Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [408]
Ken Starr’s prosecutors, in the meantime, were puzzled by the direction Hyde and company were taking. Privately, they were stunned that the House would even consider voting to impeach Clinton without conducting its own investigation. Many OIC prosecutors had envisioned the Starr Report as a mere “guideline” that the House would use to launch its own investigation, hold hearings, and develop its own body of evidence. Now, to OIC’s horror, Congress seemed poised to use Starr’s controversial report to avoid doing its own independent inquiry, transforming the beleaguered band of OIC prosecutors into the bad guys.
Some of Starr’s men also perceived a motive: Rumors were abounding that Chair man Hyde wasn’t the only one guilty of “youthful indiscretions”—scuttlebutt now suggested that Speaker Newt Gingrich and other prominent Republicans might be hiding their own extramarital affairs. Starr’s prosecutors were beginning to feel as if the congressional leaders were throwing them under the bus, to keep from being flattened themselves.
House Republicans, for their part, were fed up with Starr’s impotent investigation. Privately, they were stunned that after all this time and millions of dollars of resources, Starr didn’t have “more goods” on Bill Clinton. Hyde’s investigative chief, David Schippers, had all but written Starr off. Schippers had begun devising his own radical plan by which Congress would use its extraordinary impeachment-related powers to subpoena Justice Department records relating to suspected law violations by the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. When DOJ refused to comply, the House of Representatives would immediately hold Justice Department officials (including Attorney General Janet Reno) in contempt and lock them up in a “jail-type facility.” Hyde’s committee then would keep the recalcitrant officials incarcerated until they handed over evidence that Republicans believed they were hiding—the documents might then provide another footing for impeachment. Schippers intended to subpoena every record in the Justice Department if necessary. “If they won’t give it to us,” he told Hyde, “we’ll bring them in and we’ll put them in jail.”
Schippers also tried to shore up the case against Clinton by driving to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to meet secretly with Kathleen Willey. If Starr couldn’t deliver additional firepower, Schippers told his boss, they would build up their own arsenal of blockbuster evidence.
THE effort by some Republicans to amass new evidence against Bill Clinton by proving criminal conduct on the part of the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996 had largely sputtered out by early December. Attorney General Janet Reno had formally notified the three-judge panel that there existed “no reasonable grounds” that would warrant further investigation of these matters. With this avenue foreclosed, House Republicans marched forward, carrying their most potent grenades.
On December 12, Henry Hyde garnered a majority vote on four proposed impeachment articles flowing directly from the Starr Report. These were patterned closely after the Watergate counts lodged against President Nixon. From Hyde’s perspective, it was time to “let the chips fall where they may.” He knew that under ordinary circumstances, it might have been more appropriate to wait until the 106th Congress took over in January, rather than steaming ahead in the final weeks of the 105th Congress. But nothing about this situation was ordinary. Hyde later explained: “We had a bill of impeachment, we had the evidence already adduced, let’s see it through. Let the jury take its vote.”
Nearly a dozen moderate Republicans, including Jack Quinn of New York, were starting to “go South” on Bill Clinton. According to Clinton’s intelligence, the Republican Whip, Tom DeLay (nicknamed “The Hammer”), was openly threatening to punish members by taking