Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [163]
As Scaife had told John F. Kennedy, Jr., for a story in George magazine shortly before JFK Jr.’s death: “Maybe Ken Starr’s a mole working for the Democrats, because he didn’t get much accomplished, in this investigation.”
Scaife now added, “There [were] a lot of funny things going on. I still don’t know what happened to Vince Foster, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a clear answer on that.”
Nothing in the historical record would suggest that Ken Starr was extreme or over the top during the early stages of his tenure as independent counsel. Indeed, he was receiving ample criticism from the Republican party’s far-right wing for his timidity and in effectiveness. That is, until he started shifting the focus of the investigation, in the spring of 1997, in a slightly new direction.
SHORTLY after Starr’s aborted attempt to leave his post, Bob Woodward and Sue Schmidt of the Washington Post reported that Starr’s prosecutors were beginning to question Arkansas State Troopers on the subject of Bill Clinton and “women.” The months leading up to this had been so calm that the president’s lawyer David Kendall had declared Whitewater to be in “remission.”
Soon enough, however, that diagnosis proved to be premature. In a June 25 front-page article, “Starr Probes Clinton Personal Life,” Woodward and Schmidt revealed that FBI agents, private investigators, and Starr prosecutors had been questioning troopers about twelve to fifteen women, seeking to determine the troopers’ “knowledge of any extramarital relationships Bill Clinton may have had while he was Arkansas governor.” In what the article described as a “sharp departure from previous avenues of inquiry,” the Whitewater prosecutors and their investigators had begun probing into Clinton’s affairs with a myriad of women, including—but certainly not limited to—Gennifer Flowers. One Arkansas trooper, Roger Perry, stated that the OIC’s investigators had specifically asked him “if I had ever seen Bill Clinton perform a sexual act.” The trooper commented, “I was left with the impression that they wanted to show he was a womanizer.” Perry also volunteered other information: “They asked me about Paula Jones, all kinds of questions about Paula Jones, whether I saw Clinton and Paula together and how many times.”
It was the first linkage, however brief and ill fitting, between Starr’s Whitewater/Madison investigation and the previously unconnected Paula Jones case. Jackie Bennett viewed the Woodward and Schmidt article as a “cheap shot.” He later defended OIC’s investigative tactics: “The story was false; the point had been to go out and to try to identify people who had interacted with Clinton, who were close to him, and in a position to have observed things or to hear him say things.”
Despite such benign explanations, the shift in the investigative tactics appeared (to those inside the White House) to be proof of escalating, covert political warfare. The normally tight-lipped David Kendall held a press conference decrying the tactic as dirty pool. Kendall spoke into a microphone, grim-faced: “The report in today’s Washington Post, if true, is indicative of an investigation that has lost its way. It is out of control. No one’s personal life should be subjected to a desperate dragnet by a prosecutor with unlimited resources. No amount of pious rationalization can justify such conduct. It is intolerable, and it is wrong.”
Starr would resent the White House’s insinuations that he was punching Bill Clinton below the belt. His investigators were simply following time-honored investigative techniques, he later told the House Judiciary Committee. He harkened back to his prosecutors’ first gathering with ethics adviser Sam Dash in the fall of