the CFC demanded that its recipients certify that they do not "knowingly employ" people found on federal and international antiterrorism "watch lists"--critics call them "blacklists"--which have been shown to be sweeping and inaccurate. The critics, appalled by the CFC's screening requirements, demanded to know whom Romero had consulted before signing the CFC contract. He replied that he had acted on the "advice of counsel." The critics insist, then and now, that there was no counsel, and that Romero misled the board. The ACLU temporarily withdrew from the CFC, a move that cost the organization an estimated $500,000 in 2004.

Even Romero's most ardent supporters believe that he seriously botched the CFC matter. Today he admits that he should have immediately brought the grant application to the executive committee of the board (it took him more than five months to do so); and he blames the government for its excessive regulation of CFC recipients. When I asked Romero for the name of his "counsel," a sheepish grin appeared on his face. "I'm also a licensed attorney in New York," he confesses. "I was serving as my own lawyer."

Recalling the controversies of 2004, Romero conveys the impression that his worst blunders were not ethical or administrative, but tactical. He regrets that he was not able to vanquish his enemies on the board. "The biggest mistake I made," he says, "was not appreciating how [the various controversies] could be spun and framed to my detriment." He laments that his detractors were able to successfully "attach certain labels and criticisms that would be hard to explain away."

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