Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [457]
Moreover, Harris concluded from her investigation that OIC had constructed a conscious plan to expand into the Lewinsky matter come hell or high water, maneuvering the situation so that it was “difficult for the [Justice] Department to say no.” Her interviews with OIC prosecutors and FBI agents convinced Harris that the Starr team wanted desperately to land this new investigation of Clinton. “Very badly,” she said. “I think everyone I talked to … was absolutely persuaded, including Ken Starr, that Bill Clinton was a low life who would lie about anything. And this happens to prosecutors—but fortunately not very often—that they would have done virtually anything to get him.” Nor was Harris buying the argument that Starr’s office had no alternative because DOJ was untrustworthy and they feared Janet Reno would tip off the president. Harris, who had worked closely with Attorney General Reno for years, countered: “Frankly, she wouldn’t take that crap from Clinton.”
The final section of Harris’s report made two recommendations to Robert Ray. First, she acknowledged that DOJ rules were “all over the place” on the subject of confronting persons already represented by attorneys, prior to any criminal charges being filed. For this reason, she concluded that Starr’s prosecutors had not committed a “clear violation” of any established DOJ policy. Second, however, Harris determined that at least one OIC lawyer had exercised “poor judgment” in confronting Monica and handling this investigative step “by the seat of their pants.”
Harris’s report also had determined that Starr’s office had been “less than cooperative and less than ‘accurate’ in its submissions to OPR.” For all these reasons, she felt strongly that the public needed to learn the truth about the Starr prosecutors’ conduct.
Ray had accepted her first finding, but rejected her second finding that any OIC prosecutor had exercised poor judgment in his or her handling of Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton. As Harris deciphered it, Ray wanted to take the easy way out, by latching onto the observation that DOJ rules were murky and ending matters there. “That’s where his analysis stopped,” she said. “That’s where ours started.”
Yet Harris was a cool headed professional. She was satisfied that the American public would read her report and reach its own conclusion.
So she was “stunned” when Judge David Sentelle and the three-judge panel overseeing Ray’s investigation slapped a “sealed” sticker on her detailed findings, burying her report from public view indefinitely. Harris was doubly perturbed that Ken Starr’s former prosecutors aggressively fought to keep her report under wraps, on the theory that it would disclose “personal” information protected by the Privacy Act that might harm the professional reputation of OIC lawyers. How Starr’s prosecutors could invoke “privacy” to prevent the American public from knowing all the facts relating to OIC’s treatment of Monica Lewinsky—when the prosecutors had disgorged a mountain of private information relating to scores of people whom they were investigating—was difficult for Harris to fathom.
Years later, having anguished over the matter, Jo Ann Harris made her own decision to lift the veil of secrecy with respect to her report. “Federal prosecutors got a really bum rap from the criticism of the way OIC conducted themselves,” she explained. Starr had repeatedly defended his actions by proclaiming in public venues, “That’s how prosecutors act,” and “We did nothing wrong.” The only way to reassure citizens that the system of justice worked, Harris believed, was to address such matters openly and honestly. “You do investigate, and you let it hang out when you find that there’s been bad judgment. That just makes so much sense to me in a context like this, where it’s so public to begin with.”
Robert Ray understood Harris