A Woman in Charge (80 page)

After four days of unceasing condemnation and ridicule, Starr did an about-face, observing, “As Fiorello La Guardia would say, ‘When I make a mistake it's a beaut.' I try not to make mistakes. I do make mistakes.” Specter's comments had been particularly effective, and Starr extended apologies to his staff for deciding to depart without consulting them.

Bill said later he didn't know whether to laugh or cry about Starr's departure plans and their abrupt cancellation. Hillary was traumatized. She looked ahead at a landscape still clouded with more agonizing uncertainty. On May 27, the Supreme Court announced its 9–0 decision that the Paula Jones case could go forward, ruling that there was no constitutional or practical reasons to prevent a private civil suit from moving through the court system against a sitting president. A few days later, Starr won a decision in the Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed him to subpoena Jane Sherburne's notes of her conversations with Hillary, which the White House had resisted vigorously. In June, Starr assembled his staff to review the evidence: Hickman Ewing, his deputy running the Arkansas end of the investigation, had drafted an indictment of the first lady for perjury. To the disappointment of Starr and his staff, Sherburne's notes had not been substantively helpful.

The review confirmed Starr's reluctant opinion that, though a circumstantial case could be argued, and might justify indictment, it would be a difficult case to prosecute successfully, even against an ordinary citizen. It would be political suicide—especially since the White House had begun landing some blows on Starr's operation—to bring forward an indictment under the circumstances. There were no witnesses to confirm chapter-and-verse that there was a pattern to Hillary's misstatements. To prove perjury is a difficult prosecutorial task if there are any ambiguities, and federal law requires demonstrable evidence of showing intent to lie. Hillary's Jesuitical distinctions would in the end probably protect her, no matter how misleading or evasive her statements might seem. Under the law, they were not perjurous.

Sam Dash, who had been counsel to the Senate Watergate committee, had acceded to Starr's wooing, and agreed to serve as the independent counsel's adviser on questions of prosecutorial conduct. He concurred that the evidence was insufficient, and urged Starr and his colleagues to start wrapping up their inquiry, absent some momentous finding against the president.

All the time Starr was desperately seeking records that might help him bring down the Clintons, fifteen boxes of potentially damaging material was sitting in a Washington, D.C., vault. Starr had been told about the boxes by Webb Hubbell, but had either failed to adequately grasp their significance or, much more likely, was able to obtain only a few of the files by subpoena, because of their zealous legal protection by David Kendall.

Much of the material was protected by the attorney-client privilege, the Clintons' lawyers maintained, and they were not about to offer Starr a laundry list of what the boxes specifically contained. Subpoenas would have to be extremely specific to obtain any of the material, so Starr was stymied.

If Starr—or reporters, for that matter—had been able to examine what was in that vault, it seems possible, given the political atmosphere at the time, that the Clinton presidency might not have survived.

The idea to collect this information came in March 1992, after the Gennifer Flowers scandal during the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, when it became evident to senior figures in the Clinton campaign, including Hillary, Diane Blair, Jim Lyons, Mickey Kantor, Kevin O'Keefe, and Bob Reich, that the campaign needed to be better prepared to immediately respond to any more questions about the pasts of the candidate and his wife. This was true especially in regard to Bill's other women, Whitewater, Madison Guaranty, Hillary's work at the Rose firm, the backgrounds of the Clinton and Rodham families, Hillary's commodities trading, aspects of Bill's record as governor (among them a lobbying reform bill), tax returns filed by the Clintons, and other financial records.

The obvious person to locate, segregate, and maintain such information in absolute secrecy was Betsey Wright. Only she had complete knowledge of the thousands of boxes of Clinton files in Arkansas. Wright was technically assigned to work for Lyons, who had helped her investigate some of the women who had claimed to have had affairs with Bill. The reports of a private detective Lyons had hired, Jack Palladino, were among the papers she had in the files she assembled. By working for Lyons, Betsey and her files could be protected by an attorney-client privilege, she said—formal custody of the files would actually be his, as a Clinton attorney. This was especially true of Whitewater and Madison Guaranty, since Lyons was responsible for an internal investigation the Clinton campaign had undertaken in response to Jeff Gerth's original
New York Times
stories. “Before I came, Lyons and Kevin O'Keefe were sort of in charge of the Defense of Bill Section,” said Wright.

“The people who talked to me about doing this job in the first place were Mickey and Bob Reich, and I talked to Hillary before I started. And I didn't want to do it without talking to Bill because I could tell just from the news and the Flowers business that this would be difficult,” she said. At the time, Betsey was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She met with Bill during a campaign stop in Manhattan. “We walked through some of the things again,” she said. “One of the things I asked him about was Gennifer Flowers, and again he told me there was absolutely nothing to it. He knew that things he did as governor would be coming under attack, his previous campaigns, both his record in the state as well as questions about his character and women, and he wanted to be able to respond.”

In the first week of April 1993, Betsey moved back to Arkansas and began assembling files in bankers' boxes for the task ahead. Within a tight circle of the campaign staff, Betsey's operation became known as “The Defense Department,” and Wright was sometimes referred to as the secretary of defense. As journalists or Republican opponents made new allegations, she would examine the relevant files, determine the facts to whatever extent possible, show the underlying materials to someone in the top command of the campaign, and a response would be fashioned.

After Bill's election as president on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, “we were told to clear out headquarters in Little Rock by that Friday,” Wright recalled. (Some members of the staff stayed on.) She had been working with about two thousand boxes of materials, she later estimated, and left almost all behind to be sealed up, catalogued, and put in storage with the rest of Bill's gubernatorial records.

“There were a number of things that I thought too sensitive to be left in those general files and I took them home to my house—about eight or nine big boxes, and a few smaller ones, including my working files on Clinton's father, on Gennifer, my working files on Whitewater, a bunch of personal letters to Bill, material from detectives, a lot of internal staff memos that could be misinterpreted…anything I didn't think belonged in the archives. Out of context a lot of that stuff was deadly. I had staff memos [about Whitewater] that had been read by people who didn't know anything about it, who thought that they [the Clintons] had probably committed crimes unknowingly, and I should have torn it all up. I mean I shouldn't have kept it. I should have just destroyed it.” She said she sent an inventory of the contents of those boxes—probably fifteen in all—to Bruce Lindsey.

Shortly thereafter, Wright received a call from Lindsey saying that he and Webb Hubbell wanted the boxes turned over immediately to Hubbell. “This is when Bruce and Webb got to be idiots about not trusting me with the files and thinking they had to get them,” she said. Hubbell said it was not about lacking trust in Wright. More likely, Lindsey wanted to be sure that the files were in the custody of a lawyer who could claim privilege as counsel to the Clintons.
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According to Hubbell, during the holiday season of 1992–1993, “there was a conversation among several people—Mack [McLarty] was involved, Bruce, I'm not sure who else,” about what was to be done with the files. Bill was the President-elect, but caution was in order.

Hubbell was asked to get the files from Betsey, along with four or five handwritten index cards of Betsey's listing what was in the boxes. There were no records from the Rose Law Firm, said Hubbell, “only what Betsey had accumulated in the nine or ten months she was running this defense department—all from the attorney general's and governor's files, and her own research.” Wright delivered the boxes to him at the Rose Law Firm offices. “I then took them to my house and they stayed in my house in Little Rock until all our furniture and stuff and the whole family moved up to Washington in May.” His son, Walter, drove them to Washington, and the files were unloaded into the basement of the Hubbell home in Spring Valley.

Hubbell said he paid no notice to them until Hillary phoned the evening the Clintons, the Hubbells, and the Fosters were to have dinner together, in June. Vince and Webb had been unable to find the records Hillary had phoned about, pertaining to Bill's father and his only recently revealed marriages to other women before Virginia. After the difficult dinner with the Fosters at the Italian restaurant that night, Hubbell found in his basement the records Hillary was looking for. Hillary had seemed surprised that Hubbell now had all of Betsey's sensitive files from the campaign, he said.

 

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5, David Kendall met with Bernard Nussbaum, Bruce Lindsey, Bill Kennedy, Jim Lyons, and the Clintons' Arkansas counsel, Steve Engstrom. It was decided at that meeting that Hillary and Bill needed a lawyer in private practice to handle Whitewater matters, and Kendall was hired. The Whitewater story had returned to the news with Susan Schmidt's story in the
Washington Post
about the RTC's investigation of Madison and Andrea Mitchell's reporting.

Hubbell said he got a call in mid-November from Kendall, who said, “‘I understand you have the Betsey files, could you look and see if there is anything related to Whitewater?'” Hubbell recalled. “And I did. I put it in a big envelope. I told him I had those thirteen boxes, or fifteen, and he said, ‘I think we ought to get them.'” Meanwhile, said Hubbell, “we had discussions with Bernie and others about needing to protect the privilege, to make sure they were in the hands of private counsel for the Clintons, and ultimately I was told that Kendall and Barnett had been hired.”

At 2:30 p.m. on November 20—the day Hillary's health care bill was finally introduced in Congress—Kendall and several young attorneys arrived in two station wagons at Hubbell's home to take possession of the files. They went into the vault at the Williams & Connolly offices that contained other Clinton material and were logged in: “five larger Banker's boxes, ten smaller Miracle boxes, and a small metal two-drawer check file.”

Not long afterward, Betsey Wright was asked to come to the vault and explain the contents to Kendall, who developed a considerable appreciation for her judgment and organizational abilities. Over the next five years, some of the material would be given to the special prosecutor's office and congressional investigators when a subpoena was specific enough to match something in the files; material was denied on the grounds that it fell under the attorney-client privilege. According to lawyers familiar with these matters, Kendall was tenacious about guarding the contents of the files from intrusive investigation.

After Hubbell had been questioned a second time by Starr's investigators, they began asking questions about “Betsey's boxes.” “I explained they were with Kendall,” he said. “They were asking the same question in different ways, not that they thought the holy grail was necessarily in there, but they seemed skeptical about the attorney-client privilege.”

According to Betsey Wright, Clinton lawyers, and White House aides, the danger from the files was always the nature of their contents in a volatile political atmosphere far more than any likelihood of criminal liability—though many documents undermined public statements by the White House and by Hillary. Today, the files remain locked in the same vault.

A few weeks after the files had been moved from Hubbell's basement to Williams & Connolly offices, Hillary had told Maggie Williams—as recorded in Roger Altman's notes—“I didn't want anyone poking around twenty years of our lives in Arkansas.” With the records safely in the vault, that would be very difficult.

 

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TARR
had been shamed into staying in his post, his zealous determination to find any criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons became manic. With the likelihood of prosecution of Hillary extinguished, he began an unrestrained inquiry, under Ewing's direction, into every nook and cranny of Bill Clinton's sexual past. The logical nexus of his inquiry was the contingent of state troopers who had helped
The American Spectator
in its story. The FBI agents and prosecutors took the troopers through lists of women who might have had relationships with Clinton. Particular attention was paid to Paula Jones, and the fact that—with her case allowed to go forward by the Supreme Court—there would be a stream of witnesses giving depositions in the case. The reinvigorated investigation in Arkansas was referred to in the Office of the Independent Counsel as the “Trooper Project.” In Washington, some of Starr's top deputies were dismayed by the line of inquiry, and the desperation that seemed to be attending it. Hillary's greatest fear, of course, had always been that Bill—and their journey—would somehow be undone by his assignations with other women from his past.