Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [400]
They sat down together in Reno’s stately office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. It was the first such meeting between the independent counsel and the attorney general. It also turned out to be the last.
As soon as Starr had finished making his full disclosures, the unflappable Reno leaned forward in her chair and said, “I want to raise a point with you.” With this, Reno pulled out a sheet of talking points and explained that there were a number of “charges” against OIC—ten or eleven, to be exact—that needed to be investigated. Reno insisted that she didn’t want to cause Starr any embarrassment. To that end, she had asked the Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, to discreetly look into these accusations. She would call it a “review” rather than an “investigation” so that the media’s antennae were not alerted.
The ordinarily mild-mannered Starr nearly climbed over the conference table. He glared at his nemesis—Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, seated next to Reno—and then stated in a trembling voice, “I didn’t do anything to justify removal.” Reno, ever cool, replied, “I’ve got these complaints.… What would you want me to do?” Bob Bittman, who occupied the chair next to Starr, recalled that his boss was visibly “angry.” When Reno tried to assure the special prosecutor “it’s not that big of a deal,” Starr shot back, “To do this now is unbelievable.”
From OIC’s perspective, this was a thinly veiled effort to kill the impeachment probe and to smear the special prosecutor himself. As a political matter, Janet Reno couldn’t shut down his operation without having hell to pay from the Republicans and anti-Clinton forces. Moreover, federal law made it extremely difficult for the attorney general to remove an independent counsel except “for cause,” a tough hurdle to surmount. So DOJ, Starr believed, was trying to snuff out his operation indirectly. After all, he was about to appear on Capitol Hill to defend his report to Congress; a public investigation of him announced by the Justice Department at this pivotal moment could derail his investigation and kill his credibility. In the past, whenever complaints about OIC had popped up, the independent counsel had addressed them himself. Now, this decision to assign the matter to OPR smelled like a setup.
Starr himself would later say, anger rising up in his voice, “I knew she [Reno] was corrupt at that stage.” He set his pen on the table and explained: “It is like seventy-two hours before I’m going to go testify before the House Judiciary Committee. I’m working, you know, virtually around the clock.” Suddenly, the attorney general wanted to refer nearly a dozen allegations to OPR, specifically to one Marshall Jarrett, whom Starr viewed as “a yes man to Eric Holder.”
Starr tightened up his jaw as Reno went through her talking points. The whole scene, he concluded, was “pathetic.” Holder seemed to have a smirk on his face as if communicating that his team was “in the catbird seat.” In response, the independent counsel folded his arms and glared at Reno. “I’ve never acted like this towards any attorney general,” he recalled, “and I’ve been around a lot of them.” At this moment, however, such a naked effort to destroy his credibility went far “beyond the pale.”
Before Attorney General Reno had finished her monologue, Starr cut in. “I have two concerns,” he said. “One is the independence of the investigation. And secondly, the confidentiality of this matter, which could be quite harmful to the investigation, were it known that the Justice Department is launching a review.”
The attorney general replied laconically, “You would be the second maddest person in Washington if this leaked out.”
The two law enforcement officials stood up, doing their best to maintain a professional decorum as they parted company, a look of mutual distrust flashing between them. Five minutes later, Starr and Bittman were stepping out of the attorney general’s private elevator