Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [241]
Monica alternately cried and composed herself. Emmick tried to use his best college psychology, telling the woman that she was free to get up and walk out “any time she wanted to.” To this, Monica replied, “No, no, I’ll be okay. I want to hear more.… I have some questions.” Although at times she looked as if an eighteen-wheeler had just run over her, Emmick noticed that Monica was capable of “completely composing herself, and then asking rational, sensible questions and having some interaction with us.”
In reconstructing that difficult day, Monica admitted that Mike Emmick had “laid out the options” and told her that she could “leave at any time.” Nonetheless, the former intern said, “In my book, he lied. They were all liars in there. And they were manipulators.”
For one, Lewinsky believed that leaving was not a realistic option. Agent Fallon had “accidentally” shown her his set of handcuffs. He had also flashed his gun. When she asked if the gun was loaded, Monica recalled vividly, “[Fallon] replied ‘yes’ and asked me if it made me uncomfortable.… So I don’t know why somebody would think that they were really free to leave without there being consequences.”
Monica would later explain: “If you’re in a castle and there’s a moat around you with sharks and someone says ‘You’re free to go whenever you want’—well, that’s great, but ‘How the hell do I get out of here?’”
Moreover, Starr’s team seemed bent on getting her to do their dirty work. The former intern would insist that Emmick told her that if she cooperated, they would expect her to make some phone calls that they would tape-record, and maybe “put on a body wire and go and talk to Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and possibly even the president.” She was adamant that she would not be a stool pigeon. “Nobody was going to get me to wear a wire,” she later said. “I can tell you that. If threatening my mom and ultimately a few days later threatening my dad, too, wasn’t going to get me to do that, nobody was going to get me to do that.” Surreptitiously recording phone calls, as far as she was concerned, simply was “not in my being.” She added sarcastically, “Nothing against Linda Tripp.”
Indeed, Monica said that she had a sharp recollection of the discussion about wearing a body wire, because it caused her to concoct a crazy plan: What if she agreed to wire herself and visit Vernon Jordan’s office, then “tried to mess it up on purpose” by blurting out something that would tip off Jordan? She thought to herself: “Well, maybe I should do that and then I won’t get in trouble.” Monica even tested out this idea with one of the agents, asking innocently: “Well what if I mess up … because I’m so nervous?”
Emmick, for his part, would insist that—whatever might have been said of wiring Monica—there was never any mention of trying to get her to tape-record President Clinton. This option had been openly discussed during their planning stage, and OIC prosecutors had agreed “that’s an awfully big step. It wasn’t even clear that the president was even speaking to Monica at this point, so sending her into the Oval Office wired wasn’t practical.” Even when it came to taping Jordan, the OIC prosecutors felt that he was likely “too cagey a fellow for anything like that to work,” said Emmick. “The only real possibility we thought was maybe something with Betty Currie.”
There was also the ongoing dispute as to whether OIC and the FBI were actively dissuading their witness from contacting her attorney. Early in the colloquy, Monica had asked, “Should I have a lawyer?” She specifically mentioned to Starr’s team that she had retained Frank Carter to draft her affidavit in the Jones case. Emmick said to her, “If you want a lawyer, you can get a lawyer.” But he added, “Obviously, it’s better that the fewer people know [the better] if you’re going to decide to go the undercover route.” Emmick was thinking, first, that it would jeopardize Monica’s ability to get wired and cooperate if Carter was reporting to Vernon Jordan. The word might ricochet back to the White