Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [340]
As he cleared out his room at the Cosmos Club and headed back to California, Ginsburg voiced only one regret about being terminated by Monica Lewinsky. “Since we parted company,” the ordinarily loud lawyer would say softly, “I have not seen or heard from Bernie Lewinsky.”
Monica and her mother immediately scheduled a meeting with Plato Cacheris and Jake Stein, two leading Washington attorneys with decades’ worth of experience in highly sophisticated criminal cases. The Lewinsky ladies liked what they saw.
Stein had served as an independent counsel during the Reagan administration, investigating alleged financial improprieties by Attorney General Edwin Meese III, finding insufficient evidence to indict Meese, and wrapping up his probe quickly. With his silver hair and tight-lipped smile, the seventy-three-year-old trial lawyer was the picture of professionalism. A large bluefish mounted on the wall of Stein’s law office bore the inscription “If I’d kept my big mouth shut, I wouldn’t be here.” That was his credo.
The other half of the team was Plato Cacheris, a suspender-wearing son of a Greek immigrant from Pittsburgh who had represented former Attorney General John Mitchell in Watergate and Colonel Oliver North’s secretary in the Iran-Contra scandal. More recently, Cacheris had defended convicted CIA traitor Aldrich Ames in a spy thriller that had attracted international attention. At sixty-nine, the solid and formidable lawyer was at the top of his game. If Monica Lewinsky had prayed for divine intervention (which she did), it would have been hard to beat the Cacheris/Stein team.
On June 2, in the late afternoon, the two lawyers arranged for a press conference to announce their joint representation of Monica Lewinsky. Facing the press corps in front of Cacheris’s law office building on Connecticut Avenue, they flanked Monica Lewinsky like an impenetrable wall. The two Washington attorneys smiled politely for the cameras, announced matter-of-factly that they had taken over Ms. Lewinsky’s case, and then swiveled and escorted Monica back into the building. Said Cacheris: “We were drawing an immediate distinction, if you will, from the prior representation.”
The Lewinsky investigation had entered a new phase. For both sides, it promised both danger and opportunity.
JUST as Monica Lewinsky appeared ready to flip, OIC’s investigation took a nosedive.
Ken Starr was en route from teaching a seminar in New York when he received the heart-stopping news: He was directed to appear in the courtroom of Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson immediately—his office was accused of engaging in criminal conduct by leaking grand jury information. Starr’s train was already late; he would never make the courtroom proceeding in time. The independent counsel scrambled to contact Bob Bittman and Paul Rosenzweig to cover the emergency 6:00 P.M. hearing.
The precipitating event was an article titled “Pressgate,” appearing on the cover of Steven Brill’s slick new “media watchdog” magazine dubbed Brill’s Content, for which Starr had granted a lengthy interview. The article laid out in chapter and verse alleged leaks by Starr’s office. It gave page after page of damning detail, suggesting that Starr himself and his top deputies, including Jackie Bennett, were leaking grand jury information like a sieve in connection with the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation. David Kendall had swiftly filed another rule-to-show-cause motion, demanding to know why the Office of Independent Counsel should not be held in contempt for violating the federal rules of criminal procedure.