Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [386]
As FBI agents climbed into the backseat, Jackie Bennett handed the driver, Sandy Oldham, a Sony minicam video camera to record the historic voyage. No sooner had she secured it to the van’s dashboard and pulled out onto Pennsylvania Avenue than a pair of media trucks swept alongside with film crews “hanging out the window,” pointing cameras at the Starr entourage. Oldham shouted, “Get away!” cutting the wheel as if to drive the paparazzi off the road. Bittman said calmly, “Sandy, the last thing we want is to get into an accident. Just drive straight and be careful.”
The van sped through the streets and reached a bumpy halt on the grounds of the Capitol; here, the Capitol Police were waiting at a cordoned-off section of the driveway to accommodate the transfer. Sergeant at Arms Wilson Livingood waved the vehicle to a halt and spoke to Bittman: “I understand you have something for us.”
After personally serving a copy of the transmittal letter on Speaker Newt Gingrich (who was across the street at the Library of Congress and seemed annoyed to be interrupted) and a second copy on Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, Bittman climbed back aboard his unmarked van and left, just as a horde of television film crews surrounded the Capitol.
Back in the OIC offices, Starr’s troops were exhausted. More than twenty-five lawyers had pulled all-nighters for weeks to complete this report. Brett Kavanaugh started driving home but was so punch-drunk that he was forced to stop along the side of the road and hail a cab. Ken Starr slipped past the gathering horde of media trucks in the OIC parking garage and headed home to McLean, preparing to brace his family for the news. He had tried to handle his duty in a low-key way, titling the 452-page report simply “Referral to the United States House of Representatives pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, Section 595c,” rather than giving it a sensationalistic name. Yet these kinds of things, Starr knew, tended to make a stir in the Beltway and would likely attract some coverage on the nightly news. On the bright side, Starr told himself, this was Congress’s responsibility now. The matter “was completely out of our hands.”
The president’s lawyers were thrown off guard. They had known the report was coming. Yet they had expected that it would be kept strictly confidential, rather than being dropped off in boxes like a delivery from Sears or Amazon.com. Sequestered in the West Wing of the White House long into the night, the president’s legal team studied news footage of Bittman stepping out of the van, and of the Capitol Police hoisting cartons out of the back. They tried to reconstruct the details: How many boxes were there? What could be in this truckload of material? Was it possible there were multiple reports, not just on the Lewinsky matter but also on Whitewater?
Already, David Kendall and the rest of the president’s legal team had begun preparing a lengthy “prebuttal.” Largely thanks to media sources who transmitted information back to the White House like carrier pigeons, Clinton’s lawyers had gained remarkably accurate information concerning the planned Lewinsky referral. Now they worked furiously to address a report that they had never laid eyes on.
Congressman Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, the distinguished, white-haired chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a statement pledging a nonpartisan approach to handling the Starr referral. The Republican chairman declared: “The American people deserve a competent, independent, and bipartisan review of the independent counsel’s referral. They must have confidence in this process. Politics must be checked at the door.”
Before the sun had even peeked its head over Washington, however, rumors were sweeping through the Capitol that Speaker Newt Gingrich and his more ardent Republican colleagues were planning