Lucky Year Or Not For Margaret Warner

It started when Margaret Warner, senior correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, scored a big get: She was the first Western reporter to interview Pakistanti opposition leader Benazir Bhutto upon her release from house arrest.

Meanwhile, in the life of Margaret Warner—partner at McDermott Will & Emery in DC—the New York Post disclosed a $1,390 tab she expensed while working for WTC Captive Insurance Company, the congressionally chartered insurance fund meant to settle 9/11 claims against New York City. A fund official said that the $1,250 dinner for eight at Giovanni Ristorante on West 55th Street was okay but that an additional $138 for cocktails at the Waldorf-Astoria bar was billed to the fund in error; it doesn’t reimburse for alcoholic beverages. Warner’s law firm promised to reimburse WTC Captive Insurance for the mistake.

Asked whether she knows the PBS Warner, the lawyer Warner—known to friends as Peg—wrote that they’ve never met but that “in living in Washington for over 25 years, I sometimes have received junk mail intended for her, and apparently we see several of the same physicians.”

If the lawyer’s lucky, maybe her next $138 drink bill will end up in the mailbox of the globetrotting correspondent.

This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Washingtonian magazine. 

Garrett M. Graff