by Peter Baker
The next Monday, November 23, committee investigators took their first and only deposition of the entire impeachment inquiry. For three and a half hours behind closed doors, they questioned Dan Gecker, Kathleen Willeys lawyer, about his contacts with the presidents attorneys. Gecker testified that Clinton counsel Bob Bennett had suggested Willey avoid testifying by invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, a suggestion the presidents lawyer attributed to a judge overseeing her deposition in the Jones case. Gecker also told committee investigators that Bennett had tried to get Willey to hire his longtime friend, criminal defense attorney Plato Cacheris, promising that money would not be a problem. In exchange, Gecker said, Bennett suggested they could share information in a joint defense agreement. While Republican investigators thought those actions could be seen as obstruction, Gecker did not cast them in a venal light, and the matter was essentially dropped as soon as the deposition was over.
As they studied the figures on the piece of paper, Tom DeLays top aides looked at each other in shock. The numbers told a remarkable story: the president was just three votes away from being impeached.
Starrs performance had evidently had an energizing effect among House Republicans, an impact DeLay had encouraged by distributing copies of the independent counsels opening statement to every GOP congressman. Now the sentiment was showing up in an unofficial vote count taken by DeLays office. Of the 228 Republicans in the House, DeLays counters came up with only thirty they thought might vote against impeachment, a number that was shaved to just twenty when the issue was narrowed to a single charge of perjury. About five Democrats were thought to be ready to cross party lines to vote for impeachment, and if a couple others on the fence were to come as well, that would mean 215 votes for the anti-Clinton forces, three shy of the 218 needed for a majority. While obstruction of justice appeared out of reach, impeachment on perjury was suddenly a very real possibility. Despite the election, The Campaign was still alive.
To come up with these numbers, DeLays staff had mounted a rogue operation. Tony Rudy, now DeLays deputy chief of staff, and a few other aides had taken it upon themselves to conduct an informal survey without anyones permission, gambling that if there was enough sentiment for impeachment within the conference, it would show the members that this could genuinely happen. For such an unauthorized mission, they could not use the formal machinery of the whip structurethe Republicans had sixty-seven members involved in the normal whipping operationso instead they called friends around the Hill, aides in key offices, campaign contributors, confidants of swing members, drinking buddies, even fellow players from their fantasy-football league. What they came up with was not as reliable as an official whip survey, but it felt credible to those who kept tabs on the pulse of the conference for a living.
DeLay was not entirely surprised. A week or so earlier, he had conducted a conference call with some forty deputy whips and was happy to discover a strong current against censure and in favor of continuing with impeachment. Here they were, just three weeks after a disastrous election, and yet the House Republicans were ready to go after Clinton anyway. Having done their unauthorized survey, DeLays aides then violated another internal protocol: they leaked it. There at the top of the front page of the Washington Post on Wednesday, November 25, blared the headline Perjury Charge Faces Close Vote. With any luck, they hoped, the recognition that impeachment was alive would give it new legitimacy and make the survey something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Other senior House GOP officials, however, were stunned, not so much by the numbers as by the brazenness of those who had collected them. Scott Palmer, chief of staff to Deputy Whip J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, erupted in anger at how the organization had been abused. Vote counts were never supposed to be leakedparticularly one that had not been sanctioned in the first place. He had never given permission for such a survey, he steamed. Palmer, a longtime Hill aide who cared deeply about the integrity of the institution, argued during a come to Jesus meeting in DeLays office that they should put a halt to this corruption of the system right away.
This is the wrong thing to do, Palmer insisted. Youre going to put members in a bad position. Well be imposing our will on them in a very sensitive situation. The whip organization isnt designed for this kind of situation. Using the whip organization at this point would destroy it.
Rudy and some of his fellow aides fought back, arguing that they were in a battle to the death with Clinton and could not let DeLay lose. They had to use every possible tactic to win. If they were going to go down, at least they should go down swinging.
We have to figure out whats best for Tom, and whats best for Tom is to win, declared Rudys ally, press secretary Mike Scanlon.
But DeLays chief of staff, Susan Hirschmann, agreed with Palmer and persuaded DeLay as well. There would be no formal whipping. This was not a routine bill where they could exert party discipline; for many members, impeachment would be a question of conscience, and they would resent pressure from their leaders. DeLay would have to figure out another way of winning them to his side.
By now, though, he was already working through the subterranean tunnels of politics to build up momentum for impeachment. In addition to constantly distributing anti-Clinton information to House Republicans and keeping up a steady drumbeat of public criticism of the president, DeLay was using a network of conservative talk shows and party fund-raisers to generate pressure within the GOP. He would go on as many as ten radio talk shows a day, and his staff would blast-fax talking points and tip sheets to perhaps two hundred such programs at a time, revving up the conservative audiences that would then turn up the heat on their local congressmen. Similarly, major campaign contributors and local party officials were encouraged to talk with members about impeachment. DeLay was careful enough not to contact his colleagues directly, for fear of giving the White House ammunition to say he was strong-arming members, but he recognized better than most the various pathways of modern American politics that do not emanate from the nations capital.
DeLay was about to get some unexpected help from an unlikely sourcethe White House itself. With the Starr hearing behind them, Clintons lawyers turned their attention to answering the eighty-one questions Hyde had sent the president after the election. Any thought of refusing to respond had by now dissipated, and instead, the White House team was fully engaged in editing a package to best present the presidents case. No one in the Clinton camp had any illusions that the questions were anything but a setup; most of the inquiries had been posed during the Starr investigation, and so in their minds the only real purpose for asking them again was to get the president to repeat politically damaging assertions.
David Kendall, Nicole Seligman, and the other lawyers at Williams & Connolly prepared the first draft of the answers in characteristic fashiondefiant in the extreme, full of lawyerly niggling over words and details, almost hostile in tone. Paul Begala and the political advisers were assigned the task of neutralizing the in-your-face language without increasing the presidents legal exposure. For days they labored over the drafts, looking for ways to soften answers and humanize the language. Eventually, the legal and political teams gathered in Podestas office to go over the document before it went out. Begala had succeeded in massaging it so it was less confrontational. He had also written an introduction for Clinton to sign that was intended to minimize the damage from the legal arguments his attorneys were making: I have asked my attorneys to participate actively, but the fact that there is a legal defense to the various allegations cannot obscure the hard truth, as I have said repeatedly, that my conduct was wrong. It was also wrong to mislead people about what happened and I deeply regret that.
But the Begala scrub, while toning it down significantly, still left a document filled with argumentative and quibbling answers. The tenor was set with the first one.
Question: Do you admit or deny that you are the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America?
An
swer: The President is frequently referred to as the chief law enforcement officer, although nothing in the Constitution specifically designates the president as such. Article II Section 1 of the United States Constitution states that the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America, and the law enforcement function is a component of the executive power.
Others went along the same vein. More than twenty times Clinton said he did not recall or did not know something mentioned in the questions. Asked if he swore an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth during his deposition in the Jones case, Clinton answered, I do not recall the precise wording of the oatha phrase at least one of the political aides tried unsuccessfully to excise from the draft. Clinton went on to say he believed that he had to answer the questions truthfully. In other words, the president would not acknowledge an obligation to provide the whole truth because even his lawyers knew that his testimony in the Jones case was anything but.
Beyond the quarrelsome language, the responses broke no new factual ground as the president stuck by his story, no matter how far-fetched the committee Republicans considered it: he did not lie under oath when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky because he meant intercourse; he did not ask or encourage anyone else to lie under oath; he did not direct Betty Currie to pick up the gifts from Lewinsky; he led Currie through a series of falsehoods not to coach her possible testimony but merely to get as much information as quickly as I could.
The White House delivered the answers on a day calculated to minimize attention to themFriday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. As a cigar-chomping Clinton enjoyed a round of golf, the answers were sent over to the Rayburn Building without his signature. Peeved, the committee aides insisted on a signed copy. After all, the response was to be considered sworn testimony under oath. Kendall, decked out in a tuxedo for an evening event, returned to the White House with a notary to get the signature, then met a young committee aide outside the White House gate around 8:30 P.M. to hand it over.
The answers landed like an unguided missile on Capitol Hill. Hyde and the other committee members saw the presidents response as flagrant disrespect for them and the House as a whole. The momentum DeLay had begun to detect among Republicans only accelerated. Any inclination to give the president a break, to extend the hand of forgiveness, or even to cut their own losses following the election debacle seemed to die at this point. In its place emerged a determination to find a strong case against Clinton no matter where it came from. Even Lindsey Graham, who had almost seemed to be looking for a way to excuse the president, seethed as he read the answers and asked, How can we nail this guy?
After months of nonstop work and crisis at the White House, John Podesta finally got a chance to jog more during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend following delivery of the answers. Running helped clear his head. Things that were hard to see in the frenetic dozen-meetings-a-day pace of the White House suddenly became obvious. And somewhere on the jogging path in Washingtons scenic and almost serene Rock Creek Park on this holiday weekend, it finally became plain to Podesta: They were fucked. There was no way to turn this around.
For weeks, the political smoke detectors at the White House had remained silent. Most of the presidents aides remained confident, even cocky, following the election and embraced pollster Mark Penns faith that public opinion alone would weigh down impeachment until the Republicans gave up. There was no need for the White House to do anything; when your enemy was busy self-destructing, stay out of the way.
But Podesta had picked up on some troubling signs. For years the presidents chief firefighter through every manner of scandal, Podesta had now been elevated to replace Erskine Bowles as White House chief of staff. Shortly after the election, he went to see Bob Livingston to talk about getting rid of impeachment but found the new Speaker to be discouraging. Just as significantly, Podesta had noticed that the White House had not been able to get liberal, anti-impeachment Republican congressmen such as Jack Quinn and Mike Forbes of New York to be more publicly vocal in trying to kill momentum for the drive to evict the president. Podesta arrived back at the White House on the morning of Monday, November 30, and began sounding the alarms.
This thing is rigged, he announced grimly at a staff meeting. We are going to lose.
Most of the dozen aides in the room were flabbergasted. Was he crazy? they asked. Several had been out of town for a few days and wondered what had changed so drastically in their absence. They knew Podesta had his dark sidecolleagues joked that he would sometimes be replaced by his evil twin, Skippyand some thought that he was simply in a dour mood.
The other aides began arguing with Podesta. He was being too pessimistic. They had won the election. Surely the Republicans recognized that. Besides, what could they do if he was right? The only option might be to push off the impeachment vote into the next Congress, scheduled to take office in January, when Democrats would have five more seats. They could argue that holding an impeachment vote before the end of December as Hyde was projecting would be illegitimate because it was now a lame-duck House.
The problem was that the White House and the Democrats had forced the end-of-the-year deadline on Hyde in the first place. Joe Lockhart, who had taken over as press secretary after Mike McCurrys departure, noted that for the last five or six weeks all he had been saying was Lets end it. Now he would have to go out and say, Lets extend it? They could not do that. Greg Craig added that if the name of the game was to win, it would be better to get the House vote over quickly; the spectacle of House Republicans jamming through impeachment would guarantee acquittal in the Senate, he said.
The others were still skeptical of Podestas ominous analysis. Only one other person in the room, communications aide Jonathan Prince, echoed Podestas assessment. Theyre on a glide path toward impeachment, he said.
Despite Hydes vow not to go trolling for new allegations, he acquiesced as David Schippers and other Republican investigators began looking under all sorts of rocks in the search for impeachable offenses that would not just involve the former intern. On the same Thanksgiving weekend of Podestas jogging trail epiphany, Schippers drove down to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to meet with Kathleen Willey and her lawyer for about four hours. Willey had already gone on 60 Minutes to describe how she went to see Clinton in the Oval Office in November 1993 seeking a job, only to find him kissing her and placing her hand on his aroused crotch. What Schippers wanted to know was what had happened afterward. Willey told him about a series of frightening incidents that led her to believe she was in danger. Her tires had been punctured. Her cat turned up missing, and an animal skull later turned up in her yard. One day, a stranger jogging by her house stopped to ask whether she had found the cat or fixed her car, then asked after her children by name. Dont you get the message? she said the man had asked.
Schippers was impressed. Willey, he thought, was one of the most believable witnesses he had ever met. Her story was powerful and could fit into a pattern of potential obstruction that they could include in any articles of impeachment.
That same weekend, while back in Arkansas for the Thanksgiving holiday, Asa Hutchinson drove over to the small town of Greenwood to meet with Juanita Broaddrick at her lawyers office. With her husband and attorney on hand, Hutchinson hardly dwelled on the alleged assault itself and concentrated instead on whether she had ever felt pressured to keep quiet about what Clinton had done to her. As bitter as she was toward him, though, Broaddrick said no one connected with the president had ever tried to ensure her silence. Hutchinson left disturbed by the womans allegation but he felt that they could not include it in their inquiry if there was no obstruction-of-justice angle.
Undeterred, Schippers pursued other angles as well. He was particularly intrigued by the campaign finance scandals of 1996. He had heard that Justice Department prosecutors had given immunity to Johnny Chung, the Chinese-American businessman who had befriended the Clintons, steered money from Beijing
into Democratic coffers, and compared the White House to a subway where you have to put in coins to open the gates. Schippers wanted to know where things stood with Chung and decided to push Justice to turn over two critical memos written by Louis J. Freeh, the FBI director, and Charles G. LaBella, the head of the Justice campaign finance task force, that made the case for appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the situation.
After some jockeying, the Justice officials reluctantly agreed to help. Because the Freeh and LaBella memos were sealed, they needed permission from the judge overseeing the campaign finance investigation, but on the same Friday after Thanksgiving that the White House delivered its answers to the eighty-one questions, Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson rejected the Justice request, ruling that the department had failed to demonstrate a compelling need to break the court-ordered seal. The Judi ciary Committee investigators were dumbfounded. The committees lawyers obtained a draft of the brief filed by the Justice attorneys (the final version was under seal) and concluded that it was shoddily drafted. No wonder they had lost. Maybe they were even trying to lose. When Justice officials said they would file a motion asking the judge to reconsider, the committee attorneys were convinced that that would get them nowhere. Three of them, Mitch Glazier, William E. Moschella, and Sharee Freeman, stayed up all night drafting their own motion to the judge.
Amid the flurry over campaign finance, the committee conducted a nine-hour hearing into the consequences of perjuryessentially an extended argument by the Republicans that lying under oath, even about sex, was a serious crime that could and did land people in jail. The star witnesses of the hearing on Tuesday, December 1, were two such convicted perjurers. Pam Parsons, a former basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, had pleaded guilty to lying during a libel suit about whether she had ever been at a gay bar. Barbara Battalino, once a doctor for the Veterans Administration, had pleaded guilty after falsely denying under oath that she had had a sexual encounter with a patient.