Could money and politics have mattered just a little in the selection of people for the NII Advisory Council? If nothing else, a few questions arose in the case of West Publishing, the giant publisher of legal information. Vance Opperman was friends with Mack McLarty, Clinton’s first chief of staff.[6.48] What’s more, Opperman cochaired the finance committee during the 1994 reelection campaign of Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic U.S. senator from California who sat on a copyright subcommittee within the Judiciary Committee.[6.49] A study by the Taxpayer Assets Project, one of Ralph Nader’s groups, revealed how civic-minded West was. By way of a political-action committee and gifts from lawyers, lobbyists, and family members, the West crowd in five years had given more than $738,000 to Congress members and the Democratic National Committee. Judges, too, must have loved the company. A West-run foundation had dispensed $15,000 awards to federal judges for “distinguished service to justice.” Over a dozen years, the selection committee had included seven past or present members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ultimate interpreter of copyright law. West had paid for trips to places as far off as Hawaii and the Virgin Islands. Benefiting, according to the _Minneapolis Star Tribune_, were Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, and now-retired Justices Lewis Powell, Byron White, and William Brennan.[6.50] West impressed me. Via campaign gifts, friends, and favors such as the trips, Opperman’s crew had cozied up to all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. Eager to see how representative West was with its people’s political gifts, I phoned the Center for Responsive Politics, the Washington-based group from which I simultaneously got information about Lehman. Would the Center please send me a printout of congressional and presidential donations from some other members of the NII Advisory Council and from people and political-action committees associated with their companies? A list arrived for the period between January 1, 1991, and November 28, 1994, and I scanned down the names on the laser-printed sheets. The Walt Disney people hadn’t disappointed me. Advisory Council member John F. Cooke, president of the Disney Channel, had given at least $48,000 to politicians from coast to coast and to Democratic organizations. Non-Council member Jeffrey Katzenberg, then with the Disney conglomerate, had donated at least $63,000 in one way or another.