Contempt

by Ken Starr

  I asked the president a few questions about whether he had authorized his aides to invoke executive privilege. Yes, he said, but just out of “an honest difference of constitutional principles” between the White House and our office, not because he was worried about what they would say.

  Talking to Clinton was like nailing spaghetti to the wall. He rambled on about the “witch hunt,” arrogant and challenging. At the end of four hours, Clinton stalked from the room, clearly furious. But he returned five or ten minutes later to shake our hands, saying he knew we had a hard job. Classic Bill Clinton.

  As we left around 6:30 P.M., some on our team were discouraged; he had thoroughly bested us. But I thought we had managed to get the president on the record making significant admissions and telling demonstrable falsehoods. As we went through the transcript later, his lies were magnified. The bizarre statement that “it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” revealed Clinton’s contempt for the truth.

  At 10:00 P.M., members of the OIC gathered around a television set to watch the president’s speech to the American people. Sitting in the Map Room, he looked cool and collected, in stark contrast to the way he’d left the same room earlier that day.

  Good evening. This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of the Independent Counsel and a grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

  Still I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

  As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.

  It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failing on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

  Then came the blame shifting and the prevarications.

  But I told the grand jury today, and I say to you now, that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence, or to take any other unlawful action.

  I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people. Including even my wife. I deeply regret that.

  Now the lip biting.

  I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit which has since been dismissed was a consideration too.

  Clinton’s demeanor underwent a subtle shift, from apologetic to angry. Time to turn the tables.

  In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago—dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.

  Not exactly; just because a prosecutor doesn’t indict doesn’t mean there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

  The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends. Then into my private life. . . . This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.

  Which could all be laid at the feet of the Clintons and their lawyers. He moved on with an appeal to the Almighty.

  Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most, my wife and our daughter, and our God. I must put it right. And I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. Nothing is more important to me personally, but it is private. And I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.

  Spoken by the same man who had sent his minions out to demean, attack, and intimidate women who had tried to call him to account.

  Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact it is past time, to move on.

  Nothing to see here. Move along. He would return to his labor for the American people.

  We have important work to do, real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face. And so tonight I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century. Thank you for watching and good night.

  Though advised to apologize, to give an unabashed mea culpa, Clinton had once again let his anger get the best of him. He came off as insincere, upset because he got caught. Despite Clinton’s political skills, what came shining through was his disdain for others, his self-indulgence, his willingness to lie. The reaction from the political elite, who now discovered he’d been lying to them all along, was withering.

  August 17, 1998, had not gone well for the president. He had sealed his fate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Referral

  We had come to a crossroads on August 18. Do we seek an indictment of the president for various crimes against our justice system? Or do we turn the matter over to Congress for possible consideration of impeachment? The first question raised profound constitutional questions under our system of separation of powers. I quickly set aside the earth-shattering issue of an indictment. In the independent counsel law, Congress had specifically directed us to advise the House of Representatives of any “substantial and credible information” that may constitute “grounds for an impeachment.”

  We had that level of information in abundance. Our duty was clear under the law: we were to complete our work and submit the matter to the People’s House. The sooner the better.

  I was deeply concerned about accusations of potential interference with the upcoming midterm elections in November. Though the statute gave us no firm deadline, I believed the imminent campaign season should be able to absorb this new reality and move on from there. I set a flexible deadline: as soon as humanly possible after Labor Day.

  To complete the record, we brought in Monica for a return visit to the grand jury after Clinton’s testimony. We began piecing together the Lewinsky narrative, supported at every turn by significant evidence developed during the still-unfolding grand jury inquiry—we were determined to be thorough in telling the story, irrefutably proving every element of our case. Sending up a skeletal outline of the record to Capitol Hill would be irresponsible. The document had to be comprehensive and bulletproof.

  Clinton’s grand jury testimony proved to be the last link in the evidentiary chain. At long last, we had his story. In our morning meetings, we pored over the evidence and worked through drafts of the different components of the report, which we dubbed the “referral.”

  In that respect, Monica’s memory proved to be invaluable. Her recollection of their romps coincided perfectly with White House records of her numerous visits to the Oval Office. Other witnesses corroborated her stories: Betty Currie, Secret Service agents, and other White House staffers.

  A core question arose: How detailed should we make the descriptions of their various sexual encounters? A reasonable reader might ask, Why all this salacious detail?

  The female prosecutors, Mary Anne Wirth and Karin Immergut, who had worked most closely with Monica, insisted we had to include these explicit details. The president had insisted he had no sexual relationship with Monica because it did not include intercourse. He had relied on his own peculiar, convoluted definition of what constituted sexual relations during his testimony in both his Jones deposition and his grand jury testimony.

  By his own mendacity, and then by
his continued dissembling, the president had forced our hand. The facts were relevant to the president’s guilt. We would set forth those facts, fully and fairly, and face the inevitable criticism that we had gone too far and said too much.

  After Clinton’s nationally televised temper tantrum, Capitol Hill was uneasily anticipating receiving an impeachment referral from the OIC. Clinton had stubbornly rejected bipartisan advice to come clean before the grand jury. He trusted his own communication powers, knowing he had the considerable benefit of a country at peace. All in all, the electorate was happy. And the Clinton spin machine had transmogrified the puritanical Starr into a hyperobsessive Inspector Javert.

  Yet the facts were the facts. As the young lawyer John Adams had argued to the Boston Massacre jury, “Facts are stubborn things.” They invariably rise to the surface and demand their own day in court. For the next few weeks, we continued our assiduous review of grand jury transcripts, of White House records and other relevant evidence.

  After thorough evaluation of the Whitewater material, we decided not to include anything related to that inquiry. We were unpersuaded that we had the necessary evidence to satisfy the standard of “substantial and credible” information on Whitewater. We deliberately set the standard high—which is what we concluded Congress intended.

  Members of our staff, including Sam Dash, were of one accord.

  Our research made clear that what constituted impeachable offenses—high crimes and misdemeanors—was ultimately a political judgment entrusted to the unfettered discretion of the House of Representatives.

  We wrestled with the number and order of counts of impeachable offenses to include in the referral. Clinton had committed perjury, tampered with witnesses, and obstructed justice in many ways. We began with the clearest charge—the president’s perjury, in both the civil deposition and before the federal grand jury.

  With Brett Kavanaugh as chief wordsmith, the set of charges proceeded in a logical manner, from the first to the eleventh (and final) count—abuse of power. This last charge represented our judgment that, in various ways, the president had improperly employed the powers of his office—including meritless invocations of the doctrine of executive privilege and the ginned-up invention of the phantom protective function privilege.

  Sam Dash sat around the crowded conference-room table as we worked our way through each count. Count 11—abuse of power—created the conceptual link to Watergate. Sam agreed with every count, especially count 11.

  On Wednesday, September 9, at 1:30 P.M., I signed the referral letter, saying, “Many of the materials in the referral contain information of a personal nature that I respectfully urge the House to treat as confidential.”

  Our staff piled a mountain of materials, including relevant grand jury transcripts and exhibits, in a rented white van and drove up to Capitol Hill. With a phone call to alert the officials of its arrival, the 445-page referral—later dubbed “The Starr Report” to my chagrin—was delivered to the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives.

  Two days later, on Friday, September 11, the House voted 363–63 to release the report, sight unseen, on the internet. They wanted to “give folks something to chew on over the weekend,” said Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “We probably should redact some personal stuff, but it would be too hard to do it.”

  When we learned the entire report would be posted without redactions, or indeed without even a single person reading it, we were perplexed by the House’s rushed decision. This possibility had never occurred to us. Congress deals with classified and sensitive material, such as the Bob Packwood diaries and national security materials, all the time. We had expected the House to review and redact. Indeed, the grand jury report in the Richard Nixon impeachment had never been made public.

  CNN reported that the Starr Report generated unprecedented internet traffic as government sites were swamped.

  “An analogy for what this would be like is to have a local grocery store that supports ten cars in its parking lot. And then, all of a sudden, you are asking it in two days to build a parking lot big enough to support a free day at Disney World,” Ken Allard of Jupiter Communications told reporters.

  The format of the file uploaded by the House allowed people to search for certain terms, like “dress.” As people read, many were scandalized. Why had this salacious stuff been thrown into the public domain with no warning? Even movies have ratings to provide guidance. This document had been released willy-nilly by Congress with no thoughtful consideration given to its effect. For the first time, AOL added several government sites to its list of sites blocked by parental controls.

  Down Pennsylvania Avenue, the president changed his tune. At a prayer breakfast the same day the report was posted on the internet, he finally expressed contrition.

  “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say I have sinned,” he said, apologizing to his family, staff, and Cabinet, to Monica and her family, and to the American people. Tellingly, however, his “repentance” was entirely directed at the illicit relationship, not his status as a duly sworn witness obliged to tell the truth under oath.

  The New York Times issued a scathing editorial on September 12, titled “Shame at the White House.”

  Until it was measured by Kenneth Starr, no citizen—indeed, perhaps no member of his own family—could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness. . . . A President who had hoped to be remembered for the grandeur of his social legislation will instead be remembered for the tawdriness of his tastes and conduct and for the disrespect with which he treated a dwelling that is a revered symbol of Presidential dignity. . . . By using that great house for sad little trysts with a desperately star-struck employee, by skulking around within sight of nervous Secret Service agents, by conducting erotic telephone games while traveling without his wife, Mr. Clinton has produced a crisis of surreal complexity. . . .

  In framing the question in the Jones case, Mr. Clinton’s interrogators specified exactly the kinds of intimate activity that Ms. Lewinsky described under oath. By relying on this kind of destructive legal counsel from Mr. Kendall for so long, Mr. Clinton has managed to create one of the most disastrous personal situations in the history of the Presidency.

  Then, if possible, it got worse. Judge Johnson authorized the release of his videotaped grand jury testimony. On September 21, the world saw him arguing over the definition of sexual relations, and the meaning of the word is.

  David Kendall issued a seventy-eight-page rebuttal, calling the referral “little more than an unreliable, one-sided account of sexual behavior.”

  By this point, our prosecutors were a high-powered central nervous system prepared to assess and evaluate any serious charge of error of fact or interpretation. That powerful set of minds, consisting of some of the most highly experienced prosecutors ever assembled on a single case, were girded for battle. Kendall’s missive was a blast from a popgun.

  On September 30, Bob Bennett sent a letter to Judge Wright, who held it under seal. He admitted a misrepresentation to the court. Without corrupt intent, he had participated in misstatements to the judiciary. As a matter of honor and professional responsibility, Bennett wanted to set the record straight:

  “Pursuant to our professional responsibility,” Bennett wrote, “we wanted to advise you that the Court should not rely on Ms. Lewinsky’s affidavit or remarks of counsel characterizing that affidavit.”

  Better late than never.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Stress on the Family

  In mid-September, our daughter Carolyn, now eighteen, headed off to Stanford University, accompanied by Alice and me, as well as two of my ever-present deputy U.S. marshals.

  My children had not been insulated in McLean from the craziness of the Lewinsky phase of the investigation. Even though we had a close supportive community and ch
urch, their friends’ parents sometimes told my children they disagreed with what their father was doing to the president.

  There was a certain unwelcome notoriety in being a Starr. I was on the TV news almost every night. The media was camped out on our street most mornings; the marshals’ command post was at the curb.

  Carolyn took the disruption, the awareness that her dad’s life had been threatened, very much to heart. She could see the pressure I was under. It was difficult not to be able to discuss the investigation freely. But I couldn’t. I tried to be upbeat, to focus on what was going on with their schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and friends.

  After graduating from high school in May, Carolyn spent the summer in England, where no one knew who she was. In early September, the press reported that my daughter would be attending Stanford, along with a famous young woman, Chelsea Clinton, now a sophomore. Suddenly Carolyn came under attack.

  A newspaper columnist for the Guardian wondered how Chelsea would react to “the daughter of her father’s tormentor” arriving on campus. Comedian Jay Leno made a joke on his late-night show about Carolyn going to the West Coast to spy on Chelsea.

  The prevailing theme was: “Who does Carolyn Starr think she is? There are four thousand colleges in America? Why can’t she stay out of Chelsea’s way?”

  But Carolyn had decided she wanted to go to Stanford during her sophomore year in high school, when she attended a weeklong Japanese language and culture orientation on the Palo Alto campus before heading to Japan. When she was selected for early admission to Stanford, she thought we would be living in Malibu by the following year.

  Flying to the West Coast with my deputy marshals to get her enrolled and moved into a dorm required us to board the airplane from the rear, before the other passengers, and to wait until everyone else had departed to get off. We arrived in Palo Alto on September 16 and checked into the Cardinal Hotel, our base for three days, along with the ubiquitous marshals.