Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [300]
Monica Lewinsky’s own lawyer, ironically, helped to unravel the deal. The bearded California attorney took to the national airwaves and became a sudden media darling, rubbing the prosecutors’ noses in the immunity deal as if he had won the jackpot. Ginsburg set a new record by appearing, in one day, on all five major Sunday television shows reserved for the political power hitters of Washington. During his Meet the Press debut, Ginsburg—who was alternately philosophical and in-your-face—told host Tim Russert that his client would provide her immunized testimony to the Starr prosecutors and the nation would be saved. “The president will remain in office,” the malpractice lawyer predicted, smiling with humility into the television camera. “He’ll do a good job. We’ll all hopefully have a sound economy, keep our jobs, and I think everything’s going to be fine.”
Ginsburg seemed to be crowing from every rooftop about beating the big bad Kenneth Starr. With Monica’s written proffer in hand, he proclaimed that the Starr prosecutors would only be able to prove that Clinton had lied in the Jones deposition about one thing—a consensual fling with a White House intern that had zero connection to the allegations by Paula Jones. First Lady Hillary Clinton might be justified in taking a rolling pin to her husband, Ginsburg now chuckled, and that might not be a pretty sight. But he did not expect that a jury would convict Bill Clinton any time soon. Monica Lewinsky could go on with her life, and the president could go on running the country, having (hopefully) learned his lesson that he needed to keep his bounding sex drive on a leash.
Ginsburg had initially felt contempt toward Clinton for soiling his hands in a sexual escapade with a young lady half his age. At one point he had even threatened to go on national TV and call Clinton a “pedophile.” Now, those feelings had melted into a sense of revulsion for the Starr prosecutors, who had insisted on turning this into a federal case. The California lawyer had a newfound pity for Clinton. “I felt sorry for the poor bastard,” Ginsburg said later. “That’s exactly what I thought to myself. I said, ‘I understand what’s going on. He’s a human being. Even though he’s president of the United States, he is clearly a human being.’”
Around the time he was riding high as a national lawyer-celebrity, with a deal nearly consummated, Ginsburg arranged a clandestine meeting at the Cosmos Club with the president’s lawyer, David Kendall. Ginsburg made clear that “we were completely on the president’s side and that we really care about what happens here.” To his credit, he also made clear that he would not allow Monica to deny the relationship under oath, because “I don’t suborn perjury.” Kendall seemed genuinely surprised at Ginsburg’s intimation that a relationship existed; he sat quietly and listened. The LA lawyer went on to communicate that if Clinton’s hit squad tried to “trash Monica in any way, shape, or form,” or suggest that “she was a crazy fool, a stalker, a prostitute, anything else,” they were in for a big surprise. Ginsburg told Kendall, “In the final analysis, you’ll be sorry, because I have the dirty laundry.”
Kendall seemed startled—if not baffled—by this cryptic threat.
Starr’s office, in the meantime, was developing a deep suspicion that the grinning, bombastic fifty-four-year-old California medical malpractice lawyer had crawled fully into bed with the Clinton White House. The “written proffer,” OIC hawks feared, was simply a ploy to skate around the truth in order to save Bill Clinton’s hide.
The more they saw of Ginsburg, the more the OIC prosecutors distrusted him. Ginsburg was captured in print telling one journalist: “I’m the most famous person in the world.” He quipped that he—rather than Monica—might accept Penthouse magazine’s two-million-dollar offer to pose partially nude. As journalists Ruth Marcus and Bob Woodward noted, the bearded Southern California lawyer “look[s] for all the world like he is having the time of his life.”
At a meeting convened on February 3, Jackie