Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [236]
Mike Emmick was a handsome, blue-eyed, laid-back Californian, who was viewed within the office as a ladies’ man. Who better to seduce the presidential seductress? Although Bennett in hindsight concluded that it was “probably a mistake” to lead off with Emmick, Bennett had become distracted by all this jockeying for lead roles. His feeling was, “Work needs to get done.” A number of the OIC prosecutors seemed to be staring at Emmick. The California lawyer finally said, “Well, I’ll [volunteer].”
Jackie Bennett waved his hand and said, “Go do it.” Bennett scratched his chin and added, “Let’s do it tomorrow.”
It was already pitch-dark outside. If they were going to “brace” or “confront” Monica Lewinsky on Friday, the whole script needed to be written and played out in less than a day—that didn’t leave much time for sleep. So Emmick “went into [his] office and closed the door and just sort of thought through, ‘Well, what am I going to say? How am I going to say it?’” He put on his “FBI agent hat,” trying to figure out what the most experienced, sophisticated agent would do in his shoes.
The California lawyer soon began “plunking away” at his computer, “trying out different approaches, things to say, things not to say.” Emmick had never executed this kind of brace. So he decided to sketch out a written plan, to give himself a detailed road map.
“The approach that we were envisioning,” he recalled, “was a discussion that would last, I guess, fifteen to twenty minutes.” The plan was to “explain to her [Lewinsky] what the situation was.” Emmick intended to sit down calmly with the young woman and say, “‘We’ve spoken to Tripp. We understand that you and the president had some kind of an affair, that you filed something in which you denied that there was such an affair, that the president was planning to do the same thing, that there was some sort of agreement between you to continue to deny this, and we would like to speak with you about it.’”
After the young woman had time to digest the seriousness of the situation, Emmick would calmly explain that their investigation “has been approved by the Department of Justice.” Lewinsky would then have to decide whether or not to cooperate. The California prosecutor would make sure that Lewinsky understood she would receive “credit” for any information she provided. Emmick was thinking, as he typed up his plan, “She could either just give us a debriefing about the situation. Or she could affirmatively go out and act, be wired on telephone calls, things like that, if she wanted to.”
The more Monica Lewinsky did to assist OIC in catching the bigger fish, the more “credit” she would receive. “But that was going to be left in her hands.”
Emmick’s fingers were becoming tired and hitting incorrect keys as he typed. When he squeezed his eyes shut for a brief rest, Emmick had trouble envisioning exactly how the brace would begin and end. “I had a great deal of apprehension,” he later admitted. He knew that this was “something that would come under great scrutiny later.” Consequently, he “wanted to make very sure that nothing was done that was done inappropriately.”
As Emmick fiddled with his script, Jackie Bennett stuck his head into the office. According to the information they had received from Linda Tripp, he told Emmick, a lawyer named Frank Carter had represented Monica Lewinsky in drafting the Paula Jones affidavit. Bennett asked, “Does this raise any issues relating to ‘contacts’ with represented persons?”
Emmick was the resident expert on this subject; he had made presentations for DOJ on the issue of “contacting” witnesses who were already represented by counsel. Emmick chewed over