by Ken Starr
In our interactions, Hillary seemed cold and aloof, determined to make herself unlikable. She displayed no empathy factor at all. It was as if she were daring us: “Just try to take me on.” In our view, she had lied about her work at the Rose Law Firm, lied about the Clintons’ Whitewater investment and her role in it, and lied about the stolen law firm records. We had pages upon pages of her “amnesiac” depositions.
Some of our prosecutors had started out as admirers of the pathbreaking First Lady, who had famously taken on a substantive policy role in the Clinton administration. As important as Eleanor Roosevelt had been in her trailblazing role for presidential spouses, Hillary had set up a functional copresidency.
Yet at a human level, her behavior seemed odd and needlessly counterproductive.
Hillary would have been well advised to spend more time in Arkansas courtrooms, with real people, interacting with flesh-and-blood jurors and nervous witnesses. Courtrooms are places where human beings gather, where humanity is not checked at the door. But our interviews with people had revealed she’d been a mediocre attorney, for the most part. I remembered my early mentors describing their mantras for success in the courtroom. Likability, rock-solid integrity, and honesty: “Jurors will know that every word that comes out of my mouth is true.”
Jim McDougal had shed light on the work Hillary had performed for Madison. A close examination of her Rose Law Firm billing records contradicted what she had previously said. We’d recovered more Whitewater documents, including Clinton tax returns that suggested the possibility of fraud. But McDougal had died on March 8, 1998, in a Fort Worth federal prison facility. We had reached a point where we had to make a decision about pursuing any criminal charges against Hillary with what we had to date.
At my direction, Hickman Ewing, as head of our Little Rock operation, led a team, including Bob Bittman and Paul Rosenzweig, that drew up a draft indictment and supporting prosecution memorandum of the First Lady. We wanted to answer the question: Was there admissible evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of any alleged federal offense?
Before his death, Jim had tried to persuade Susan to cooperate with the OIC; he thought he knew why she refused so adamantly. He claimed in his memoir, Arkansas Mischief, published in 1998 after his death, that on the day when the OIC and defense attorneys met in the White House to take Bill’s deposition during the 825 trial, Bill had pulled Jim aside to show him how FDR had used the room to view maps of troop positions during World War II.
“Tell Susan to hang on,” Bill told Jim. “It’ll be all right.” The implication Jim took from that conversation was that Susan would be pardoned.
Jim had complicated relationships with both Susan and Bill. By his account, his marriage to Susan had ended in all but name after he discovered medical records indicating she’d had an abortion while they were married. Jim was furious that she hadn’t discussed this profound moral issue with him. He later overheard an intimate telephone conversation between Susan and Bill. He believed they were having an affair. (Susan denied both allegations when Jim’s biography, coauthored with Curtis Wilkie, a respected Boston Globe reporter, was released.)
But Clinton’s implicit promise to pardon Susan made it appear there may have been some truth to his belief.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Disruption
On Monday, January 12, 1998, prosecutor Jackie Bennett was working at the OIC office about 9:00 P.M. when he got a phone call from a woman who declined to give her name.
After trying both the 825 case and the Perry County Bank case, Bennett had taken over as deputy independent counsel in Washington. As Bennett was talking on the phone, a new colleague, Steve Binhak, entered the room. A witty Assistant U.S. Attorney from Miami who had expertise in prosecuting tax fraud, Binhak had been recruited to deal with Hubbell’s continuing legal jeopardy over income tax issues.
FBI agent Steve Irons walked in and Bennett waved him over.
“So, let me get this straight,” Bennett said into the phone. “You’ve tape-recorded calls from a woman who had an affair with the president. She’s lied about it in the Paula Jones case, and is trying to get you to lie about it. People are helping her get a job to buy her silence. And Vernon Jordan is involved in it.”
Washington lawyer and power broker Jordan was known to be the president’s close friend. Bennett later told me Binhak’s eyes were “like saucers.”
Jackie asked her a few questions. Then the woman dropped a bomb: “You know me. I’m Linda Tripp. I was a witness in the Vince Foster case.”
Tripp had been Foster’s executive assistant. Now she truly had Jackie’s attention.
Like first responders, Bennett, Binhak, Irons, and Sol Wisenberg, a brilliant career prosecutor from San Antonio who often worked late, jumped into Sol’s van and headed to Tripp’s home in suburban Maryland, listening to Sol’s Ralph Stanley cassette as they drove.
Upon their arrival at about 11:45 P.M., my four colleagues sat and talked with Linda deep into the night. None of them had been involved in the Foster death investigation; thus, they were assessing her credibility for the first time. They found her believable, though they were unsure about her motives.
A veteran of the Bush administration, when she worked in the White House counsel’s office, Linda had continued in that role for Vince Foster. From the beginning, Tripp had been appalled at the Clintons’ arrogance and treatment of other White House staff. Plus, she was a reminder to everyone around her of Foster’s tragedy. After his death, she had been reassigned to a political-appointee job in the Pentagon.
Tripp explained that Monica Lewinsky, who she described as a Beverly Hills child of privilege in her early twenties, had served as a White House intern, starting in July 1995. She had struck up a relationship with the president. The affair had started during the government shutdown in November 1995, when interns manned the phones and delivered documents. Monica, then twenty-two, and Clinton began having sexual trysts in a hallway off the Oval Office. After her internship was over, Lewinsky got a job in the West Wing and continued to see the president whenever possible.
However, after coming under the watchful eye of Hillary’s hatchet person, Evelyn Lieberman, Monica had been reassigned in April 1996 to a job across the Potomac. She found herself confined to a desk in the Pentagon’s Public Affairs office. She had been trying ever since to snare another job in the White House complex.
Linda became close to the much younger woman, whom she described as emotionally immature for her age. Working at the Pentagon that summer, Monica began confiding in Linda about her divorced parents, and about her anxiety about being overweight. Then Monica began sharing details of her relationship with the president and her ongoing visits to the West Wing, usually arranged through Betty Currie, the president’s secretary.
At first Tripp didn’t know whether to believe her. But the level of detail, the way her story coincided with White House events, and the gifts that the president had given Monica—including a special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—convinced Tripp she was telling the truth.
We later learned it was Tripp who had told Jones’s lawyers about Monica’s relationship with the president. On December 15, Jones’s lawyers had served Clinton with a request “to produce documents related to communications between the President and Monica Lewinsky.” His lawyers had been surprised. Who was Monica Lewinsky?
Jones’s lawyers sent a subpoena to Monica (named Jane Doe 8) on December 19, 1997, requiring her to appear for a deposition. They had done the same to a handful of other women who they believed had a sexual relationship or encounter with the president, including a woman named Kathleen Willey.
Monica said the president had told her she could get out of the deposition by submitting an affidavit denying any such relationship existed. The president, through Vernon Jordan, had arranged for her to get an attorney. Lawyer Frank Carter drew up
the document, which Lewinsky signed on January 7, 1998, affirming: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the President.”
Now Monica was pleading with Tripp, who had also been subpoenaed in October because she had witnessed the emergence of Willey from the Oval Office in August 1997 in a flustered state—face red, lipstick smeared, blouse untucked—to file a false affidavit.
Tripp had captured these conversations and more—much, much more—with a telephone recording machine. But she was worried. She had since learned that Maryland had a law making it illegal to tape a telephone conversation without the other party’s knowledge. She would turn over her evidence, but only if she could be granted immunity.
Our team agreed that immunity was no problem, assuming the tapes were authentic. They left Tripp’s home around 2:00 A.M. and drove back to Washington, not with a sense of triumph but with deepening concern. They found her believable, and if the tapes were authentic, they were powerful proof of an ongoing criminal conspiracy. If what Tripp said was true, not only had Monica committed perjury by filing a false affidavit, the president of the United States was obstructing justice.
I had to fly to Little Rock early that morning to discuss the Hubbell tax case with Bittman and Hickman. We got on a conference call with Bennett after I arrived. At first, I found Tripp’s story hard to believe. How could an intern have carried on an affair with President Clinton in the Oval Office? Monica’s tale sounded like the feverish fantasies of a Valley Girl. The White House was a goldfish bowl. It would be difficult to have any privacy for a tryst when Secret Service agents were manning doors, and there were cameras and entry and exit logs. It just didn’t seem possible.
I wasn’t completely surprised by the revelation, however. Jackie had called me the previous Friday, January 9, while I was in Aspen for a conference. He had alerted me that a tip alleging some malfeasance on the part of the president might be coming in—one of those “I have a friend who has a friend” kind of tips that usually go nowhere or aren’t worth pursuing.
Bennett had learned of this “source” in a roundabout way, after four lawyers who knew one another decided to have dinner in Philadelphia to catch up on old times and new interests.
Jerome Marcus, who lived in Philadelphia, set up the dinner on January 8. Richard Porter, a young Kirkland & Ellis partner in the Chicago office, flew in from the Windy City. (Richard and I practiced in entirely different fields, he in corporate and I in litigation, and our paths seldom crossed.) George Conway, a New York lawyer, came down on a whim. They were joined by Paul Rosenzweig, a member of the OIC team who lived in Washington. At times, Rosenzweig stayed at my apartment in Little Rock when he needed to be in Arkansas on OIC business.
Porter and Marcus told Rosenzweig that they were helping lawyers representing Paula Jones. They’d come across a source who claimed that President Clinton was involved in an illicit relationship with a young woman and that the White House was trying to get her a job to cover it up and keep her quiet. Would the OIC be interested?
Rosenzweig had informed Jackie Bennett, who at first balked. He told him, “We can’t have hearsay.” But he realized that if a crime was being committed, the provenance didn’t matter. He told Rosenzweig that he was interested, but the information had to come in “through the front door,” meaning the source would have to call him directly.
Though I was skeptical, if what Tripp was saying was true, it was a remarkable parallel to the story of Webb Hubbell. An individual who knew of potential wrongdoing was being told to keep silent to protect the president, and was promised that, with the help of the White House, she would be well taken care of.
The president was scheduled to give his own deposition in the Jones case on Saturday, January 17. The issues to be explored would include whether the president had sexual relationships with state or federal employees, or other subordinates, which would tend to corroborate Paula Jones’s allegations with respect to what had happened in the Excelsior Hotel. At a minimum, the background evidence would be sufficiently relevant to pursue in discovery and perhaps to be allowed in at trial.
Jordan was helping Monica find a position in New York, where she would be out of the lawsuit’s reach; federal courts have limited power over out-of-state witnesses in civil cases.
We couldn’t turn a blind eye, but we needed independent corroboration before we could take the next steps. And we had little time. The two women had made plans to meet late that afternoon for coffee at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City.
We knew the stakes were at their highest level in the entire course of our long-running investigation. Potentially the presidency was at stake. Clinton had survived Whitewater, though he had testified untruthfully time and again; but this time in his recklessness he appeared to be carrying on an active criminal course of conduct.
Tripp had planned to surreptitiously tape Lewinsky herself, using amateur equipment. Instead, FBI agents, led by Irons, outfitted her with a microphone and a high-tech recorder that would allow the agents to listen as the women talked. Perhaps to the fainthearted, wiring a cooperative witness is poor form. But wires are used routinely in law enforcement. It’s an entirely lawful tool that serves a pivotal purpose in truth gathering. That way, the targets speak for themselves.
The two women met, found a table, and began talking. “This is what my lawyer taught me,” Monica said. “You really don’t—you don’t very often say ‘no’ unless you really need to. The best is ‘Well, not that I recall, not that I really remember. Might have, but I don’t really remember.’”
As the FBI team listened in, the Monica-Linda conversation turned quickly to Monica’s request that Linda draft and file a false affidavit regarding Kathleen Willey. Monica was counting on Linda’s friendship. Her rationale was entirely political: we need to protect the president whom we both serve.
But the device malfunctioned. Suddenly the lead agent couldn’t hear what was being said. Hoping that the conversation was still being recorded, the FBI team moved two agents into the restaurant to listen from an adjoining table. They heard enough of the conversation to confirm the topics. After the women’s meeting was over, agents removed the wire and learned to their relief that the device had recorded the women’s conversation.
Monica insisted that the president didn’t consider the false affidavit as lying. “He thinks of it as, ‘We’re safe. We’re being smart.’ Okay? . . . It’s good for everybody.”
After listening to the tape, my initial impression was this was the real thing. Monica described a carefully constructed presidential plan to commit crimes against the fair and honest administration of justice. In return, Jordan was helping her find a job in New York, perhaps with Revlon-affiliated companies.
We were still investigating the extraordinary payments received by Hubbell from, among other clients, Revlon, and the connection to his unwillingness to provide information to the OIC about certain core Arkansas matters. This was not a perjury trap, this was a perjury game, a calculated plan to prevent the courts from getting at the truth. We saw this as a criminally culpable attitude on the part of both Bill and Monica. But the president was far more culpable. He not only was more than two decades older than she, he was a lawyer and an officer of the court. Even more, he was the chief executive of the United States.
The following day at work, January 14, Monica gave Tripp a three-page document: “Points to make in an affidavit.” These included details about Willey’s encounter with the president such as “I never saw her go into the Oval Office, or come out of the Oval Office. I have never observed the President behaving inappropriately with anybody.” She even suggested that Tripp say, “I now find it completely plausible that [Willey] herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc.”
By her actions, Monica was confirming Tripp’s information. But that didn’t mean Monica had been telling the truth about her affair with Clinton. What if she had a vivid imagination and was
regaling her friend with a fantasy story?
Bizarrely, January 14 was the date we had scheduled months earlier to take a deposition of Hillary Clinton on the matter of the FBI files before we made our final determination about her involvement. Shortly after noon, Bennett, Rod Rosenstein, and I went to the White House for the deposition. As we entered, I introduced Bennett to the First Lady as the prosecutor who had tried Tucker and the McDougals. She gave me a peculiar look. I just smiled.
The deposition took only about thirty minutes; Hillary had little involvement with the FBI debacle. At least this time, she didn’t repeat her usual mantra of “I don’t recall.”
Later that day, our team sat around the long conference table and talked about what to do. The Tripp-Lewinsky matter was arguably within our investigative authority under prior grants from the Special Division. We could proceed under the specific umbrella of what we understood to be our “related to” jurisdiction. That is, a witness already known to us from the Foster death investigation, Linda Tripp, had come to us with credible evidence that the president was in the process of planning and committing crimes.
My own view was this: What had been revealed by Tripp—both in her statements to our career prosecutors and in the recording of her conversation with Monica—clearly “related to” our ongoing work and had “arisen out of” our investigation. The factual and logical connection to Foster’s death case gave us the necessary jurisdictional hook to carry on the inquiry, at least preliminarily.
This situation stood in stark contrast to someone coming in off the street and urging: “Criminal activity is afoot in the White House, and you should investigate it.” That had happened not infrequently in Little Rock (“prison deal at Calico Rock . . . crooked as a snake”). As a matter of course, we simply referred those walk-in leads to the FBI on the second floor of Two Financial Centre.