Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [93]
Those two matters, it seemed, had absolutely nothing in common.
CHAPTER
12
THREE JUDGES IN BLACK
As Robert Fiske would later explain, he had an indirect interest in the Jones case because it might tie in to his Whitewater/Madison Guaranty investigation, as a matter of legal precedent. If the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) found any liability on Clinton’s part and wanted to go after money damages and restitution, Fiske’s lawyers would face the question of whether the president was immune from civil liability—the same question that would be decided by the Jones case. When Fiske contacted Ken Starr in the summer of 1994, Fiske first asked the well-known constitutional lawyer “whether we [OIC] should do it.” The second question was, “If so, would he do it?” Starr replied “yes” on both counts. As a constitutional matter, Starr felt strongly that President Clinton was subject to suit in the Jones case. In terms of his own availability, it sounded like a stimulating assignment. He was prepared to handle the OIC brief in the Supreme Court. Fiske and Starr quietly agreed to set up a meeting to discuss this undertaking.
That meeting, for reasons that neither man could have ever anticipated, would never take place.
ON the afternoon of August 5, 1994, Robert Fiske was in an airport in Florida when his beeper went off. He walked to a pay phone and dialed his office in Washington. Mark Stein, one of the prosecutors, blurted out, “You were just replaced by Ken Starr.”
In Arkansas, the weather was oppressively hot. A FedEx delivery man walked sluggishly into Two Financial Center in Little Rock, requesting a signature on a package. Suddenly, word swept through the office that all lawyers were to report to the OIC conference room. There was a sense that “something was wrong.”
The mood in the independent counsel’s office, after the news was delivered, turned into one of shock. Said prosecutor Dennis McInerney, “All we thought about was Bob. And how unbelievably unfair this was. And how unfortunate for the country.” Julie O’Sullivan, the first lawyer Fiske had hired, was unable to speak. Besides being “a terrific lawyer,” Robert Fiske was “a really decent human being.” This was cruel and morally outrageous. As lawyers remained frozen in their chairs, O’Sullivan recalled that a new emotion surfaced. “There was a really deep sense of—I can’t capture it. I have to say, anger.”
Gabrielle Wolohojian, who had transplanted herself from Boston to Little Rock to work on the new tax case involving Governor Jim Guy Tucker, felt suddenly adrift. “I was in an alien landscape—and by that I mean Arkansas itself.… It was sort of like being sent to sleep-away camp,” Wolohojian said a decade later, breaking her self-imposed silence regarding that period of her career. “It was all extremely interesting, but you were very far from home. And it had a sense of surreality.” Now, the world in Little Rock suddenly seemed even stranger. On a more practical level, there was the question “What should we do?”
Some prosecutors announced on the spot that they were resigning. Others were too stunned to put together an action plan. They all agreed on one thing: “We needed to close the office.” It was unclear what authority those hired by Fiske possessed, in the wake of this regime change. “And so, we decided that we needed to secure the offices. Close them and have everyone leave.” They would preserve the status quo “until we got instructions.”
In Washington, Janet Reno’s Justice Department was equally stunned. Jo Ann Harris, chief of the Criminal Division, recalled experiencing a jolt of shock and disbelief when she learned of the court’s order. “It certainly never crossed my mind that the court would not understand, for a whole lot of reasons, that the best thing they could do was just appoint Fiske and let it go on,” she would say. “I could not