A Vast Conspiracy (59 page)

From almost the day the scandal broke, the key members of the White House political operation—among them John Podesta, Rahm Emanuel,
and Paul Begala—recognized that the chances for Clinton’s survival in office rested principally on the shoulders of congressional Democrats. As long as the White House could portray Starr’s investigation as a partisan vendetta, impeachment and removal—not to mention resignation—appeared to be remote possibilities. But the political team thought frequently of the delegation of Senate Republicans who came calling on Richard Nixon in the first week of August 1974. When this group, which included such party stalwarts as Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott, told Nixon he had to go, they—more than any Democrats—forced the first presidential resignation. It was the possibility of a similar mission by their heirs across the aisle that obsessed Clinton loyalists.

So John Podesta was especially attentive when he was summoned to Steve Elmendorf’s office one afternoon in May. As the top aide to Richard Gephardt, the leader of the Democrats in the House, Elmendorf served as the principal day-to-day emissary between the White House and its most important constituency. (The frenetic Emanuel would sometimes call Elmendorf almost hourly for briefings on Clinton’s status among House Democrats.) Gephardt had told Elmendorf to pass an emphatic message to his counterparts on Clinton’s staff. “John,” Elmendorf told Podesta, “you cannot let him take the Fifth. He has got to know that that’s just not an option. He has got to testify. You’ll lose the Democrats up here if he doesn’t.” Podesta, who had worked on Capitol Hill for many years, did not disagree, but David Kendall did—vehemently.

Fifty-three years old, Kendall was an odd amalgam—a Quaker and a zealot. After growing up in a small Indiana town, he had discovered the civil rights movement—he was jailed in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964—and eventually moved into private law practice at Williams & Connolly. If the Quaker values of tolerance and nonviolence shaped Kendall’s political consciousness, the very different spirit of Edward Bennett Williams forged his approach to the law. Williams believed in litigation, and especially criminal law, as total war—a ceaseless battle in which a lawyer should never yield on even the smallest points. (In this, Kendall’s outlook clashed with that of Bob Bennett, who took a more accommodating approach, and the two men shared a rich contempt for each other.) Kendall did mostly civil work at the firm, and he long represented the
National Enquirer
. In his office, he possessed perhaps the only leather-bound sets in existence of not only the
Enquirer
but its wackier sister tabloid, the
Weekly World News
.

In representing criminal defendants, Kendall had absorbed the central lesson of Williams’s catechism—that a suspect should always,
always
take the Fifth Amendment. But this was, as even Kendall had to recognize, a political matter more than a legal issue, and ultimately Clinton’s political advisers—and, of course, the president himself—had their way. On July 24, in a letter marked
CONFIDENTIAL
, Kendall wrote to Bittman, “The President is willing to provide testimony for the grand jury.…”

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 …”

S
tarr 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 surrendered 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.