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By Root 1801 0

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., published a book that October titled The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. This unflattering account, coauthored with a ghostwriter identified only as “Anonymous”—who was widely believed to be Ted Olson—left little to the imagination. A mixture of fact and fantasy, the book described a lifelike impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton that took place one year in the future (in 1998), presided over by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, in which the reader was left to imagine that Clinton was ultimately convicted. The foreword to the impeachment book was written by none other than Congressman Barr, who effused that “every American who is concerned with the survival of our cherished system of government… must read this book.” Tyrrell, dropping a hint for readers about the identity of his coauthor, revealed that “Anonymous” was a person who “has been close to the center of politics for as long as I have known him/her.” He added, “Between the two of us we know most of the key players in this book.”

Judge Robert Bork, an icon of the conservative legal movement who served as resident-scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, did his part by publishing a review of the impeachment docudrama for the December issue of the American Spectator. Bork heaped praise on the anti-Clinton tome, stating that the authors had made out a “powerful case” for removing Bill Clinton and describing the Clinton presidency as the “sleaziest” administration in the nation’s history. Bork gave two thumbs up to the book’s plot development, which began with Whitewater crimes and ended with a suspenseful Senate trial of Bill Clinton led by the lionlike House manager, Henry Hyde. Judge Bork hinted that the authors may have gained some inside information from the Office of Independent Counsel concerning the draft referral, telling readers provocatively: “All of the scenery is not in place … because a major factor, the Report of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, has not yet been submitted. The authors assume that it will be [released] by mid-1998, though they can say only that the report concerns ‘the Whitewater cover-up.’”

Looking back at the pieces of evidence buried in the archives from late 1997, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there was some loose communication or coordination between these giants within the conservative Republican movement when it came to the now-forgotten impeachment drive that predated the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Robert Bork and Ted Olson were both close to Starr; they moved in circles that would enable them to learn discreetly what OIC might be working on. That all these men seemed to be floating trial balloons, simultaneously, with respect to an impeachment based on the Whitewater evidence, does not appear to be coincidental. As David Brock would sum it up: “The timing of it is all just extremely interesting.”

At the same time, Ken Starr never received sufficient credit for keeping his draft report to Congress largely under wraps. By December 1997, the independent counsel had essentially concluded that a Whitewater-related impeachment referral to Congress would not fly. In a responsible fashion, he took pains to make sure that the specifics of the possible charges against President Clinton were not leaked to the media. Starr himself would later underscore that the draft referral was not made public until much later. “You will not find a single suggestion that any such thing was in preparation,” he said, “until I revealed it in November of 1998 in my testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.” Starr added, in defense of himself and his OIC team, that they could have used this to damage Clinton if that had been the singular endgame. “Look, we’ve been accused of every kind of wrongdoing and unprofessionalism and [being] out to get the president and so forth,” Starr said. “We had information that is very unflattering to [Clinton]—that he committed perjury in [McDougal’s] May 1996 trial, not over sex but over his financial arrangements in the 1980s. And we safeguarded