A Vast Conspiracy (68 page)

“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 Avenue.

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.

Clinton’s lawyer then noted that during Starr’s testimony before the committee, he had been asked many questions about the credibility of witnesses, including Lewinsky. “It is true,” Kendall then asked Starr, “that you were not present when Ms. Lewinsky testified before the grand jury?”

“That is true,” Starr replied.

“And you were not present at her deposition?”

“I was not present.”

Then Kendall went through all of the interviews that Starr had not seen firsthand, including all of them with Lewinsky (whom Starr never met), as well as the interrogations of Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and literally hundreds of other people questioned by the OIC.

Kendall’s point was clear—and devastating. Starr was the only witness to testify about the facts of the allegations against the president. Yet Starr had neither seen the events in question nor interviewed anyone who had. In other words, the Judiciary Committee was considering the impeachment of the president of the United States based on, at best, a thirdhand recitation of the evidence against him. Even by the low standards of congressional hearings, it was a remarkably shabby practice.

Having made this elegant point, however, Kendall promptly turned to the same kind of name-calling as the rest of the Democrats. “Mr. Starr,” Kendall intoned at one point, “in fact there has been no case remotely similar to this in terms of the massive leaking from the prosecutor’s office. I think we know that.” This kind of speechifying by Kendall allowed Starr to offer some righteous indignation of his own. “I totally disagree with that,” Starr said, and the examination descended into a decorous spat.

Kendall even left an opening for Hyde to make a telling joke at his expense.
Shortly after nine at night, with everyone in the room growing punchy, Hyde announced, “Mr. Kendall, your time is up. You may want to get into the facts. Do you need additional time?”

As the chairman pointed out, Kendall had not asked Starr a single question about Clinton’s conduct, preferring to belabor Starr about his. It was probably a wise strategic choice on Kendall’s part, but it also opened a revealing window on the legal case for the president. By implication, Kendall’s priorities suggested that even Clinton’s own lawyers found his conduct indefensible—not impeachable, to be sure, but repugnant in every other way. In any event, Kendall devoted the remaining minutes that Hyde granted him to hectoring Starr about the treatment of Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton.

With the clock passing ten, Schippers finally took over, and he brought his mannered, regular-guy persona to Starr’s defense—and to Hyde’s. Unfortunately, Schippers also brought a nearly total ignorance of constitutional law. For example, stung by Kendall’s criticism of the process in the Judiciary Committee, Schippers pointed out that “the sole power to try an impeachment resides in the Senate.”

“That is true,” said Starr.

“So if this House were to permit cross-examination and to hold a mini-trial here, they would be usurping the constitutional duties of the United States Senate, isn’t that correct?”

Much as Starr welcomed Schippers’s softballs, the former judge knew too much about the Constitution to embrace this absurd idea. “Well,” Starr stuttered, “I am not sure I would necessarily agree with that”—and then the Democrats began groaning at the absurdity of Schippers’s idea that the House had no right to call witnesses. Except for this impeachment, that was how it was always done.

“I hear the moaning of the left,” Schippers snarled, then moved on to his remaining questions. He had planned his peroration carefully. “Judge,” Schippers wound up, “you have been pilloried and attacked from all sides, is that correct?”

“I would hope not all sides, but yes, that’s—”

“How long have you been an attorney, Judge Starr?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“Well, I have been an attorney for almost forty years, and I want to say I am proud to be in the same room with you and your staff.”

With that, to close the day’s events, Schippers led a Republicans-only standing ovation for the independent counsel.

Starr had borne up with dignity during his nearly twelve hours of testimony, but he wasn’t allowed even a day’s grace to savor the accomplishment. The following morning, November 20, Starr’s “ethics adviser,” Samuel Dash, resigned from the OIC in protest. A law professor at Georgetown and a former aide to the Senate Watergate committee, Dash charged that Starr had impermissibly become an “advocate” for impeachment during his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. In truth, Starr’s remarks differed only in degree, not in kind, from his report to Congress two months earlier. The only thing that had changed in the interim was that Starr’s popularity had continued to plummet. A prodigious egomaniac even by Washington standards, Dash no longer found it useful to be associated with the office that had paid him $400 per hour in taxpayer money for his advice on lawyerly virtue. Dash’s eleventh-hour abandonment said more about his own character than Starr’s ethics, but the White House savored the news, just the same.

Hyde thought Starr had been a superb witness, even though he had not delivered any bombshells to change the political dynamic surrounding the impeachment. (Indeed, the only “news” in Starr’s appearance had been his revelation that the Clintons had been cleared on Travelgate and Filegate.) Still, the chairman was frustrated by what he regarded as hostile press coverage of Starr’s appearance. He wanted the Republican members of the House to know that the independent counsel had made a powerful case for Clinton’s impeachment. Fortunately, to Hyde’s thinking, there was a volunteer to spread the news among the Republican faithful.

Tom DeLay agreed to keep everyone posted. In the months that followed the House vote on impeachment, several myths flourished about the role of the former exterminator who went on to become the third-ranking Republican in Congress. It was said that DeLay, the majority whip, browbeat fellow Republicans into voting yes, that he threatened to take away their subcommittee chairmanships, that he promised conservative primary challengers to any moderates planning to vote the other way. With everything from his slicked-back hair to his well-cultivated air of menace, DeLay practically encouraged the legends about his own ferocity. But in truth, DeLay did less than many people thought. At a time when Gingrich
had surrendered and his designated successor, Robert Livingston, had refused to play a public role in the impeachment controversy, DeLay made sure the process continued. He vowed that the House leadership would deliver a prompt vote on any articles of impeachment—and, most important, he promised that no vote on censure would be allowed. By depriving fence-sitters of the appealing middle ground of censure, DeLay forced his fellow Republicans to make a straight up-or-down vote on the president’s conduct.

DeLay’s role began after Starr’s testimony. He ordered his whip organization to put out summaries of Starr’s main arguments, and from that point forward DeLay kept his deputies churning out anti-Clinton material to the members. In an atmosphere in which many members often feel neglected by their leadership, DeLay’s attentions were much appreciated by the rank and file. After November 27, when Clinton gave heavily lawyered answers to the eighty-one questions Hyde had submitted to him, DeLay helped spread the official Republican line of indignation.

DeLay’s priorities were noted by his nominal superiors as well. During the week after Starr’s testimony, Gephardt went to Livingston’s office for a private one-on-one meeting with the speaker-designee about impeachment. Earlier, just after the election, Livingston had suggested to Gephardt that he might be amenable to allowing a vote on censure in the House. But by later in the month, Livingston had a different message for the Democratic leader. Now he wasn’t going to allow an alternative to impeachment to reach the floor. DeLay’s view had become Livingston’s.

Notwithstanding the backstage machinations, though, Hyde was still left with the problem of what to do with the rest of the hearings. In this he was guided by one of his most energetic and determined fellow Republicans, Bill McCollum, of Florida, the third-ranking member of the panel. McCollum had represented an Orlando district for nearly two decades, but he retained a boyish enthusiasm for his work. Actually, McCollum was mesmerized by one part of the case in particular, and it earned him a secret nickname among Republican staff members: “Mr. Genitalia.” McCollum dwelled obsessively on the fact that Clinton had lied about where and how he placed his hands on Monica Lewinsky’s body. McCollum did have a point. Lewinsky had testified that the president had touched her breasts and vagina, and Clinton had denied it, or at least denied that he had employed his hands and lips “with intent to arouse” her. McCollum had carefully placed tabs on the sections of Lewinsky’s sex deposition where she
had described how Clinton had stimulated her. “If he fondled her breast or messed around with her in the other way, it’s perjury,” he told visitors to his office.

The issue actually made a useful proxy for the whole impeachment debate. On the one hand, the president’s position that his gropings with Lewinsky amounted to a sexual one-way street was fairly absurd on its face. But on the other, one could scarcely imagine less significant falsehoods than those concerning the mechanics of the Clinton-Lewinsky frolics. The question came down to how seriously to take the issue of “lying about sex,” as Clinton’s perfidy was often described. McCollum and his allies asserted that lies on this subject, as much as any other, amounted to high crimes and misdemeanors; the public—with the history and meaning of the Constitution on its side—was never convinced.

The obsession of McCollum and others with pumping up outrage over this kind of misdeed led to the unintentional comic high point of the impeachment hearings. On December 1, Hyde convened a hearing on what he called, rather grandly, “the consequences of perjury and related crimes.” Hyde and his staff located the two witnesses around whom the day’s testimony would resolve—“the perjury ladies,” as some would come to call them.

After his sonorous introduction, Hyde turned the questioning over to McCollum, who promptly demonstrated why many congressmen leave this sort of thing to the staff.

“Ms. Parsons,” McCollum intoned, addressing the younger of the two women at the witness table before him, “am I correct that you were basketball coach at the University of South Carolina when the occasion of this perjury that you were convicted of arose? Am I right about that?”