Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [231]
Those seated around the table agreed that if the Justice Department dragged its feet, they would all be accused of “obstructing the investigation in order to benefit the president.” There was also a view that DOJ “didn’t have any ability to get our own investigation up and running in such short order.”
One lawyer present recalled feeling as if “the ghost of John Mitchell was floating around.” Mitchell had been President Nixon’s attorney general who was convicted of participating in the Watergate cover-up and became the first U.S. attorney general to serve a prison term. Nobody in the room wanted to suffer Mitchell’s fate once the Lewinsky bomb dropped. This new Lewinsky matter was radioactive. The underlying Paula Jones case was totally unrelated to DOJ’s jurisdiction. Why not let someone else handle it?
Ohlson, seated beside the deputy attorney general, recalled feeling, “Oh, my God …” this could “lead to the president’s resignation.” Although his mind did not conjure up the word “impeachment,” he felt that if the allegations were true, “out of sheer and utter embarrassment [President Clinton] would end up resigning.” Ohlson was also ticking through a dozen questions in his mind: “Are they [OIC] going to wire up Lewinsky? What exactly are they going to do to her in terms of the investigative steps, and just how ugly is this about to become?”
Ohlson recalled, foremost, feeling that danger had crept into the equation. “There really was the sense of the world being turned upside down in very short order here.”
Eric Holder was thinking in much more pragmatic terms. “From my perspective, the question was not whether we [gave the case to Starr],” he later explained. “But how.” The biggest worry, for Holder, was an institutional one. For the good of the two-hundred-year-old Justice Department, how did DOJ hand this hot potato off to OIC without getting its own hands singed in the process?
Janet Reno ducked out of the room to beat out a fire on a different matter. When she returned, she did not retake her seat. As Holder would explain, “She’s a pretty cool character. And she’s not a person who exhibits emotion, though she feels it.” With one hand on the chair, Reno said, “This is what we need to do.” She ticked off an action plan: DOJ would give the case to Starr, rather than seeking the appointment of a different independent counsel, because the latter was not feasible under the existing time constraints. DOJ would accomplish this by requesting expansion of Starr’s jurisdiction, rather than agreeing with Starr’s argument that this was “related to” his jurisdiction—that was bunk. The DOJ people would hand off the investigation and keep their fingers out of the case, so they could not be accused of steering it into a ditch. There was zero time for horsing around, so they would contact the three-judge panel by telephone immediately, and seek authority for Starr to do the job he had so forcefully requested.
Holder would later comment, “You know, it didn’t make us very popular, I’m sure, at the White House.” Yet at the time, all of the top brass in the Justice Department were convinced “it was the right thing to do.”
Years later, as she sat back in a wicker chair on the screened porch of her Miami home, Reno herself recalled the unwinnable dilemma that had confronted her. Just one month before the Lewinsky-Tripp tape-recording incident, she had taken a drubbing in the national media for refusing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate alleged unlawful fund-raising telephone calls made by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore initiated from the White House during the reelection campaign of 1996. Reno had concluded these allegations were too flimsy. Now, here were new politically charged allegations,