Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [448]
The men now entered through the diplomatic entrance and proceeded to the Map Room—the same room where, two years earlier, Ken Starr and his prosecutors had extracted a confession from President Clinton during his grand jury testimony. As the new special prosecutor inspected his target on this wintry night, the president looked intense, focused, and pumped full of nervous energy. It was as if Clinton were sprinting toward the finish line after eight years in office, determined not to succumb to heat exhaustion in the final lap. The group sat down at a small table. Ray got directly to the point, summarizing what it was going to take for him to “exercise my discretion not to prosecute the president after he left office.” President Clinton and David Kendall watched and listened. Their eyes searched for signals regarding the special prosecutor’s true intentions.
Ray emphasized that there would need to be “a complete resolution” of all matters before any deal could be struck—and he wasn’t promising any deal. He first addressed the disciplinary matters pending against Clinton before the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, flowing from Judge Wright’s contempt order. These would have to be worked out. Most likely, he said, Clinton would have to agree to “a suspension of his bar license for some period.” The parties would also have to hash out a final resolution to the amorphous Monica Lewinsky investigation. For Ray to even consider resolving the case, he stated bluntly, there would have to be some “acknowledgment [by Clinton] that his testimony was false.”
Kendall had already made crystal clear that there would be “no [guilty] plea, absolutely no way, never.” Even pleading to some lesser crime like “uttering false statements,” Kendall had emphasized, was out of the question. So the new special prosecutor proposed a different plan to change the equation: He wanted the president to admit that his testimony was “knowingly evasive and misleading.” This wouldn’t constitute an admission of a crime. It would amount, however, to an admission of wrongdoing.
It was a game of “who will blink first?” All of the players were highly skilled.
Already, Kendall was developing a strategy for crushing OIC if Ray took the risky step of indicting Clinton. The president’s lawyer had prepared enormous binders of cross-examination questions for Linda Tripp, Ken Starr, Monica Lewinsky, and other likely witnesses. He had assembled evidence to demonstrate how Monica’s affidavit had been obtained by Tripp’s lawyer in cahoots with Paula Jones’s lawyers. He would file motions to exclude the Clinton deposition in its entirety as “tainted by prosecutorial misconduct;" he would strive to select a predominantly older jury, including plenty of women, who would understand that the Jones lawyers’ tortured definition of “sexual relations” left plenty of room for honest differences of interpretation.
For the most part, this was turning into an elaborate word game. Even Monica Lewinsky concluded that Bill Clinton had lied under oath. She later acknowledged in 2009: “In the Paula Jones case, the only way he could not have been lying was if, in his mind, he had other reasons for intimately touching me (i.e., not that he didn’t touch me, but that it was not for the reasons/intentions given in the Paula Jones definition of sexual relations).” When it came to Clinton’s grand jury testimony, however, Monica concluded that “there was no leeway on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully.” Moreover, in the Jones deposition Clinton had denied that she had engaged in a “sexual affair” or “sexual relations” with him, which was certainly false under the operative definition. Additionally, Clinton had stated