by Ken Starr
Unfortunately, we were continually confronted with Ginsburg’s exasperating game of cat and mouse. Ginsburg kept tinkering with the immunity proffer.
We kept coming back to basics. The FBI had confirmed the Tripp tapes were authentic; we corroborated many of the contemporaneous notes Tripp had taken. They revealed Monica’s fierce determination to lie under oath. Her written proffer waffled on those key facts. Monica was clearly holding back, just like Webb Hubbell and Susan McDougal had done.
Insisting we had an agreement, Ginsburg went to court to enforce it. Understandable, but what was not understandable, with his client facing legal jeopardy and press scrutiny, was Ginsburg’s making statements that did not portray Monica in a positive light.
“I can’t tell you what’s true and what’s not true,” he told a journalist on January 21. “She signed the declaration and stands on it at this time. . . . But I’m smart enough after 30 years as a trial lawyer to know that there’s always a surprise around the corner. If [Clinton] did have a sexual relationship with a 23-year-old intern, I question his judgment. If he didn’t, then I think Ken Starr and his crew have ravaged the life of a youngster.”
On January 22, we issued subpoenas for a number of witnesses, including Monica, Betty Currie, other White House staffers, Secret Service agents, and for White House documents. With or without Lewinsky, we were going forward. We would vigorously investigate whether she had lied or obstructed justice.
Ginsburg obviously loved the unprecedented exposure. He extended his newfound notoriety week after week. Had Monica cooperated right away, the investigation would have been over within a few weeks. That precious extra time allowed forces to be mustered to the president’s side. Time gave Clinton room to maneuver.
And with Olympian effectiveness, that was what the president did. Monica Lewinsky saved the nation’s wily chief executive, who unleashed virtually every weapon in his formidable arsenal against the investigation.
On January 23, Clinton told members of his Cabinet the allegations were false. After the meeting, several Cabinet members appeared outside the White House to fight the rumors.
“I believe that the allegations are completely untrue,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said. She was backed up by Commerce Secretary William Daley, Secretary of Education Richard Riley, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala.
The next day, Ann Lewis, White House communications director, said she and other Clinton supporters had been given a green light to talk about the allegations. “I can say with absolute assurance that the president of the United States did not have a sexual relationship because I have heard the president of the United States say so,” Lewis said on Good Morning America. “He has said it, he could not be more clear. . . . Sex is sex, even in Washington, I’ve been assured.”
The Comeback Kid appeared in the Roosevelt Room in the White House on January 26, issuing his strongest denial yet. “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” He wagged his finger for emphasis. “I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false.”
Watching this performance, I was puzzled. He was insulting a young woman who potentially held his fate in her hands. We later learned this had devastated Monica. But she and her incompetent lawyer’s televised bloviating sessions continued shielding the president from potential political disaster.
That disaster seemed to be unavoidable. A powerful employer trysting with an impressionable recent college graduate in the nation’s most impressive place of employment did not make for a sustainable narrative of presidential innocence. And too many people—especially the Secret Service uniformed officers—knew that their private sessions in the Oval Office were not cerebral encounters.
To his credit, the president performed impressively during his State of the Union speech on January 27. He mentioned nothing of the burgeoning scandal.
But his surrogates did. That same day, Hillary went on the Today show with Matt Lauer to defend her husband. “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
Representative Charlie Rangel of New York weighed in on January 28. “That poor child has serious emotional problems. She’s fantasizing. And I haven’t heard that she played with a full deck in her other experiences.”
He was referring to a married man from Oregon, who had come forward to sell a story to a tabloid about his long-running affair with Monica while she was an undergrad student at Lewis & Clark University in Portland.
Rahm Emanuel, Clinton’s senior policy adviser, told CNN: “Did the president have a sexual relationship with this young lady? No. Did the president ask this young lady to lie? No. That’s what matters in a media frenzy about rumor and gossip. [You’ve] got to get back down to the facts.” Then the gossips began their dirty work, with an onslaught of cruel and deeply personal attacks. Monica was a “clutch,” a narcissistic stalker, an overweight fantasist who made it all up.
But there was one bright spot for Monica. Back in Little Rock, Judge Wright issued a ruling that Monica’s testimony was “not essential to the core issues” in the Jones lawsuit. Her evidence would be excluded. Jones’s lawyers immediately appealed.
Free to go and under assault from the press, as well as from Clinton surrogates, Monica had had enough. She left Washington and went home to California to spend time with her father and stepmother.
Meanwhile, the president also regrouped. Two weeks later, he appeared deeply reverent at the National Prayer Breakfast, a Washington tradition launched by President Dwight Eisenhower early in his first term. To show up at that annual event, with Hillary at his side, took some chutzpah. Without mentioning the brewing scandal even indirectly, the president addressed four thousand people scrunched into the Washington Hilton. He spoke movingly to them, and via television, to the nation and the world.
Here was a deeply human president, reaching back to his Southern Baptist upbringing. He spoke to the country’s heartland and to the traditional culture that prevailed in his native South. The National Prayer Breakfast is for Little Rock and countless hamlets across America, not Hollywood or Manhattan. Here, on the morning of interdenominational and multifaith prayer, Bill Clinton returned to his spiritual roots, to his days as governor of Arkansas, when he sang in the choir of Little Rock’s massive First Baptist Church.
It was the last admirable move he would make for some time. Yogi Berra famously advised: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” With the public revelation of the Lewinsky relationship, the president had a stark choice. Before him lay two roads: the high road and the low road. Like most successful politicians, Clinton could adroitly motor along both roads at the same time. This time, however, he took the low road and pressed hard on the gas pedal.
Clinton selected this route in the wake of an infamous overnight poll done by Dick Morris. The American people, Morris reported back to the president, would forgive adultery, but not perjury or obstruction of justice.
It was too late. He knew what he had done. He had lied under oath in his deposition in the Paula Jones case. The president’s fateful response to Morris: “Well, we just have to win, then.”
“Winning” meant employing a multifaceted strategy: First, take care of or at least neutralize Monica, much in the way the White House had taken care of Hubbell. Second, stonewall the investigation while purporting to cooperate. Third, send out surrogates to aggressively attack Starr and his team—and to trash Monica.
Meanwhile, stay focused on the day job. The country was at peace, and it was prosperous thanks to a tech boom and soaring stock market. The danger of being forced to resign had passed, thanks to Monica’s self-sacrifice.
“I would never walk away from the people of this country and the trust they’ve placed in me,” Clinton said on February 6, 1998, during a news conference with UK prime minister Tony Blair.
With no agreement in place with Monica, we began bringing other witnesses in to testify before the Washington grand jury, including eleven friends and family members Monica had told about the “secret” relationship.
The circuslike atmosphere prevailing on the third floor of the courthouse—near the grand jury room—finally led Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to call a halt to the disruptive spectacle. She moved the press to a location outside the courthouse. But even so, upon completing their grand jury appearances, witnesses and their lawyers frequently headed directly to curbside on Constitution Avenue, on a spot that was soon dubbed “Monica Beach.”
Things got even weirder when Ginsburg went on a public relations blitz. On February 1, he entered news history by making the rounds of all five major American Sunday-morning talk shows. His main message: Ken Starr is the bad guy.
Ginsburg’s behavior was appallingly unprofessional and wildly ineffective in terms of serving the interest of his client. He told the press Monica was being “squeezed” by Starr’s office and was now a target of the Whitewater prosecution.
Perhaps a bit spooked, Clinton’s lawyers began claiming that executive privilege extended to his top aides on these nonpresidential issues. This was a harbinger of hard-fought battles to come over the right of the grand jury to obtain evidence versus endless White House legal gambits to delay and deny.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dirt
Early in 1998, we had heard that people were poking about for dirt on individual OIC team members. Laughably, someone circulated the rumor that “Ken Starr had a honey” in Little Rock. A lie. Not content with going after just me, the White House’s allies decided to make the so-called cowboy prosecutors the enemy, dredging up personal history and old DOJ investigations to paint them as rogues out to get the president.
I believe one major reason the attacks had ramped up was that we had summoned to the grand jury White House aide Bruce Lindsey, who had helped prepare Clinton for his deposition in the Paula Jones case. We’d been bringing in lower-level witnesses—stewards, secretaries, Secret Service agents—but now we were getting closer to the president. Clinton claimed executive privilege and/or attorney-client confidentiality covered his conversations with Lindsey.
I believed neither privilege applied. Under established law, executive privilege claims are overcome by the specific, concrete needs of the criminal justice system. That was precisely our situation. And Lindsey was a White House lawyer, not the president’s personal attorney.
Mystery faxes and anonymous phone calls to members of the press promised spicy details proving that “Ken Starr’s office is completely imploding.” Not true; our office remained remarkably united. We had terrific esprit de corps.
But I recognized that the Clinton White House had declared war. We moved immediately to strengthen our ranks. Mike Emmick proved to be an effective recruiter, bringing on board Tom Bienert, a career prosecutor from Los Angeles, and Karin Immergut, an Assistant U.S. Attorney from Portland, Oregon. We also recruited new members of the brain trust—especially academics who could counter the White House’s onslaught of constitutional claims impeding our investigation. Some were professors from law schools, including Andy Leipold (University of Illinois), Craig Lerner (George Mason University), Bill Kelley (Notre Dame University), Ronald Mann (University of Michigan), and Ron Rotunda (University of Illinois)—quite a collection of legal minds.
The brain trust tackled a pivotally important question: Can a sitting president be indicted? Renowned constitutional scholar Rotunda and his colleagues concluded—contrary to the Justice Department’s stated position—that a president can, in fact, be summoned to the bar of criminal justice. The basic reason: in our constitutional democracy, no one is above the law. But we didn’t need to act on the brain trust’s carefully considered judgment. Congress had provided the OIC with a road map containing highly specific directions for our journey. We were to take our findings to the House of Representatives for possible impeachment, not to a grand jury for possible criminal indictment.
I stopped watching the news. I encouraged my colleagues to do the same. It made no sense to go home after an exhausting day fighting the White House attorneys and, night after night, watch such press luminaries as Geraldo Rivera and White House functionaries like Sidney Blumenthal spew out venom.
My long-suffering wife, Alice, kept up with all the major newspapers and TV news pundits. Of course, criticism of her husband upset her, but she was determined to know what was being said by the White House and other critics. She would let me know when she felt I needed to pay attention to some fresh tactic or allegation against the office. Only rarely did she show frustration. For a documentary for the A&E network, she made a telling comment: “Sometimes, it seems like a nightmare that won’t ever go away and I always think to myself, ‘It can’t get worse than this.’ And it does. Every day it seems to get worse and worse.”
The barrage of charges was unremitting. A common theme was: Starr found nothing in all his years poking around Arkansas, looking for something, anything, to pin on the Clintons. Now, in desperation, he was probing into the most private of human relationships. Someone should rein in this prosecutor gone rogue.
I turned to those who had authorized me, asking them to weigh in. Attorney General Reno, however, ran for cover. Time and again, I complained that the Justice Department should either rally to our defense, or if I had in their view gone off the rails, Reno should fire me.
Under the statute, the AG could remove an independent counsel for “good cause.” If she had done so, I would not have appealed, as the statute provided, to federal court for review of that decision. To the contrary, I would have headed off to Malibu.
Reno didn’t fire me, nor did she defend me. Leaving me in limbo, she remained silently aloof. She deliberately sat on her hands while we twisted in the wind, week after week, with no Monica deal in hand. This was moral cowardice, and I said so to my colleagues. Frequently.
To take sides in the White House-OIC confrontation, Reno said, would intrude into the independence of the investigation. Not so. With the threat to the president’s survival growing, she cowardly remained on the sidelines.
The AG’s agnostic approach stood in stark contrast to the courageous stand of FBI Director Freeh, who at every turn supported the investigation in ways great and small. Freeh had become one of my heroes. Unlike the DOJ leadership, Freeh stood firm in supporting the basic values of the FBI—not only fidelity and bravery, but integrity. We always had the basic personnel—and FBI expertise—that we requested, and Freeh made sure we had the best that the Bureau had to offer. From beginning to end, he was all in to support the rule of law.
The press continued to camp outside our house in McLean. I learned to wave and say, “No comment . . . Have a nice day,” as I settled into the backseat of the marshals’ vehicle to leave for the office. With regularity, I would mutter harmless bromides such as: “The investigation is active and ongoing.” Or: “We’re just seeking the truth.”
I repeated the “We’re just after the truth” statement enough that some thoughtful observers, such as Ben Wittes of the Washington Post, concluded that I was tilting too far in the direction of truth-seeking rather than striving for justice. I saw the two as inextricably intertwined. To do justice, we needed to know the whole truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Closing the Books on Hillary
On April 25, 1998, we had our last interview with Hillary in the Map Room at the White House. She responded to all our questions about legal work she had done for Madison Guaranty as reflected i
n the previously “lost” billing records. The interviewing team was led by Hickman, with assistance from Bob Bittman, Sol Wisenberg, Pat O’Brien, and me.
Hillary seemed well prepared, not surprised by much except the “Pay off Clinton” check and the Hubbell prison recordings. She stuck with most of what she had said in prior interviews, changing some details to fit newly discovered evidence, like documents found in Vince Foster’s attic. Again, she answered many of our questions with “I do not recall,” but we had fully expected that. It was more of the same.
Two days later, the entire OIC, including Dash, gathered in our D.C. conference room for a full-day marathon. We were there to decide whether to ask the grand jury in Little Rock to indict Hillary Clinton before its term expired on May 7.
We each had a copy of a three-inch-thick binder containing a comprehensive prosecution memorandum prepared by the Little Rock prosecutors. This “pros” memo, written predominantly by Paul Rosenzweig, would be examined in detail. Paul built upon the work of Bob Bittman, Eric Dreiband, and Pat O’Brien.
The memo outlined our findings with respect to Hillary’s conduct in the entire investigation. This included Whitewater, the missing Rose Law Firm records, Webb Hubbell, her legal work for Madison Guaranty and other McDougal projects, as well as her “selective amnesia,” those convenient but profound memory lapses under oath.
We were continuing to look at the panorama of Arkansas-related events. We had already determined in late 1997 that the entire body of evidence against the president did not meet the exacting standard that Congress set forth in the independent counsel statute with respect to sending a potential impeachment matter to the House of Representatives.