Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [208]
Over Christmas break, while Monica took a break in New York City, Frank Carter contacted one of the Jones lawyers in Dallas, recounting the story of “this poor young girl” and asking, “Why are you going to sweep her up in this and tag her with this stuff?” The Dallas lawyer listened politely, then replied, “We’re casting a wide net to try to get as much information as we can, and we’re not inclined to withdraw a subpoena.” He did inform Carter, lawyer to lawyer, that “there have been other women who have been subpoenaed who have filed motions to quash so we’re used to this happening.” The Dallas lawyer even gave Carter the phone number for Barry Ward, Judge Wright’s law clerk in Little Rock, to cut through the red tape so that Carter could file his motion and affidavit expeditiously. The Washington criminal defense attorney felt that he was making good progress.
As part of his due diligence, Carter also contacted the president’s attorney of record, Bob Bennett. He and Bennett had known each other for years as members of the criminal defense bar in D.C. He asked—did Bennett know why Monica Lewinsky might be on the witness list? Bennett replied that he had no clue: “I’ve done some asking around, and I don’t have any information that would be of assistance to you. Or about your lady.” As far as he could tell, Bennett said, this was a classic fishing expedition. For Carter, this response confirmed what he had already concluded—that Monica was “a client who was nothing more than a speck on the horizon.”
After Christmas, Monica Lewinsky returned to Carter’s office, where he reviewed the draft affidavit. The lawyer closed the door of his conference room and talked through each point, scribbling with a red pen and typing changes directly onto his computer. He and Monica went through the document “paragraph by paragraph” until the young woman indicated that she “felt very comfortable with the finished product.”
There was a notary located in the building, so they walked down the hall to have it signed and duly notarized. Carter ran off a copy and handed it to Monica, keeping the original. Carter said that he would complete his research on the motion to quash, then FedEx the motion and affidavit directly to Judge Susan Webber Wright in Arkansas, hopefully within a week.
As attorney and client parted company, on Wednesday, January 7, they were the only two people in the world who possessed copies of the affidavit. Carter said later, still wondering how it got into the hands of Ken Starr’s prosecutors, “No one else, absolutely positively no one else got a copy of that.”
MONICA Lewinsky, as she climbed into a cab, knew that the affidavit she was carrying might be false. In paragraph 8 of the document, she had stated: “I have never had a sexual relationship with the President.” The affidavit also averred that in the period after she ceased working in the White House, the only times she had seen the president were during “official receptions, formal functions or events.” She made all these false statements “under the penalty of perjury.”
Thinking back on it, Monica admitted that she knew that she had done something wrong. Yet there were plenty of ways that she could justify this fibbing. When it came to the “no sex” statement, she remembered thinking, “Okay, I can argue to myself that this is true, because we didn’t actually have intercourse.” As she arrived at her Watergate apartment, stepping out of the cab with the document safely stashed in a folder in her handbag, she felt more and more comfortable that there were plausible arguments she could pull out of her hat if Paula Jones’s lawyers ever tried to prove she had committed perjury. “I could parse that affidavit probably as well as anyone else, I guess,” Monica explained. “Could you find a way to make it true? Yes.