Read After the Tall Timber Online
Authors: RENATA ADLER
After the Tall Timber (61 page)
“Tell us about that day,” a juror says, and then another juror inquires about the encounter between Ms. Lewinsky and all those men from the Office of the Special Prosecutor and the FBI.
“Maybe if I could ask, what areas do you want to get into?” Mr. Emmick asks. “Because there’s—you know—many hours of activity.” A few lines later:
A JUROR: We want to know about that day.
A JUROR: That day.
A JUROR: The first question.
A JUROR: Yes.
A JUROR: We really want to know about that day.
MR. EMMICK: All right.
The jurors are right to insist on a description of the day. That was the day, January 16, 1998—and the night—when the prosecutors came as close as they have so far to bringing the entire constitutional system down.
Ms. Lewinsky starts to tell about that day. Ms. Lewinsky and Ms. Tripp had arranged to meet at the food court of the Ritz-Carlton in the Pentagon City mall.
THE WITNESS: She was late. I saw her come down the escalator. And as I—as I walked toward her, she kind of motioned behind her and Agent [blank] and Agent [blank] presented themselves to me . . . . They told me . . . that they wanted to talk to me and give me a chance, I think, to cooperate, maybe. I—to help myself. I told them I wasn’t speaking to them without my attorney.
This is the turning point. This is the moment when the investigation begins to reveal itself as what it truly is. There is absolutely no doubt, none whatsoever, that the investigators—prosecutors and FBI agents alike—were obliged by law to stop right there, without another word, until Ms. Lewinsky brought in her attorney. Indeed, they were required, under Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, to have contacted her attorney in the first place. They did nothing of the kind.
THE WITNESS: They told me . . . I should know I won’t be given as much information and won’t be able to help myself as much with my attorney there. So I agreed to go. I was so scared. (The witness begins crying.)
Two questions later, she turns to the lead attorney at this grand-jury hearing, Michael Emmick:
THE WITNESS: Can Karin [Immergut] do the questioning now? This is—can I ask you to step out?
MR. EMMICK: Sure. Okay. All right . . . .
MS. IMMERGUT: Okay. Did you go to a room with them at the hotel?
A: Yes.
Q: And what did you do then? Did you ever tell them that you wanted to call your mother?
A: I told them I wanted to talk to my attorney . . . . And they told me—Mike [Emmick] came out and introduced himself to me and told me that—that Janet Reno had sanctioned Ken Starr to investigate my actions in the Paula Jones case, that they—that they knew I had signed a false affidavit, they had me on tape saying I had committed perjury, that they were going to—that I could go to jail for twenty-seven years, they were going to charge me with perjury and obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and witness tampering and something else.
Q: And you’re saying “they,” at that point, who was talking to you about that stuff?
A: Mike Emmick and the two FBI guys . . . . And I just—I felt so bad.
This is an extraordinary scene. Monica Lewinsky, who has faced hour after hour, day after day of questioning about her most intimate experiences, has quietly drawn the line. She has asked the prosecutor, Michael Emmick, one of the participants in the events of “that day,” to leave the room. It is a side of Monica Lewinsky that has not appeared before.
Q: I guess later, just to sort of finish up. I guess . . . was there a time then that you were—you just waited with the prosecutor until your mother came down?
A: No.
Q: Okay.
A: I mean, there was, but they—they told me they wanted me to cooperate. I asked them what cooperating meant, it entailed, and they told me . . . that they had had me on tape saying things from the lunch that I had had with Linda at the Ritz-Carlton . . . then they told me that I—that I’d have to agree to be debriefed and that I’d have to place calls or wear a wire to see—to call Betty and Mr. Jordan and possibly the President . . . .
Q: And did you tell them that you didn’t want to do that?
A: Yes . . . . Then I wanted to call my mom and they kept telling me . . . that I couldn’t tell anybody about this, they didn’t want anyone to find out and . . . that was the reason I couldn’t call [her attorney] Mr. Carter, was because they were afraid that he might tell the person who took me to Mr. Carter.
The person who took her to her attorney, Francis Carter, was Vernon Jordan.
So obsessed are the prosecutors with the prospect of getting the President and Vernon Jordan, or rather the President
through
Vernon Jordan, that they fear that
any
attorney she might select would alert Mr. Jordan. They actually propose to Ms. Lewinsky that she call an attorney they have chosen.
A: They told me that I could call this number and get another criminal attorney, but I didn’t want that and I didn’t trust them. Then I just cried for a long time . . . . They just sat there and then . . . they kept saying there was this time constraint, there was a time constraint. I had to make a decision.
And then, Bruce Udolf [another prosecutor] came in at some point and then—then Jackie Bennett [yet another prosecutor] came in . . . and the room was crowded and he was saying to me, you know, you have to make a decision. I had wanted to call my mom, they weren’t going to let me call my attorney, so I just—I wanted to call my mom and they . . . And they had told me before that I could leave whenever I wanted, but . . . I didn’t really know . . . . I mean I thought if I left then that they were just going to arrest me.
As all the FBI agents and prosecutors from the Special Counsel’s office gathered in that crowded room had every reason to know, they were in flagrant violation of Ms. Lewinsky’s rights—and, not incidentally, their own oaths of office.
A: And so then they told me that I should know that they were planning to prosecute my mom for the things that I had said that she had done.
(The witness begins crying.)
A JUROR: So if I understand it, you first met the agents, Agents [blank] and [blank], at around 1:00 and it wasn’t until about 11 p.m. that you had an opportunity to talk to a lawyer?
THE WITNESS: Yes.
Ms. Immergut now makes a small attempt to redeem the reputation of her colleagues:
Q: Although you were allowed to—the thing with Frank Carter was that they were afraid he would tell Vernon Jordan? Is that what they expressed to you?
A: Right. And I had—I had—I think that someone said that Frank was a civil attorney and so that he really couldn’t help me anyway. So I asked him if at least I could call and ask him for a recommendation for a criminal attorney and they didn’t think that was a good idea . . . .
A JUROR: Sounds as though they were actively discouraging you from talking to an attorney.
THE WITNESS: Yes.
Ms. Immergut tries again, with what is in no sense a question:
Q: Well, from Frank Carter.
A: From Frank Carter, who was my only attorney at that point.
MS. IMMERGUT: Right. Right.
THE WITNESS: So I could have called any other attorney but—
A JUROR: You didn’t have another attorney.
THE WITNESS: I didn’t have another attorney and this was my attorney for this case, so, I mean, this was—
A JUROR: And this is the attorney who had helped you with the affidavit.
THE WITNESS: Yes. And that—the affidavit—well, the affidavit wasn’t even filed yet. It was Fed Ex’d out on that day.
This is an altogether remarkable revelation. For all the prosecutors’ talk of “time constraint . . . time constraint” and pressure brought by a squad of no fewer than three prosecutors and two agents of the FBI on Ms. Lewinsky to “make a decision,” the entire apparatus of the Independent Counsel’s office, with prosecutors and FBI agents, its four-year, $40 million investigation, was now focused on this young woman—when her affidavit had not yet even been filed. It was Friday. The following Monday was Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday. For all they knew, in spite of anything she had said to Ms. Tripp on any tape—and, as it turned out, she had lied to Ms. Tripp on several matters crucial to the case—Ms. Lewinsky might have changed her mind and filed a truthful affidavit. So at that point, Ms. Lewinsky, contrary to what the prosecutors were telling her and had told the U.S. attorney general and the court, had committed no crime. They had no right whatsoever to detain, let alone mislead her. They wanted her affidavit to arrive, and they wanted it to be false.
On Thursday, right after their taping, the Special Prosecutor’s office had applied on an “emergency basis” to the attorney general, Janet Reno, and to the three-judge appellate court panel to extend the prosecutors’ jurisdiction to the Jones case and to Ms. Lewinsky. All they had, at this point, was the suggestion—by Ms. Tripp, on Ms. Tripp’s tapes—that Vernon Jordan might have asked Ms. Lewinsky to lie on her Paula Jones affidavit in exchange for a job. It is hard to see how, without deceiving Ms. Reno or the judges, the Special Prosecutor could justify his claim. Ms. Tripp, not the President, had come up with the idea of enlisting Mr. Jordan in the job hunt. Ms. Lewinsky had in fact signed her affidavit before she was offered a job (at Revlon) she found acceptable.
It is hard in any case to see how the possibility that someone will commit perjury can constitute an “emergency.” The lie, after all, remains in the record. It will last and be detected in due course. A border crossing with drugs, or a conspiracy to murder might require emergency jurisdiction in that the evidence may vanish, or irreversible damage may be done. But it is the height of absurdity to claim an emergency in the loss of an opportunity to catch someone in a lie
that has not yet occurred
. What seems obvious is that the prosecutors were all too aware that the Tripp tapes really proved no crime. Their hope had to be that wiring Ms. Lewinsky, in conversation with Vernon Jordan and the President himself, might provide evidence of something else—a real obstruction of justice, say, or, better yet, evidence of some Whitewater- or Hubbell-related crime. Ms. Lewinsky refused to be wired.
A JUROR: During this time in the hotel with them, did you feel threatened?
THE WITNESS: Yes.
A JUROR: Did you feel that they had set a trap?
THE WITNESS: I—I—I did and I had—I didn’t understand . . . why they had to trap me into coming there . . . . I mean this had all been a set-up and that’s why I mean that was just so frightening. It was so incredibly frightening . . . . They told me if I partially cooperate, they’ll talk to the judge . . . .
A JUROR: So you didn’t know what would happen if you left.
THE WITNESS: No.
It is all very well to say that Ms. Lewinsky is being overly dramatic; that she survived; that she did not collaborate in the prosecutors’ efforts to make her, like Ms. Tripp, their agent; and that she suffered no adverse consequences. But it is not true.
Quite apart from her eleven-hour ordeal, the interrogation was not without adverse consequences for Ms. Lewinsky. That night, when her mother, Marcia Lewis, arrived by train from New York, one of the prosecutors took Ms. Lewis aside and conferred with her alone. Later, in a phone call, made at Ms. Lewis’s insistence, with Ms. Lewinsky’s father, in California, the prosecutor said that the matter was “time sensitive.” It may be that any family, under these conditions—in which the prosecutors made so clear their aversion to their daughter’s attorney—would have thought it wise to fire that attorney. It may be that Ms. Lewinsky’s parents thought things would go better for their daughter with another lawyer. Certainly the prosecutors in their time alone with Ms. Lewinsky’s mother had ample opportunity to tell her so. And, in fact, that night the Lewinskys decided to fire Francis Carter and hired William Ginsburg—a California attorney specializing in cases of medical malpractice. Whatever else might be said about Mr. Ginsburg, he was not likely to strike fear into the hearts of the prosecutors or to be in any way connected with Vernon Jordan. He was not an expert in constitutional or criminal law, and he did not move to have the case against Ms. Lewinsky thrown out on grounds of prosecutorial abuses. If Ms. Lewinsky had had a constitutional lawyer, the case against her would have been thrown out.
Later, the Lewinskys may have thought that, to avoid further, long and expensive litigation, they needed Beltway attorneys more acceptable still to the forces arrayed against them. Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein, respected though they are, are also not without political affiliation. (Cacheris’s most famous client, at the time of Watergate, was former attorney general John Mitchell. Stein had been the attorney for Kenneth Parkinson, a Watergate defendant acquitted in the case before Judge Sirica.) Ms. Lewinsky would almost certainly have been better off with her original attorney, Francis Carter.
To return to the case. The President’s deposition in the Jones case was scheduled for the following day. Paula Jones’ attorneys had made it clear to Ms. Tripp that whatever information she had would be useless to them after that date. Having failed to wire Ms. Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr is eager to supply the Jones attorneys with information to formulate questions for which the President will be unprepared, and on which it is virtually impossible for the President, or any other person, to be entirely truthful, not just for the obvious reasons—discretion, family, a reluctance to injure—but because such a line of inquiry never ends. The many people—journalists, government officials—who have expressed their belief that the whole matter would have gone away if only the President had, from the outset, “looked people in the eye and told the truth” seem not to have considered where that sort of testimony would lead. Even in Mr. Starr’s documents, the counsel presses on and on, to elicit testimony about “masturbating,” for example—which could have no possible relevance in the case. There is the threat of perjury lurking behind every such expression of the prosecutor’s salacious appetite. In fact, the volumes the Special Counsel has submitted to Congress show precisely how detailed, ugly, preposterous, ultimately endless, and unconscionable such questions are.
