Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [401]
Starr located a phone and called Holder, nearly shouting, “This is obscene!” The special prosecutor’s face was nearly purple; it was the angriest his staff had ever seen him. Holder replied “in his smarmy way,” as Starr later described the conversation, that he was shocked the information had been leaked. Starr later shared his own theory as to how this terrible breach of confidentiality had occurred: “It was Eric Holder. He leaked it.”
Yet Justice Department officials would insist that Starr was seeing evil villains lurking in every shadow, where none existed. Charges against Starr’s office had been accumulating for an “extended period of time.” Now, DOJ lawyers felt there was no alternative but to take action. Holder responded later to the charge that DOJ had orchestrated a plan to bring Starr down: “It’s convenient for them to kind of take shots at [me and other DOJ lawyers].… They don’t want to come to grips with the fact that, you know, a lot of people were turned off by a lot of things that they did.”
Although these details were not even known to Starr, H. Marshall Jarrett, a career OPR prosecutor with decades’ worth of experience, had started reviewing a stack of complaints against Ken Starr as early as the summer of 1998. Jarrett’s job, in conducting a preliminary investigation, had been to sift through thirty or so categories of charges filed against the independent counsel, to determine if any had merit. Most of these complaints—dealing with alleged leaks, conflicts of interest due to political bias, and so forth—Jarrett had quickly tossed out. He then wrote a lengthy preliminary report, winnowing the charges down to ten or eleven that warranted further investigation. These were the charges that Reno had placed on the table at her meeting with Starr.
Reno understood that the timing was not perfect. Yet she also worried that the impeachment process could drag on for months, even longer. Some of the complaints about Starr’s office, particularly those relating to OIC’s handling of the sting of Monica Lewinsky, were serious matters. Reno now felt that she had a duty to take the next step, however angry it might make Starr.
“That was the point from which the relationship between Janet Reno and Ken Starr never recovered,” one DOJ official would state soberly.
THE papers of Sam Dash later revealed that OIC convened a hurried meeting on Monday, November 16, just as Starr was preparing for his do-or-die appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. The purpose of this gathering was to decide whether Starr’s team should send Congress a quick “supplemental referral” concerning Kathleen Willey. In a twenty-three-page document written by Stephen Bates and circulated to “All Attorneys,” the OIC scrivener began: “There Is Substantial and Credible Information That President Clinton Lied under Oath, Both in a Civil Deposition and in the Grand Jury, about an Encounter with Kathleen Willey.” On September 15, the FBI had administered a polygraph test to Willey, providing fresh evidence of potentially impeachable offenses. In response to the question, “Did the president place his hand on your breast?” Willey had responded, “Yes.” In response to the follow-up question, “Did President Clinton place your hand on his groin?” the witness had answered, “Yes.” The FBI polygrapher concluded in his report: “It is the opinion of this examiner that Ms. Willey was truthful when responding to the above listed questions during this test.”
OIC also was prepared to make public that Kathleen Willey had told a number of friends about the encounter. These confidantes included Linda Tripp and Willey’s close friend Julie Hiatt Steele.
There were problems in opening this can of worms, however. The internal OIC memo itself acknowledged that Willey’s story could be discredited on a half-dozen grounds. For one, Willey had taken two polygraph tests. The first of these, conducted on September 15 (which