Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [174]
Although she had come to the White House to read Clinton the riot act, Monica was again feeling mushy toward him. She wanted to help Clinton get out of this bind. She was thinking, “Well, gee … maybe there is something he could do to fix it.” Maybe the president could even get this Willey woman a job, she suggested, to make the problem go away. Clinton told her, with an abbreviated hug, that he appreciated her help and friendship.
Ten days later, after Monica had flown to Madrid for a Pentagon project and returned home, the president summoned her back to the Oval Office. This time the atmosphere in the room was noticeably chillier. The president asked, Was the woman whom Monica had mentioned during their last conversation (the one who had talked to Isikoff about Kathleen Willey) a person named Linda Tripp? Lewinsky balked momentarily, then admitted, “Yes.” Clinton looked “distant and very cold,” she recalled. He said that there was a story on the “Sludge Report,” referring derogatorily to the Internet political gossip publication, indicating that Linda Tripp had been the source of the Willey information. The president posed the question delicately: Could Monica ask this Linda Tripp person to call his adviser Bruce Lindsey in the White House? Maybe they could see if this Newsweek story could be nipped in the bud. Monica nodded her head; she could certainly try. The president asked one more favor: Could she call Betty Currie and let her know “mission accomplished” as soon as she had spoken to Tripp?
Clinton ended their meeting by posing two more questions to Monica. One of them, the young woman answered truthfully; the other, she did not.
The first question was, “Do you trust Linda Tripp?”
Monica answered, “Yes.”
The second question was, “Have you told anything to Linda Tripp about our relationship?”
She turned to Bill Clinton, as he sat in his rocking chair, and responded firmly to the question. “No,” she said.
AS Jim McDougal grew accustomed to his new surroundings at the federal penitentiary in Forth Worth, Susan McDougal was being moved from a minimum-security facility in Texas to solitary confinement in Los Angeles, at a dank county jail designed for hardened criminals.
Flamboyant talk-show host Geraldo Rivera engaged in a lively discussion about whether the continued incarceration of this noncooperative witness, for the better part of a year, constituted an abuse of the civil contempt process. Susan’s new attorney, celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos from Los Angeles, told the television audience that holding Susan behind bars for this extended period, after it became clear she would never change her mind, was an illegal form of “punishment.” Prominent Washington lawyer Joseph DiGenova, who had served as an independent counsel himself, shot back that as long as Judge Susan Webber Wright believed jail time was “appropriate” to deal with this recalcitrant witness, federal law permitted the judge to keep McDougal incarcerated to gain truthful testimony and to “break [Susan’s] will.”
There was much speculation as to whether Ken Starr and the Office of Independent Counsel were somehow involved in the abrupt move of Susan McDougal from the “soft” Carswell Medical Prison in Texas to the “county jail hell-hole” in Los Angeles. Susan was facing embezzlement charges in the county courts of Los Angeles for the 1992 allegations that she had swiped