A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The subpoena to Clinton had another effect, one that was not yet visible to the lawyers in the president’s camp. The prospect of Clinton’s testimony had prompted Starr to call Jake Stein and suggest that they meet for breakfast at the home of Sam Dash, the Georgetown law professor who served as Starr’s ethics adviser. The call came as a surprise to Stein, because he and Cacheris had not heard anything from the OIC in nearly six weeks. Of course, Lewinsky’s lawyers did not know that Starr had just subpoenaed Clinton and it appeared that the president was actually going to testify. Even the hard-liners in Starr’s office now recognized that they needed Lewinsky’s testimony more than ever. If they were going to examine Clinton properly, and especially if they were going to prove that he lied, they were going to have to hear Monica’s side of the story first.

  The meeting at Dash’s house on Friday morning, July 24—the same day that Kendall told Bittman that Clinton would testify at long last—didn’t even last long enough for anyone to touch the bagels that had been laid out. Starr and Dash agreed that if Monica gave what they regarded as a truthful proffer under a “Queen for a Day” agreement, the OIC would give her full and complete immunity from prosecution. Starr said they wanted to meet with Monica right away. Because she was in California, they settled on Monday morning, July 27, in New York, where there would be less press scrutiny than in Washington. They would meet in what Starr called “Grandma’s apartment”—his mother-in-law’s place—on East 56th Street. Wearing a blond wig, baseball cap, and sunglasses, Monica flew to New York on Sunday night. Tell the truth, Lewinsky’s lawyers instructed her, and you’re home free.

  Starr spent Sunday night at Grandma’s place, but left first thing in the morning to teach his class at NYU Law School. From Ginsburg, Starr knew how Lewinsky loathed him, and he thought it better to stay out of her sight on this traumatic day. At around ten-thirty, Lewinsky arrived with her team—Stein, Cacheris, and Sydney Hoffmann, a part-time colleague of Cacheris’s whom he had brought on to handle the detailed debriefings of his client. (“I didn’t want to hear about who blew who,” Cacheris said later.) The Starr team was already in place—Bittman, Sol Wisenberg, Mary Anne Wirth, Sam Dash, and an FBI agent to take notes. In order to make Monica more comfortable, the prosecutors allowed Hoffmann to lead the questioning for the first half hour.

  So, in Grandma’s small living room, Lewinsky told what would soon become a very familiar tale: the first encounter during the government shutdown, the furtive visits to the study, the phone sex, her forced departure from the White House staff, the job search from the Pentagon, the gifts from the president that she hid with Betty Currie. Lewinsky’s memory was dazzling. When she discussed having breakfast with Vernon Jordan, she remembered where and what they ate—and the name of the waiter! There was only one moment of tension.

  “What about a dress?” Bittman asked.

  “We’re not talking about that item today,” Cacheris interjected. He knew that the blue Gap dress was still in Marcia Lewis’s New York apartment. Cacheris was worried that the Starr team might give Lewinsky or her mother something called “act of production” immunity, force them to produce the dress, and then prosecute them for hiding it. (That might have been a clever strategy, but it apparently never occurred to anyone at the OIC.) Better, Cacheris thought, simply to wait until Monica had full immunity and then produce the dress without any fear of reprisal. On this occasion, Bittman didn’t press the issue.

  The core of Lewinsky’s story would never change. Yes, there was a sexual relationship (short of intercourse). No, neither the president nor anyone else ever told her to lie or withhold evidence in the Paula Jones case. In the argot of those closest to the case, Monica gave them the sex but not the obstruction.

  At about two-thirty, Cacheris saw that Monica’s energy was starting to flag, and he said he thought they should stop. The lawyers on both sides retreated into a bedroom to discuss their next steps.

  “We need another day to question her,” Bittman said.

  Cacheris exploded: “If you don’t have the story by now, you’ll never have it.” He said they could talk to her again only if they gave her a full immunity agreement.

  Bittman smiled and said, “You mean a signed agreement?”—a joking reference to the unsigned February 2 document that had caused both sides so much aggravation. They parted on friendly terms.

  That night, Starr called Stein and asked him to come to the independent counsel offices the following morning. He had an immunity agreement waiting, and the defense lawyers found little to quibble with in the wording. By that afternoon, Lewinsky had signed, making her officially a government witness, and Cacheris announced the deal to the public. The following day, Monica would begin a grueling round of all-day debriefings.

  It was July 28, 1998, precisely 176 days since Bruce Udolf had made his immunity agreement with Bill Ginsburg. That delay of nearly half a year earned Starr and the Office of Independent Counsel precisely nothing—and cost them a great deal. Lewinsky’s recitation in Grandma’s living room was substantively identical to the version she wrote out by hand in the Cosmos Club. But if Monica’s testimony did not waver, the political and legal terrain had been transformed since those frenzied first days of the scandal. By and large, the months had allowed the country to come to terms with the fact that the president probably did have the affair with the intern—but that he had managed to do a pretty good job anyway. Starr had used the time to prove that his ineptitude was exceeded only by his zeal.

  Like so many enemies in Clinton’s past and future, Starr had held out with Lewinsky in the hope that something would turn up to cinch the case against the president. But it didn’t and it wouldn’t, because the case was never anything more than it appeared to be—that of a humiliated middle-aged husband who lied when he was caught having an affair with a young woman from the office.

  17

  “I Don’t Care If I’m Impeached …”

  Starr spoke frequently to his staff about their need to insulate themselves from the political currents swirling around their work. He was particularly preoccupied by the November 1998 elections. His initial insistence on submitting his report to Congress in July, more than three months before the voting, suggested how much Starr worried about the perception that he was trying to help the Republicans and hurt the Democrats. In public and private, Starr’s statements on this issue never changed.

  There is, however, ample evidence that the independent counsel protested too much about his desire to veer clear of politics. Indeed, the negotiations between Bob Bittman and David Kendall about the president’s grand jury testimony admit to almost no other interpretation. The OIC’s position about Clinton’s testimony suggested that far from seeking distance from the electoral fray, Starr’s office did have a political agenda—specifically, to humiliate the president and damage his party.

  On July 24, Kendall told Bittman that Clinton would testify, but the lawyer didn’t lay out his conditions until three days later. On that day Kendall wrote to the prosecutor saying that Clinton would testify only “in a way that is consistent with the obligations of the office.” Kendall demanded withdrawal of the subpoena, meaning Clinton could testify voluntarily; testimony at the White House, not in the grand jury room; strict time limits; and “adequate time to prepare”—which the lawyer interpreted as no testimony before September 13 or 20. Kendall and Bittman spent many hours hashing out these points between July 27 and 29. (The announcement of Lewinsky’s immunity deal, on July 28, made the stakes for Clinton’s testimony even higher.)

  To Kendall’s astonishment, Bittman caved on almost everything. He agreed to withdraw the subpoena, so Clinton would not have to suffer the indignity of being the first president compelled to appear before a grand jury. Bittman agreed to allow Clinton to testify at the White House, in the presence of his lawyers—which was something denied to all other grand jury witnesses, who had to face their interrogators alone. And in the most important concession, Bittman quickly su
rrendered his demand for two days of testimony from Clinton and settled for just four hours. The OIC spent that much time on minor witnesses and dozens of hours with people like Tripp, Jordan, and Currie. Kendall believed that with no judge present to limit how much Clinton talked, a mere four hours would pass in a flash. Such accommodations were nearly without precedent in the rancorous relationship between the president and the independent counsel.

  But Bittman did not yield on two points. The first was the date. The prosecutor said the middle or end of September was simply too late. In his letter, Kendall admitted that the Clintons had planned a two-week vacation starting on Saturday, August 15. A trip to Ireland and Russia would immediately follow. The letter had all but invited a compromise date in lieu of the first few days of the president’s vacation, and Kendall settled on Monday, August 17, for Clinton’s testimony. But Bittman’s other demand was more surprising. Kendall had agreed that the grand jurors could come to the White House or, alternatively, watch a live closed-circuit feed of Clinton’s testimony, but Bittman insisted that the testimony be videotaped as well. Kendall asked why.

  “Someone on the grand jury might be absent that day,” Bittman said.

  This was preposterous. First, it is hard to imagine that any of the twenty-three grand jurors could have had more pressing business on August 17 than listening to the president of the United States testify. Second, even if someone was absent, he or she could read a transcript or listen to a reading of one; that was how grand juries usually worked. Still, in light of all of Bittman’s other concessions, Kendall decided to give in on this one as well.

  But why did Bittman insist on only these two points? Testimony in August allowed Starr to release his report in early September—at the beginning of the campaign season, but not so late as to expose him to criticism for interfering in the races. In fact, one could not have chosen a more politically incendiary moment to release the report than the time Starr eventually did select. The videotape demand was even more suspicious. At this point, Starr knew that he would be turning evidence over to Congress; he understood that the legislators would face enormous pressure to release it, especially in the middle of their campaigns. Though Starr, Bittman, and his staff denied it, the only reasonable interpretation of their insistence on videotape was to embarrass Clinton—to display him to the public answering the kind of questions that no president, and scarcely any American, had ever been required to address.

  The videotaped grand jury testimony was, it appeared, the independent counsel’s form of payback for four years of Clinton’s hostility and disdain. Yet like so many of Starr’s plans during his long tenure, this one, too, did not have the results he may have expected.

  Both sides spent the next fortnight in frantic preparations for Clinton’s grand jury testimony. Starr gained a psychological edge with a brief, understated letter that Bittman sent to Kendall on July 31. “Investigative demands,” he wrote, “require that President Clinton provide this Office as soon as possible with a blood sample to be taken under our supervision.” That could only have meant one thing. On the day after Lewinsky signed her immunity deal, she handed Mike Emmick a “GAP dress, size 12, dark blue,” as the FBI report put it, in a brief meeting in Cacheris’s office. A test the next day showed the presence of semen, giving Bittman the justification for his letter. Though Kendall was not told the results of the DNA tests before Clinton’s testimony, the lawyer had a pretty good idea why Bittman was asking. (The president provided the blood sample on August 3, and preliminary tests that night showed a match. More refined tests later put the odds at 7.87 trillion to one that the semen on the dress came from someone other than Clinton. In a reflection of the tense atmosphere in the Starr office before the president’s testimony, Bittman lied to several colleagues about the results of the DNA test, suggesting there was no match.)

  At around nine on the morning of August 6, Lewinsky made her way past the phalanx of television cameras in front of the United States Courthouse and settled down to her first day of grand jury testimony. At 11:06 A.M., President Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House at a ceremony to mark the fifth anniversary of the gun control legislation known as the Brady Bill. That night, Monica’s mother knew how tired her daughter would be after her big day, so she brought home her favorite Chinese dinner, chicken chow mein, and the two women ate in front of the television. As they were watching, Monica was startled to see the blue-and-gold necktie Clinton was wearing on the occasion.

  “I gave that to him,” she told her mother, of the Ermenegildo Zegna design. “I bet it’s a signal to me.”

  Thus began one of the story’s more peculiar byways—the saga of the “love tie,” as it was sometimes called. The next day, Lewinsky passed her hunch to the prosecutors. She said that she had mailed Clinton the tie for his fiftieth birthday, in August 1996, and told him, “I like it when you wear my ties because then I know I’m close to your heart.” (It was at Clinton’s fiftieth birthday party, at Radio City Music Hall, that she surreptitiously grabbed his penis.) Some of Starr’s staff believed that the tie was another sign of Clinton’s perfidy—that he was dressing to obstruct justice. By wearing the tie, they thought, he was instructing Lewinsky to remain faithful to him.

  This was a fairly absurd notion; Clinton appeared in public only after Lewinsky began testifying. But Jackie Bennett took the tie issue seriously enough to ask Clinton several questions about it during his grand jury testimony. Within a week of Clinton’s testimony, the tie issue leaked in the press, to much public merriment. Surprisingly, the tie-signaling story made sense to some of Clinton’s closest friends. Unlike most people, they knew Clinton was actually a superstitious man, a collector of rabbit’s feet and lucky pennies, which he meticulously placed in his pocket each day. (Some of these same friends were convinced that Clinton had had an affair with Lewinsky only when they heard that she had given him a wooden frog letter opener; small frog sculptures were another one of his private hobbies.) It would be like Clinton, they thought, to seek some sort of cosmic alliance with Lewinsky by wearing her tie on the day of her debut before the grand jury.

  After Clinton’s own grand jury testimony, Starr avoided the tie controversy in his report to Congress, so the issue largely faded from view. But had the prosecutors pursued the issue, the president might have been saved by a suitably bizarre deus ex machina regarding the love tie. In December 1996, the president’s brother, the singer Roger Clinton, had traveled to Italy. His agent had told him to look up another one of his clients, a woman named Marina Castelnuovo, who made her living as Italy’s foremost Elizabeth Taylor impersonator. In Rome, Castelnuovo took Roger shopping for Christmas presents for his brother, an expedition that was tape-recorded by the RAI television network. Almost two years later, when Italian television broadcast photographs of the Zegna tie in question, the Italian entertainer instantly realized that she and Roger, not Monica Lewinsky, had purchased that tie for the president. Castelnuovo tracked down the RAI videotape and passed the proof triumphantly to David Kendall.

  In truth, the matter could never be resolved definitively. Clinton received many ties from different people and cycled through them quickly, and he swore he couldn’t remember the origin of the blue-and-gold number he had worn on August 6. It was even possible that Roger and Monica had both given him the same tie; Zegna distributed this model only in 1996. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. But as Clinton prepared to face his inquisitors at the Office of Independent Counsel, he could be sure that they, if not the American people, were always ready to believe the worst about him.

  Clinton had survived decades of rumors about his sex life either by denying them or refusing to address them. In spite of this strategy—or, perhaps, because of it—he had twice been elected president of the United States. As the August 17 date approached, all of the people around the president knew how difficult it would be to persuade him to change his ways. But Lewinsky had been in the grand jury; the DNA tests were under way. Tho
ugh no one in the Clinton camp said it directly, the mission in preparing the president was to save him from himself.

  Only two people were in a position to know what he was going to say. In the days leading up to his testimony, Kendall and his partner Nicole Seligman spent many hours with Clinton, and even they were not entirely sure how he was going to address the issue of his relationship with Lewinsky. On many issues, Clinton’s positions were clear. He didn’t ask Vernon Jordan to find Monica a job in return for her silence; he didn’t ask her to retrieve the gifts to avoid the Jones subpoena; he didn’t obstruct justice. That was the easy stuff. But as for the issue at the core of the case, Clinton wouldn’t commit one way or the other. This was, of course, a personal as well as political and legal dilemma. For seven months, he had told his wife nothing more than he had on the first day—that he had only “ministered” to the troubled Monica Lewinsky.

  As the final weekend before his testimony approached, the White House moved into the same kind of crisis mode that had prevailed just after the story broke. Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason returned from California. Mickey Kantor, the former trade representative and commerce secretary, began spending virtually all his time at the White House, in his role as an additional personal lawyer for the president. A genuine foreign policy crisis further rattled the atmosphere. Saddam Hussein evicted United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq, and the administration was threatening to resume air strikes.

  Finally, the logjam was broken in a manner distinctive to Washington. In the Friday, August 14, edition of The New York Times, a front-page story bore the headline CLINTON WEIGHS ADMITTING HE HAD SEXUAL CONTACTS. Citing a member of Clinton’s “inner circle,” the story suggested that Clinton was thinking of changing his story to admit that he had had “intimate sexual encounters” with Lewinsky. In a way, the story could be seen as a proactive leak—designed more to shape Clinton’s testimony than to disclose his plans for it. Most people around the president felt that he had more to lose from lying than from admitting the affair; thus, this leak. In private as well as public, all of those in the “inner circle” denied being the source of the story. However, close observers were drawn to one of the four bylines on the Times story—that of David E. Sanger. An international economics specialist, Sanger had not covered the Lewinsky story. On the other hand, he had spent several years chronicling Mickey Kantor’s career.