Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
In Part 2 of "The Clinton Wars," the prim independent counsel grows obsessed with the president's sex life and cultivates an "army of spies" within the press
May 6, 2003 | On the morning of January 22, 1998, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell. "The FBI," it reported, "last week secretly tape recorded former White House aide Monica Lewinsky saying that President Clinton urged her to lie about having a sexual relationship, then confronted her with the tapes to persuade her to cooperate with their investigation of Clinton, sources familiar with the investigation said yesterday ... The FBI operation helped corroborate other tapes made earlier ... and was used to help persuade Attorney General Janet Reno and a three-judge panel to authorize a new investigation into Clinton, according to sources."
The article, coauthored by Susan Schmidt and based on "sources," was like a thunderclap, stating conclusively that the president's guilt was proven by evidence already in the hands of the prosecutors. It drove the rest of the media to perceive inevitable doom. Democrats on the Hill wondered if they would soon have to send a delegation to ask the president to resign, and many on the White House staff wondered about that, too. There was no way of knowing that the article's flat assertions that Lewinsky had said that Clinton "urged her to lie" and that it "helped corroborate other tapes" were false.
The office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr demanded documents and issued subpoenas, and the White House legal counsel office began to cooperate. In their conversations with the OIC prosecutors, the White House lawyers encountered an extraordinary truculence and arrogance. The prosecutors acted as though the president were a criminal, as though their case were airtight and he would soon be toppled. The White House lawyers concluded that Starr's strategy was to stage the Lewinsky story as a political shock wave that would force Clinton to resign.
Later that day, Starr appeared before a bank of microphones in front of his office to declare three times that his conduct had been proper: "We use appropriate investigative techniques that are traditional law enforcement techniques." But his illegal leaks were holding virtually the entire press corps in his thrall. At the top of his hierarchy of status were his favored reporters and producers: Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post; correspondent Jackie Judd and her producer, Chris Vlasto, at ABC News; and Michael Isikoff at Newsweek. Below them, the others scrambled for access. Starr granted it immediately to the networks and newsweeklies, but regional newspapers had to scrape by on leavings. The New York Times was second-best in his eyes to the Post. Cutouts emerged -- conservative lawyers close to the investigation -- who fed scandal-hungry reporters. A survey conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists on the reporting done during January 21-27 revealed that of the 1,565 statements and allegations repeated by major television programs, newspapers, and magazines, only 1 percent were based on two named sources, 41 percent had no claim of factual reporting at all, and 40 percent were derived from anonymous single sources. Matt Drudge was simply a trendsetter.
Susan Schmidt's method was to reproduce what was given her, and her reports were valuable to readers who understood that they accurately presented what Starr wished people to know. Jackie Judd was the standup on-camera talent mostly for the work of her producer, Chris Vlasto, a new type of journalist peculiar to the period. Vlasto had the intensity of a true believer but no real political ideas. He wasn't an ideologue himself, just someone who relied on ideologues for his information. Scandal and Clinton hatred, not politics, animated his work. Clinton scandal peddler David Bossie became Vlasto's friend and source. "Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me," Vlasto told a reporter from the Washington Post. "If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I'd believe Bossie any day." He wrote articles for the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard, insisting portentously that Whitewater had darker secrets yet.
If Vlasto was an apolitical scandalmonger at ABC News, Dorrance Smith, producer of "This Week," was ultimately political. Smith had been President Bush's communications director, and his secretary in the White House had been Linda Tripp. "The Washington bureau was like an outpost of the American Spectator," an ABC News correspondent told me. "Dorrance was in constant touch with Tripp. He was calling the shots. He kept opposing views off the air and put views supportive of Starr on the air." (One of the Smith-promoted commentators, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington Law School professor with a specialty in environmental issues, testified before the House in favor of impeachment, and another, Brad Berenson, was to become an associate counsel in George W. Bush's White House. Jeffrey Toobin, the regular ABC News legal analyst, was not permitted to appear on "This Week.")
But the reporter most indispensable to the advancement of the scandal from the moment Paula Jones appeared at the conservative conference in Washington in 1993 to the breaking of the Lewinsky story in 1998 was Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. He was an avid participant who rushed to the center of the scandal, wrapped in the raincoat of intrepid detective. He was used at every turn by everyone from Paula Jones's lawyers to Lucianne Goldberg to Starr. "The players in this saga -- the accusers, the conspirators, even the president -- had all at times calculated their actions in response to what they thought I might do," Isikoff boasted in his book. But his peregrinations through the fragrant alleys of the scandal made him a useful man to many he found there.
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