A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Finally, Moody agreed to return the following day, when Behre, as promised, turned over Tripp’s tapes. By this point, Moody was beginning to share his new client’s paranoia, so he didn’t take the tapes straight to his office. Rather, he engaged in a series of evasive maneuvers to avoid what he imagined might be White House surveillance. (Because Moody couldn’t really see, he had a difficult time determining whether he was being followed.) He took a cab to the Capitol and walked through one entrance to the Russell Senate Office Building and out the other. He stopped at another Senate office. Then he took a cab to Georgetown, talked on a pay phone for a while, and finally took another taxi to his office.

  That night, Moody shared the tapes with two of the elves. Lacking a good home sound system, Moody took the recordings to the home of Ann Coulter, the conservative activist, where he listened to them with her and George Conway, the New York elf, who happened to be in Washington on other business. One of the lawyers for Jones had faxed Lewinsky’s affidavit to Moody, and Tripp’s lawyer that evening sent it over to Starr’s investigators.

  As Tripp drew the Starr investigators deeper into the intrigue surrounding her own and Lewinsky’s affidavits and depositions, the question remained: Why was the Whitewater independent counsel investigating the Paula Jones case? What business was this of Ken Starr’s?

  Under the law, independent counsels were allowed to investigate matters that had been specifically referred to them by the Special Division and also “related” matters—a usefully vague term. The questions troubled some of Starr’s prosecutors from the moment they heard of Linda Tripp’s first phone call.

  The issue didn’t trouble Jackie Bennett. A beefy former offensive tackle in college, Bennett was Hick Ewing’s counterpart in Washington. In practical terms, Bennett served as Starr’s chief deputy in the Washington office in the same way that Ewing was Starr’s deputy in Little Rock; but in a more profound sense, Bennett and Ewing were kindred political spirits as well. Bennett believed that Starr needed no additional authorization from the court to pursue Tripp’s leads, but he was prevailed upon at least to inform the Justice Department of the developments on Wednesday night. At 10:18 P.M., on January 14, Bennett caught Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder by cell phone just as he was leaving a Washington Wizards basketball game.

  “We are sort of into a sensitive matter,” Bennett’s notes of the conversation begin. “Breaking. Paying close attention to jurisdictional limits—confident sufficient jurisdictional nexus. Involves people at and associated with White House.” At this stage, there was little Holder could say or do. They agreed to meet the following day, and on Thursday, January 15, Bennett led a delegation to Holder’s office that included Mike Emmick, Bruce Udolf, and a younger lawyer, Stephen Bates, who took detailed notes. Bennett began by reciting Tripp’s allegations. In Bennett’s recitation, he replaced the murky tangle of the facts with perfect clarity. The evidence was “explicit. Lewinsky feared retaliation from the powers that be. She acknowledged she had lied or would continue lying. She told Tripp that she planned to sign a false declaration.” In fact, the sting tape itself contained evidence to contradict all of these assertions, which Holder and his deputy could not have known. “The effort” at providing a false story in the Jones case “seems to go back to the President and a close associate of his, Vernon Jordan.”

  “We’ve had no contacts with the plaintiff’s attorneys,” Bennett explained. This was close to an outright lie—and an important one. For one thing, Starr himself had consulted extensively with Gil Davis shortly after the Jones suit was filed and had spoken out publicly in favor of her right to sue the president. That might have been worth mentioning when, in essence, Starr’s office was about to start investigating whether Bill Clinton had committed a crime against Davis and his successors in the Jones lawsuit. But more important, Bennett had been tipped off about Lewinsky’s existence less than a week earlier by his colleague Paul Rosenzweig—who had heard about her from Marcus, Conway, and Porter. Had the deputy attorney general known about the cozy alliance between the Jones elves and the Starr team, he might have asked a lot more questions about the origin of the investigation. But because Holder was misled, he didn’t pursue the issue. Bennett later asserted that the elves were really not “the plaintiff’s attorneys,” but only assistants to her attorneys or friends of Tripp’s. The Starr office would later call for Bill Clinton’s impeachment for playing similar word games.

  The only other person to speak at the meeting with Holder was Bruce Udolf, who took a considerably narrower view of the evidence. “The allegations against the president are not as clear as those against Jordan,” he said. When Udolf suggested that if the case only involved Jordan, perhaps the Department of Justice should take it over, Bennett jumped in: “We think it’s real, and it involves the White House.”

  Bennett and Bates followed up the meeting with a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, formally asking her to petition the court to expand Starr’s mandate to include the Lewinsky matter. Mostly, the letter illustrated just how desperately the Starr team wanted to hold on to the nascent investigation. “For two reasons, we believe that Mr. Jordan’s and Ms. Lewinsky’s alleged efforts to suborn perjury fall within our jurisdiction,” Starr wrote.

  “First, Ms. Tripp is an important witness in our investigation,” the letter stated. She was now apparently being urged to perjure herself in Jones v. Clinton. “Should she in fact perjure herself, obviously her usefulness as a potential witness in any trial would be greatly reduced, which is a matter of deep concern.” This was a transparently bogus rationale. Tripp’s role in Travelgate and the Foster investigation did not make her an important witness in Starr’s ongoing work; Bennett didn’t even recognize her name. Indeed, this rationale was so tortured that Starr didn’t even mention it in his celebrated report to Congress later that year.

  Second, Starr wrote that he was already investigating whether witnesses in his criminal case were promised jobs for their silence. “Ms. Lewinsky’s statements suggest that the very same individuals are using the very same tactics in the civil case. In particular, we are already investigating Vernon Jordan for having helped arrange employment for Webster Hubbell.” Starr had a better claim here; there was at least a surface similarity between the two cases—although, ultimately, he couldn’t make the jobs-for-testimony case in either one. But the Vernon Jordan connection did serve as the narrow bridge to allow Starr to march his divisions from the failed land deal in Arkansas to the presidential boudoir.

  Politically, there was little Reno and Holder could do except agree to Starr’s request. Based on the sketchy, incomplete picture that Jackie Bennett had presented, the Justice Department could scarcely have refused to go to the three-judge court and ask to broaden the prosecutor’s jurisdiction. By late in the day on Thursday, January 15, Starr was officially sanctioned to investigate obstruction of justice in Jones v. Clinton.

  There was never much debate in the Starr office about what to do next. They had to flip Lewinsky.

  And, it turned out, they had to do it fast. On Thursday, Isikoff, responding to pressure from his editors to deliver something for Newsweek, had called both Betty Currie and Jackie Bennett to ask about Monica Lewinsky. (On the advice of Jordan and Bruce Lindsey, Currie said nothing.) Currie also alerted Lewinsky that Isikoff was asking about her. For his part, Isikoff was ferrying information between Goldberg, Tripp, and the prosecutors, in the process walking up to and perhaps over the line that separates observers and participants. The Goldberg notes recount, “Isikoff told me PJ lawyers told him about the feds coming in.”

  The prosecutors were clinging to the hope that they might maintain the element of surprise. Bennett invited Isikoff to the OIC offices and implored him to wait until the following week to publish. Isikoff was noncommittal—this was a decision for his editors to make—so Bennett had to assume the story would run. Newsweek would release its story on Sunday, January 18, so the Starr forces had two days at most—Friday
and Saturday (the day of the president’s deposition)—to use Lewinsky to make their case against Clinton.

  Thursday night, Tripp and Lewinsky had their final telephone conversation, in which they rehashed the same material one more time. They detoured briefly onto the subject of Tripp’s sex life (L: “We gotta get you laid.” T: “… After seven years, do you really think there’s a possibility I’d remember how?”), but came back to the subject of how they should testify in the Jones case. As always, the conversation ended inconclusively, and they agreed to speak in the morning. On Friday morning, on instructions from the OIC, Tripp set up a meeting with Lewinsky, at 11:30 A.M., in the food court of the Pentagon City Mall, near where the two women had had lunch on Tuesday.

  Bennett, Emmick, and Udolf scrambled to choreograph the meeting between Tripp and Lewinsky. Steve Irons and Patrick Fallon, Jr., who were FBI agents assigned to Starr, would descend on Lewinsky as soon as Tripp identified her. They would then bring her up to a room in the Ritz-Carlton where she could be debriefed. Early that morning, Udolf had told the two agents to bring a female colleague with them. “You don’t bring a woman to a hotel room without a woman agent,” Udolf had said. But the agents, who enjoyed being labeled tough guys, ignored the prosecutor’s advice and arrived by themselves.

  At 12:45 P.M., as Tripp went down the escalator, she signaled Irons and Fallon, who were waiting. They descended on Lewinsky and told her that she was wanted for questioning in connection with an investigation of the president of the United States for obstruction of justice. The two agents quickly escorted Lewinsky to Room 1012 of the adjoining Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Tripp trailed behind and joined them in the small room.

  Not long after the general outlines of the case became known, the interrogation of Lewinsky in Room 1012 became a symbol of the purported excesses of the OIC investigation. Starr’s critics asserted that Lewinsky’s rights were violated in any number of ways—that she was held against her will, prevented from calling a lawyer, threatened with abuse and other unspecified outrages. From the beginning, Starr was on the defensive about the hotel room encounter.

  The independent counsel made trouble for himself by the way he defended the conduct of his investigators on this day. On at least two occasions in the subsequent year—in a letter to Brill’s Content magazine and in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee—Starr denied that anyone in Room 1012 had tried to persuade Lewinsky to make secret tape recordings of Jordan, Clinton, or others. Starr wrote to the magazine, “This Office never asked Ms. Lewinsky to agree to wire herself for a conversation with Mr. Jordan or the President.” Starr’s claim was so obviously false that it served mainly to illustrate a larger truth about his stewardship of the OIC. Starr’s lack of experience as a prosecutor was such that he exercised almost no critical judgment on the key decisions made by his office. But controlled phone calls are the standard investigative technique for white-collar crime. Not surprisingly, the entire purpose of the approach to Lewinsky was to get her to flip on Jordan, Currie, and perhaps Clinton as well. With Isikoff’s story looming, such calls were the only way to collect useful evidence in the brief time available.

  But Starr’s muddled defense should not obscure the fact that Lewinsky’s treatment in the hotel room was entirely appropriate for an important witness in an unfolding criminal investigation. From the moment she arrived at 1:05 P.M., Emmick and later Jackie Bennett did encourage her to cooperate—and make the controlled calls. They told her she might be prosecuted and face a long prison sentence, which was a real, if remote, possibility. Regarding the dicey business of contacting her lawyer, the prosecutors didn’t want her to reach out to Frank Carter, but they didn’t stop her either. (The situation was complicated by the fact that the prosecutors regarded Carter as a suspect at that point; they believed he had prepared Lewinsky’s false affidavit, but they didn’t know whether Carter knew it was false.) If a narcotics suspect had been treated as Lewinsky was at the Ritz-Carlton, there might well have been public outrage about how she had been coddled. The discomfort with Lewinsky’s treatment seemed mostly to have been a form of displaced anger. It wasn’t the interrogation that offended people as much as the subject matter of Starr’s investigation—one rooted in consensual sexual encounters.

  In truth, the showdown in Room 1012 traced a slow but sure trajectory from tragedy to farce. The prosecutors had agreed that Emmick would handle the questioning. An Angeleno, like Lewinsky, Emmick was also a handsome, easygoing type who had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Compared to the overbearing Bennett and intense Udolf, Emmick was the obvious choice.

  At first, though, Lewinsky was in no position to be questioned. She had launched into an angry tirade against the stone-faced Tripp, who was sitting silently on a sofa. “Make her stay and watch,” Monica recalled saying to the agents. “I want that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me.” Soon enough, however, Udolf stepped in from the adjoining room and suggested that they let Tripp go on her way. “If we’re going to flip this girl,” Udolf said quietly to his colleagues, “we’re not going to do it with that bitch in the room.” Tripp was excused, but the agents told her to remain in the mall. Lewinsky was finally alone with her inquisitors.

  Emmick tried to play the good cop, explaining that Starr’s office wanted Lewinsky to cooperate in their investigation. Lewinsky listened in silence for a time, and then, almost without warning, she broke down in hysterical, unhinged sobbing. Emmick tried to calm her, but he couldn’t break through. As Emmick fretted to his colleagues in the adjoining room, Lewinsky went on and on, for a full ninety minutes. Finally, at around three o’clock, she began to recover her equilibrium. Lewinsky asked to call her mother, and Emmick reluctantly allowed Monica to leave the room and make the call from a pay phone. Since she wasn’t under arrest, Emmick couldn’t stop her. “Well, that’s it,” Emmick told the agents. “She’s never coming back.”

  But Lewinsky did return, and her mother, Marcia Lewis, called the room from New York. On the spot, Emmick decided to offer immunity to both Monica and her mother. Obviously stalling, Lewinsky asked if her mother could join the negotiations in person. Emmick didn’t like the idea of the delay, but he had little choice but to agree. After weighing whether Monica should be escorted to New York or to the middle ground of Philadelphia, Lewis said she would leave immediately for D.C. As Lewinsky weighed the offer, Jackie Bennett arrived to play the bad cop. “You’re twenty-four years old, you’re smart, you’re old enough, you don’t need to call your mommy,” he said. But Lewinsky wanted to wait for her mother—who feared air travel and was arriving by train.

  As the minutes, and then the hours, began to pass, Emmick and his colleagues began to notice a transformation come over Lewinsky. She began to try to ingratiate herself with the investigators—and then display her own sense of entitlement. She said she had wanted to become an FBI agent herself. She told them a dirty joke. She said she wanted to go for a walk, so Emmick and the agents took her on a long amble through every level of the mall—into Crate & Barrel, a men’s clothing place, and a few other stores. At one point, Lewinsky said she had to go to the bathroom and was gone for about fifteen minutes. Again, Emmick figured she had skipped. (In fact, she had tried unsuccessfully to tip Betty Currie about the investigation.)

  When Lewinsky returned, and the whole group went to dinner at Mozzarella’s American Grill. They returned to the room and watched the beginning of There’s No Business Like Show Business. At around eight o’clock, Lewis called to say her train was delayed. At one point, Lewinsky said her contact lenses were drying out. An agent searched the mall for a drugstore, but the best he could do was persuade the Ritz-Carlton sundries store to reopen. When the agent returned with the solution, Lewinsky said, “That’s cleaner. I wanted saline”—and the agent returned to prowl the mall again.

  Marcia Lewis finally arrived at 10:16 P.M., and spoke to her daughter alone. At this point, everyone in the room was woozy from the combination of boredom and tension.
Mother and daughter called Monica’s father, Bernie Lewinsky, in Los Angeles. A lawyer friend of Bernie’s, a fellow named William Ginsburg, called to speak to Monica and then to the prosecutors. Clearly, Lewinsky would not be cooperating. At 12:45 A.M., the agents escorted Lewinsky and her mother to Monica’s car in the mall parking lot.

  As she wandered the mall with her law enforcement escort on Friday, Lewinsky never noticed one of her more famous fellow shoppers. As it happened, Susan Carpenter-McMillan had chosen that very mall to shop for a new suit for her friend Paula Jones. Susan thought Paula deserved something special to wear to the deposition of President Bill Clinton the following day.

  12

  The Definition of Sex—and L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y

  “All right,” said Judge Susan Webber Wright. “The purpose of this hearing is really rather unusual. It’s to enable the court to make some kind of decision concerning the scope of the deposition of President Clinton. This deposition will be an extraordinary event.”

  They were all in an unfamiliar courtroom. In an effort to avoid the scrutiny of the press, Judge Wright had called a hearing in the small federal courthouse in Pine Bluff, about forty miles south of her usual home base in Little Rock. The judge had even ordered the windows in the courthouse covered, so that no one could see that she was meeting with the lawyers in Jones v. Clinton. News of the meeting did not leak, and the secrecy prompted unusual candor, especially from the judge. It was the morning of Monday, January 12, five days before Bill Clinton would become the first sitting president in American history to be examined as a party in a lawsuit.

  In her decision on December 11, Wright had already established the general ground rules for the examination of the president, but she wanted one last chance to clarify matters with the lawyers. Everyone recognized that the stakes for Saturday’s deposition were at least as high as for the lawsuit itself. The opportunity to examine Clinton under oath had been a principal reason the Dallas lawyers agreed to represent Paula Jones. Like all the depositions in the case, the president’s would take place in secret, but Bob Bennett understood the ways of politics well enough to know that some—or, more likely, all—of the president’s words would eventually be made public.