A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  “They’re more real than you think,” the reporter replied cryptically.

  By Friday afternoon, the circle of knowledge about Starr’s sting was expanding. Frustrated that Newsweek hadn’t yet committed to running a story in the next issue, Lucianne Goldberg tipped a reporter at the New York Post to call Isikoff and ask him about the big scoop he had in the works. Isikoff, meanwhile, was abiding by Jackie Bennett’s request that he hold off on calling Vernon Jordan. But the reporter was itching to make the call, because Newsweek couldn’t run a story unless he had at least tried to get in touch with Jordan.

  And Bill Clinton was preparing for his testimony for one final day. After the session on Monday, the plans of the Jones lawyers could not have been clearer. They would begin by asking about Kathleen Willey and proceed to the woman whose name the judge didn’t recognize—L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y. Actually, as Bennett’s team had their final meetings with their client, they received encouraging news. Frank Carter, Lewinsky’s lawyer, faxed Clinton’s lawyer a copy of Lewinsky’s affidavit, so Bennett knew that Clinton and Lewinsky were allied in their denials.

  Bennett and Ettinger arrived at the White House at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, and they didn’t leave for six hours. Ettinger did most of the mock interrogation of the president, pelting him with the rudest questions he could imagine. Ettinger focused, as he knew Fisher would, on the other women: Willey, Lewinsky, and the like. Clinton’s responses were unchanged from the moment that the lawyers had first told him these names were on the witness list. Settlement was off the table. Clinton was confident, instructing Bennett, “If Paula Jones wants a trial, go and give her one.”

  Bennett had a final word of advice for his client. “The only thing you have to worry about is if you lie in there,” he said. “The crazies will come after you. They will try to impeach you if you lie. That’s the only thing to worry about.” Bruce Lindsey, who was also present, thanked Bennett for emphasizing that point.

  Finally, at around ten o’clock on Friday evening, Ettinger said, “Okay, I think you’re ready.”

  “No,” the president replied. “Come back tomorrow morning, and let’s do it again.”

  So, starting at about eight in the morning of Saturday, January 17, Bennett and Ettinger gave the president a final ninety minutes of preparation. Afterward, Ettinger made his way to the deposition on his own, but Bennett rode in the presidential limousine, along with Secret Service agent Larry Cockell, the short distance to the offices of Skadden Arps and their 10:30 A.M. appointment with their adversaries.

  On August 17, 1998, seven months later to the day, President Clinton testified at the White House in a videotaped presentation for Kenneth Starr’s grand jury. By that point, of course, Starr was investigating whether Clinton had lied in the course of his deposition on January 17. Late in the tense day of questioning by Starr’s prosecutors, Clinton provided a vivid picture of his state of mind at the time he confronted Paula Jones’s lawyers.

  “I think we might as well put this out on the table,” Clinton said. “I will admit this, sir. My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful. I did not wish to do the work of the Jones lawyers. I deplored what they were doing. I deplored the innocent people they were tormenting and traumatizing. I deplored their illegal leaking. I deplored the fact that they knew, once they knew our evidence, that this was a bogus lawsuit—and that because of the funding they had from my political enemies, they were putting ahead. I deplored it.

  “But I was determined to walk through the minefield of this deposition without breaking the law, and I believe I did.”

  In the Skadden Arps office on that Saturday in January, the lawyers and the judge gathered around the oval table promptly at ten-thirty. There were four lawyers from Bennett’s firm; the White House counsel, Charles F. C. Ruff; Bill Bristow, representing Danny Ferguson; and a half-dozen lawyers from Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke, of Dallas, Texas.

  “Good morning, Judge,” Bennett began—and he tried to get an edge right away. “The presidency is an important institution, Your Honor,” Bennett said, “and it is very important that it not be held in disrespect or it be held up to be the laughingstock of the world.” He accused the Jones team of leaking information about Kathleen Willey’s deposition, which had just been completed. He needled the six lawyers present from Donovan Campbell’s firm about their plans to blanket the Sunday-morning news shows the following day. “My only point in raising this,” Bennett went on, “is this just underscores the importance of Your Honor keeping restraints and controls on this deposition.”

  The judge shared Bennett’s concerns, but she recognized her duty to proceed under the law. “I have agonized over this case and the very embarrassing nature of some of the issues in the case,” she said, then added a sentiment that would be shared by many people before the year was out: “What was initially very shocking and embarrassing to the Court is not quite as shocking and embarrassing anymore.”

  After a little more preliminary discussion, Bennett said, “I’ll get the president.”

  Clinton walked through the double doors and greeted Judge Wright warmly. The president also had a few words for Bill Bristow, who was attempting to follow in his footsteps into the Arkansas governor’s mansion. He greeted the videotape operator and the court reporter. For Paula Jones and her counsel, Clinton had neither a handshake nor a smile.

  This was more extraordinary than it seemed. Clinton prided himself on his courtesy toward adversaries, and he got a perverse sort of pleasure out of reaching out to even his most fervent enemies. During Starr’s prosecution of the two Arkansas bankers in 1996, Clinton had given videotaped testimony at the White House, where he was sharply examined by Hickman Ewing, who was well known even then as a fierce opponent of the president. Following his testimony, Clinton went around the room to shake hands, and it appeared to several people that Ewing was trying to slip away before he had to exchange any greetings with the president. Clinton rushed to Ewing’s side, put his hand on his shoulder, and practically spun him around in order to shake his hand. But on January 17, Clinton did not even display the pretext of civility with the Jones lawyers and their client. He deplored them—and he wanted them to know it.

  “Sir,” Fisher began, “I’d like to hand you what has been marked Deposition Exhibit 1. So that the record is clear today, and that we know that we are communicating, this is a definition of a term that will be used in the course of my questioning, and the term is ‘sexual relations.’ I will inform the Court that the wording of the definition is patterned after Federal Rule of Evidence 413 [the Molinari law]. Would you please take whatever time you need to read this definition, because when I use the term ‘sexual relations,’ this is what I mean today.”

  It was, in a peculiar way, a fitting way to begin the deposition. From its origins more than three years earlier, the Paula Jones case had never been about whether Paula Jones suffered employment discrimination, but whether Bill Clinton could be embarrassed about his sex life. Here, Fisher had begun this climactic part of the case not by asking about the nominal subject matter of the lawsuit, but rather about the obsession of Clinton’s enemies—sexual relations as a general matter. As Fisher asked the question, he handed the judge, the president, and his lawyers a copy of the definition he had crafted back in Dallas earlier in the week. It read:

  For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in “sexual relations” when the person knowingly engages in or causes—

  (1) contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;

  (2) contact between any part of the person’s body or an object and the genitals or anus of another person; or

  (3) contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person’s body.

  “Contact” means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing.

  Even by the low standar
ds of legalese, this definition stood out for its complexity and incomprehensibility. With his complaints about prurience, Bennett had spooked Fisher into gumming up a fairly simple issue: What exactly had Bill Clinton done with these assorted women? The president’s enemies would pay a heavy price for Fisher’s blunder.

  But at the moment the definition was being passed around the table, Mitch Ettinger was struck by another thought. A former prosecutor, he noticed the similarity of the language to the federal law of sexual assault. He leaned over to Bennett and whispered, “Bob, they’re trying to get him to admit to a criminal act.”

  Bennett had still another thought. “Your Honor, as an introductory matter, I think this could really lead to confusion, and I think it’s important that the record be clear,” he said. “For example, it says, ‘contact’ means intentional touching, directly or through clothing.” What if Clinton patted Bennett on the behind and said he could lose ten pounds? That would seem to be covered under the definition. Bristow jumped in on the same theme: “Frankly, I think it’s a political trick, and I’ve told you before how I feel about the political character of what this lawsuit is about.” Bennett had a point. A pat on the butt could have been covered under item 2 of the definition.

  The issue put Judge Wright on the spot right away—and illustrated the importance of her presence at the deposition. Basically, she agreed with Bennett’s argument that the definition was “too broad, too encompassing.” So she struck items 2 and 3 and limited the definition to item 1—which she said covered “intentional sexual contact.” (Curiously, Clinton’s supporters, and Clinton himself, later argued that the definition was too narrow—that it covered sexual intercourse and nothing else; at the time, Bennett complained that it was too broad—that it covered any kind of contact.)

  Fisher, feeling a little embattled before the president had even answered a question, tried to defend his original three-part definition. But Bennett cut him off. “Your Honor,” he said, “I object to this record being filled with these kinds of things. This is going to leak. Why don’t they ask—they have the president of the United States in this room for several hours. Why don’t they ask him questions about what happened and what didn’t happen?… He can ask the president, what did you do? He can ask him specifically in certain instances what he did, and isn’t that what this deposition is for? It’s not to sort of lay a trap for him, and I’m going to object to the president answering and having to remember what’s on this whole sheet of paper, and I just don’t think it’s fair. It’s going to lead to confusion.”

  This was a time for quick thinking by Fisher. He had come up with the convoluted definition because he wanted to avoid antagonizing the judge with explicit sexual questions. But now Bennett was inviting Fisher to make just those kinds of inquiries. With the benefit of Tripp’s briefing, Fisher could have had Clinton on the spot immediately with straightforward questions like “Did Lewinsky perform oral sex on you?” But Fisher, in a classic lawyer’s mistake, stuck with his plan. “What I’m trying to do is avoid having to ask the president a number of very salacious questions and to make this as discreet as possible,” Fisher said. This prompted even more back-and-forth among the lawyers, and soon the deposition was twenty minutes old and the president hadn’t been asked a single substantive question.

  At one point, Wright sighed, “It’s just going to make it very difficult for me to rule, if you want to know the truth, and I’m not sure Mr. Clinton knows all these definitions, anyway.” That sentence alone might have crippled a perjury prosecution of the president, but Fisher let it pass uncontested. A full half hour into the proceedings, Fisher finally turned to his first subject. “Mr. Clinton,” the Jones lawyer said, eschewing the honorific “Mr. President,” “do you know a woman named Kathleen Willey?”

  Clinton was primed and ready for the subject. His story was simple and believable. He had met Willey and her husband during the 1992 campaign, and after the election, Kathleen had worked as a volunteer in the White House social office. Once she had visited him in his private office at the White House to ask for a full-time job because her husband was having financial difficulties. (She would return home to Richmond and find that he had committed suicide that very day.) “I remember this very well,” Clinton testified, “and she didn’t stay long, but she was quite agitated, and that was the only meeting I had with her.”

  The president did not behave like a trained witness; he gave long answers, and often volunteered more information than was called for by the questions. At one point, he said, unbidden, “I embraced her. I put my arms around her, I may even have kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it.” But Clinton’s windiness sometimes worked to his advantage, as when he added, “Let me remind you—Kathleen Willey asked for this meeting with me. I didn’t ask for the meeting with her.”

  At about eleven forty-five, Fisher turned to a new subject.

  “Now,” he said, “do you know a woman named Monica Lewinsky?”

  “I do,” Clinton said.

  Fisher began with a series of questions about Lewinsky’s employment history—her internship, her service in the White House, then her move to the Pentagon. Throughout the deposition, Clinton suggested he knew Lewinsky because she was a friend of Betty Currie’s. Accordingly, Clinton professed a vague familiarity with her progress through the ranks, and the questions didn’t trouble either the president or his lawyers. (In truth, Clinton had played no role in Lewinsky’s various job changes within the government, much to her dismay.)

  After a short break, though, Fisher started to put his knowledge to work. “Mr. President, before the break,” he said, “we were talking about Monica Lewinsky. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky together alone in the Oval Office?”

  “I don’t recall,” Clinton began. “I typically worked some on the weekends. Sometimes they’d bring me things on the weekends. She—it seems to me she brought things to me once or twice on the weekends. In that case, whatever time she would be in there, drop it off, exchange a few words and go, she was there.” (This, of course, was the cover story Clinton and Lewinsky had constructed to explain her visits to him on the weekends. It was why Lewinsky always carried a folder when she visited Clinton for their assignations.)

  “So I understand,” Fisher continued gently, “your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?”

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Clinton said. “It’s possible that she, in, while she was working there, brought something to me and that at the time she brought it to me, and she was the only person there. That’s possible.” In the year to come, this series of questions about whether they were “alone” proved to be the nightmare of Clinton’s defenders. The president’s answers were unequivocal lies.

  “Did it ever happen that you and she went down the hallway from the Oval Office to the private kitchen?” Fisher continued.

  Bennett took the opportunity to jump in—and unveil what he regarded as his secret weapon on the subject of Monica Lewinsky. “Your Honor, excuse me, Mr. President,” Bennett said, “I need some guidance from the Court at this point. I’m going to object to the innuendo. I’m afraid, as I say, that this will leak.… Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky had filed, has an affidavit which they are in possession of, saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.…”

  Perhaps understandably, the affidavit—and several conversations between Bennett and Frank Carter—had lulled the Clinton team into a false sense of security about Lewinsky. With both Clinton and Lewinsky on record as insisting that there was no sexual relationship between them, Bennett felt he had the right to be indignant about the “innuendo” in Fisher’s questions. Bennett insisted, “I would like to know the proffer”—the basis for Fisher’s questions about Lewinsky. “In preparation of the witness for this deposition, the witness is fully aware of Ms. Lewinsky’s affidav
it, so I have not told him a single thing he doesn’t know, but I think when [Fisher] asks questions like this where he’s sitting on an affidavit from the witness, he should at least have a good faith proffer.”

  But Judge Wright let Fisher proceed without a proffer, and he asked Clinton again about whether he and Lewinsky had gone down the private hallway to the kitchen behind the Oval Office.

  At this point, as if in an instant, Clinton’s demeanor changed. To answer this question, and all of the remaining queries about Lewinsky, the president assumed the posture in which he would spend much of the following year—one of abject self-pity, coupled with sustained dishonesty.

  “Well, let me try to describe the facts first,” Clinton began, “because you keep talking about this private kitchen. The private kitchen is staffed by two naval aides. They have total, unrestricted access to my dining room, to that hallway, to coming into the Oval Office. The people who are in the outer office of the Oval Office can also enter at any time.

  “I was, after I went through a presidential campaign in which the far right tried to convince the American people I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother’s bed with four prostitutes, and done numerous other things, I had a high level of paranoia. There are no curtains on the Oval Office, there are no curtains on my private office, there are no curtains or blinds that can close the windows in my private dining room. The naval aides come and go at will. There is a peephole in the office that George Stephanopoulos and then Rahm Emanuel occupied that looks back down that corridor.