Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [446]
KEN Starr had left behind a number of messy problems for Bob Ray to clean up. Judge John W. Kern III, the special master appointed to dig into alleged improprieties by OIC, had filed a report that nobody (except Judge Norma Holloway Johnson) was permitted to see. Yet those close to Kern could discern that it was not all pleasant. Confidential sources would later confirm that the Kern Report “did not paint a rosy picture” of OIC’s dealings with the media. The special master was deeply troubled by the repeated “off-the-record conversations” that Jackie Bennett and other OIC deputies had engaged in with journalists. Although Judge Kern stopped short of concluding that the Starr prosecutors had violated the law or illegally disclosed grand jury information, a reliable source confirmed that the special master believed OIC had acted over aggressively—and perhaps irresponsibly—in responding to perceived attacks by the White House.
Ray also had to deal with the fallout from OIC’s “bracing” of Monica Lewinsky. Of the myriad complaints lodged against Ken Starr’s office with the Justice Department, this was the only one that OIC couldn’t shake. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) had completed its report on this topic, raising serious concerns. Now, Ray had no choice but to investigate his own office. He appointed a neutral professional—Jo Ann Harris, the former assistant attorney general who had headed DOJ’s Criminal Division in the mid-1990s—to determine whether Emmick and other Starr prosecutors had violated Justice Department regulations in conducting their “sting” of Lewinsky. Specifically, Harris was assigned to determine if Starr’s prosecutors had crossed the line in discouraging Lewinsky from contacting her attorney Frank Carter, despite her repeated requests to make that call.
Harris, who was then working as a criminal defense lawyer and law professor in New York, pledged to proceed swiftly and fairly. “I would give him [Robert Ray] findings of fact, conclusions and recommendations, and he was free, as is anyone in the Department of Justice, to accept them or to not accept them,” she later summarized the plan. As Harris understood it, the results of her investigation would then be made public. In this fashion, she said, the American people could judge for themselves whether Starr’s office had acted appropriately.
Even as these problems were piling up on Ray’s desk, another one appeared: The tax charges filed by Starr’s team against Webb Hubbell in Hubbell II were thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, nullifying Hubbell’s guilty plea. The Court declared that OIC’s use of Hubbell’s own financial documents against him—documents that he had turned over pursuant to his grant of immunity—would violate his Fifth Amendment rights.
WITH the Office of Independent Counsel under siege from all directions, Robert Ray summoned Monica Lewinsky to his office in downtown Washington for a meeting: He wanted to look the former intern in the eyes and assess whether she was a truthful witness. Ray intended to make clear, immediately, that he was handling things differently from Ken Starr. His strategy was to communicate to Monica: “You’re hearing from the horse’s mouth. This is what I expect. This is what you need to know.” Indirectly, Ray also planned to send a strong message to the White House that he meant business. “I was aware that if I met with her, that word would travel to where I wanted it to travel,” he later disclosed.
If Ray’s goal was to shake up the former intern, he succeeded masterfully. Monica had hated Ken Starr so passionately that she assumed Robert Ray