Tobacco Suit Up In Smoke?
The Bush administration is seeking to settle a protracted civil suit demanding billions of dollars in damages from the tobacco industry.
CBS News Correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis reports Attorney General John Ashcroft decided on the move after receiving a recommendation from career attorneys in the Civil Division, which is leading suit, filed by the Attorney General Reno in 1999 after then-President Clinton announced his intention to sue during his State of the Union Address.
Anti-tobacco advocates were quick to label the move as an effort to please tobacco industry donors who pumped $8.3 million to the president's and congressional campaign. They promised to appeal to the Justice Department to continue the suit.
The government's lawsuit claimed federal health care plans spend more than $20 billion a year treating smoking-related illnesses.
The suit is at a critical juncture. A federal judge had thrown out the claims for recovering billions of dollars spent by the federal government to treat sick smokers. The judge, Gladys Kessler, is scheduled to rule in August on the government's renewed motion to revive those claims.
However, the original racketeering claim — that big tobacco conspired to hide the dangers of smoking — has survived with the judge scheduling discovery proceedings leading up to a trial in 2003.
All the same, concerned about the strength of the government's case, the administration wants to forge a settlement now rather than risk losing later, sources said.
Ashcroft has decided to assemble a team in an effort to settle the Justice Department's landmark lawsuit, his spokeswoman said Tuesday. The lawyers were meeting for the first time Tuesday with the department's tobacco litigation team to begin talking about a potential settlement.
Mindy Tucker said Ashcroft, a long-time critic of the lawsuit brought by the Clinton administration, informed congressional leaders of his decision aimed at trying to reach a settlement in the case.
Officials emphasized that the department was not abandoning the lawsuit, saying it would continue to litigate the case even while pursuing a settlement agreement.
But anti-tobacco advocates were skeptical of that claim.
William V. Corr, executive vice president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, said the administration had tried to kill the lawsuit by cutting off funding, but ran into congressional opposition. Now, Corr said, the Bush administrtion is aiming to end the suit by settling it.
"We are deeply concerned because the department has told reporters that it believes its case is weak and therefore it needs to try to settle it," Corr told CBSNews.com. "No good faith negotiator tries to settle a lawsuit by announcing at the beginning that their case is weak."
Lawyers have said the government could potentially recover hundreds of billion of dollars in the suit.
Anti-tobacco arguments said the size of the settlement will not matter because the point of the lawsuit was not a cash payment. "In attempting to settle, they will weaken their ability to force the industry to stop marketing to our kids and other deceptive behaviors."
The Justice Department sued the tobacco industry to recover billions of dollars taxpayers have spent on smoking-related health care, accusing cigarette-makers of a "coordinated campaign of fraud and deceit."
The government alleged that the cigarette companies conspired since the 1950s to defraud and mislead the American public and to conceal information about the effects of smoking and the addictiveness of nicotine.
The lawsuit was filed against Philip Morris Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., American Tobacco Co., Brown - Williamson Tobacco Corp., Lorillard Tobacco Co., British American Tobacco Ltd., Liggett and Myers Inc., the Council for Tobacco Research-USA and the Tobacco Institute.
At the time the civil suit was filed, the Justice Department formally closed, without charges, a nearly 5-year-old criminal investigation of whether tobacco companies lied to Congress or regulatory agencies about the addictive nature of tobacco.
The idea of suing the tobacco companies to recover money spent for health care followed an expensive settlement that cigarette-makers reached with most state governments a year earlier, based on state outlays for health insurance. The industry agreed to pay the states more than $240 billion over 25 years.
©MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press and Reuters Limited contributed to this report