Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [364]
JUROR: During this time in the hotel with them, did you feel threatened?
WITNESS: Yes.
JUROR: Did you feel that they had set a trap?
WITNESS: I didn’t understand why they had to trap me into coming there, why they had to trick me into coming there. I mean, this had all been a set-up and—I mean, that was just so frightening. It was so incredibly frightening.
Toward the end of the session, as Monica was nearing an emotional breakdown, the jurors rallied around her. One gave an impromptu pep talk: “Monica, none of us in this room are perfect. We all fall and we fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is now I get up faster.”
Another juror delivered a soft pitch down the middle: “Monica, is there anything that you would like to add to your prior testimony, either today or the last time you were here, or anything that you think needs to be amplified on or clarified? I just want to give you the fullest opportunity.”
Monica, her voice becoming shaky with emotion, replied, “I think because of the public nature of how this investigation has been and what the charges are, that I would just like to say that no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence. And that I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for everything that’s happened.” She broke down sobbing. Monica took a final breath and blurted out, “And I hate Linda Tripp.…”
With this, multiple jurors rushed to Monica’s defense, circling around the fallen witness like protective mothers.
JUROR: Right now you feel a lot of hate for Linda Tripp, but you need to move on and leave her where she is because whatever goes around comes around.
JUROR: It comes around.
JUROR: It does.
JUROR: And she is definitely going to have to give an account for what she did, so you need just to go past her … [because that’s] going to keep you from moving on.
As David Kendall was busy negotiating the ground rules for the president’s own grand jury testimony, President Clinton was privately meeting with top military advisers, planning a rocket strike on Afghanistan. The move was based on intelligence reports that terrorists would be gathering at a hidden camp in that mountainous country to plot their next attack.
One person who knew about the complicated world in which Bill Clinton found himself operating during that summer of 1998 was Secret Service Director Lew Merletti. He was increasingly incensed that Starr’s office and the FBI were wasting manpower and resources chasing after evidence of the president’s sexual misadventures when true threats to the country’s well-being were darting around in shadowy corners of the United States and elsewhere around the globe. Merletti was also angry that the FBI had questioned his predecessor, Eljay Bowron, insinuating that there was some quid pro quo by which President Clinton had appointed Merletti director in return for protecting the president in the Jones case—an insulting notion. Although Merletti had forced Starr to apologize via the Justice Department, that didn’t remove the burr from under his saddle.
Merletti was keenly aware of the growing problem of terrorists encamped in Afghanistan; he had engaged in confidential briefings with Richard Clarke, Clinton’s chief counterterrorism adviser and member of the U.S. National Security Council who had served under Presidents Reagan and Bush. In February 1998, there had been another aborted plot to assassinate Clinton in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group had hoped to carry out the plan in Islamabad, until it was thwarted by American intelligence officials, who abruptly canceled the president’s trip. Bin Laden was also suspected in a plot to kill Clinton in Indonesia and