A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Drudge’s initial account served as a useful snapshot of what Goldberg and the elves believed was important about the Lewinsky story. Drudge wasn’t told of Lewinsky’s status as a subpoenaed witness in the Jones case or of the unfolding Starr investigation related to her. There was no pretext that the affair between the president and the intern related to Clinton’s truthfulness, his litigation strategy, or a criminal investigation. Drudge only had the sex—but that was enough for him and his sources. They knew the sex would make the story irresistible to the mainstream media. Once Drudge issued his first bulletin, it was foreordained that the story would leak into the political life of the nation.

  It took only about eight hours, and the vehicle was a Sunday-morning talk show. Though little watched by most Americans, the network programs serve as useful benchmarks for the political class. Because the incumbent administration and its supporters are expected to put forth a more or less coordinated message each week, the Sunday shows are generally where that position is first made public. By early 1998, Matt Drudge was helping to set the Sunday agenda.

  Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and a conservative panelist on the ABC News program This Week, heard about the Drudge story early on Sunday morning, January 18, and he made an effort to check it out. He spoke to the elf Porter (with whom Kristol had served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle) and satisfied himself that Drudge was on to something real. The former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, at that time still a defender of the president on the program, decided to make a discreet inquiry of his own. On Sunday morning, he called John Podesta, then the White House deputy chief of staff.

  Podesta had been hearing ominous rumblings for about a day. On Saturday, while Clinton was still in his deposition, Podesta was called by a reporter for Time magazine who was nosing around about a possible scoop by his competitor Mike Isikoff at Newsweek. Podesta knew nothing about it, but he decided to call Isikoff, whom he knew vaguely. Isikoff said that he was working on a story about a woman named Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones case, but “it had nothing to do with the grand jury or Ken Starr.” In fact, Isikoff’s story had everything to do with Starr, but the reporter was protecting the independent counsel’s investigation—just as Jackie Bennett and Bruce Udolf wanted him to do.

  In light of all this, the call from Stephanopoulos was not a complete surprise to Podesta. So he took a cautious route and, as Podesta later testified, told Stephanopoulos, “The only way you can respond to it is to say, ‘This is Drudge, he’s a rumormonger,… and you can’t believe what you read in the Drudge Report.’ ”

  Kristol and Stephanopoulos were now briefed to do battle on the air. On Sunday’s broadcast, Kristol said, “The story in Washington this morning is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer [sic] intern at the White House, an intern of Leon Panetta’s—”

  Stephanopoulos interrupted Kristol, saying, “And Bill, where did it come from? The Drudge Report. You know, we’ve all seen how discredited that is.…”

  “No, no, no,” Kristol replied. “They had screaming arguments in Newsweek magazine yesterday. They finally didn’t go with the story. It’s going to be a question of whether the media is now going to report what are pretty well-validated charges of presidential behavior in the White House.” The story of the intern and the tapes had moved into general circulation.

  Like Susan Carpenter-McMillan, the president’s team tried to shape public perceptions of the deposition. According to leaks from the Clinton camp, everyone was delighted by the way the day had gone. But that wasn’t really the case. Bennett and Ettinger had been unnerved by the strangely specific questions about Lewinsky, and even in Clinton’s answers, they sensed that their client had not told them everything about his relationship with the young woman. That evening, Clinton himself was uncharacteristically subdued as well. He made a handful of telephone calls and canceled his dinner plans.

  The deposition seems to have evoked a clear sense of foreboding in the president. In one of those conversations that night, he called Betty Currie, whose name he had mentioned so often in response to the questions about Lewinsky, and asked her to come in to work the following day. It was unusual for the president to summon Currie on a Sunday—and this meeting was stranger still.

  Inside of a month after the Lewinsky story broke, the public perception of Betty Currie was defined by a single image—that of a diminutive, overwhelmed African-American woman fighting through an unruly crowd of photographers after her first appearance before the grand jury. The truth about Currie was more complex. She occupied a distinctive niche in Bill Clinton’s White House. In an atmosphere that was usually busy, even frenetic, Currie had little to do. She handled some of Clinton’s private correspondence, placed some of his phone calls, and generally passed time with visitors who were waiting to be admitted to the Oval Office. She handed out candy to frazzled staffers and reminded them not to work too hard.

  But Currie, who had long ago retired as a federal government secretary in Washington, was also a seasoned pol. At fifty-seven years old, she had worked in every Democratic presidential campaign since 1984, and even moved to Boston to work for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and then to Little Rock, to help Clinton, four years later. (During downtime she worked as an assistant to the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley.) As it turned out, Currie was also Kenneth Starr’s potentially most damaging witness against Bill Clinton.

  Currie met Clinton on the White House putting green at about five o’clock on Sunday, and a few moments later they sat down together in the Oval Office. There, Currie testified, Clinton told her that he had been asked a number of questions at his deposition about Monica Lewinsky. “There are several things you may want to know,” Clinton said, and then prompted her to agree with a rapid-fire series of statements:

  • “You were always there when Monica was there.”

  • “We were never really alone, right?”

  • “Monica came on to me, and I never touched her.”

  • “She wanted to have sex with me, and I can’t do that.”

  Clinton had to know that these statements were false. In her testimony about this peculiar conversation, Currie put the most benign face possible on Clinton’s behavior. First, she said she didn’t know that all the statements were specifically false; second, she said she felt no pressure “whatsoever” to agree with the president’s comments. As for Clinton, he later testified that he spoke to his secretary on Sunday because he was trying to “refresh my recollection” and because he figured a media storm was going to erupt and “I was trying to figure out what the facts were.” Clinton gave basically the same rationale for having a second conversation with Currie along the same lines three days later—when the story had indeed broken in the press.

  As a technical legal matter, Clinton’s lawyers were probably correct that the president’s behavior with Currie on these two occasions did not amount to a crime—neither obstruction of justice nor witness tampering. For one thing, Currie was not yet a witness in the Jones case (or before Starr’s grand jury); for another, his secretary’s very supportive rendering of Clinton’s behavior suggested that she did not feel that she was being coerced to lie. Finally, it is possible, through tortured analysis, to conclude that not all of Clinton’s statements to Currie were completely false. (In justifying his statements to Currie, in his grand jury testimony, Clinton made the infamous remark that “it depends how you define ‘alone.’ ”) In sum, then, most prosecutors probably would not have brought a criminal case against the president based on these facts.

  But lawyers’ excuses cannot obscure how contemptibly the president behaved with his secretary. Clinton had to live with the consequences of his dismal affair with Lewinsky. But here Clinton recruited another person into his circle of deceit—his secretary, who occupied a position at the opposite end of the spectrum of power and prestige from his own. A less loyal and savvy woma
n than Currie might have drawn a more sinister portrait of her boss’s behavior. But still, the picture is bad enough. The president’s willingness to use others to serve his own ends probably deserves greater condemnation than his sexual misadventures. Clinton’s right-wing enemies had indeed leveraged the Lewinsky affair from a personal problem to a legal and political crisis. But instead of confronting the issue with candor and courage, Clinton hid behind lies and the skirts of his secretary.

  And Currie—despite her brave words to the contrary—seems also to have panicked in response to the summons from the president. After her meeting with Clinton on Sunday, Currie began paging Lewinsky frantically. In the past, Lewinsky had responded instantly whenever Currie paged her; indeed, Currie spent a great deal of time ducking Monica’s own pages. Currie tried four times on Saturday night. Monica called back once late, but Currie was too tired to talk. Then, on Monday morning, starting at 7 A.M., Currie paged Monica seven times in an hour, attaching increasingly alarmed messages each time. “Please call Kay [Betty’s code name with Lewinsky] at eight this morning.” “Please call Kay at home. It’s a social call. Thank you.” “Please call Kate [sic] re: family emergency.” “From Kay. Please call. Have good news.” No responses.

  Monday was Martin Luther King Day, so Clinton was checking with Currie at home, to see if she had reached Monica. In the morning, the president spoke with Vernon Jordan, who had just heard from Frank Carter that Lewinsky had hired a new lawyer. The last time Clinton spoke to his secretary on Monday, he explained that the reason Monica hadn’t called back was probably that her new lawyer had told her not to talk to anyone.

  The new lawyer was Bill Ginsburg. He had been drawn into the story late on Friday afternoon, when his old friend and client Bernie Lewinsky had tracked him down at a court appearance in Santa Monica. Bernie had sounded agitated on the telephone, telling Ginsburg that he had to see him right away but refusing to give the reason. It happened that two of Ginsburg’s children were on airplanes that day, and he became consumed with the thought that Bernie was going to tell him that one of the flights (or both!) had crashed. Monica’s father was the kind of old friend who might be trusted to deliver that kind of news. On the drive downtown to rendezvous with Lewinsky at the Biltmore Hotel, Ginsburg was so nervous that he wouldn’t even turn on the radio for fear that he would hear of the crash.

  Melodrama suited Ginsburg. Bearded and bespectacled, Ginsburg represented Lewinsky from January to June 1998 and through his incessant appearances on television became one of the most familiar faces in the country. Because of his ubiquity on the airwaves, Ginsburg made the transition from conscientious advocate to national joke faster than almost anyone in history. But if he mangled his role as a public spokesman—a business associate once described him as “an ego with a digestive system”—he also did a better job for his client than he was generally given credit for. Indeed, Ginsburg’s epitaph might come out of Monty Python: “I may be an idiot, but I’m no fool.”

  At the time of the phone call from Bernie, however, Ginsburg had a nonexistent public profile. He defended medical malpractice cases at a quietly successful firm of about forty lawyers in Century City and lived in modest circumstances in the San Fernando Valley. Lewinsky had invited Ginsburg to speak on Friday evening at a radiologists’ conference at the Biltmore. When the lawyer finally tracked down the doctor at the hotel, Ginsburg was so overwrought that he practically fell into Lewinsky’s arms. But Ginsburg’s family wasn’t the problem.

  “Monica’s in some kind of trouble,” her father said.

  Ginsburg knew that she worked at the Pentagon, so a single thought flashed through the lawyer’s brain.

  Espionage! Monica’s been arrested for selling state secrets!

  Not exactly, said Bernie.

  The two men commandeered one of the rooms at the Biltmore, and Bernie started to explain.

  “Monica might be involved with the president of the United States,” Lewinsky said.

  Ginsburg figured this was the kind of news that entitled them to raid the minibar.

  Bernie said Monica was with the FBI even as they spoke. The two men convinced themselves that even they might be subject to surveillance at that moment, so they decided to take their drinks and start walking around downtown Los Angeles, to foil wiretaps.

  At last, they migrated to the Jonathan Club, a social club a few blocks away, where Ginsburg called the room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel where Monica was being interrogated. He spoke to Michael Emmick, of Starr’s staff. Emmick asked, “How do I know you’re her lawyer?”

  “Because, you miserable cocksucking motherfucker, I tell you I’m her lawyer!”

  The exchange set the tone of Ginsburg’s relationship with the Office of Independent Counsel for months to come.

  Emmick told Ginsburg that Starr’s office wanted Lewinsky to make controlled telephone calls as part of their investigation. Wisely, Ginsburg said he wanted immunity for his client—transactional immunity, which is the broadest kind. After Emmick and Ginsburg squabbled for a while about immunity, the prosecutor said there was another problem. He didn’t have a word processor or a fax machine, so they couldn’t make a deal right there. Ginsburg, who had stayed at the Ritz-Carlton and knew there were fax machines in the concierge lounge, said he would happily accept a handwritten agreement. Emmick wouldn’t oblige.

  Ginsburg persuaded Emmick to put Monica on the telephone, and her new lawyer instructed her simply to leave the hotel and go home. Along with her mother, who had arrived by that point, that was just what Monica did.

  The following morning, Saturday, January 17, Ginsburg flew to Washington, and Monica picked him up at the airport. From there they drove to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from the White House, where they spent three hours discussing Lewinsky’s situation. One thing Ginsburg knew for sure was that Monica shouldn’t talk to anyone—not the president, not Betty Currie, and not the prosecutors (at least before he obtained immunity for her). That evening, Monica ignored her lawyer’s advice and did return one of Currie’s pages, but that was when the president’s secretary was too tired to talk. The following day, when Currie tried seven times to prompt a phone call from her, Lewinsky did not answer.

  The story percolated, just beneath the surface, for one more day, the King holiday on Monday. At this point, Drudge had basically turned over his site to Lucianne Goldberg, who was giving him new material every few hours. Drudge became the first person to go public with the name Monica Lewinsky, and then he reported that Lewinsky had filed an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying a “sexual relationship with President Clinton.” At one point, however, on that frenetic Monday, Goldberg and Drudge got their signals crossed.

  The headline on one Drudge dispatch was CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND TAPES OF FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, AS STARR MOVES IN. This was a major development, because it was the first suggestion that the Lewinsky matter had potential criminal ramifications and that Starr was investigating. Drudge was on to the story of his life, and though he wished Clinton ill, he was more interested in generating scoops than protecting Starr’s investigation. Goldberg, on the other hand, had a broader perspective and a deeper political and personal animus.

  “Take that goddamn story down!” Goldberg shouted at Drudge on the phone. The news that Starr was involved would deprive the prosecutor of the element of surprise. (Ginsburg, who was visiting the Starr offices on Monday, recalled prosecutors passing around printouts of the Drudge Report and despairing about the leak of their investigation.)

  Drudge’s news flash about Starr had been posted for only twenty minutes, so he did take it down overnight. But on Tuesday, Drudge saw that events were moving so fast that he said to himself, Fuck her—let’s run it. Drudge’s transmission actually anticipated the central controversy about the new area within Starr’s jurisdiction. “ ‘Starr is not on the bimbo beat,’ one source close to the situation told the Drudge Report late Tuesday. ‘He’s looking at a potential for obstruction of j
ustice charges.’ … The development has completely consumed high-level Washington, with Starr’s investigators working past midnight in recent days.… Developing …”

  At around nine in the evening on Tuesday, January 20, a White House lawyer named Lanny Breuer was sitting at his desk addressing invitations to his wife’s fortieth-birthday party. Breuer was in charge of handling the legal aspects of the manifold congressional and criminal investigations of the White House—mostly on campaign finance (which was still a relatively hot topic) but also on the dying embers of the Starr investigation. The phone rang with a call from Wolf Blitzer, of CNN.

  “Have you heard anything about an intern?”

  Unlike many people at the White House, Breuer did not read the Drudge Report. (Drudge enjoyed pointing out that his site received 2,600 visits from White House staffers in the twelve hours after his first Lewinsky dispatch.) Breuer couldn’t help Blitzer … but then about ten minutes later the White House lawyer’s pager nearly overheated with calls.

  The same thing was happening all over Washington. Scores of reporters had spent the day in a blind sprint to catch up to the disclosures that Goldberg had been feeding Drudge for the past three days. The prosecutors in the Starr office had been saying nothing, relying on the increasingly forlorn hope that they might still arrange for controlled telephone calls to their chief targets. But the Jones lawyers were emboldened by the possibility of an obstruction of justice investigation based on their lawsuit. Above all, they wanted Clinton destroyed, which a new criminal probe might accomplish. The Jones lawyers—not the Starr prosecutors—served as leakers-in-charge.

  Chris Vlasto, the ABC producer who had dined with the Jones team on the night of the deposition, called Bob Bennett at home on Tuesday night and told him there were tapes of Lewinsky. At first, Bennett was so distraught he could scarcely mutter a single question: “How bad?”