A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Altogether, then, as with the independent counsel statute, sexual harassment law became a monument to the cost of good intentions. Each half step in the law seemed rational at the time. Some employers did harass their subordinates, and men generally did have more power than women in the workplace. Defendants sometimes did succeed in withholding relevant evidence about their past conduct from juries. But the system that had been jerry-built in response to these problems created new ones. Evidence of consensual sexual activity was presumed to be relevant to what was, in fact, the totally unrelated question of sexual harassment. And in any event, because of the Molinari “reforms” to the rules of evidence, the line between consensual sex and harassment scarcely existed at all.

  In practical terms, the ruling meant that President Clinton would have to answer questions, under oath, about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

  The same day as Judge Wright’s order—December 11—Monica Lewinsky had a lunch date: turkey sandwiches and Diet Cokes in Vernon Jordan’s law office in Washington.

  Prodded by Linda Tripp, Lewinsky had asked the president to reach out for Jordan’s help in her job search during the first week in November. Lewinsky first went to Jordan’s office on November 5, described her interest in finding a job in New York, and received his assurance, “We’re in business.” But after that promise, nothing much had happened. Jordan was out of town for the last three weeks of November, and Monica, in the meantime, had received a job offer from Bill Richardson at the United Nations—a position she didn’t want. Anxious to find something in the private sector in New York, Lewinsky nudged Betty Currie during the first week in December to remind Jordan to help her. Currie did, and on December 8, Jordan and Lewinsky set up their lunch for three days later.

  Who did Vernon Jordan think Monica Lewinsky was? Why was he helping her—and, more important, why did he think the president wanted him to help her?

  Jordan would later answer these questions with a careful vagueness. He said he enjoyed helping young people find their way; he was always happy to be of assistance to the president; he was not aware that Lewinsky was sexually involved with Clinton; he thought she was just a “bobby-soxer who was mesmerized by Frank Sinatra, who was quite taken with this man because of his position.” There has never been any way to disprove Jordan’s answers, but his professed ignorance about his new protégé strained credulity. Both Clinton and Currie had called him on Lewinsky’s behalf, something they had never done for any former aide, much less a former intern.

  Jordan’s ignorance about the true nature of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship was even more unlikely after his conversation with her over lunch on December 11. According to her grand jury testimony, Lewinsky told Jordan she “didn’t really look at him as the president,” and instead saw him “more as a man … and a regular person.” She was upset “when he doesn’t call me enough or see me enough.” Jordan replied, “You’re in love, that’s what your problem is.” When he said that, Lewinsky recalled, I “probably blushed or giggled, something like that.” (In his own testimony, Jordan corroborated Lewinsky’s general outline of their conversation.) In any event, after their lunch, Jordan went to work for the president’s lovesick young friend, making introductions for her at American Express, Young & Rubicam, and MacAndrews & Forbes, the parent company of Revlon.

  Vernon Jordan was not the only person who was monitoring the progress of Lewinsky’s job hunt. Tripp, Goldberg, Isikoff, and the Dallas lawyers were speaking to one another almost every day in this period. Thanks to Tripp, of course, the Jones lawyers knew the details of the president’s relationship with Lewinsky, and in mid-December, they began to tip their hand. On December 15, they subpoenaed Clinton for all “documents that related to communications between the President and Monica Lewisky.” (The Jones team was still relying on the misspelling in Richard Porter’s e-mail to George Conway.) This subpoena, in turn, appears to have prompted a late-night call from Clinton to Lewinsky the following night. In her obsessive way, Monica kept tabs on the first lady’s schedule, knowing that the president called only on nights when Mrs. Clinton was traveling. Lewinsky knew that Hillary happened to be in town this week, so Monica was especially surprised, at around 2:30 A.M. on December 17, to receive a call from Clinton.

  This phone call, which lasted forty-nine minutes, later served as a centerpiece of the obstruction of justice case against the president. According to Lewinsky, Clinton began their conversation by giving her a piece of sad news: Betty Currie’s brother had been killed in a car accident. After they commiserated on that topic for a while, the president let Monica know of another unfortunate development: Lewinsky’s name had appeared on the plaintiff’s witness list in the Jones case. “It broke my heart when I saw your name on the list,” Clinton said.

  The question of what Lewinsky should do about it naturally arose. First, Clinton said that her name on the list didn’t necessarily mean that she would be subpoenaed; this was true. But if she was, the president went on, she could file an affidavit in an attempt to avoid testifying. This, too, was true; she could say that she had no evidence relating to sexual harassment—as indeed, in any real sense, she did not—and perhaps the judge would excuse her on that basis alone. In any event, Clinton said, if she did get a subpoena, she should let Betty Currie know about it.

  At some point, the conversation turned to the “cover stories” that Clinton and Lewinsky had discussed in the past to explain her visits to the Oval Office. They discussed their old tales that Monica was visiting Currie, or delivering papers to Clinton. But—the critical legal question—did Clinton tell Lewinsky to put these cover stories in her affidavit? Lewinsky testified on several occasions that the president did no such thing. Moreover, the cover stories were not technically false; she had visited Currie and delivered papers. Of course, the cover stories were monumentally incomplete, but that is sometimes how attorneys use affidavits. Sworn statements that are misleading but literally true cannot be criminal. An affidavit can disclose what one side wants to disclose—and no more. Clinton and Lewinsky agreed that their relationship had nothing to do with harassment, the subject of the Jones case. So, in an understandable effort to spare both of them tremendous embarrassment, they struggled to come up with a way that they thought could excuse Monica from testifying. (In passing, Lewinsky mentioned that it would be a pretty good idea for Clinton to settle the Jones case—which was probably the best advice she ever gave him.)

  Toward the end of their call, Clinton mentioned that he had some Christmas presents for Monica. Perhaps, he said, he should summon Betty Currie over the following weekend, and she could arrange for Monica to visit him. In other words, Clinton considered dragging his secretary away from mourning her brother to arrange another rendezvous with his twenty-something friend. Even Lewinsky had the compassion to say that they ought to leave Currie alone with her family. Lewinsky concluded with a promise to keep him posted—and then burst into tears as soon as she hung up.

  Obstruction of justice by the president? Not even close. Lewinsky could have filed a truthful, if limited, affidavit that might have gotten her out of testifying in the Jones case. Suggesting that she do so was no crime. But sleazy, selfish behavior by Clinton? Absolutely. The costs of his affair with Lewinsky—in political, legal, and moral terms—were becoming clearer all the time. The president could have chosen candor, squarely facing the consequences of his personal misbehavior. Instead he hedged, equivocated, waffled, misled—and urged his former girlfriend to do the same. The president had the right to do what he did—which did not mean it was the right thing to do.

  Two days later, it became clear that the president had offered Monica false hope about avoiding a subpoena. On December 19, a process server called Lewinsky at her desk at the Pentagon and told her he had a subpoena for her. The subpoena called not just for her testimony, but also for her to produce “each and every gift” she had received from the president, including “jewelry and/or hat pins.” The mention of the gifts
should have tipped Lewinsky off that she had a mole in her life—and Tripp was the obvious suspect—but Monica didn’t realize for some time that her friend was consorting with the enemy.

  From the Metro station where she met the process server, Lewinsky staggered to a phone booth, in tears, to call Vernon Jordan. He invited her over, calmed her down, and said he was going to find her a lawyer. While she waited, Jordan made an appointment for Lewinsky to meet Francis Carter, a criminal defense lawyer, three days later. (Later that day, Jordan testified, he happened to attend a Christmas party at the White House and sought a private word with the president. Jordan told Clinton about Lewinsky’s subpoena and asked him about the nature of his relationship with the young woman. Clinton denied any sexual relations with her.)

  The subpoena to Lewinsky served as the trip wire for the explosion that nearly consumed the Clinton presidency. News of the subpoena ricocheted, ultimately, from Lewinsky to Tripp to Goldberg to the elves (and Isikoff) to Kenneth Starr. As always, in this case, political animus and greed were the salient motivators for virtually everyone involved—Linda Tripp, preeminently.

  Tripp had orchestrated her own “surprise” subpoena from the Jones lawyers a few days before Lewinsky’s, and, as planned, she took it to Kirby Behre, the young former prosecutor who had been advising her for some time. Tripp had confided to Behre that she had been tape-recording her conversations with Lewinsky. Unlike Goldberg, who was Tripp’s original source on the legality of tape-recording, Behre actually knew the law—and he informed Tripp that she was committing a crime in Maryland. He not only urged Tripp to stop, but asked her to allow him to go to Bob Bennett and urge him to settle the Paula Jones case. If the case was settled, the tapes would never come to light, and Tripp would have no worries about being prosecuted for her illegal taping. Plainly, Behre gave Tripp the correct legal advice, but Tripp didn’t want to hear it. It was a measure of Tripp’s obsession with getting the president—and writing her book—that her reaction to Behre’s advice was to tell Goldberg that she wanted a new lawyer.

  For her part, Lewinsky had to decide what to do about the subpoena. On December 22, Jordan escorted Monica to Frank Carter’s office. Jordan’s role in December and January was suspicious in many ways—how much did he really know about Clinton and Lewinsky? Did he really want Monica to tell the truth?—but his decision to introduce Lewinsky to Carter suggests that Jordan wanted to play by the rules. Carter had spent many years as the director of Washington’s public defender program and enjoyed a sterling ethical reputation. If Jordan had wanted Monica to testify falsely, he never would have taken her to Frank Carter. To Carter, the situation looked fairly simple. Lewinsky denied to him that there had been any kind of sexual relationship between her and the president. After their first meeting, he said that he would draft an affidavit for her to that effect—and that he thought, as a result, he could get her out of testifying.

  That evening, December 22, Tripp taped her last telephone call with Lewinsky—even though Kirby Behre had just warned her that she would be breaking the law by doing so. More than ever, the transcripts read as if Tripp was speaking to the tape recorder as much as to Lewinsky. “Look, Monica,” she said at one point, “we already know that you’re going to lie under oath. We also know that I want out of this big-time. If I have to testify—if I am forced to answer questions and answer truthfully—it’s going to be the opposite of what you say, so therefore it’s a conflict right there.” At another point, Lewinsky wondered about how the Jones lawyers could have developed such specific information about things like the hat pin. “Someone has told them something,” Tripp said. “Now, do we think that’s a little something or a lot something? Do they have specifics to ask us? We don’t know this.” “We” did know, of course—because Tripp herself was the Jones team’s source.

  The next day, Tripp called Isikoff and let drop that she and Goldberg would soon take her story of the whole case, along with her tapes, to a publisher for a book deal. Isikoff recalled that he was shocked that Tripp was planning to write a book. In retrospect, it’s difficult to see why he was surprised. He had seen her 1996 book proposal; why else would Tripp be talking to the same literary agent about essentially the same subject—the president’s sex life?

  In any event, Isikoff immediately started to try to talk her out of it. The reporter appealed to her desire to see Clinton lose the Paula Jones case. A book proposal, he said, “would undermine her credibility and the credibility of her information.” Isikoff was coaching Tripp on how to be a more effective witness against the president they both despised. And when he finished doing that, Isikoff called Goldberg and made the same pitch. If Linda sold a book, he warned, she would have to testify about it in her deposition. According to contemporaneous notes from Goldberg’s side of the conversation, Isikoff said, “Don’t see a publisher or they will ask about it in deposition.” (Isikoff was also considering a book of his own at this moment, so his advice served his financial self-interest as well as the anti-Clinton political cause.)

  But Goldberg had an even more immediate priority—finding Tripp a new lawyer. On the same day that Isikoff called her, December 23, Goldberg convened a conference call of two of the chief elves, Richard Porter, in Chicago, and Jerome Marcus, in Philadelphia. The agent passed along Tripp’s fantasy that Kirby Behre was somehow in Bob Bennett’s pocket; her evidence of Behre’s perfidy, of course, was his advice that she stop committing the Maryland crime of illegal wiretapping. Porter and Marcus agreed to help out in the search for more ideologically simpatico counsel. Goldberg had other exciting news for the lawyers: Vernon Jordan had told Monica to lie under oath in her deposition in the Jones case. This was a clear exaggeration of what Lewinsky had told Tripp in the taped phone call, but in the Lewinsky-to-Tripp-to-Goldberg-to-elves phone chain, it turned into an accusation that Jordan had committed a crime—something the elves were only too happy to hear. Porter and Marcus agreed to help out in the search for a new lawyer, with the added fillip that the entire matter might turn out to be criminal as well as civil. Goldberg never lost sight of Tripp’s (and her own) financial goals either. According to the Goldberg notes, the lawyers “said it was a good idea to get her to a publisher.”

  The circle of people who knew about the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship was widening. There were Monica’s eleven friends and relatives, and the core group of Tripp, Goldberg, and Isikoff, and now the elf team was putting the word out on the conservative legal circuit that an explosive witness needed a new lawyer. Marcus, who had helped Danny Traylor draft the original complaint on behalf of Paula Jones, was by this point in his fourth year of sporadic work on the case. He told Isikoff that the involvement of Clinton and Jordan in the machinations around Lewinsky suggested that this was a criminal—not just a civil—matter. But, the elf wondered, who would be the prosecutor?

  Just after Christmas, Lewinsky reminded Betty Currie that the president had promised her Christmas gifts. The secretary invited Monica to see the president at eight-thirty on the Sunday morning of December 28. The president greeted Lewinsky in the Oval Office, where he introduced her to his then new dog, Buddy, for whom Monica had brought a small gift. Then they went back into Clinton’s private office, and he pulled a few knickknacks out of canvas bag from the Black Dog restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard. He gave her a little marble sculpture of a bear, which he had received at the Vancouver economic summit; a blanket from Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes; a pin with the New York skyline; a stuffed animal wearing a Black Dog T-shirt; a box of chocolates; and a silly pair of sunglasses. The glasses, Lewinsky later testified, were “a long running joke with us,” because she used to tease him about his sunglasses.

  For about ten minutes, their conversation turned to her subpoena in the Jones case—another critical moment in the case against Clinton. (Lewinsky ultimately was compelled, in no fewer than ten separate interviews with law enforcement, to recount the details of this brief conversation.) Clinton speculated that it was Linda Tr
ipp—or, as he called her, “that woman from the summer, with Kathleen Willey”—who was cooperating with the Jones lawyers. (Monica lied and said she had not told Tripp about the gifts.) Lewinsky then raised the question of what she should do with all the gifts, since they were called for in the subpoena. She suggested that she move them out of her apartment or perhaps give them to Betty Currie. Asked repeatedly about Clinton’s responses, Lewinsky said that he either said nothing or “I don’t know” or “Hmm.” Of course, Clinton should have simply instructed Lewinsky to comply with the subpoena. But just as surely, his ambiguous response did not constitute obstruction of justice. Like so much of the president’s conduct, his vague answer was shabby, but not illegal.

  Their meeting in the study ended with what Lewinsky called a “physically intimate … passionate kiss.” Lewinsky went home. They have never again seen each other in person.

  A few hours later, Currie and Lewinsky spoke on the telephone and discussed how Currie was going to come over to Monica’s apartment at the Watergate and pick up the president’s gifts. Neither woman had a clear memory on the critical subject of who initiated the gift pickup. Lewinsky said it was Currie’s idea; Currie said Lewinsky made the call. If Currie called, it would have been virtually certain that Clinton told her to retrieve the gifts that were under subpoena—an act that really might have been obstruction of justice. But if Lewinsky asked Currie to come over, that didn’t implicate Clinton. On balance, the evidence suggests that the president did not participate in the plot to hide the gifts from the Jones lawyers. Not only did Currie deny that Clinton gave her any such instructions, his behavior was not that of a man who wanted gifts hidden. Why, after all, would Clinton give Lewinsky more gifts on December 28 if he was trying to get her to hide the ones she already had? Not even Clinton’s most ardent accusers could ever explain why he would in one breath give Lewinsky gifts and in the next concoct a plan to get them back.