Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [307]
In Emmick’s case, one newspaper story trumpeted: “STARR AIDE NOT STRANGER TO SEX TAPE INQUIRIES,” suggesting that the Southern California prosecutor had been involved in sleazy sex crime prosecutions for the past decade. The media simultaneously clobbered Udolf, proclaiming that the Miami vice squad prosecutor had once been forced to flee his position as district attorney in an Atlanta suburb, because he had wrongfully jailed a man for possession of a stolen gun, requiring taxpayers to ante up fifty thousand dollars to correct his misfeasance. An Atlanta Constitution editorial, widely circulated by the White House in brown envelopes and faxes, referred to Udolf as “a man who trampled a citizen’s rights; now he’s investigating the President.”
Emmick and Udolf were being squeezed from both ends. The hard-liners inside OIC, led by Sol Wisenberg, saw them as Clinton apologists. It was time to stand up and to be strong, they felt, or succumb to the weak defectors in the office. Wisenberg feared that Emmick and Udolf were positioning themselves to take over the Lewinsky investigation. “So I approached Jackie to f——ing do something about it,” he later recounted. Wisenberg shouted at Bennett, “Goddam it, you can’t let something like this happen. You can’t let them f——ing call meetings like they’re running the f——ing meetings.”
As a result of this power play, Emmick and Udolf were pushed out of meaningful roles. Instead, the more aggressive, less experienced Bob Bittman solidified his position as leader of the Lewinsky investigation. Wisenberg, whose tour of duty with OIC was set to expire, agreed to stay on as deputy in charge of Lewinsky grand jury matters.
One former OIC prosecutor who generally admired Ken Starr (and thus asked not to be identified) worried that a “B team” quality had crept into the new management structure. None of the new prosecutors running the show in Starr’s office had developed those key Washington connections that were necessary to “keep a perspective and make things run smoothly.” None of them had a positive working relationship with the Justice Department or with the White House Counsel’s Office, or with David Kendall, who stood between OIC and extracting information from the president and First Lady. Inside the Beltway, personal relationships and private telephone numbers and feelings of mutual trust meant everything. The new leadership team that had locked down control of the OIC operation in Washington, virtually overnight, possessed none of these assets.
The newly constituted Starr office quickly flexed its muscles by going after Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist for the Washington Post and the New Yorker, who was believed to be spreading “vicious, false information” about OIC to the media. Starr’s prosecutors were itching to get Blumenthal under oath. As Starr himself would explain: “We viewed it as possibly bearing on obstruction. Why would the White House, through a very senior adviser who has all of these friendships in the press … be disseminating sewage?”
Yet the moment OIC issued a subpoena to Blumenthal, this triggered a new uproar. In news reports, Starr’s office was suddenly being accused of thumbing its nose at First Amendment freedoms and the prerogatives of the press, in its wrongheaded quest to get Bill Clinton. Starr himself, taking out the garbage at his home in suburban Virginia, paused long enough to lecture reporters at the curbside: “It isn’t in the interest of the First Amendment for distortions, lies about career civil servants [or OIC prosecutors] to be spread.… Lies and distortions have no place in our First Amendment universe.”
As the OIC prosecutorial team poured its energy and resources into the Monica Lewinsky investigation, fighting feverishly on a dozen new fronts, one lone prosecutor took a different path, filled with hope that it would pay dividends.