Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [456]
Although Ken Starr’s office launched a successful blitz to bury the hundred-page report filed by former Justice Department lawyer Jo Ann Harris—the person charged with investigating OIC’s handling of Lewinsky—new evidence now reveals that Harris found serious problems with OIC’s January 1998 brace of Lewinsky, particularly OIC’s repeated efforts to dissuade the former intern from contacting attorney Frank Carter.
Speaking for the first time about her lengthy report that remains locked in a government archive, Harris—a former assistant attorney general who headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department and then worked as a trial attorney and scholar in residence at Pace Law School in New York—expressed deep dismay that her findings had been shielded from public view.
As part of her exhaustive investigation, Harris had interviewed Ken Starr and “virtually everybody in Starr’s office,” including key FBI agents and the Justice Department officials who had interacted with OIC during their brace of Lewinsky. The initial, internal OPR report had been “none too kind” in assessing the conduct of Starr’s team. At the end of Harris’s investigation, she had reached the same regrettable conclusion, with additional evidence to buttress her findings. On the million-dollar question of whether Starr’s lawyers had acted appropriately in plowing forward with the brace after Monica had pleaded to speak with attorney Frank Carter, Harris said, “I wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole. I really wouldn’t have. I mean, Frank Carter was representing her, as far as I am concerned, on a matter that really fell ‘within the scope of their investigation,’ and that’s applying almost verbatim the Department’s language.”
Explained Harris, “The minute she says, ‘Can I call my lawyer?’ you stop. And when she says it for the sixth or seventh time, you really stop. It won’t be the first time that an investigator’s lead hasn’t quite played out the way prosecutors think it should. I mean, there are limits.”
Had Monica been permitted to call Frank Carter as she had repeatedly requested, Harris believed that Carter—a first-class criminal defense lawyer—would have swiftly worked out a sensible deal and likely avoided the year-long national ordeal. “It could probably have been done in a week with Carter,” Harris said matter-of-factly. “And it would all have been done quietly and in a dignified way, and there wouldn’t have been all this [damaging] press.”
It was also troublesome to the federal investigator that Monica “had not [necessarily] committed a crime yet” when Starr’s prosecutors confronted her. At the time of the sting, Monica’s affidavit—smuggled to OIC by Linda Tripp’s lawyer—had not yet been filed in the Arkansas federal court. “It’s one thing to sign an affidavit, and I suppose if the notary stamps it, then you have already committed whatever [offense] you have committed,” explained Harris. “But I start looking at it more seriously when it gets filed with the court.” If Frank Carter had spoken with Monica that afternoon and learned that the affidavit contained false information, Harris noted, the lawyer could have easily instructed his secretary: “‘Call the clerk in Little Rock and say, “Hold that thing, we don’t want to file it.” ’
Furthermore, Harris was troubled that Starr was out of the picture while much of the decision making was made. “The thing was run by committee, and whatever guys happened to have the aggressive personalities were the ones who prevailed on everything,” she said. “I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say they really didn’t have a strategy about Lewinsky until about two hours before they went to the hotel, because everyone was doing everything, and no one was in charge.”
From Harris’s perspective, the brace of Monica was ill fated from the start. “Ken Starr was over his head,” she said, “and I don’t mean that in a denigrating way at all. For heaven’s sake, he’s one of the most outstanding lawyers we’ve got in