Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [251]
The FBI agents and prosecutors dropped the bombshell that they already possessed a copy of Monica Lewinsky’s affidavit in the Paula Jones case. Even though Frank Carter had not formally filed that document with the court in Little Rock—the package was still en route to Judge Susan Webber Wright’s chambers and would arrive the next day—they had somehow put their hands on a copy. Ginsburg said to Emmick, “Can you fax me this affidavit?” Emmick replied, “Yes, we can fax it to you.” Fallon made a face indicating, “I can’t believe you just said that.” After another time-out, during which the prosecutor engaged in a heated conversation with his FBI agents, Emmick returned to the phone and said that he could not fax a copy of the affidavit, because there was “no fax machine in the hotel room.”
In fact, the FBI agents had reminded Emmick that this crucial document on which OIC was premising its criminal pursuit of Lewinsky had not even been docketed in the federal court house. Once again, OIC was trying to stay “ahead of the curve.”
During the course of their whispered conversations in the hotel room, Emmick and the FBI agents had repeatedly suggested that the situation with Lewinsky was “time sensitive.” Marcia Lewis remembered looking at the clock and being puzzled by their perceived urgency. “I couldn’t understand what they meant by ‘time sensitive,’” she said. Ginsburg decided to call the question; he couldn’t deal with prosecutors like this from three thousand miles away. “We can’t say that she’s going to cooperate now,” he boomed loudly over the telephone. “I’ll catch the redeye, and I’ll get there and this thing will move along as quickly as it can.”
For the life of her, Monica’s mother could not remember meeting Bill Ginsburg, although he kept telling the prosecutors that he was an intimate family friend. She knew that he was an acquaintance of Bernie’s, but she could not recall his ever setting foot in their home. Still, she was grateful that someone was prepared to come to Monica’s rescue. She had asked Starr’s lawyers as gingerly as possible whether she and Monica could “take a room in the hotel so that we could sleep.” So far, there was no sense that walking out the door was an option. As Marcia Lewis would describe it, “They never said, ‘We’ll shoot you if you leave.’ But it was very clear to me we weren’t supposed to leave. So yes, they can technically say that we weren’t ‘held’ there. I mean, that’s ludicrous.”
Ginsburg got back on the line with Emmick. “Look,” he said, using his tough voice, “you’ve got a young lady there who is my client.… You’ve held her for in excess of several hours, and you have no right to speak with her whatsoever without having given her the right to call an attorney.” As Ginsburg would reconstruct it years later, “So I basically gave him Miranda in the teeth and told him, you know, this was out of line.”
Ginsburg demanded to speak with Monica again, now ordering her, “Just leave. Don’t say another word to them, but leave.” Emmick turned to Monica and her mother and said, “Well, he says there’s no deal, so I guess we’re done.” The two women looked at each other. Did this mean they could return to Monica’s apartment? Emmick shrugged his shoulders. “Fine, you can go home.” Emmick remembered this moment as “a little bit touching.” All of them “had actually been through quite a lot.” Monica and her mother, as they gathered up their belongings, said a lot of “really nice things,” including “Thank you for being so nice to us and for being so professional and for explaining all these things and letting me [Marcia] come down and all the delays—you’ve really just been wonderful.” Emmick, who hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, was thoroughly burned out. He was feeling good, in one way, about the way things had gone down. “We thought we had done everything right in some very, very difficult circumstances,” he would say, recalling that night with weariness.
On their way out, the FBI agents handed Monica and her