Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [237]
Bennett nodded and sauntered back to his office.
In that thirty-second exchange, OIC had made one of its most crucial decisions in the sting of Monica Lewinsky. It was almost certainly a legal assessment that was ill advised.
Emmick later pieced together how events transpired that night: “I don’t actually have very much recollection of Ken [Starr] being involved at all. I also don’t have much recollection of anybody being in charge. I know that Jackie was the head of the office, and I had some meetings with Jackie, but the office at that time was more or less not a traditionally organized kind of place.” Each person had his or her own projects, which evolved in a fluid way. It was not, Emmick said frankly, “a top-down sort of organizational structure.”
For the rest of the night, as grogginess and dreams of a long, leisurely sleep competed for his attention, Mike Emmick sat alone in his office, typing away and asking himself, as another part of his brain reassured him there was no reason to be nervous: “Well, what am I going to say? How am I going to say it?”
ON Friday morning, clusters of OIC prosecutors and FBI agents buzzed around the office. Josh Hochberg from DOJ stopped by Emmick’s office and raised, for a second time, a concern that Monica Lewinsky “has an attorney. What’s your thinking on that?” Emmick ticked through his analysis of the previous night. Hochberg did not overrule or countermand OIC. He just listened.
In hindsight, Emmick would come to admit that the entire plan “wasn’t gamed out nearly as much as we might have hoped.” Among other things, it was a gross miscalculation to assume that this “was going to be a very brief kind of a presentation,” after which Lewinsky would simply roll over and cooperate fully with OIC. Looking back on it, Emmick would marvel at his own naïveté in believing that this confrontation with Monica Lewinsky, over an affair with Bill Clinton that could destroy Clinton’s presidency, would be wrapped up neatly in a fifteen-minute exchange.
As events played out, he confessed, it took considerably longer. “Oh, it did,” Emmick repeated with an exhausted sigh.
As Emmick was getting ready to depart for the Pentagon City Mall—where Linda Tripp had arranged to meet with Monica Lewinsky—he peered down the hallway and saw a group of prosecutors congregating around Ken Starr’s office. Feeling somewhat cranky, Emmick thought to himself, “Gosh, here I am about to go talk with this person, and I’m not even at the meetings.” So Emmick strode down the hall, his mind still ticking through the possible complications that could arise once he confronted his quarry. One thing that he had been worrying about was that Ms. Lewinsky might know enough to say, “Gosh, am I going to get prosecuted? Shouldn’t I get immunity?” What was his response going to be to that simple question? Emmick decided to put it directly to his boss. He pulled Ken Starr aside and spoke in a confidential tone: “One of the things that may happen is that she may insist on immunity,” he said. “So what should we do? Do we have the authority to try to handle this on an ad hoc basis, based on what the views of the people there are?” According to Emmick’s distinct recollection, Starr said, “Yes, I’ll just have to leave it to the people who are there.” Emmick thought to himself, “Oh, that’s good.” One of the things that the office had become known for was its “long, protracted discussions about everything under the sun, and it was nice to have that preauthorization.”
With that loose end tied up, Emmick gathered