Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [319]
A hushed-up meeting was held at OIC’s Washington offices on April 27, just before the Whitewater/Madison grand jury was scheduled to expire. In preparation, a thick draft indictment was reviewed by top prosecutors in Starr’s office. It was a defining moment for the Starr investigation. On April 25, Ken Starr and his prosecutors had visited the White House to question the First Lady under oath for the sixth time—on this occasion for nearly five hours—about her business dealings with the McDougals and her legal work for Madison Guaranty. Many remained skeptical of the truthfulness of the First Lady’s account, especially relating to the troublesome billing records issues. Yet the consensus was that any effort to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be extremely risky.
It was only Hickman Ewing, unshakable in his belief that Hillary Clinton had perjured herself, who clung to the hope that OIC might bring formal criminal charges against her before his investigation came to a close. Never before had a First Lady of the United States been indicted. That was no reason, in Ewing’s mind, to resist taking this historic plunge.
The Tennessee prosecutor still burned with frustration as he watched his fellow prosecutors trip over themselves pursuing the matter involving Monica Lewinsky; he believed far too much emphasis was being placed on this Johnny-come-lately investigation. Lewinsky had never been part of Starr’s original jurisdiction as independent counsel. In contrast, the office had spent four grueling years tracking down the facts relating to the Whitewater/Madison Guaranty irregularities involving the McDougals, Jim Guy Tucker, the Clintons, and other bad actors. Now, if it proceeded boldly, OIC could finally justify its existence. Ewing believed as passionately as he had ever believed anything in his career that Hillary Rodham Clinton needed to be brought to justice and tried in criminal court before a jury of her peers.
Yet Starr’s other top prosecutors, in private, worried that this would amount to whistling in the wind. Although they were thoroughly distrustful of Mrs. Clinton and leery of her testimony, getting an Arkansas or a Washington grand jury to indict the First Lady seemed like a long shot. The better course, they opined as they poured coffee and took seats at the conference table, was to funnel all of OIC’s resources into stalking the great bull elephant and bringing down Bill Clinton with one great blast relating to his perjured testimony in the Jones deposition. They repeated their mantra: “Forget about [Hillary]. We have the president in [our] sights.”
And so, Ewing later asserted, only half facetiously, “Monica saved Hillary.”
THE spring of 1998 was a busy time for OIC, as Starr’s prosecutors sought to tighten the noose around Bill Clinton’s neck. The president had lapsed into a state of evasive denial, continuing to disavow a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky but deferring to his lawyers whenever questions became uncomfortably specific.
The president’s secretary, Betty Currie, had turned out to be far less helpful than Starr’s team had hoped. After Currie had allowed herself to be swept back into the White House’s fold, she suddenly displayed signs of “amnesia.” As Jackie Bennett recalled, OIC had left the initial meetings with Currie and her attorney thinking: “Betty is the occasional rare person who is not going to lie. We haven’t seen many such people in our dealings with the Arkansas crowd.” After Currie appeared in the grand jury and gave testimony that was oblique and included plenty of “I don’t remembers,” the Starr prosecutors threw up their hands. “In a very short period of time she was backpedaling and forgetting,” said Bennett. “And so the view very quickly became in the office, you know, ‘they’ve gotten to her.’ And I think that’s probably what happened.”
So Starr’s office decided to summon a parade of its own witnesses to Washington who could