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By Root 2086 0

up before the grand jury expired. Now, with the Lewinsky investigation falling out of the sky “like a bolt out of the blue,” Jackie Bennett concluded that it was necessary to make some adjustments. Things were moving at warp speed; it was “all hands on deck in Washington.” Bittman, it turned out, was perfectly positioned to play a key role. While others were bracing Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton, he sat in an office a thousand miles away, alongside an FBI agent, listening to taped conversations between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. He had also drafted an “investigative plan,” which included action items such as subpoenaing telephone logs and other documents from the White House and drafting subpoenas—for Lewinsky, for her mother, for Betty Currie, and for other key witnesses.

Most prosecutors in D.C. were too busy to focus on this kind of careful lawyer work. So it had seemed natural for young Bob Bittman to fly to Washington to lend a hand, the week after the Lewinsky case broke open. Soon, he was functioning as the deputy in charge of that operation.

Jackie Bennett, who had run the D.C. office during the previous year, had no particular experience, or interest, in managing a massive new prosecution from the ground up. The Lewinsky case was Whitewater times ten. The roller-coaster speed of the Lewinsky investigation required Starr to reconfigure his Washington office overnight. Prosecutors like Mike Emmick and Bruce Udolf had far more experience than Bittman did. But they were viewed with increasing suspicion by their hard-line colleagues. As Bennett would say, in recalling how Bittman came to be selected to run this massive new investigation with such little experience: “There just weren’t many candidates.”

Bittman’s first order of business was to implement the investigative plan that he had mapped out. He would recall, “It was not the Holy Grail—much was obvious. Debriefing Linda Tripp. Issuing subpoenas. Getting traces on calls, DNRs [dialed number recorders]. Listing people involved. Issuing a subpoena to the mother and Monica and the dad.”

Bittman prided himself in being a cautious prosecutor. During the initial bracing of Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton, some OIC lawyers had sounded the war cry, declaring, “We have probable cause to believe she’s involved in a crime. Let’s arrest and charge her!” Bittman’s advice from Little Rock was, “No. That’s preposterous.” The Lewinsky investigation was potentially explosive. The slower they moved, the better. OIC needed to put pressure on the avuncular Mr. Ginsburg to see if he could be brought around. If that failed, only then should they move to Plan B. The best course would be to bring charges against Lewinsky in Northern Virginia, he thought, rather than in Washington, where the Lewinsky lawyers would be expecting it. The heavily African American juries in D.C. would be far too sympathetic to President Bill Clinton and to the young former intern. In contrast, the federal courts in Northern Virginia were an excellent place to prosecute, because judges and juries there “didn’t mess around.” Said Bittman, in laying out OIC’s strategy years later, “We decided it would be in Virginia. If we hadn’t worked out a deal, we would have [indicted her]. She would have been charged in mid-August in Virginia.”

OIC had one important ally in FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was a big fan of Starr’s work and did not particularly like or respect Bill Clinton. He immediately called to pledge whatever resources OIC needed to deal with the Lewinsky morass. Bittman spoke up directly: “I want twenty FBI agents and ten FAs [financial analysts].” He recalled that Director Freeh did not waste a minute: “We had them the next day.”

One person who was not pleased with the whole turn of events in Washington was Hickman Ewing, Jr., still camped out in Little Rock. In that Southern locale, the OIC offices were beginning to resemble a sheriff’s office covered with cobwebs in a ghost town. Ewing felt as if Bittman had been called by a trumpet blast and transported to the heavens of Washington with