A Vast Conspiracy (51 page)

“I guess that will teach them to fuck with us,” the first lady said.

The president’s spirits didn’t respond as quickly as his wife’s. Thomason continued to coach the president, exhorting him to keep after his adversaries. When Thomason walked Clinton to the door of the White House as he was leaving for Capitol Hill to give the State of the Union address, he told him, “Just remember—you’ve got the biggest balls over there. Just go over and kick their butts.”

Which was, more or less, what Clinton did. His pollster, Mark Penn, was standing just out of camera range in the House chamber, waiting for the first thirty seconds of the speech. Penn knew that the president was prepared to deliver a poised and polished address, full of the moderate, poll-tested initiatives that were the trademark of his presidency. Once Penn saw that the legislators would react to Clinton the way they had in previous years, he exhaled. He knew then that Clinton was going to make it.

Unaccountably to many in the scandal-crazed capital, as the story approached its one-week anniversary, independent public opinion polls registered little change in the president’s already high approval ratings. In the year ahead, those polls would provide no end of succor to the White House. Yet there was another key to Clinton’s deliverance, one that also began to emerge on the same tumultuous day that saw the first lady discoursing to Matt Lauer and the president orating before Congress. However, this other favorable augury for the president was visible only to those who had access to the secret proceedings of Kenneth Starr’s grand jury.

From the moment that Starr’s investigators first interviewed Linda Tripp, they knew that Betty Currie would be a central witness in their investigation. She served as the intermediary between all of Starr’s principal
targets—between Clinton and Lewinsky, Lewinsky and Jordan, and even, to a lesser extent, Clinton and Jordan. As Lewinsky described her relationship with the president in the conversations that Tripp tape-recorded, Currie had served as enabler in chief for the commander in chief. Everyone on Starr’s staff knew they had to have Currie as a witness. So, on Saturday, January 24—when Harry Thomason was fortifying the Clintons’ spirits at Camp David—Starr’s investigators took Currie to Room 618 of the Residence Inn Hotel, in Bethesda, Maryland, to begin debriefing her.

Who should lead the questioning of Currie? Not surprisingly, in an investigation that seemed to go from irrelevant to omnipotent in about a week, issues of turf quickly arose for the prosecutors. But Starr had no doubt about which lawyer he wanted in charge of the president’s secretary—Bob Bittman. After all, along with Jackie Bennett and Hick Ewing, Bittman was one of Starr’s three top deputies in 1998. Indeed, while Bennett supervised the work of the independent counsel’s entire Washington office, Starr placed Bittman in direct charge of the first criminal investigation of the president of the United States since Watergate.

Perhaps no lawyer in American history had been given an assignment for which he was less qualified. One of Starr’s original top deputies, Mark Tuohey, had hired Bittman in 1994. At the time, Bittman was thirty-two years old, and his legal career consisted of six years as an assistant state attorney in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. There Bittman mainly prosecuted street crime in Annapolis. In his most noteworthy case, he tried a high school teacher for having had consensual sex with one of her students. She was acquitted. In Annapolis, as later in Starr’s office, Bittman was renowned for his devotion to his golf game, and he would often stay at his parents’ home, adjacent to the grounds of the storied Congressional Country Club, so that he could squeeze in a game around work. Bittman was also a stalwart Republican.

Bittman worked his way through the ranks of the Starr office. Though hired as a third-level prosecutor, he had stayed long enough to see virtually all of the seasoned veterans who started with him move on to other opportunities. Bittman took over as the sort of chief administrative officer of the Starr operation, running meetings and keeping tabs on various investigations. In office debates about strategy, Bittman (like his fellow deputy Jackie Bennett) invariably took the toughest line with the office’s adversaries. This impressed Starr, who gave Bittman the nickname “Bulldog.”

Bulldog Bittman spent parts of both days over the weekend at the hotel
in Bethesda with Currie, her two lawyers, and a pair of FBI agents. The mood was tense, urgent. The FBI had chosen the obscure location so that no one would know Currie was cooperating with Starr. Bittman told Currie’s lawyers that he wanted to bring Currie before the grand jury that very week. Currie’s lead lawyer, Larry Wechsler, an experienced Washington hand and former prosecutor, wondered about the rush. Federal prosecutors usually devote many painstaking hours to preparing key witnesses to testify in the grand jury. But Bittman had talked to Currie for only four hours on Saturday and less than two on Sunday. He wanted her to testify on Tuesday.

By any standard, Currie wasn’t ready to testify. She was emotional; her memory was not good; her dealings with the principal players occurred over many months and involved many separate conversations; the Starr office had yet to analyze her telephone or pager records; Bittman didn’t have any important documents to refresh her recollection. Currie was giving the Starr prosecutors all the time they wanted. They could have taken days, even weeks, to nail down her story. What was the hurry?

The answer revealed a great deal about the future course of the investigation. Bittman argued that calling the president’s secretary as the first witness before the grand jury would be a sign that Starr’s office meant business. He wanted to “lock her in” to her story right away. Starr, who of course had no prosecutorial experience of his own, put much stock in purported “signs” of “strength” and “weakness.” Besides, Bittman argued, the longer Currie remained outside the grand jury, the greater the chance that she would be “love bombed” by the Clinton forces and her testimony spun in ways favorable to the president. Starr wanted the White House to see how fast his investigation was moving. Currie would be his first witness. So much the better that it was Tuesday morning, January 27, 1998, the day of the State of the Union address.

“Mrs. Currie, that water in front of you is yours,” Bob Bittman began at 10:19
A.M.
, three hours after Mrs. Clinton’s appearance on the
Today
show and eleven hours before her husband’s speech to Congress. As he stood before the witness, Bittman had never prosecuted a single case in federal court.

“Thank you,” the president’s secretary said.

Currie moved haltingly through her background and her responsibilities as the president’s secretary. She gave a complex description of the routes in and out of the Oval Office, but because Bittman had not arranged for a diagram, Currie’s recital was almost incomprehensible. Quickly, Bittman moved to the subject of Monica Lewinsky. Currie said that she had had some vague awareness of Lewinsky when she worked at the White House, but had become friendly with her only after Lewinsky went to work at the Pentagon.

“How many times since Ms. Lewinsky left the White House has she visited the West Wing of the White House, in the immediate area of the Oval Office, approximately?” Bittman asked.

“I’d only be guessing. I cannot—” Currie sputtered.

“Would it be fair to say that is several times?”

“That would be a good one, sir—several.”

Bittman went on to ask about how often Currie had cleared Lewinsky into the West Wing, and how often the former intern actually saw the president. With more preparation, and with the benefit of White House records that had not yet been produced, Currie might have been prodded to provide a more specific picture of the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, but Bittman was left with Currie’s vague disavowals.

After Lewinsky left the White House staff, Bittman asked, did her relationship with the president change?

“I was unaware, sir—not to my knowing,” Currie replied, in another damaging (and rather preposterous) answer for the prosecutor. If she had been confronted with all the phone messages, pager calls, records of visits, and gifts between them, Currie might have changed her mind. But in this rushed appearance, Bittman was stuck with the answer.

The examination meandered to the topic of Lewinsky’s private meetings with the president. Currie could remember only two, though there were more. Bittman then asked a convoluted series of questions about Currie’s phone calls to Lewinsky. He wanted to know whether Currie was calling for herself or for Clinton. But he asked like this: “On the several occasions that you called Ms. Lewinsky at the Pentagon, you told us that you called more than half the time for the president or on behalf of the president?”

In answer to this bewildering statement, Currie could say only, “I don’t know.”

Asked why she and Lewinsky used code names for their messages to each other, Currie said, “I don’t know. It was suggested. Fine.” Bittman left it at that.

Still, the real disaster in Bittman’s examination concerned the president’s single most legally incriminating act in the aftermath of his affair with Lewinsky. Currie testified about how, on the day after Clinton’s deposition in the Jones case, the president had summoned her and made his series of leading statements—“You were always there when Monica was there,” “We were never really alone,” and so on.

But the greatest potential risk to Clinton concerned his second round of leading statements to Currie—and this was where Bittman blundered. This climactic moment in Currie’s grand jury testimony began with a question about a late-night phone call to her from the president on the night of Tuesday, January 20.

“And I was sound asleep at the time,” Currie replied. “And he told me that apparently—let’s see—what story that broke on Wednesday—I think, tapes maybe, whatever—”

Bittman broke in to say, “The story broke on Tuesday morning, in
The Washington Post
.”

“It was Tuesday morning?” Currie asked.

“It was Tuesday morning that the story broke in the print media. It was on Monday that it broke in a report called the
Drudge Report
.”

“Then he may have called me Monday night,” Currie said.

But Currie was right and Bittman was wrong. The story had broken on Wednesday morning, not Tuesday. Bittman was so ill prepared to examine Currie that he was polluting the transcript with his own errors and confusing an already perplexed witness.

“Okay,” Bittman went on. “Did there come a time after that you had another conversation with the president about some other news about what was going on? That would have been Tuesday or Wednesday, when he called you in the Oval Office?”

“It was Tuesday or Wednesday,” Currie said. “I don’t remember which one this was, either. But the best I remember, when he called me in the Oval Office, it was sort of a recapitulation of what we had talked about on Sunday—you know, ‘I was never alone with her’—that sort of thing.”

“Did he pretty much list the same—?”

“To my recollection, sir, yes.”

Here Bittman was questioning a witness about an event of potentially
enormous significance, yet he could scarcely have confused matters more if he had tried. If the conversation between the president and Currie took place on Wednesday, as seems likely, that would have been of great importance, because on that day Clinton knew for certain that a criminal investigation was under way. If it was Tuesday, Clinton’s lawyers might have put a more benign spin on it. Bittman didn’t even try to sort it out. And what exactly did Clinton say? That, too, could make or break a case against him for obstruction of justice. But Bittman never even asked, and instead left Currie’s vague characterization—“sort of a recapitulation”—without asking for elaboration. If Bittman had devoted adequate time to preparing his witness, not to mention himself, he might have avoided these problems.

If Bittman’s bad morning had been an isolated act of incompetence in an otherwise flawless investigation, it might have loomed smaller than it eventually did. Instead, it established a pattern that Starr’s team would follow straight through the following year—an obsession with meaningless atmospherics and tendentious “signs” to their adversaries, an unhealthy interest in using the media to send messages, and a predilection for canine zeal over solid prosecutorial judgment. As Starr himself often pointed out, he relied on what he called his staff of “career prosecutors.” But the ones Starr listened to were the country-club tough guys (and the whole staff was, almost without exception, guys) like Bittman, whose faux sophistication led them all to oblivion.