Hillary Clinton's Pollster Sued Over E-Mails

from Newsmax.com

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/7/4/73822.shtml?s=ic

Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist is being accused of illegal eavesdropping in a civil lawsuit that alleges he and his polling firm monitored the personal e-mails of a former associate who started a rival company.

Mitchell E. Markel, a former vice president at polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, claims in the suit that the firm began monitoring all messages sent from his personal Blackberry device nearly a month after he had resigned and become president of his new business. The suit claims that the founder of the firm, Mark Penn, who is Clinton's strategist and pollster, knew about and approved of the monitoring, which the suit says violates federal wiretapping laws.

Penn, Schoen & Berland, a world-renowned firm that has helped elect clients like former President Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is accused of hacking into Markel's Blackberry and rigging his e-mail accounts to send blind carbon copies of his e-mails to another account that it had set up. The suit says the Blackberry that Markel used was always his own, never the property of his former employer.

"Through this unlawful interception scheme, defendants clandestinely received confidential and proprietary information of Markel's company ... including pricing, strategy and work product, and proprietary information of other companies whose e-mails were also intercepted," the suit says.

Howard Rubin, an attorney for Penn, Schoen & Berland, disputed the claim that the e-mails were private or that the firm engaged in unauthorized monitoring.

"The company hasn't done anything improper and the e-mails came in on our own e-mail account," he said. He declined to elaborate.

The suit filed last Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan is the latest twist in the saga of the high-profile polling firm, which not only advises on political strategy but also does brand building and corporate messaging for clients like Microsoft and Time Warner.

A week earlier, the firm had filed its own lawsuit against Markel and another former partner, Michael J. Berland, accusing them of breach of contract because Markel's new company was soliciting Penn, Schoen & Berland clients, with Berland's help.

Markel, Berland and other employees of Penn, Schoen & Berland signed agreements that prohibited them from competing with the firm or soliciting and servicing its clients for a certain period of time if they were to leave the company, according to the suit.

Some observers have wondered whether that first suit against Berland and Markel was a warning shot from the Clinton campaign to Bloomberg, who is said to be contemplating his own independent presidential run. Associates of the mayor, who insists he is not running, say that if he did decide to get into the race he would likely want to hire pollsters he knows and trusts; Berland worked on both of his mayoral campaigns.

Berland left Penn, Schoen & Berland in December, and Markel left this year to run a new company that he has formed called Global Insights & Strategies, LLC.

It was also from that first suit that Markel initially learned his e-mail was being monitored, because the suit quotes e-mails between him, Markel and others that show conversations they were having about doing business with clients of their former firm. The clients described in the suit were not political candidates but corporate accounts like the National Hockey League, Estee Lauder and Qwest.

The first suit, also filed in State Supreme Court, claims that Berland and Markel violated the non-competition agreement by pursuing those clients, among other things, on behalf of Markel's new company.

It was filed to stop Berland, Markel and two other former employees "from engaging in an orchestrated and illegal plot to sabotage PSB's business in New York by soliciting PSB's most significant clients and servicing them through a new and competing company" that had "assistance and funding from Berland," the complaint says.

Berland's attorney did not return a call seeking comment about that suit.

Markel's suit seeks monetary damages and asks the court to restrain Penn, Schoen from disclosing or using any of the intercepted electronic communications, including for competitive use or in any trial or court proceeding, and asks that they be ordered to destroy everything they intercepted.

The previous suit also sought unspecified damages and asked the court to stop Berland, Markel and other former employees from soliciting their clients and engaging in other competitive business practices.