Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [330]
In early May, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson handed the independent counsel an important win, rejecting the White House’s efforts to invoke “executive privilege” to shield key Clinton aides from appearing in front of the Lewinsky grand jury. The White House had worked frantically to keep two of its gatekeepers, Deputy Counsel Bruce Lindsey and Senior Adviser Sidney Blumenthal, from testifying about their conversations with the president and First Lady around the time of the Paula Jones deposition. Both of these Clintonites were on OIC’s “most wanted” list. Blumenthal, a former journalist who maintained strong ties to the media, had tried to make a monkey out of Starr’s office by howling that OIC was violating his First Amendment rights. Now Starr got the last word: In a sealed ruling that was swiftly leaked to the press, Judge Johnson ordered the presidential advisers to appear before the grand jury and to tell what they knew.
With OIC appearing to be on a roll, Bob Bittman wrote a seventh letter to David Kendall, demanding that President Clinton appear before the grand jury and ending with a touch of sarcasm: “Having tried and tried, I will now try once again. Please give me a straightforward yes or no answer to the following question: Will the President ever agree to testify voluntarily about the matters involving Ms. Lewinsky?”
In a blistering seven-page reply, Kendall told Bittman, in essence, to pound sand. He also took his younger opponent to task for his insolent tone, upbraiding him for the “Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this whole enterprise.”
Kendall had his own surprise up his sleeve: In a move that nearly blew Starr’s lawyers off their feet, Kendall on May 6 filed a “rule to show cause” against OIC, his second in a series of frontal assaults. After again accusing the special prosecutor of leaking grand jury information to the media (he had filed an initial “show cause” motion in February), he demanded that Starr appear before Judge Johnson and “show cause why your office and/or persons therein should not be held in contempt of court for these latest flagrant leaks.” Kendall cited dozens of examples, including the leak of Judge Johnson’s opinion just days earlier. Fox News seemed to know every detail about that sealed opinion—Starr himself had appeared on Fox News and proclaimed the ruling “magnificent.” How blatant could one get? demanded Kendall. Starr had already pledged to conduct an “internal investigation” to find the person or persons in his office responsible for smuggling out information to the media. How long would the judge permit the fox to guard the hen house?
With OIC under siege from all directions, Starr’s team took a bold step by initiating a showdown with the U.S. Secret Service, hoping that the testimony of a few closemouthed agents would allow OIC to salvage its investigation and repair its badly damaged reputation.
THE Secret Service issue had been brewing even before the Lewinsky story broke. In January, Paula Jones’s lawyers had tried to subpoena four Secret Service agents in close proximity to the president, hoping to unearth evidence of Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Judge Susan Webber Wright had slammed the door shut on this inquiry, ruling that U.S. Secret Service agents’ observations had no bearing on “the core issues in this case.” Moreover, the judge wrote, there existed a real possibility that interrogating these agents could “provide critical information at the core of how the Secret Service actually functions,” which could create an “unacceptable” risk to the president and others if disclosed.
So the Office of Independent Counsel moved to a different playing field. Ken Starr personally appeared in the courtroom of Judge Norma Holloway Johnson on May 14, seeking to force the agents to testify. OIC had continued to gather up nuggets of “anecdotal” information suggesting