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By Root 1689 0

Bill Clinton needed to be handled much more like a recidivist felon. Ewing, during the moot court sessions, had pulled a few maneuvers as Clinton’s stand-in, admitting “petting” but “no perjury,” or confessing to some “physical relationship” with Lewinsky but refusing to give details. These “partial admissions” were tough to handle. A number of OIC prosecutors believed the only antidote to such slick maneuvers was to “pop Clinton in the nose” immediately, by confronting him with his lies: Why had he said he was never alone with Monica Lewinsky except when she was delivering pizza? Wasn’t this patently false? Why had the president called Betty Currie into his office, immediately after his Paula Jones testimony, and recited out loud to Currie that she could “see and hear everything” during his meetings with Lewinsky? Wasn’t this designed to taint Currie’s testimony and to make her lie? Didn’t this also constitute proof that Clinton possessed a guilty mind and wrongful intent when he coached Betty Currie, hoping to create a sham witness to buttress his false story? The hard-liners believed that if they hit Clinton between the eyes early on, no matter how “Slick Willie” answered, he would dig himself into a deeper hole.

But the less experienced Bittman continued to express trepidation about going down that path. As one OIC lawyer later confessed, “Bob did not want to cross him. He just kept saying, ‘We don’t need to do that.’… He was petrified by the idea of handling this as a cross.” Most of Bittman’s experience as a state prosecutor had been in “dope cases and sex cases.” This sort of complex cross-examination involving slippery topics and a world-class witness seemed to be outside his comfort zone.

OIC files now reveal that prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh, who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and was considered one of Starr’s intellectual heavy-lifters, pushed hardest to confront Clinton with some of the dirtiest facts linked to his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky. In a memo to “Judge Starr” (with a copy to “All Attorneys”), dated just two days before the grand jury showdown, Kavanaugh disclosed a stark division within OIC over how to handle this slippery president. He wrote:

After reflecting this evening, I am strongly opposed to giving the President any “break” … unless before his questioning on Monday, he either i) resigns or ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to you. I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him.… In the end, I am convinced that there really are [no reasonable defenses]. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me.…

[T]he President has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles—callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle. He has committed perjury (at least) in the Jones case.… He has tried to disgrace [Ken Starr] and this Office with a sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush.

So Kavanaugh listed ten sample questions, however explicit and unsavory, that he believed Starr and his questioners should ask. They included the following:

If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions you had her give [you] oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?

If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?

The tension within OIC was only growing thicker as the clock ticked away. Bittman had insisted that they take Clinton to the grand jury immediately—rather than waiting until September, as the White House had repeatedly requested. Now, Bittman’s own team members whispered that they may have given themselves insufficient time to prepare.

To add to the pressure-cooker environment, the results of the DNA tests came back just