Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [234]
Yet the purported Jordan connection turned out to be much ado about nothing, as demonstrated by the scant mention of it in OIC’s final report. Even during Lewinsky’s extended lunch conversation with Tripp, each word of which was taped by the FBI, nothing implicated Jordan in any wrongdoing.
Finally, Justice Department lawyers felt hoodwinked, if not betrayed, when they learned about OIC’s extensive contacts with the Paula Jones camp. Especially alarming was the discovery that Tripp had initially contacted Starr’s office after the elves had used one of OIC’s own prosecutors (Paul Rosenzweig) as the conduit to gain her access to the office. Why had Jackie Bennett failed to reveal that connection during their “urgent” discussions? If more facts had been put on the table, Holder and others felt, they would have asked “some searching questions and likely reached a different decision.”
It was on this topic, more than any, that a lack of trust came to infect the relationship between the Justice Department and Starr’s operation. The hawks on the OIC team, to the end, would make no apologies about the office’s loose association with actors in the Jones litigation. “I never had [any] problem with getting stuff from the Jones people,” Sol Wisenberg later retorted. “I have no problem if Paula Jones calls up and says, ‘Guess what’s happening in my case.’ I mean, I have no f——ing problem with that as long as it’s all revealed.” Yet Justice Department officials had several big problems with it. Among other things, if they had been informed about the unholy connection between Starr’s team and the Paula Jones forces, they said, this certainly could have tipped the scales in favor of selecting a different independent counsel, regardless of Michael Isikoff’s artificial deadline. As one senior DOJ lawyer stated: “We were told the sky would fall.” After the dust had settled, “it turned into a tawdry investigation involving oral sex.”
Looking back on these events, Deputy Attorney General Holder concluded, recognizing that it was a supreme understatement: “If I knew everything [I know today], and if you could remove that time pressure, I think we would have asked somebody else to look at the case.”
Ironically, the Justice Department lawyers ended up walking away from this ugly presidential sex scandal unscathed, while Ken Starr and his prosecutors marched directly into the jaws of the crocodile.
CHAPTER
28
“THE BRACE”
Jackie Bennett would have preferred to chill out for a few days. “Monica didn’t know that we had recorded her,” he explained. “The White House didn’t know any of this.” In an ideal world, OIC would have liked to “[sit] back and see what happens. Not do anything that would tip anybody off.”
Yet time seemed to be moving in strange directions these days. Newsweek didn’t hit the newsstands until Monday morning, but rough copies got faxed out over the weekend for use on Sunday morning television shows. Bennett later concluded that Isikoff’s “actual deadline” given modern typesetting technology was “probably an awful lot later than he had let on.” At the time, though, Bennett was operating on the assumption that the trigger would be pulled on Friday afternoon.
Early Friday morning, Ken Starr “hastened in” to work. The head of DOJ’s Public Integrity section, Lee Radek, had walked over to Starr’s office accompanied by his deputy, Josh Hochberg.
The group sat around a speakerphone and placed an emergency call to Judge David Sentelle, the federal judge whose three-judge panel had appointed Starr and presided over independent counsel investigations. At approximately 9:30, they reached Sentelle at home—his daughter was having jaw surgery and he had been awaiting a call from the hospital. After hearing a synopsis of the new developments, Sentelle