A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Ewing and other veterans of the Starr hard core made a conceptual breakthrough early in their investigation. At first, they had thought Bill and Hillary Clinton were motivated by greed, which was what usually drove corrupt politicians in their experience. But they decided that theory was wrong. Instead, they said, it was sex and politics that drove the president and first lady.

  The subject first came up in connection with the suicide of Vince Foster. Like both Mrs. Clinton and Webb Hubbell, Foster was a partner in the Rose Law Firm who had come to Washington to work in the new administration. Foster’s suicide, on July 20, 1993, unsettled the White House; investigators began attempting to learn more about documents, including the Clintons’ personal legal papers, that had been taken from Foster’s office soon after his death. There was much speculation in the news media that loyal White House aides had removed documents relating to Whitewater, but the Starr staff developed another theory. It was no secret that Mrs. Clinton regarded Foster as a trusted friend, and some prosecutors came to believe the extraordinary—and entirely unproven—theory that Mrs. Clinton had had an affair with Foster, and that her chief concern was keeping it secret. According to this scenario, the Clinton aides were worried that Foster had left behind something about his relationship with Hillary, such as a suicide note saying something like “We can’t sleep together anymore.” This sort of fanciful speculation had surfaced previously, but mostly in the more extreme elements of the Clinton-hating press.

  That was only the beginning of the sex-driven theory underlying the Starr investigation. Some asserted that Clinton became involved in the fraudulent loan to Susan McDougal in the Madison Guaranty case because he was having an affair with her—something both she and the president denied. Ewing was convinced that the Clintons’ friend deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey was the designated keeper of the secrets about the president’s personal life, and the prosecutor undertook an elaborate effort to persuade Lindsey to flip. In 1996, Ewing led the prosecution of two Arkansas bankers—Herby Branscum, Jr., and Robert M. Hill—on charges that they misapplied bank funds and concealed cash transactions related to the Clinton gubernatorial campaign in 1990. In that case, Starr named Lindsey as an unindicted co-conspirator. The hope was that Branscum and Hill would be convicted, and then inform on Lindsey, who would, in turn, testify against the president. But Ewing’s plan fell apart when the jury failed to convict the two bankers.

  This failure, of course, exemplified the central problem with the Ewing thesis: he could never make it stick. As with the financial issues at the heart of the Whitewater case, neither Ewing nor anyone in Starr’s office could tie the president or first lady to any criminal activity related to sex or anything else. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. As late as 1997, FBI agents working for Starr’s Little Rock office—which Ewing ran—started questioning Clinton’s friends and associates about the then governor’s relationships with women in Arkansas. They were the same sorts of questions Mike Isikoff had been asking three years earlier. In a demonstration of the endless circularity of the pursuit of Clinton, the FBI paid particular attention to his former bodyguards with the Arkansas state police—the same people, of course, who were David Brock’s sources on the story that began the Paula Jones case. The Trooper Project, as it was known in Starr’s office, also came to naught.

  So when Linda Tripp called Jackie Bennett on the night of January 12, 1998, she found an audience primed to hear her tale of sexual misconduct and cover-up by the president. Bennett himself represented the hardest of the hard core. Though he had tried without success for some time to find a job with a private firm in Washington, Bennett was as committed as anyone to bringing Clinton down. Before joining Starr, he had spent much of the previous decade as a prosecutor in the public integrity section of the Justice Department, on a rough-and-tumble crusade against Democratic politicians in south Texas. There Bennett had mixed results. He won a conviction of former representative Albert Bustamante (as well as the Justice Department’s John Marshall Award for the top prosecutors in the nation), but he also lost a case against Doug Jaffe, a businessman in San Antonio who was a big Democratic contributor. After Bennett lost one case, the trial judge delivered an unusual rebuke, saying, “I really wish you’d take a message back to [the Justice Department] that we’re not interested in wasting our time on rinky-dink cases.” Because of episodes like this, Bennett was known to some colleagues as “the thug.”

  To many people, then, including some veterans of the Starr office itself, the story of Monica Lewinsky seemed awfully far afield from the Whitewater-based jurisdiction of the independent counsel. But to the true believers who remained on Starr’s staff, it was as if they had spent three years and five months waiting for Tripp’s call.

  As Jackie Bennett recalled the conversation for Michael Isikoff, Tripp initially pretended that she had “a friend” who was being asked to lie under oath in her deposition in the Paula Jones case. But she soon dropped the fiction, identified herself, and asked a question that had been haunting her since her conversations with Kirby Behre. Could Starr’s prosecutors give her immunity if she had made illegal tapes? Bennett told her yes. He was intrigued to hear that Tripp had been interviewed by the Starr office in connection with the Foster suicide. Quickly, he had heard enough to want to meet Linda Tripp. He found Steve Irons, an FBI agent assigned to Starr, and two other prosecutors, Sol Wisenberg and Steve Binhak, and they piled into a car for the forty-minute drive to Tripp’s home in Columbia, Maryland.

  They didn’t settle down in Tripp’s living room until about 11:45 P.M. on January 12. As recorded in the six-and-a-half-page single-spaced FBI report of the meeting, Tripp gave her interlocutors an astonishingly distorted survey of the twists and turns of the case. The theme was Tripp as victim—of Bob Bennett, Monica Lewinsky, Kirby Behre, Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton. Tripp dropped tantalizing details about Monica’s soiled dress and talked at length about her tapes, but she lied about the real purpose of her recordings. “TRIPP believed that BENNETT and the White House would try to destroy her based on what she had seen them do to other people who got in their way,” the report stated. “That belief ultimately motivated TRIPP to begin tape recording telephone conversations TRIPP had with MONICA LEWINSKY.” Thus, Tripp conveniently said nothing about her plans to write a book—and never even mentioned the name Lucianne Goldberg. Moreover, Tripp did not say that, through Goldberg, she had herself told the Jones lawyers about Lewinsky, and that she had herself conspired with David Pyke, of the Jones team, for the “surprise” subpoena that was now causing her such anguish.

  As the hours stretched on toward daybreak, Bennett had a decision to make. Tripp was scheduled to have lunch with Lewinsky on that very Tuesday, January 13. Should the OIC tape the meeting?

  Tripp believed the situation was urgent—Lewinsky had to be recorded. But was there really an emergency? Tripp and Lewinsky were in regular contact; Tripp’s deposition was not even scheduled; there would undoubtedly be more contact between the two women in the near future. At this point, Bennett had to make his decision exclusively on the basis of Tripp’s word—and Rosenzweig’s briefing from the elves in Philadelphia the previous week. But who was Linda Tripp? Who were those lawyers in Philadelphia and what was their role in all of this? Bennett could have waited a day or two to check out Tripp’s bona fides and motives and weigh whether Starr’s office ought to be investigating this subject at all.

  But Jackie Bennett was not one for agonizing. That night he called the FBI technical services division and ordered up a body wire for the next day. Linda Tripp was going to be an undercover operative on behalf of the Office of Independent Counsel.

  On Tuesday morning, Lewinsky began her day with a visit to Vernon Jordan’s office, to drop off some gifts for him. (“I spend a lot of time and am very particular about the presents I give to people,” Lewinsky testified later.) The previous week, Monica had accepted a job in the Revlon public relations department at $40,000 a year, which was
less than she was making at the Pentagon but still acceptable to her. Also the previous week, Lewinsky had signed the affidavit that Frank Carter had drafted for her. In the critical part, paragraph 8, the affidavit stated: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the President, he did not propose that we have a sexual relationship[.] The occasions that I saw the President after I left my employment at the White House in April 1996 were official receptions, formal functions or events related to the U.S. Department of Defense, where I was working at the time. There were other people present on those occasions.” (Jordan had let the president know both when the job offer had come through and when Lewinsky signed her affidavit.) For setting her up with Revlon and Carter, Monica wanted to say thank you to Jordan.

  Then, following her visit with Jordan, Lewinsky made her way to the Ritz-Carlton and her late lunch with Linda Tripp. (Tripp had arrived first to meet with her FBI handlers, who fitted her with a body microphone.) Downstairs, Tripp found a secluded table in the restaurant’s smoking section. Monica arrived at 2:45 P.M.

  “Listen,” Tripp began, “I’ve been thinking about you nonstop.”

  The conversation lasted an excruciating three hours—always rambling, at times incoherent, but with a few identifiable themes. Lewinsky spoke with a maddening inconsistency. On the one hand, she professed continued loyalty to the president: “No matter how he has wronged me, how many girlfriends he had,… it was my choice.” On the other hand, Monica portrayed herself as holding out for a job from Jordan in return for her testimony denying the affair. As she told Tripp at one point, “I said, ‘I’m supposed to sign, and I’m not signing it until I have a job.’ ” This latter statement by Lewinsky was false on two counts. In truth, Monica had already signed her affidavit, and she had already gotten a job through Jordan. At still another time, Monica seemed afraid that Clinton was going to have her killed: “For fear of my life, I would not cross these people.”

  The confusion illustrated the risk of basing a criminal case on meandering girl talk. Based on this conversation, it was clear that Monica was going to deny a sexual relationship with Clinton and she wanted her friend to do the same. Yet it wasn’t apparent that Lewinsky actually felt she had to lie, or that anyone had asked her to withhold information about her relationship. Describing the draft affidavit, she said that she denied having a “sexual relationship” with the president. “I never had intercourse,” Lewinsky explained, in a theme that they had discussed in earlier, taped conversations. “I did not have a sexual relationship.” So, in this respect, Lewinsky apparently felt she could file a truthful, if misleading, affidavit. The only sure thing about what became known as the “sting tape” was that Lewinsky was a confused and troubled woman. Her attitude toward Tripp was muddled. She said at one point, “I look at you as a mom.” Tripp replied, “I know that.” Yet when Tripp went to the “bathroom”—in fact, to get her wiring adjusted—Monica checked Tripp’s bag for a tape recorder, perhaps because Tripp had been instructing her, “Stop whispering. I can’t hear.” In the 262-page single-spaced transcript of the sting tape, it was possible to find support for virtually any theory of the case—Clinton was lying (or being lied to); Jordan was calling the shots (or responding to them); Lewinsky was filled with fear (or bravado); Tripp was the instigator (or the victim) of a conspiracy. Near the end Tripp sighed, “I feel like we’re in the middle of a John Grisham book.”

  After the “lunch”—it was by then early evening—on January 13, Tripp’s handlers retrieved the tape and took her back to the Starr office, on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. There the prosecutors gathered to listen to the tape and begin their debriefings of their newest witness. Both the review of the tape and the interview with Tripp took a long time, and it was well into the evening when a pair of prosecutors volunteered to drive Tripp back home to Columbia—the same forty-minute ride that Jackie Bennett and his colleagues had made one night earlier.

  Tripp’s escorts were Bruce Udolf and Mary Anne Wirth. These two prosecutors, along with a third, Michael Emmick, had joined Starr’s office only in the past year, and in certain important respects they did not resemble their longer-tenured colleagues. Udolf and Emmick had led two of the largest and most important public corruption sections in any United States Attorney’s Office in the nation, Udolf in Miami and Emmick in Los Angeles. Udolf and Emmick were both forty-five years old, with literally decades of high-level law enforcement experience with corrupt politicians between them. (Wirth had served as a federal prosecutor in New York.) Because Emmick and Udolf had essentially just joined the office, they shared few of the accumulated frustrations that had festered among the true believers. To a greater extent than their colleagues, they could treat the Clinton case as just another federal investigation, not a holy war. (Udolf, Wirth, and Emmick were also Democrats.)

  At least at first, Udolf in particular had no problem with being a loner in Starr’s office. After graduating from college, he had tried to make a living playing bass in a blues band, but then drifted into law school, at Emory University in Atlanta. After graduating, he took a job as a prosecutor in a small county north of the city where the district attorney had served for thirty-three years. Within a couple of years, however, the old-timer announced he was quitting and wanted Udolf to serve as his successor. When Udolf won the office, in 1982, he wasn’t yet thirty years old, and he was voted out of office after just a single four-year term. But he caught the prosecuting bug and went on to a legendary career in Miami, where he convicted a passel of crooked mayors, judges, and cops. At the time he joined Starr’s office, in mid-1997, Udolf was just getting over a bout with liver disease, and he and his wife had a new baby daughter as well. He saw the job with Starr as a sort of culmination of his prosecutorial career, the chance, in a relatively brief period of time, to put his skills to work in the most important forum in the country.

  But for the night of January 13, Bruce Udolf was Linda Tripp’s chauffeur. Tripp treated him to an extended monologue on her own heroism and what she would expect from the prosecutors in return. Udolf and Wirth (whom Tripp would come to dub “the witch”) were horrified at the arrogance and sense of entitlement of their office’s newest and closest ally.

  The first thing Wednesday morning, Udolf sought out Jackie Bennett. Swarthy and excitable, Udolf never hid his feelings from friends or adversaries. “That woman,” he told Bennett of his passenger of the previous night, “is a fucking cunt. If you want to get in bed with that bitch, you’re going to pay for it eventually.”

  Bennett, taken aback, replied, “But she’s credible.”

  “Any jury would hate that woman,” Udolf answered.

  For her part, Monica Lewinsky spent the morning of Wednesday, January 14, at the word processor in her apartment at the Watergate. There she composed a document that would briefly become one of the most discussed writings in the country—the “talking points.” In a way, the talking points were a logical outgrowth of her conversation with Tripp of the previous day. Among other things, Lewinsky had suggested that Tripp could file an affidavit with the Jones lawyers to avoid testifying. (Lewinsky’s affidavit, drafted by Frank Carter, was intended for that purpose.) At the end of the work day on Wednesday, Monica, who had quit her job in preparation for the move to New York, picked up Tripp at the Pentagon and handed her the three-page draft of the affidavit.

  The first words on the document were “points to make in affidavit.” It then continued, “Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself—what you do now, what you did at the White House and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.” The next section—the bulk of the document—consisted of a recounting of Tripp’s experience with Kathleen Willey. At this point, Lewinsky believed that Willey was the only subject about which the Jones lawyers wanted to interrogate Tripp. In the talking points, Lewinsky accurately summarized Tripp’s view of the Willey incident—that Willey had sought out the meeting with the president and that
she was pleased, not distressed, by Clinton’s interest in her. “I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody,” Lewinsky wrote in Tripp’s voice.

  Later, when the Lewinsky story broke and copies of the talking points were leaked to the press, the document became the subject of frenzied speculation. According to the working hypothesis of many observers of the investigation, the talking points were drafted by some high-level Clinton administration official—Vernon Jordan or Bruce Lindsey, maybe even the president himself. That person gave the talking points to Lewinsky for her to turn them over to Tripp as a script for how she should lie in the Jones case. In this way, the talking points were evidence of a conspiracy within the Clinton administration to obstruct justice in the Jones case. All this hypothesis illustrated, however, was the hysteria that afflicted Clinton’s critics. For starters, every word in the talking points was true; thus, regardless of its authorship, there was no way the document could be evidence of a plot to obstruct justice. Lewinsky was simply assisting in Tripp’s stated goal of avoiding testifying. (It was Tripp who was lying—by saying she didn’t want to testify when, in fact, she had engineered her subpoena from David Pyke.)

  Tripp immediately turned over the talking points to the FBI, and the agents prepared her for a monitored phone call with Lewinsky that evening.

  Also on the afternoon of January 14, Jim Moody showed up unannounced at the office of Kirby Behre, to say that he was taking over the representation of Linda Tripp. He was there to pick up the case files and the tapes. Mortified, horrified, but mostly stunned, Behre called Tripp to confirm what Moody was saying. She did—but Behre said he needed a day to get the tapes organized. Moody, goaded by Tripp, was starting to panic about Behre. What if he took the day to copy the tapes and give them to Bob Bennett? Moody wanted the tapes—now. He insisted on seeing the senior partner on the case, then the top partner in the firm. Behre stood firm.