Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [250]
Bernie Lewinsky, clearly distraught, got on the line and told his daughter, “Bill Ginsburg is going to be your lawyer.”
Monica would recall that she responded, “Bill Ginsburg? The malpractice lawyer?” Although it was unknown to anyone else in the world, she had called Ginsburg after Thanksgiving to sound him out on “the definition of perjury”—she had never imagined that this garrulous personal-injury defense lawyer soon would represent her.
Bernie Lewinsky said to his daughter, “Do what Ginsburg says.”
In Monica’s own mind, Frank Carter was still her lawyer. But it was 11:30 at night and something had to be done. “It was fine,” she said. “I trusted my dad. So if my dad’s telling me to do something, I did it.”
William Ginsburg took charge, administering a tongue lashing to the OIC prosecutors. Mike Emmick would later say, struggling to sound diplomatic, “So Ginsburg was kind of bombastic, an odd sort of fellow. He said a lot of rude stuff to me on the phone, which is an odd thing when you’re, you know, trying to represent someone in a cooperation mode.” The OIC prosecutors quickly realized that Bill Ginsburg was no Perry Mason. When Emmick began talking about possible immunity for Monica, Ginsburg cut in sarcastically: “Oh, I didn’t know you were a judge!” Emmick was flabbergasted. “He [Ginsburg] said a couple of other things like that, that suggested that he really didn’t know what the heck he was talking about.”
Ginsburg also began pestering Emmick to reduce some kind of immunity agreement to writing and fax it to him. Emmick answered, “If we have to put this in writing, I gotta go drive back to the office. It’s already eleven o’clock at night. Why don’t you just make up your mind?” Ginsburg snapped back that this was impossible, because “I haven’t even talked to my client yet.” So Emmick handed the phone to Monica and let her communicate with her new attorney, for better or worse.
After this brief consultation, Emmick next made an offer that—if it had been accepted on the spot—might have led to a completely different outcome in this prolonged saga. In one of the greatest lost opportunities for both sides, Emmick retrieved the phone and told Ginsburg, “We’ll give you a pass.” This was prosecutorial lingo for “we’ll give you complete immunity.” Although Ken Starr’s office would later back-pedal and argue that Emmick did not have the authority to make a binding immunity agreement on that night, Emmick would insist that if Ginsburg had accepted the deal at that moment, it would have been virtually impossible for OIC’s top brass to undo it. “Yes, absolutely,” Emmick said later. If Monica had accepted the immunity deal, then and there, he was “prepared to make it stick.”
Bruce Udolf concurred that there was “absolutely” a deal that he considered legally and morally binding. He added, “If the OIC had honored the deal, seven months of parading people in front of the grand jury would have ended. Monica said in the end what she said in the beginning. If she had been given incentive to cooperate right away, we would have known if we had a prosecutable case right away. If not, the country could have been spared much of what took place over the next year.”
On the other end of the phone, Bill Ginsburg was conferring loudly with Bernie Lewinsky. Word circulated in whispers among OIC lawyers that it sounded as if Ginsburg had been drinking—more than just a friendly cocktail. Emmick would sum up his impressions of Bill Ginsburg that night: “His mood was very, I don’t know, ‘bombastic’ is the word that keeps coming to mind, but very sort of dismissive. I don’t think he really was taking any of this seriously.” Udolf, who had no reason to stick up for OIC after later being shunned as a traitor, nonetheless concurred: “He