A Vast Conspiracy (57 page)

And despite all that, no one saw anything—at least not directly. Almost all of the sexual encounters had taken place on weekends when Monica was still on the White House staff. For most of their trysts, Clinton had simply arranged to run into Lewinsky “accidentally” in the hallway and then invite her to the study. Often, no one saw her go in. (And since they were intimate fewer than a dozen times, there were not many opportunities to be discovered.) Starr’s best witness was a former uniformed Secret Service agent named Lewis Fox, who testified about a weekend afternoon in late 1995, when he was on duty outside the Oval Office. On that day, Clinton had poked his head out of the office door and said to Fox, “I’m expecting a young lady, a congressional staff member. Would you please let me know when she shows up?” Moments later, Lewinsky arrived, and Fox admitted her to the Oval Office. “You can close the door,” Clinton then said. “She’ll be here for a while.” About forty minutes later, Lewinsky left. To be sure, the incident was suggestive, but it didn’t prove a sexual affair. And it was the best direct evidence Starr had.

So the prosecutors, imbued with the macho culture of the Starr office, pressed their witnesses for any sliver of information about Clinton and Lewinsky’s relationship. Grand juries operate under different, looser rules of evidence than criminal trials. Most important, hearsay evidence is admissible before grand juries, so witnesses can be asked what they heard from other people about the issues in the case. But as weeks and then months passed with little visible progress, the prosecutors grew frustrated, and they began searching farther afield to find something—anything—that might substantiate Lewinsky’s tales to Tripp. The testimony of a uniformed Secret Service agent named John Muskett provided a characteristic, and disturbing, example of the Starr office in action.

Muskett testified about how he saw Lewinsky enter the Oval Office alone on Easter Sunday in 1996—similar testimony to Fox’s, about a different occasion. The prosecutor Sol Wisenberg then asked, “Now, were there to your knowledge before the April 6, 1996, incident, were there any rumors about Monica and the president that you were aware of before that incident?…”

“Not that I was aware of, sir,” Muskett said.

“Okay, and were there any rumors about why she was transferred?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And can you tell us briefly what those rumors were?”

“Briefly, Monica was seen by someone, and I believe to the best of my ability today, someone from the White House or the first lady’s staff walked in on the president and Monica in the family theater located in the East Wing,” Muskett explained.

“All right,” Wisenberg went on. “Walked in and then what?”

“I guess in a compromising position.”

“Okay, that’s the rumor that was going around?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was nothing technically improper about this kind of questioning by Wisenberg, but it was an extraordinarily shabby way to conduct a criminal investigation. “Rumors” have no legal significance. Like Isikoff years earlier, the prosecutors were having trouble nailing down “rumors” of Clinton’s amorous adventures, and like the reporter, Starr’s investigators were expanding the definition of relevance in an effort to pin something on the president.

But Wisenberg wasn’t finished with Muskett. The prosecutor went on
to ask about what he called an “outlandish version” of a rumor: “Was it ever expressed to you as you having witnessed Monica with her head in the president’s lap?”

“The only time I ever heard that side of the story or that rumor was in the independent counsel,” said Muskett, “when I came down here to have a talk a couple of weeks ago.” In other words, Wisenberg was polluting the minds of the grand jurors with “rumors” that appear to have been manufactured in Starr’s office. (False rumors at that; not even Lewinsky ever claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Clinton in the White House theater.)

This kind of zeal and desperation bred questions like this one from prosecutor Mary Anne Wirth to Navy steward Glen Maes: “Did you ever hear anything from any source, firsthand, secondhand, eighteenth-hand … ever hear anything that led you to believe that there may have been some kind of social or physical relationship between Monica Lewinsky and the president?”

The reply was as succinct as the question was tendentious: “No.”

As the Lewinsky investigation moved into its third month, in March, the Starr forces and Paula Jones’s lawyers moved into an imperfect alignment. In the first days of Starr’s Lewinsky investigation, the Jones forces had made trouble for the prosecutors by trying to subpoena people who were also witnesses in the criminal case. But after January, when Judge Wright had cut off further depositions in
Jones v. Clinton
, the priorities of these two centers of anti-Clinton activity merged. Each one, in its own way, put aside all other priorities to try to drum the president out of office. For his part, Starr began assembling staff to write an impeachment report to Congress. The Jones lawyers took a less decorous and, for them, more familiar route—that of public humiliation.

Ever since Judge Wright’s candid remarks in the secret court hearing before Clinton’s deposition, the Jones lawyers had known she was strongly tempted to throw the case out on summary judgment. Thus, the lawyers recognized that if they were going to hurt the president politically, they had to use the process of what was probably the final legal proceeding in the case to dump damaging material into the public domain.

Bob Bennett, too, spent much of the previous month seething at Bill
Clinton. The lawyer quickly came to the conclusion that the president had at least misled him about his relationship with Lewinsky, if not outright lied. (Later, it became apparent that Clinton did lie.) But the existence of Starr’s Lewinsky inquiries made it all the more important for Bennett to win his summary judgment motion. In filing such a motion, a defendant says, in effect, that in light of all the evidence collected in the discovery process, the plaintiff has no case. Winning a motion for summary judgment would thus serve a crucial double purpose for Clinton. It would, on a simple level, rid him at last of the Jones case; and in a more atmospheric way, it would also undermine Starr’s efforts by showing that his obstruction of justice case was, in effect, created out of thin air—that there was never a genuine case to obstruct.

Bennett had studied Wright carefully during the long years that the case had been pending, and he knew the argument that would appeal most to her. He recognized that Wright had no special fondness for Clinton, but he could tell that the judge resented how the Dallas lawyers used her court to press their political agenda. In ordinary circumstances, a he said/she said case like this one might not be dismissed on summary judgment; judges usually let juries decide whom to believe. But in a brilliant, powerful brief written by Bennett’s colleague Amy Sabrin, the Clinton lawyers argued that even if the then governor had propositioned Paula Corbin at the Excelsior Hotel, she had never suffered any on-the-job harm that amounted to legal sexual harassment.

The brief included a damning recital of the way Jones’s lawyers neglected the facts of their client’s case in favor of their investigation of Clinton’s sex life. “Plaintiff spent 99 percent of her discovery efforts attempting to substantiate rumors that President Clinton made sexual advances to
other
women,” Sabrin wrote. “But she has failed to establish that she personally has a cause of action.” In a small but revealing fact about the way the Jones case was pursued, Clinton’s brief noted that the plaintiff admitted during her deposition that she had never examined her own employment records at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission—neither before she filed the suit nor before she gave her deposition. Those records revealed that Jones had always received raises and satisfactory job reviews. In short, there was no evidence of any kind of retribution for the purported incident at the hotel. What was the only “tangible job detriment” that Jones could point to as a supposed result of her encounter with
the governor? “The only specific act of rudeness to which plaintiff pointed was that she did not receive flowers on Secretary’s Day in April 1992, nearly one year after the purported incident,” the brief observed.

The Dallas lawyers used their reply brief, which was submitted to Judge Wright on March 13, to disgorge the sexual research they had gathered over the past six months. As exhibits to their brief, the plaintiffs attached hundreds of pages of excerpts from the depositions of Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, and Dolly Kyle Browning—the most salacious material they had. (In light of the fact that the husband-and-wife team of Rick and Beverly Lambert had interviewed more than two hundred women in search of dirt on Clinton, their yield of useful material was rather small.) All of this sexual evidence was, of course, irrelevant to the summary judgment issue before Judge Wright, but the Dallas team still ladled it into the public domain.

In the relatively small portion of their brief devoted to the actual issues in the case, the Jones lawyers betrayed their desperation to prove that Paula had suffered some kind of legal injury because of the incident at the hotel. So they attached a deposition they had obtained just a week earlier from one Patrick J. Carnes, the editor in chief of a publication called
Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity
, in Wickenburg, Arizona. Carnes said that he had met Jones in February 1998, nearly seven years after the alleged incident. Based on this single meeting, Carnes concluded that Jones was still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that Clinton had caused her to experience “extreme anxiety, intrusive thoughts and memories, and consequent sexual aversion.” The precise nature of her sexual aversion was not disclosed. Her lawyers asserted in their brief, “Mrs. Jones continues to feel ashamed and horrified and is unable to watch Mr. Clinton on television, talk about the incident, or even think about it without experiencing emotional trauma and stress.” (A few weeks later, Jones was apparently able to put aside these feelings and attend the president’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where she and Susan Carpenter-McMillan were guests of Sun Myung Moon’s
Insight
magazine.) On March 20, the Clinton team responded to this torrent of irrelevancies by asking, in a rather perfunctory way, for Judge Wright to strike them from the record, itself a rather meaningless remedy because the documents were already public.

What followed, however, was a signal moment in the whole long saga—one of the most irresponsible acts by Clinton’s adversaries, ever. It is considered
professional misconduct for a lawyer to distribute a legal filing to the news media before it is submitted in court. So, on Saturday, March 28, the Jones lawyers deposited a brief in a twenty-four-hour drop box in the federal courthouse in Pine Bluff, many miles from Judge Wright’s chambers in Little Rock. This sham filing allowed the Dallas team to distribute copies of the document all over the country, in time for the Sunday papers.

The real outrage, however, was what the document said. The centerpiece of this brief was a new claim in the case: that “significant evidence suggests that Defendant Clinton and his agents have exerted great efforts to suppress and obstruct testimony by Juanita Hickey Broaddrick that Defendant Clinton in the past forcibly raped and sexually assaulted … her and then bribed and/or intimidated her and her family into remaining silent about this outrage.” The claim had no relevance to any issue in the brief (or even in the case), but rather it was meant to float one more example of the president’s alleged inhumanity. Not incidentally, the disclosure of her name also violated Judge Wright’s rules on privacy; Broaddrick was supposed to be identified only as Jane Doe Number Five. Jones’s lawyers also failed to inform the judge that Broaddrick had, just weeks earlier, given a sworn affidavit and deposition
denying
any untoward conduct by the president. This final brief by Jones’s team of Dallas lawyers—an improper, immoral act, which was as unfair to Broaddrick as it was to Clinton—epitomized the lawlessness at the heart of the legal offensive against Clinton.

Far worse for the lawyers, and especially for their client, they had riled Susan Webber Wright. Two days later, Judge Wright gave the first sign of her displeasure. In an order dated March 31, she repeated her admonition that “no party should make public any pleading, past, present or future, which reveals the identity of any ‘Jane Doe.’ ” Further, she noted frostily, “No future pleadings should be made public before they are filed in Little Rock or otherwise in the hands of the judge. The Court has not yet seen the pleadings filed by the plaintiff in a drop box in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.…” The following day, she took her revenge—not merely against this final transgression by the lawyers, but against the abuse of the legal process that the entire Paula Jones case represented. In a lucid, understated thirty-nine-page opinion issued on April 1, 1998, Judge Wright granted summary judgment to Clinton and (apparently) ended the case of
Jones v. Clinton
just short of the fourth anniversary of its commencement. True to her role as an isolated beacon of sanity in the darkness around her, Judge Wright ruled that nothing in the case showed that “plaintiff’s reaction to Governor
Clinton’s alleged advances affected tangible aspects of her compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.”