At the “swamp,” the triangle of grass on the Senate side of the Capitol where congressional press conferences took place all day long, the other Judiciary Democrats waited impatiently for Boucher. At last, Conyers started without him. At about ten forty-five, Boucher jogged up to the gaggle of his colleagues and gave them a satisfied nod. By the time it was Boucher’s turn to speak, most of the reporters had lost interest, but he knew, as did just a handful of others, what he had accomplished.
Every day at 7:30 A.M., Henry Hyde would meet his chief of staff, Thomas E. Mooney, at the Hyatt near Capitol Hill, eat breakfast, and mope. From the day the Starr report arrived, Hyde had hated everything about the process—not least what had happened to him. On September 16, the online magazine Salon had reported a story about an extramarital affair Hyde had had during the 1960s. He had made peace about the issue with his wife, who had died in 1992, but none of his children or grandchildren had known about it. Hyde recognized that the source of the story was probably the woman’s cuckolded husband, but he blamed the White House for its scorched-earth method of dealing with adversaries. He was right to worry. Sidney Blumenthal had shifted the target of his “oppo” campaign from the Starr prosecutors to Clinton’s pursuers in Congress. One day around this time, Blumenthal, who is from Chicago, told me his mother had recently been reminiscing about how Hyde used to bring his girlfriend to the Sherman Hotel.
Such an environment put Hyde in no mood to compromise. Hyde was in a political vise. As the reaction to the release of Clinton’s grand jury videotape illustrated, there was little public support for impeachment. But Hyde’s Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee desperately wanted to press forward. And overriding all other motivations was the belief that had sustained Clinton’s enemies for years: Hyde believed that there were more shoes to drop. Starr had tantalized the Republicans on the committee with his pregnant warnings that his investigation was continuing. Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate remained within his jurisdiction, as did the separate inquiry about whether Clinton had lied about his encounter with Kathleen Willey. The supposed campaign finance scandal, with its vague intimations of a connection to Communist China, beckoned Hyde as well. In light of all this, what really worried the chairman about Boucher’s proposal was the limitation on the scope of the hearings to Lewinsky alone.
But Boucher had put Hyde on the defensive, as became apparent when the chairman appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday, October 4. Hyde rejected the Boucher plan’s limitations on time and scope of the hearings, but the chairman wanted to show that he was being reasonable, too. So Hyde volunteered, “I have a New Year’s resolution and that is we finish by New Year’s. Now, you know how New Year’s resolutions sometimes get broken, but it’s my hope and prayer that we could finish by New Year’s.” Democrats rejoiced. By limiting his schedule to the end of the year, with the November election intervening, Hyde had essentially admitted that he would not have time to call any witnesses about Clinton’s behavior. (If Hyde started calling fact witnesses like Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, Democrats would have had the right to call their own witnesses, and that would have taken the hearings well into 1999.) Hyde’s New Year’s resolution meant that he would be relying exclusively on the evidence collected by Starr. Whether Hyde liked it or not, he was now the unpopular Starr’s permanent teammate.
On Tuesday, October 6, Hyde had one last chance to thwart the Democrats’ strategy. At a committee hearing to determine the measure that would be sent to the House floor, Howard Berman, an unpredictable liberal from California, surprised everyone with a proposal that seemed to split the difference between Boucher’s limited approach and Hyde’s open-ended mandate. Berman proposed that the committee simply assume that the allegations in the Starr report were true and then move to a determination whether such conduct by the president amounted to an impeachable offense. It was simple and straightforward, and Barney Frank, the Massachusetts iconoclast who was the best tactician on the committee, saw that the Republicans might embrace it. This possibility of an outbreak of civility worried Frank, because he believed in Gephardt’s winning-by-losing strategy.
Frank sat near Berman in the hearing room, and he leaned over and whispered to Berman that he knew just how to kill his proposal—by endorsing it wholeheartedly. Frank knew that many Republicans on the committee were simply against anything he was for, on principle. Frank’s gambit worked, and Berman’s idea was voted down on a party-line vote. So was Boucher’s proposal. And Hyde’s open-ended, no-formal-deadline approach was passed by committee, also by a straight party-line vote, twenty-one to sixteen.
The Boucher and Hyde proposals, both slightly modified, came to the floor on October 8, the first time that the full House had considered impeachment since September 11, when Clinton was thrashed in the vote to release the Starr report. This time, though, the atmosphere was different. Buoyed by polls that suggested continued support for the president, nearly all the Democrats had come home. That didn’t stop a last-minute bout of panic from hitting the White House—when James Carville bellowed at Rahm Emanuel that the Republicans were going to undercut Gephardt’s strategy and agree to Boucher’s proposal. The contagion of worry even spread to Abbe Lowell, who burst in on Gephardt to ask, “What if they accept the deal? What if the Republicans call our bluff and agree with our proposal?”
But Gephardt, at this point a veteran of the Gingrich Republicans’ kamikaze style, promised that the GOP would stand unified behind Hyde’s proposal, even if it meant being branded as a partisan lynch mob. “They can’t help themselves,” Gephardt said. “They will never do it. They will be against it because we are for it.”
Gephardt was right. Hyde’s plan passed by a vote of 258 to 176, with all of the Republicans in the House and just thirty-one Democrats voting with the majority. At the end of the day, Rick Boucher’s proposal came to the floor and the gentleman from Virginia rose with a request for Newt Gingrich. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “on that I demand the yeas and nays.”
The tabulations found 236 against and 198 for the plan that limited the impeachment hearings to the Lewinsky allegations and called for their conclusion by the end of the year. The vote had run almost entirely along party lines. No loser ever left the House floor more content than Rick Boucher did on that day. And like the rest of his colleagues, he fled the Capitol following the vote and returned home to campaign.
19
Mr. Genitalia and the Perjury Ladies
On Wednesday, November 4, the day after the elections, Henry Hyde summoned his aide Tom Mooney to the place they always went when they wanted secrecy: a conference room at the O’Hare Hilton, just outside Hyde’s district in Illinois. The chairman’s mood had evolved from misery to despair. The elections of the previous day had been an epic disaster for the Republicans. In the sixth year of a two-term presidency, the party controlling the White House had traditionally lost many, sometimes dozens, of seats in Congress. With the Lewinsky scandal roiling, Democrats had feared losses of that magnitude. (Vice President Al Gore told Mark Penn, the president’s pollster, that he thought the Democrats would lose between thirty and forty seats.) Though many polls tightened in the final days, almost no political observer predicted the scale of the Democratic comeback. The Senate stood unchanged, at fifty-five Republicans and forty-five Democrats. Republicans actually lost five seats in the House, and their advantage there was shaved to a bare 223 to 212.
Every election was subject to varying interpretations, but Hyde joined in the consensus that the voters were expressing their displeasure with the Republicans’ obsession with the scandal. Gingrich’s last-minute decision to spend $10 million of party money on advertisements that attacked Clinton had flopped. If there was any good news for Hyde, who loathed Gingrich, it was that the election would clearly cost the speaker his job. (By the end of the week, Gingrich announced plans to resign.)
But the question of impeachment remained. What should Hyde and his committee do now? Late on that Wednesday afte
rnoon, Hyde and Mooney convened a gloomy conference call with the other twenty Republicans on Judiciary. Jim Rogan, who had expected an easy coast to reelection, was still waiting for the last votes to be counted, to make sure that he had won. Bob Inglis had lost his Senate race in South Carolina. Their experiences provided vivid examples of the political cost of association with their cause. Hyde said that he wanted to discuss two issues. First, he said he was completing work on written questions for Clinton to answer. The president had refused invitations to testify before the committee, but Hyde thought that he could at least put Clinton on the spot by forcing him to address some of the embarrassing questions raised by his conduct.
Second, the chairman said, he believed they ought to call Kenneth Starr as a witness. Previously, it had been mostly Democrats who were agitating to hear from Starr. They said they wanted to confront him about the alleged improprieties in his investigation, but basically the Democrats had wanted Starr as an exhibit—a physical embodiment of the most unpopular man in American politics. But Hyde now saw Starr as a final opportunity to see if there really was something more to the scandals than Lewinsky. If anyone knew of the elusive other shoe, it was Starr—so they ought to hear what he had to say.
Hyde’s colleagues didn’t agree or disagree as much as listen in grumpy silence. The chairman sensed their dismay, so he offered words of gentle encouragement. “What can we do?” he asked. “Can we sweep it under the rug?” No, he answered for them, they had a duty to continue, regardless of the political consequences. Later, Hyde would joke privately that he gave this speech twice a week to his fellow Republicans on Judiciary. In a strange way, Hyde was invigorated by the futility. Like Clinton, he reveled in self-pity. Indeed, the less popular he and his inquiries became, the more he was persuaded that he was on the right course. The chairman promised he was leading his troops to certain failure, to public ridicule, to political calamity even greater than the one they had just endured.
Onward!
“Point of order, Mr. Chairman,” said Mel Watt, an imperious Democrat from North Carolina.
“I don’t yield for any points of order,” Henry Hyde responded. “I would like to make my statement.”
It was November 19, the day that Starr was going to testify, and the Judiciary Democrats were observing their custom of opening each hearing with a little procedural torture for the chairman. Watt was protesting the amount of time that Hyde had allotted David Kendall to question Starr. “Now,” Hyde continued, “you are disrupting the continuity of this meeting with these adversarial motions.”
“We are disrupting a railroad, it seems like, Mr. Chairman,” Watt shot back.
Everyone was on edge, because Starr was the one person who could, in theory, transform the impeachment debate. The Democrats were particularly worried. In the typical congressional manner, they had demanded that he appear—and then panicked when it became clear that he would. For days, the Democratic members had badgered their counsel, Abbe Lowell. “What should we ask him? What should we do?”
Starr also recognized the stakes, both for his investigation and for his own reputation. He had prepared for his appearance as he used to rehearse for Supreme Court arguments, with staff members peppering him with questions. As a former solicitor general, Starr was well suited for this kind of interrogation, and he wore a confident smile when he sat down at the witness table, with his diminutive wife behind one shoulder and the stolid Bob Bittman behind the other.
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Starr began. “I welcome the opportunity to be before the committee.”
“Would you pull the mike up?” Hyde interrupted.
“I was just told to push my mike away,” Starr replied.
“By a Democrat, I am sure,” Hyde said, drawing a laugh.
“The person did not identify his affiliation in saying that,” Starr answered, displaying, in contrast, his leaden wit.
The previous night, the OIC had given the prepared text of Starr’s two-hour presentation to members of the Judiciary Committee, so there were no surprises. His remarks basically recapitulated the highlights of the Starr report. Following the lunch break, the Democrats had their chance to have at Starr for the first time. Abbe Lowell took the first shot, and he employed the clipped, contemptuous tone of a veteran cross-examiner. “Mr. Starr, isn’t it true that …”; “Mr. Starr, you have to agree, I take it …”; “Mr. Starr,… the key word in your title ‘Independent Counsel’ is ‘independent’?… Part of being ‘independent,’ I think you would agree with me, is being free of conflicts of interest that might bias your investigation, correct?”
The consistent theme of the Democratic critique, articulated first by Lowell and then by the committee members themselves, was that Starr himself had broken laws—that he and his staff had violated Lewinsky’s rights in the Ritz-Carlton, had illegally leaked information to the press, had conflicts of interest in the Jones case. Starr handled these accusations with aplomb. Ironically, with respect to Starr, the Democrats fell into the same trap as the Republicans did throughout the Clinton years. The problem with Starr was not that he was a lawbreaker, as the questioners consistently tried to imply, but rather that he lacked judgment and reason when it came to this case. Neither Starr nor Clinton was a criminal. The errors of both Starr and his critics illustrated the perils of a world where the legal system had taken over the political system. It was never enough to prove that your adversaries were mistaken; you had to prove that they were evil as well.
On most of the issues that Starr addressed, the prosecutor also had the advantage of being right. When Lowell pressed him about the alleged mistreatment of Lewinsky on January 16, Starr calmly and appropriately rejected the charge. “We did, in fact, use a traditional technique that law enforcement always uses,” he said in his fussy diction. “We made it clear to the witness that she was, in fact, free to leave. The Ritz-Carlton, shall I say, is a fairly comfortable and commodious place. We will show you … telephone records that indicated she reached out to Mr. Carter, her attorney.… She called her mother. She went for a walk.… We conducted ourselves professionally.” And so, Democratic accusations notwithstanding, they had.
As usual, though, Barney Frank was operating a few steps ahead of everyone else. Listening to Starr’s opening presentation, Frank noticed that, in passing, the prosecutor had conceded that he had found no evidence of impeachable offenses in the Travelgate and Filegate areas within his jurisdiction. This admission dashed the Republicans’ central hope in summoning Starr—that he had some new bombshell to drop. But Frank, characteristically, was thinking of a further implication of this disclosure by Starr. Frank noted that Starr had said he sent the information about impeachable offenses to Congress “as soon as it became clear.” But when, the congressman asked, had he decided that there was no information incriminating to the president in Travelgate?
“Some months ago,” Starr conceded.
“Let me just say, here is what disturbs me greatly,” Frank replied. Starr had filed his report about Lewinsky before the election, but his office had actually been studying the Filegate and Travelgate affairs for much longer than they had been scrutinizing Lewinsky, “yet now, several weeks after the election, is the first time you are saying that.
“Why did you withhold that before the election when you were sending us a referral with a lot of negative stuff about the President and only now … you give us this exoneration of the president several weeks after the election?”
Starr mumbled a meager answer that began, “Well, again, there is a process question”—but it was more than a process question. Starr and his team had worked to exhaustion to get their Lewinsky allegations in front of Congress and the public at the most politically perilous moment for Clinton’s party. But they felt no rush to reveal their exoneration of the Clintons on Filegate and Travelgate. Again, there was nothing illegal about Starr’s priorities, but they did reveal a great deal about the “process” that was under way in his suite on Pennsylvania Av
enue.
The questioning from that moment forward consisted mostly of alternating harangues and homages, depending on the party of the interrogator. The back-and-forth took so long that it wasn’t until eight-thirty in the evening that the most important confrontation of the day took place, between Starr and David Kendall, who began by saying, with characteristic bombast, “My task is to respond to the two hours of uninterrupted testimony from the independent counsel, as well as to his four-year, $45 million investigation, which has included at least twenty-eight attorneys, seventy-eight FBI agents, and an undisclosed number of private investigators, an investigation which has generated by computer count 114,532 news stories in print, and 2,513 minutes of network television time, not to mention twenty-four-hour scandal coverage on cable, a 445-page referral, 50,000 pages of documents from secret grand jury testimony, four hours of videotape testimony, twenty-two hours of audiotape, some of which was gathered in violation of state law, and the testimony of scores of witnesses, not one of whom has been cross-examined.
“And I have thirty minutes to do this.”
After this introduction, Kendall began simply. He called Starr’s attention to a press release that the OIC had issued in February regarding the immunity negotiations with Lewinsky. “We cannot responsibly determine whether she is telling the truth without speaking directly to her,” Starr had said. “We have found that there is no substitute for looking a witness in the eye, asking detailed questions, matching answers against verifiable facts,” and so on.
A Vast Conspiracy Page 45