Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [233]
Not everyone agreed that Isikoff deserved an award. Some OIC prosecutors felt that he had been too “aggressive.” Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp’s literary agent friend, grumbled that “Spikey” had manipulated the situation, and injected himself into events in a way that made him both reporter and subject of the saga. “All along, Michael Isikoff was a player in this story,” she complained in a Slate piece titled “Spikey’s Hypocrisy.” “He guarded the story with the ferocity of a mother tiger hovering over the last shard of an impala’s bloody haunch.”
A number of federal prosecutors and judges, of both political stripes, would privately concur that letting a reporter establish ground rules and set deadlines was a major blunder for both OIC and the Justice Department. The job of federal law enforcement was to fight crime—not to prevent Newsweek reporters from contacting sources simply because they might prod Bill Clinton or any other witness to tell the truth.
One federal judge who had a strong Republican résumé and who had served as a state court prosecutor before ascending to the bench said that OIC’s decision to allow Isikoff to establish the ground rules backfired terribly. Even if Starr’s prosecutors had secretly hoped to punish Clinton for his exploits with the intern and for his lack of truthfulness, it would have been much better to allow Isikoff to publish his story and then permit the national media to have a field day with the scandalous facts. The judge explained: “He [Clinton] would have still faced political heat. But the process would not have been initiated by Starr.” Starr was already a political lightning rod; once he planted himself in the middle of this electrical storm, “he became the issue as much as Clinton.”
Moreover, other observers noted that the reasons that were so urgently presented by Starr’s prosecutors to the Reno Justice Department for taking over the Lewinsky case turned out to be flimsy. The argument that Linda Tripp held great significance as a witness for OIC and, further, that her testimony would be tainted if she were convinced to perjure herself was dramatically overblown. By this point in 1998, the Vince Foster matter had been put to rest. The Travel Office matter was nearly wrapped up; at any rate, Tripp was a minor player in that saga. Tripp herself would later acknowledge that she never had any serious “kinsmanship” with Starr’s office. Indeed, she later admitted that when Goldberg suggested that she call OIC, she wasn’t even sure if Starr and his office “were still in existence.”
Likewise, the argument that Tripp was somehow in danger of being compromised as a government witness was a whopping exaggeration. Tripp had no intention of perjuring herself in the Jones case. She had contacted the Jones attorneys in Dallas, personally, to make sure that she disgorged every damning detail of the story about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton the moment she was deposed. Even Paul Rosenzweig, one of Ken Starr’s most loyal prosecutors, later admitted that this justification was “something more of an afterthought.”
Finally, the concern about the Vernon Jordan connection, while valid on the surface, proved to be a colossal overstatement. OIC had embraced the Jordan story (as told by Linda Tripp) with open arms—largely because the Starr prosecutors wanted to believe it. Tripp herself would admit years later, “I made that a big deal. I mean I did, because to me that was the link to prove the obstruction, to prove the subornation of perjury.… I highlighted it as an enormous deal to me.” Tripp would profess that it was only because she was a “mechanical midget” that Jordan had escaped his deserved day of reckoning. She explained that she had failed to record a key phone conversation, in which Lewinsky had confessed that Jordan played a role in creating the false affidavit and promised her a job as her payoff, because of a technical screwup. It turned out, said Tripp, that her little black box from RadioShack was only capable of recording calls