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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Ken Starr had been granted his authority for an expanded investigation. He had a budget of unlimited funds. He had prosecutors, FBI agents, and private investigators. For all intents and purposes, he had no authority exercising oversight over his work. That was why he was the independent counsel.
He also had a retinue of reporters at his call. Of course, it is against the law for a federal prosecutor to leak information that is or might be used in a grand jury. The Federal Code of Criminal Procedure 6(e) strictly forbids that sort of disclosure by a prosecutor or anyone associated with his apparatus. Witnesses are free to speak about their own testimony, but this is rare because they fear punitive retribution. Starr's men, however, had been leaking for years in their slog across the marshes of Whitewater. Starr's grand jury chamber became an echo chamber by virtue of his influence over the press. Within the grand jury room his prosecutors ruled unchallenged, and by using the grand jury process -- dragooning witnesses and leaking information or surmise about them -- Starr now dominated Washington.
Starr had believed that Clinton would be gone within days of the story about Monica Lewinsky breaking. He was unprepared for any response other than swift capitulation. And he was enraged at the first lady for labeling him political, for urging the press to cover the "vast right-wing conspiracy," and for remaining loyal to her husband. He was incensed that the president's popularity had increased rather than collapsed after the State of the Union address, and he was exasperated by news articles that described him as anything other than righteous. He still had no evidence to prove the criminal case he had trumpeted through the Washington Post on January 21 -- no evidence that Vernon Jordan had obstructed justice or suborned perjury, nor that the president had done so. Nonetheless, he believed he would somehow prevail. After all, Starr had the grand jury.
The Office of Independent Counsel was opaque to us at the White House. What little we knew we gleaned from the spare contacts the president's lawyers had with the prosecutors -- and from press accounts, which Starr's office leaked. It was like looking into a black pool. As I was writing this book, however, I encountered a prosecutor from Starr's office who explained to me what happened within it: its personnel, its political complexion, its operations, its conflicts, and Starr's actions. The firsthand account of this participant verifies much that many of us in the White House only supposed about Starr's office and contradicts published accounts of various crucial episodes written by reporters to whom Starr leaked partial information.
I also had extended on-the-record conversations with Samuel Dash, who was Starr's ethics counselor until he quit during the impeachment. Dash had been the majority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation and a principal proponent of the Independent Counsel Act. He was a professor at the Georgetown Law Center when Starr asked him in late 1994 to act as ethics counselor. He spent perhaps a couple of days a week at the office, attended staff meetings, and spoke regularly with Starr; though he was not there every day, he had access to all the prosecution memos on all matters from the beginning.
Starr established an atmosphere that was contemptuous of the president. Some of the prosecutors were professional lawyers who regarded sex as irrelevant to their work. They believed they were there to investigate white-collar crime. But those in charge regarded Clinton as morally unfit to hold his office. For them anything to get at Clinton was fair game. "There was a general animosity toward Clinton," I was told. "This was fueled by frustration by not getting anywhere, dead ends on other investigations. So we had to see who he is screwing." Their moral indignation and Republican politics could not be disentangled from their prosecutorial work. "I saw decisions made on moral grounds that had nothing to do with criminal grounds," Dash told me. "They believed that someone was a bad person, a sinful person, who ought to be punished for it. They distorted their judgment. Ken allowed his personal concepts of morality to interfere with the role of a prosecutor."
According to Sam Dash, Starr "could have rounded up" his initial investigation within two years of his appointment, "by 1996 or 1997. On all the issues involving the White House, fairly early he had enough information to conclude." Dash carefully reviewed the prosecution memos in each and every case: Whitewater, Susan McDougal, Webster Hubbell, the White House Travel Office, the FBI files. "They had nothing," he told me.
But far from closing shop, Starr's office was expanding its work. The prosecutors' sense of mastery after they broke the Monica Lewinsky story became an almost intoxicated belief in their own omnipotence. Swagger and supremacy were raised to ultimate virtues. Within the office, Jackie Bennett, Starr's deputy, promulgated a cult of toughness. He and his closest allies called themselves the "Likud faction," after the hard-line, right-wing Israeli political party, and dubbed others who did not always share their unbending fervor "commie wimps." They posted a chart in the office with "Likud" written above their names at the top and "Commie Wimps" at the bottom, beneath which were listed those who had not attained their plateau. In staff conferences, the soft-spoken Starr made a point of stressing the word "toughness." He would not be a "commie wimp."
Jackie Bennett was "a crazed hard charger," according to my source, and "fascinated with the president's sex life." He had grabbed onto sex as a means of getting Clinton and had been using private investigators to conduct sex hunts for almost a year. "It was whatever worked." When Bob Woodward's article about Starr's sexual pursuit of Clinton was published in the Washington Post in June 1997, a prosecutor who was not privy to Bennett's work asked Starr if it was true. "He said it was not happening." Yet Starr publicly admitted at the impeachment hearing before the House Judiciary Committee that it had been happening. Reading Woodward's article, Sam Dash also asked Starr about it: "The response I got was, 'We're not looking into the sex life of the president. We're looking into persons who may have information. We're trying to identify them on Whitewater and things of that nature.' I accepted that."
Bennett was the chief leaker in Starr's office -- "leaking to reporters constantly," a prosecutor told me -- and had a hierarchy of favorites in the press whose careers had become reliant on him. He was especially "sweet" on Susan Schmidt at the Washington Post. Starr assured Dash that he was investigating for the source of the leaks and asked Dash if he wanted to do so as well. Dash explained that that was not his job. "I was constantly told by Ken and his staff that they weren't leaking," he told me. The leaks went on.
When Dash took the job, he received an assurance from Starr. Dash said, "He was a partisan Republican. I really believed him when he said when he undertook it he said he could push that all aside." But, said a prosecutor, "It was clear that this was a mean-spirited, politically motivated investigation. Was Ken naively manipulated? Now I don't think he was naive at all. He was just prolonging the pain to keep Clinton on the ropes. To that degree he was enormously successful. He was incredibly political. Ken is capable of saying anything so long as you don't have him on tape."
Starr was "usually indecisive," and under pressure from those who claimed to be tougher and more resolutely conservative, he would usually cave in. He was often on the phone with Republican politicians. "He used to talk to the governor of Oklahoma" -- Republican Frank Keating -- "all the time." And he spent much of his time with his door closed, which to the prosecutors meant that he was on the phone.
He prized his reputation above all. When Starr found himself suddenly a subject of criticism, he "felt he was trapped," a prosecutor told me. "He was obsessed with public relations." Every day the prosecutors were given a packet of media accounts of the investigation from around the country-"three inches thick." "He read a great deal of it. He was very conscious of how it would impact on his career."
"He lacked a lot of judgment," Dash told me. "Starr didn't see the difference between sin and crime. His judgments were distorted." Once on the sex trail, Starr sentenced himself to presenting sex from a certain angle through the peephole. Without proof of anything else, it became Starr's only way of making Clinton's position foul. It is the easiest and basest pornographic technique to depict sex -- any sex, even between the happiest of married couples -- as sordid by using graphic detail. Microscopic, clinical documentation removes the human element as it distances and alienates the viewer (or voyeur). Starr used this method to excite and repel simultaneously. Though he did not himself question a single witness before the grand jury, he personally dictated the compilation of sexual question upon sexual question.
Sex had been a label to explain a cluster of ideas and values that had upset Clinton's enemies for decades. He had always been a screen on which were projected conservative feelings about the 1960s, the counterculture, and race. Through it all, sex had been a tracer, a code. Clinton had been accused of miscegenation -- an ancient and recurrent theme in racist Southern politics -- from the start of his career. In politics, sex is rarely just about sex. The prudish and pedantic Starr was setting off cultural depth charges.
