Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [341]
Until now, Judge Johnson had seemed to be in OIC’s corner. When Bittman and Rosenzweig arrived at her courtroom on this night, however, everything about the judge’s face, manner, and voice indicated that she felt betrayed by these prosecutors who had repeatedly denied leaking to the press. Kendall seemed to be on fire with righteous indignation, demanding that the judge give him authority to take the depositions of Starr’s entire office to get to the bottom of this lawbreaking.
Having rushed back from Union Station, his eyes filled with shame, Ken Starr quietly gathered with his prosecutors in the OIC conference room. Wet and rain-soaked after returning from the train station, he began: “Let me apologize to each of you personally for the damage I’ve done to the office and the investigation.” Within minutes, Starr’s team was drafting a nineteen-page response to Steven Brill, trying to dig its way out of this frightful new hole.
Chief Judge Johnson wasted no time, declaring that the president’s lawyers had “presented a prima facie case” to move forward. She pointed to specific broadcasts on major news networks and published accounts in the New York Daily News and the recent Brill’s Content article, all of which identified “sources in Starr’s office” as the conduit for sensitive grand jury information. If proven, she declared, this breach could constitute criminal conduct. The judge would permit the president’s lawyer to depose Ken Starr, personally, and to dig into OIC’s internal records to determine if the prosecutors had violated federal rule 6(e). She was giving Kendall the green light to drill into the heart of the Starr operation.
If any decision threatened to blow Starr’s investigation out of the water, this was it. Starr would later acknowledge, “It was the nadir, as far as I’m concerned, of the investigation.” He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “We had many travails, but there was no worse day than that day when the chief judge [rendered her decision].”
Suddenly, Starr’s office was transformed from the hunter into the hunted animal. Although he shared this decision with no one but his most trusted deputies, Starr resolved to fight to the death. Empowering President Clinton’s lawyers to dig into the most confidential aspects of OIC’s investigation would plunge a knife into the heart of OIC’s operation. Starr filed an emergency appeal with the Court of Appeals. He also confided in his inner circle that he was ready to defy Judge Johnson’s order. He would stand tough and refuse to give Kendall access to OIC’s evidence vault, to save his office from ruination, even if this act of disobedience led to his removal.
Starr’s investigation seemed to be unraveling in every direction. To the surprise of everyone, including Susan McDougal herself, the usually hard-nosed Judge George Howard in Little Rock released McDougal from prison for ninety days—out of concern for serious back problems (scoliosis) that had caused the inmate’s health to deteriorate such that doctors warned that her medical problems could become permanent. Newspapers showed Susan McDougal enjoying a celebratory dinner with family and friends at the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, with well-wishers flocking into the grand hotel lobby to show their support for the defiant OIC witness.
In a swift one-two punch, U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington threw out OIC’s newly filed tax evasion case against Webster Hubbell and his wife in “Hubbell II.” Judge Robertson declared sternly that the tax-evasion charges filed against the Hubbells were “six degrees of relationship” away from anything Starr was authorized to investigate in his charter and violated Hubbell’s Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, because they were premised upon documents extracted from Hubbell as part of his immunity deal with OIC. The hulking Webb Hubbell, speaking at the doorstep of his home in Washington, expressed relief. “It’s a good day,” he told reporters in a weary Arkansas drawl.
OIC was even hitting a brick wall on the Secret Service issue, despite