Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [94]
Harris rode the elevator to the fifth floor, where she delivered the news to Janet Reno. The attorney general stood behind her desk and “sort of fix[ed] her jaw.”
Reno certainly knew there was no guarantee that the three-judge panel would reappoint Fiske. Yet this particular selection threw her for a loop. Of Ken Starr, Reno would later say, “To my knowledge, he had limited experience in investigating and pursuing [criminal] investigations. That was my concern.”
The OIC lawyers and staff stationed in Little Rock fled the locked building and gravitated to the garden apartment complex on Sam Peck Road, where most of them had made their home in this foreign land. They carried with them food and drinks, commencing a subdued party that resembled a wake. Julie O’Sullivan and Gabrielle Wolohojian, both women in their thirties, partook in a few libations and impulsively decided, “We’re going to the Ozarks. We’re going to see Arkansas. The hell with this.” As Wolohojian explained it, “No one really knew what we should be doing, because we didn’t know if, in fact, we had jobs anymore.” As a result, she said, “Julie and I decided to take a road trip, rather aimlessly, with plenty of cigarettes in the back of the car. And headed off.”
THE three-judge panel that oversaw independent counsel investigations, a curious court unknown except to a tiny colony of lawyers, judges, and journalists who navigated within this arcane world, was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. For seven and a half years, its presiding judge, appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, had been Judge George A. MacKinnon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. A conservative jurist who had stubbornly refused to be drawn into politics, MacKinnon followed a simple creed in selecting prosecutors to serve under the independent counsel law: Attorneys with strong ties within the Washington Beltway—of either party—were generally excluded from consideration. Regardless of good intentions, MacKinnon felt, anyone who moved in national political circles or anywhere near its orbit presented an unnecessary risk as a special prosecutor.
In the fall of 1992, just weeks before Governor Bill Clinton defeated President George H. W. Bush in the November elections, Chief Justice Rehnquist made a quiet move that would forever reshape history. He replaced the elderly Judge MacKinnon with Judge David B. Sentelle, a fifty-one-year-old federal appeals judge in Washington known for his strong Southern, conservative Republican roots. Rehnquist also added Judge Joseph T. Sneed (age seventy-four) from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, who was even more conservative than Sentelle. The lone Democrat on the panel was seventy-six-year-old Judge John D. Butzner, Jr., from Richmond, a senior judge who had been appointed to the federal appeals court by President Johnson.
Years later, crippled from a stroke and unable to speak except in brief utterances of yes and no, yet still mentally sharp, Judge Butzner would sit in his wheelchair in a skilled nursing facility in Virginia. Here, he confirmed that he had strongly opposed the replacement of Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr, during secret discussions among the three judges during the summer of 1994. His papers, previously under seal but now housed in an archive at the University of Virginia, bear out the judge’s unusual version of events.
As early as November 1992, immediately after Bill Clinton had won the right to move into the White House, Judge Sentelle had circulated a list of eleven “potential Independent Counsel,” even before there existed a case to investigate. Sentelle also circulated, via confidential fax, a typed list of prospective candidates that numbered nearly eighty. He had distilled this list down from a larger collection of names that he kept under lock and key.
It had been the practice of the special court, dating back to Judge MacKinnon’s tenure, to maintain a “Talent Book” that listed the names and biographies of attorneys