A Vast Conspiracy (53 page)

When the agents finally arrived at Lewinsky’s apartment, one of them called Speights to ask about some pictures and photographs that they had been led to believe were on the walls. Now, it appeared, there were only blank spaces. Where were the pictures?

As patiently as he could, Speights asked the agent whether he saw any cardboard boxes directly below the spaces on the wall. Did you look in the boxes? Speights asked.

No, the agent hadn’t gotten around to it.

You’re searching the apartment and you haven’t looked in the moving boxes? Speights was incredulous.

The agents did rouse themselves to look through the boxes, and they also collected Lewinsky’s computer and most of her dresses. They were, of course, looking for the semen-stained dress that Tripp had told them about, but it had been moved earlier to Monica’s mother’s new apartment, in New York. All in all, then, the search yielded little useful evidence, but it left Lewinsky with almost nothing to wear.

In any event, the true life-changing event for Lewinsky took place on Wednesday, January 21, when she confronted a double blow. First, of course, she remained a suspect in a criminal investigation. But the big news on Wednesday was that her name had finally surfaced in the mainstream press, and she became the object of the most intense media surveillance since O. J. Simpson’s Bronco ride across Southern California. For the next several months, camera crews established round-the-clock surveillance in front of her building in the Watergate complex. (One day, Monica’s next-door neighbor, former senator Bob Dole, brought doughnuts to the crews.)

The public disclosure of Monica’s name transformed Ginsburg’s behavior, and even his personality. At this point, Ginsburg shut down virtually all contact between Monica and the outside world. He basically forbade his client to speak with anyone except her mother. He even directed his friend Bernie to cease speaking to his daughter for the time being. Monica moved upstairs to the fifth floor of the Watergate, where Marcia’s mother had an apartment, and she began spending virtually all of her time staring at her own image on the television and relying on her attorney to keep her apprised of her fate. Outside of her mother, her lawyer, and her newly recruited team of psychiatrists, Lewinsky had almost no contact with the world.

In one sense, Ginsburg was just being cautious. As the subpoena to Marcia Lewis illustrated, the prosecutors were obviously willing to question those closest to Lewinsky in order to build their case. Limiting contact with Monica restricted the amount of evidence that could be assembled against her. But the move was also a power play. Ginsburg quickly developed a taste for being the center of attention, and his exclusive access to his client guaranteed him a ready audience whenever he wanted one. His first public comment on the case suggested that his anger at Clinton still trumped his distaste for Starr. “If the president of the United States did this—and I’m not saying he did—with this young lady, I think he’s a misogynist,” Ginsburg told the press on the day the story broke. “If he didn’t, then I think Ken Starr and his crew have ravaged the life of a youngster.” Since Ginsburg at that point knew that Clinton “did this”—that is, conducted the affair with Lewinsky—Ginsburg did regard the president as a misogynist. But the Office of Independent Counsel was taking steps to make sure that their putative star witness, and her lawyer, would transform their allegiances.

It is no exaggeration to say that the next two weeks determined the fate of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the critical behind-the-scenes drama of that period was the negotiation between William Ginsburg and the Office of Independent Counsel. The president himself raised the stakes to this level with his finger-wagging denial of January 26. In the clearest, most emphatic way, Clinton denied that he had had “sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Ginsburg’s client could give the testimony—and provide the physical evidence—that would prove definitively that the president
had lied. Could Ginsburg and Starr cut a deal that would let the prosecutor make his case?

Starr’s team convened on this and other issues twice a day, at eight in the morning and five in the afternoon. Dozens of people—prosecutors, agents, paralegals, as many as fifty of them at a time—would gather around the large conference table to chew over the matters before the office. (Often, Starr’s team of a dozen or more people in Little Rock would join in the conversations by speakerphone.) Starr believed in giving everyone a chance to talk, and the result was a maddeningly slow way to do business. But the group dynamics had a substantive impact, too. Over and over, Starr spoke of the need for “toughness,” and he relished those comments that called for confrontation and conflict. The independent counsel not only recognized that he lacked experience but hated that the public saw him as a fleshy, Milquetoast kind of person. One day he mentioned how angry he was that some of his adversaries in Little Rock were spreading the false rumor that he was having an affair on his visits there; what really teed him off was that everyone—everyone!—thought the rumor was inconceivable.

After months, even years, of irrelevance, it was suddenly a heady time for Starr’s prosecutors. The Jones lawyers wanted to piggyback on the OIC’s investigation, so they started to send their own subpoenas to everyone Starr was calling before the grand jury, starting with Betty Currie. The Starr team objected, filing a motion before Judge Wright to stop the Dallas attorneys. “After serious consideration,” the brief stated, “we respectfully submit that the pending criminal investigation is of such gravity and paramount importance that this Court would do a disservice to the Nation if it were to permit the unfettered—and extraordinarily aggressive—discovery efforts currently underway to proceed unabated. The criminal matter raises issues of the gravest concern, and their resolution may moot many of the discovery questions pending.” This last line demonstrated the confidence in the Starr camp. It suggested that Clinton might soon leave office, and thus his departure would moot some of the issues before Judge Wright.

But the Arkansas judge was one of the few people to remain calm and focused in the excitement of the first week of the scandal. She noted that discovery was already scheduled to close at the end of January, so she was disinclined to cancel the last few days. Then Judge Wright did something even bolder. She simply ruled that all “evidence concerning Monica Lewinsky should be excluded from the trial of this matter.” From the beginning, Wright had clung to the idea that the Jones case was about one lone woman’s
claim of employment discrimination, not an open-ended inquiry into Bill Clinton’s sex life. Judge Wright concluded that Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky in 1998 had nothing to do with whether Paula Jones was sexually harassed in 1991. The decision was both an astute resolution of a legal quandary and a subtle message to Starr—that his investigation had steered off into areas remote from anything except his determination to land the president.

If that was Wright’s message, few in Starr’s camp were in the mood to hear it. They believed they had Clinton on the ropes, and their confidence leeched into arrogance with everyone they dealt with—especially Bill Ginsburg. True, Ginsburg seemed to be doing his best to alienate Starr’s people as well. In public, he had become a one-man interview machine, providing reporters with often inaccurate accounts of his negotiations with Starr. In private, Ginsburg was even more unhinged. During one session with Jackie Bennett, the prosecutor mentioned darkly that successful doctors like Bernie Lewinsky often found themselves in trouble with the IRS and then asked Ginsburg to accept service of a subpoena to Monica’s father, just as he had earlier accepted one for her mother.

It was a ghoulish, entirely inappropriate threat by Bennett, and Ginsburg—jet-lagged, emotionally overwrought, and a little loony—responded by losing his composure completely.

“You motherfucking, cocksucking cunt,” he remembered saying, “I will kill you before I accept service for a subpoena to Bernie.”

Bennett stood up across the conference table.

“If you want to take a cut at me,” Ginsburg went on, “I’ll whip your ass.” Ginsburg collected Speights and left with the issue of immunity for Monica still unresolved. (Bennett denies mentioning the IRS.)

At last, the OIC hit on the strategy of leaving the negotiations with Ginsburg to the two most experienced public corruption prosecutors in the office, Mike Emmick and Bruce Udolf. (Ginsburg and Bennett couldn’t get along, and Bittman, preoccupied with Betty Currie, popped in and out of the discussions.) In their own ways, Emmick and Udolf were renowned for their toughness in their respective parts of the country. But they quickly came to the conclusion that it was self-defeating to go on quibbling with Ginsburg about immunity for Lewinsky. They had, at best, a one-witness case against Clinton for lying and obstruction of justice, and Monica was the witness. Sure, Ginsburg was behaving like a clown, but the needs of the case required that Starr give the lawyer what he wanted.

By January 27—the day of the State of the Union address—Ginsburg and the prosecutors were exchanging drafts of an immunity agreement. Each day, Emmick and Udolf would haggle with Ginsburg and then return to the conference room, where their work would be critiqued by the committee of fifty. The invariable consensus there: Emmick and Udolf weren’t being tough enough. Why wouldn’t she take a polygraph? In response, Udolf added a line to the agreement: “It is understood and agreed that upon request by the United States, Ms. Lewinsky will voluntarily submit to polygraph examination.” What if she told her shrink about her relationship with Clinton? Another new line: “Upon request, she will waive all privileges, without limitation, except as to your representation of her.” This meant the prosecutors could interview Lewinsky’s therapists.

Finally, the committee persisted on the issue of the oral proffer. Why should they give her immunity if they didn’t get to talk to her first? They wanted the “Queen for a Day” agreement before they committed themselves to immunity. Here, Ginsburg, fearing for Monica’s sanity, wouldn’t budge. But he hit on a compromise with Emmick and Udolf. In her own hand, Monica would write out a proffer, which would summarize her testimony, and the prosecutors could decide whether it was sufficient.

So on January 30, Ginsburg sent Monica to an empty room at the Cosmos Club—the city club in downtown Washington where he was now staying—and told her to write a summary of her relationship with the president. The resulting ten-page document, written in Monica’s girlish scrawl, is above all a poignant summary of a young woman’s crush. She summarized all of the key issues in the relationship—her transfer to the Pentagon, her dealings with Vernon Jordan, her job hunt, the subpoena from the Jones team—but the first sentence gave the clearest picture of Monica’s conception of the relationship. The first two paragraphs isolated the key legal issues as well.

1. Ms. Lewinsky had an intimate and emotional relationship with President Clinton beginning in 1995. At various times between 1995 and 1997, Ms. Lewinsky and the President had physically intimate contact. This included oral sex, but excluded intercourse.

2. When asked what should be said if anyone questioned Ms. Lewinsky about her being with the President, he said she should say she was bringing him letters (when she worked in Legislative Affairs) or visiting Betty Currie (after she left the WH). There is truth to both of these statements.

The ten pages were good enough for Emmick and Udolf. The handwritten proffer merely repeated what Monica had been saying through her lawyers all week, and it was undoubtedly the best they were going to do. On Sunday, February 1, Emmick wrote back to Ginsburg that “after evaluating your draft, we hope to meet with you this evening and, if we succeed in bridging what I believe are relatively small differences between us, negotiate a binding agreement.” The deal, in other words, was just about cut.

If Bill Ginsburg is remembered for anything in future years, it may be for a dubious bit of history he made on the same day that Mike Emmick wrote to him about his client’s immunity. On February 1, Ginsburg appeared on all five major Sunday-morning talk shows. From the day Lewinsky’s name became public, Ginsburg had reveled in the attention of the television news aristocracy. Months after the stars lost interest in him, Ginsburg still pined for them. “Mike Wallace is like a father to me,” he said. “Barbara, Wolf, and Cokie kept me sane.”