Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [293]
Ewing understood the shift in priorities, now that the president had been caught with his pants down in the Lewinsky/Paula Jones soap opera. Yet he was not prepared to let the case against First Lady Hillary Clinton die before the grand jury expired. He wanted to give it every ounce of Tennessee grit at his command. Former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker was still scheduled for trial on tax fraud charges on February 23. If they were able to strike a plea deal on the eve of trial, Tucker might finally cough up information that was helpful—“especially as to Mrs. Clinton.” So as the rest of the office was going great guns on the Monica Lewinsky case, which had fallen into their laps like manna from heaven, Ewing was still cobbling together his dwindling resources to take one final shot at Hillary.
With these two efforts moving ahead on wholly disconnected east-west tracks, the Office of Independent Counsel steamed forward, entering a winter like no other.
IF a single event convinced the Starr prosecutors that they were dealing with obstruction of justice, it was the unexpected visit from a lawyer named Lawrence Wechsler, just two days after the Lewinsky story blew open in the media. Wechsler, a respected Washington criminal defense attorney, appeared at the OIC office carrying a flat box. The bespectacled lawyer asked to meet privately with Ken Starr. Inside a small conference room, with Starr and Jackie Bennett listening with astonishment, Wechsler informed them that he represented Betty Currie. “This is not going to look good for the president,” he stated. The lawyer quietly unpacked a collection of gifts—T-shirts, photos, and assorted baubles—that President Clinton had given to Monica Lewinsky. These gifts had been kept inside a box under Currie’s bed, Wechsler said, at Ms. Lewinsky’s request.
As Starr and Bennett did their best to camouflage their disbelief, the heavyset criminal attorney explained that Currie was being pressured heavily by the White House to protect the president. Around the time of the Paula Jones deposition, Clinton had called his secretary into the White House to rehearse a series of facts about his relationship with Monica that simply weren’t true. Consequently, Betty and her husband had gone into hiding. The poised, discreet African American woman knew plenty about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, but her loyalty to the president was causing her to feel conflicted. Starr’s office would have to handle this matter delicately to extract the full story from her, but she was prepared to cooperate.
This surprise visit, Ken Starr recalled, was a defining moment in his investigation. He was now certain that the president was lying, and engaging in blatant obstruction by pressuring others to cover up for him.
Ken Starr viewed his role as that of a “minesweeper.” He always needed to be on the alert for explosives that might blow up in OIC’s face. Betty Currie’s lawyer assured him that his client was an “honorable, loyal, God-fearing, church-attending lady who felt just terribly about all of this.” Betty was being barraged by “increasingly urgent overtures from the White House … pages and so forth,” transmitting messages such as “we love you, please call us.” The president’s secretary was prepared to meet with OIC to have an honest discussion. But this meeting needed to occur “off campus.”
The next day, Sunday, Starr’s new deputy Bob Bittman sat alongside two FBI agents in a room at the Bethesda Marriott Residence Inn, attending a secret meeting with Betty Currie and her lawyers. Although Currie appeared uncomfortable seated on a couch facing the prosecutor, she was forthcoming