by Ken Starr
I didn’t intend to be seen, much less present for the interview. Because Stein was known for his punctuality, I left fifteen minutes before they were scheduled to arrive. I made my way to the nearby Fitzpatrick hotel, where several other members of our team were standing by.
I was gone when a cab drove up. Monica, wearing a blond wig and glasses, got out along with Plato Cacheris, Jake Stein, and Sydney Hoffman, a female associate with Plato’s firm. They went upstairs to talk to our team.
The hours wore on, and finally the word came to the Fitzpatrick.
“She’s completely believable,” our colleagues announced. Sam Dash was effusive in his praise of Monica’s powerful memory and winsome manner. With his vast experience, Sam saw her as a credible and sympathetic witness. I was relieved and thankful. At long last, the end was in sight.
Within days, we had worked out immunity agreements for Monica and her mother. On July 30, Monica’s lawyers delivered a navy-blue dress to our office. We sent it to the FBI for testing.
Hallmark and another female prosecutor in our office, Karin Immergut, began meeting with Monica at her Watergate apartment, interviewing her in detail over two weeks about her long-standing relationship with the president. Karin had once served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles; she understood the Beverly Hills landscape in which Monica had been raised. Tall, athletic, and very pregnant, Karin came across as Scandinavian cool. The three women made a strong connection. Soon Monica began knitting something for Karin’s baby.
Monica disclosed that she and the president had had ten sexual encounters, which she faithfully documented on a calendar. But the relationship included fifty or so late-night intimate conversations that sometimes included phone sex. She had given him about thirty gifts, including carefully chosen ties. He wore these at various events knowing he’d be photographed, telling Monica later the tie was a message that he was thinking of her. The president had tried to terminate their relationship on February 19, 1996, but they resumed the sexual contact on March 31, 1996.
After each interview session, I talked with the two prosecutors to see where we were. I had already been impressed with Monica’s intelligence, as she had run circles around us and our experienced prosecutors on Prom Night. Now, I was astonished at Monica’s prodigious memory. Monica remembered who the president had been talking to on the phone during some of their sexual encounters, and what the subject was. She created an eleven-page chart that chronologically listed her contacts with the president, including meetings, phone calls, gifts, messages, and notes.
I sensed a genuine affection and rapport had existed between Monica and Bill Clinton. Their relationship was complex, sparked by physical attraction, but deepened by other human touches.
But for the shutdown of the government, the love affair might never have happened. Monica had become a friend and intimate of the president of the United States due to unusual circumstances. It might have ended when all normalcy returned. Instead, it continued. Bill seemed drawn to Monica, as illustrated by their long late-night chats.
I remembered Clinton’s earlier denial that he had not had a sexual relationship with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” She must have felt a deep hurt and a sense of outright betrayal at a time when she was facing legal jeopardy. Yet he was twice her age and her employer.
Monica told Wirth and Immergut that the president did not ask her to lie, but he didn’t have to; he just led her in the direction he wanted her to go. She knew what he wanted and needed to happen. Most of all, she wanted their relationship to continue. But she now knew, thanks to his public statements, that would never happen. Clinton and his surrogates had tried to destroy her reputation. Harming the president was, she said, “the last thing in the world I want to do.” But she had to tell the truth. She could lose her immunity if evidence showed she lied.
We made arrangements for Monica to testify before the Washington grand jury. As Hickman would say, the molecules were moving again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The President Testifies
We arrived at the White House for President Clinton’s grand jury testimony on the afternoon of August 17, eight months to the day after he had given his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit.
After months of presidential stalling, we had backed Clinton into a corner. After learning the FBI had confirmed Monica’s dress was stained with semen, I asked Bob Bittman to send a letter to Kendall saying that “investigative demands” required the OIC to seek a blood sample from the president.
Though we provided no other information, he would surely guess it was for a DNA test. On August 3, by return letter “to be opened by Mr. Bittman only,” Kendall agreed that the White House physician would be made available to draw the president’s blood that night.
Bittman and an FBI technician were escorted into the Map Room at 10:00 P.M. Ten minutes later, Clinton, who was hosting a White House dinner that night, appeared and perfunctorily shook the visitors’ hands. A female doctor drew his blood; Bittman noticed the president’s face and neck turned bright red.
A day or two later, the FBI gave me the news. The president’s DNA matched the semen on the dress. I told no one but Bittman and Hickman. The FBI ran a more sensitive second test; it also matched Clinton’s DNA.
Now the day had come for President Clinton to testify before the same grand jury that had been taking evidence from White House staffers. So far, it had not leaked out that we had a deal with Monica—or that she had begun testifying before the grand jury.
After months of no cooperation, I had sent Kendall a subpoena for the president’s testimony. I was tired of playing the White House’s games. We sparred with Kendall over the terms. He insisted that Clinton would testify, but wanted us to withdraw the subpoena so the White House could say he was presenting himself to the grand jury voluntarily. This was a bad joke, because Kendall had been refusing our polite letters for months, while telling the press they were cooperating fully.
I had some sympathy for the president’s situation. Unlike most witnesses, he could not plead the Fifth Amendment; that would likely destroy his political career. But once we withdrew the subpoena, what was to compel him to follow through with his end of the deal? After years of lies, we had no trust he would do the right thing.
Kendall wanted to bring the grand jury from the courthouse to the White House, the president’s turf. We declined, realizing that the majestic trappings of his office would be distracting. Kendall refused to have it videotaped. We insisted, because one grand juror could not attend. Finally, it was agreed the president would testify via a live two-way video feed to the courthouse. That allowed the grand jurors to ask questions, as they did with other witnesses.
We prepared for days on end, holding moot court sessions with Hickman playing the role of Clinton. Our prosecutors—Bittman, Wisenberg, Bennett, and me—would each ask the president questions on different topics. We would have four hours. Here was our chance to try out our game plan. Almost everybody in our office attended to render their opinions.
Hickman, who had deposed Clinton, watched him at trial; studied his speeches, television appearances, and body language; parried our best efforts in a drawl that was a dead-on impersonation of the president at his most charmingly southern.
Sol asked if he had ever given Miss Lewinsky gifts.
“Why, Mr. Wisenberg, we are generous in the South,” Hickman said. “We may not have much money, but we are always giving gifts. At Christmastime, your aunt might keep some extra gifts on top of the washing machine.” On and on.
Asked by Bob Bittman if he had ever hugged Miss Lewinsky, Hickman laughed.
“Now, Mr. Bittman, I’m from the South. We hug in the South. We hug everybody. That’s just who we are down South. So yeah, I could have hugged her once.” On and on.
Lesson: Don’t ask Clinton imprecise questions or he’ll run circles round you. It would be ha
rd to cut him off politely.
Hickman drew out his answers, running out the clock. His performance was brilliant, maddening, and disquieting. Two of our newest prosecutors congratulated him at the end of our last mock session. After seeing how well his “President Clinton” had performed, they were skeptical we had a chance.
“You’re better than Clinton,” one said.
The leaks from the White House started a few days before Clinton was due to give his testimony. Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post that Clinton planned to admit sexual activity with Monica and trusted that Starr would accept his retraction “magnanimously,” without trying to humiliate him with “intrusive sex questions.”
“Starr wins,” a Clinton confidant said. “And we hope he wouldn’t feel it necessary to drag the body around the arena.”
Clinton’s people were approaching Sam Dash, trying to feel him out about what level of disclosure would appease Starr. Keep the embarrassing details to a minimum. Spare the president and his spouse humiliation. Dash told me of these overtures. But we were long past gamesmanship. I remained noncommittal. Yet out of respect for the presidency, I took a leap of faith and directed that the subpoena be withdrawn.
The night before the grand jury testimony, the White House pulled another stunt. Attorney Cheryl Mills called and vetoed the grand jury phone line, as well as our plans to record the president’s session with a video camera. No two-way feed to the courthouse meant the grand jurors couldn’t ask questions. Our missing juror wouldn’t see it without video.
A career prosecutor, Jay Apperson, a relatively new member of our team, didn’t buy it. He had dealt with Mills in the past. He believed it was just another White House gambit, designed to force our office to call it off. We pushed back, eventually coming up with a phone line work-around.
I later learned Kendall had just gotten a copy of the sealed video deposition of the president in the Jones case. It wasn’t flattering. Now he was trying to call off our agreement to tape the testimony; next he was demanding that we destroy the tape after the missing grand juror saw it. Ad infinitum.
Finally, the day arrived.
Anticipation hung in the air. Washington, D.C., was talking of little else, even though grand jury appearances are supposed to be secret.
On the drive to the White House, I was lost in thought. Bittman told me his father, who was a renowned lawyer, had offered him some advice born of experience. “Don’t worry about how you do,” he said. “You’re just going to have every litigator in the country picking apart your performance for the rest of your life.” That made me chuckle. I was feeling that tension all too keenly.
A chair was set up in the Map Room. We noticed the TV lights had a rosy glow. We speculated that, because the president turned scarlet when upset or angry, the rose-colored light was intended to mask his anger for those seeing him on camera.
Our team set up ahead of time, making sure the phone lines worked and the grand jury was ready at the courthouse ten blocks away.
Kendall and his team of lawyers arrived, including Nicole Seligman, Charles Ruff, and Cheryl Mills. Kendall asked me to go outside the room to speak privately. The president would make a statement, and would answer all the questions asked of him. But “to preserve the dignity of his office,” he would refuse to go into details about his relationship with Monica.
“You can’t ask the president deeply personal questions,” Kendall said in a menacing tone, “or I’ll fight you to the knife.”
I was taken aback. This I had not expected. I returned to my team and told them what Kendall had said. Everyone looked at me in astonishment. They took it as an outright threat.
I had never been spoken to like that by an opposing attorney. That threat undoubtedly reflected the president’s deep anger at me personally, and the investigation more generally.
Then I thought, “This is one great defense lawyer.” In that instant, I realized he had a pretty empty toolbox. He was doing the best he could.
Kendall was using the image of sharp edges. In his strange warning, I heard the voice of the great litigator Edward Bennett Williams, his firm’s founder. It was Williams’s philosophy: Gut the opposition. They were doubtless thinking, “We’ve made Starr’s life miserable. Let’s keep beating him up and threatening him. He’ll make a deal.”
But Kendall and the president had nothing to offer. We wanted the truth.
At this point, of those on the OIC team, only Hickman, Bittman, Wisenberg, and I knew about the results of the DNA test. That information had not been shared with Clinton’s legal team, but they could guess the results. I now shared the news with the rest of the team, which included Apperson, Bennett, and Mary Anne Wirth. We had the dress. We had less to prove. That lifted some spirits. All we had to do was get President Clinton on the record.
The president arrived and greeted everyone, cordial but somber. Apperson had previously advised Wisenberg, our leadoff questioner: “Ask him what he thinks taking the oath means. What does telling the truth mean to him?”
Genius. Remind him of the seriousness of the oath at the front end. The American people would forgive adultery, as Dick Morris had told the president, but they wouldn’t forgive perjury.
That afternoon, President William Jefferson Clinton placed his left hand on a Bible, raised his right hand, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
After Wisenberg’s opening, Bittman wasted little time on niceties: “Were you physically intimate with Monica Lewinsky?”
Clinton put on his reading glasses and pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. As unusual as this was, we had expected this—yet another accommodation we had made to his office.
In his prepared statement, he admitted to “inappropriate contact” with Monica, but said, “These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse, they did not constitute sexual relations as I understood them to be defined at my January 17, 1998, deposition.” More important, he admitted he was alone with Monica. That seemingly innocuous statement was an admission that he had obstructed justice in the Jones deposition.
He folded the paper and said, “This is all I will say about the specifics of these particular matters.”
We called for a short break. Here was the parsing Clinton, just as Hickman predicted. He was admitting to “inappropriate contact,” but not lying under oath. Now he was defying us and the grand jury. Our choices were limited. We could play his game and ask no further questions about Monica and their sexual relationship. We could pack up and walk out, giving the White House a victory, because we could not talk about what had occurred. Or we could press on. If Clinton refused to answer, Bittman had a fresh subpoena in his pocket for that exigency.
My decision was to press ahead, to evaluate the situation as it unfolded, but not to play the president’s game.
Monica’s affidavit, introduced by Clinton’s lawyer in the Paula Jones case, had stated she had no sexual relationship with the president. Asked if that affidavit was true and accurate, Clinton had testified it was “absolutely true.”
Wisenberg pointed out to the president that he just acknowledged being physically intimate with Lewinsky. Why had he allowed his attorney to tell a federal judge, “There is absolutely no sex of any kind”?
“Well, in the present tense that is an accurate statement,” Clinton said.
Wisenberg pinned Clinton down. “That statement is a completely false statement. Is that correct?”
“It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is,” Clinton said. “If is means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”
We were all astonished. Even Hickman had never soared to this level of parsing the English language.
“Do you mean today that because you were not engaging in sexual activity with Ms. Lewinsky during the deposition,
that the statement of Mr. Bennett might be literally true?” Sol said, picking up on a note handed to him by Apperson.
“No, sir,” Clinton said. “I wasn’t trying to give you a cute answer. . . . I was trying to tell you that generally speaking in the present tense, if someone said that, that would be true.”
At any rate, he claimed he hadn’t been paying attention to what his lawyer was doing in that deposition and had little to offer. Untrue. They had taken a break to discuss this strategy in great detail. He had believed that Monica Lewinsky could offer a truthful affidavit about the relationship. Their “inappropriate contact” had ended, so therefore it was true.
A phone call came from the courthouse. The grand jurors wanted the president to be more specific about the “inappropriate conduct.” Clinton danced around the question, explaining how painful and embarrassing it all was, complaining that his enemies were trying to “criminalize my private life.”
Another question from the grand jury. Was oral sex included in the definition provided to him by the judge in the Jones deposition?
“As I understood it, it was not, no . . . if performed on the deponent,” Clinton said.
He later followed up with a clarification. “Let me remind you, sir, I read this carefully. And I thought about it. I thought about what ‘contact’ meant. I thought about what ‘intent to arouse or gratify’ meant. And I had to admit that under this definition that I had actually had sexual relations once with Gennifer Flowers.” He was referring to the nightclub singer in Little Rock who had claimed they had a twelve-year affair. “Now I would rather have taken a whipping than done that.”
Under Clinton’s delusional view, Monica had sex with Clinton, but he didn’t have sexual relations with her. His dissembling and outright lies were unconvincing.