Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [218]
Udolf, a registered Democrat, had already begun rubbing many OIC prosecutors the wrong way. He had been “carping” about the poor quality of the tapes and how the FBI had handled the wiring of Tripp. Both he and prosecutor Mary Anne Wirth, who had spent considerable time with Tripp the previous night, had reported that they didn’t trust her worth a nickel. Now, Udolf’s words sounded like heresy to many of his colleagues: “What if Monica is fantasizing this?” he asked. “We can be the hero.” OIC could “rebut” the allegations being spun out by Tripp, expose her anti-Clinton paranoiac plot, and come out looking like the truth-seeking white hats.
Jackie Bennett and other hard-chargers in the room, like Sol Wisenberg, were becoming agitated. “Nothing we were ever going to do in any scenario, ever, was going to put us into hero status in the Clinton White House,” Bennett would later say. “And it’s not something that we should have wanted, anyway. I mean, that wasn’t our job.”
From Little Rock, Hickman Ewing and Bob Bittman chimed in by speaker-phone. They counseled strongly in favor of taking the case and running with it. The Clintons, after all, had been skating on the edge of lawlessness for years. Why cut them any slack now? “We have a duty to investigate ongoing crimes,” said Bittman, who had prosecuted sex offenses in Maryland before joining OIC.
Mary Ann Wirth, with years’ worth of experience as a federal prosecutor in New York, expressed serious concern about delving into the president’s sex life. Wasn’t there a high likelihood that this would blow up in their faces, just like the Bob Woodward story had caused them grief when they began interviewing women in Arkansas the previous spring? Why not deputize another prosecutor to take on this undignified, sex-laden investigation? The hard-liners seated at the table rolled their eyes.
Starr made sure everyone had a chance to weigh in. He told his prosecutors: “We want to do it the right way.”
After absorbing the give-and-take for two hours and after consulting with FBI agents who had listened to the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes with their own ears, Starr reached his own conclusion. “This is serious stuff,” he declared. In Starr’s mind, the single most important factor was the “connection between Vernon Jordan and Monica Lewinsky,” which was “strangely similar to what we saw with [Webb] Hubbell.” The evidence they had unearthed to date indicated that Hubbell had received lucrative consulting deals, including one hundred thousand dollars in cash from the Riady Corporation for work that was “at best ambiguous.” It was Vernon Jordan who had arranged for Hubbell to receive “consulting” jobs from this parent company of Revlon while Hubbell was under criminal investigation. Now, it appeared “he was doing the same for Monica Lewinsky.”
Ken Starr did not agree with Jackie Bennett that they already possessed “related-to” jurisdiction. Yet he concurred that OIC needed to take the case. In Starr’s mind, it was especially significant that Linda Tripp was “well known to us.” She had “been a witness in both the Foster death case, the Foster documents case, and in the Travel Office case.” Now, here was their own witness telling OIC that she had held back information in the Travel Office matter “because the right questions were not asked.” Even worse, their own witness “was being asked to participate in activity that certainly was potentially criminal,” to wit, “[filing] a perjurious affidavit.” This was starting to look and smell like witness tampering. OIC couldn’t sit idly by, Starr declared, while the White House coached government witnesses to lie.
Linda Tripp had made clear that she didn’t trust the Justice Department. A majority of Starr’s team shared Tripp’s distrust. If they tipped off Attorney General