by Peter Baker
While poorly prepared, both sides had been bracing for this moment for months. Way back in the spring, Hyde had met at a Chicago hotel with a casual friend of his, former mob prosecutor David Schippers, and asked him to come to Washington in case the Judiciary Committee needed an impeachment investigator. Like anyone else, Hyde could see that the Lewinsky scan dal was heading his way, and he wanted someone outside of the Washington loop reporting to him. With white hair and beard that made him look like Santa Claus with a badge, the sixty-eight-year-old Schippers brought to the table a long rsum of tough cases, including his investigation of Mafia boss Sam Giancana. The father of ten children, he also sported a Democratic pedigree straight from the wards of Chicago and Robert F. Kennedys Justice Department, a rsum Hyde made much of, even though Schipperss political views resembled those of conservative Republicans on the national level.
Hired in March for $20,000 a month, Schippers brought with him a team of eight experienced investigators and lawyers, including his son Tom, and they set up shop in the warrens of the Ford Building, far from the main traffic of daily congressional life. Ostensibly they were there at first to conduct oversight hearings on the Justice Department, but they really were in place so they could hit the ground running as soon as Starr decided to send a report to Congress.
By the time Schippers was on board, the Democrats were still trying to find their footing. For guidance, Dick Gephardt turned to a longtime adviser, Robert F. Bauer, one of Washingtons smartest and best-connected Democratic lawyers. Bauer, an election law specialist, had gotten to know Gephardt while representing his 1988 presidential campaign. Although virtually invisible to the public, Bauer at forty-six now had the ear of the nations most important congressional Democrats, representing Gephardt and Tom Daschle simultaneously while also holding accounts of both the House and Senate Democratic campaign committees. Schooled in the politics of scandal from his days defending House Majority Whip Tony Coelho, who was forced to resign in 1989 over financial improprieties, Bauer instinctively knew how serious Clintons problem was for Gephardt and sent him an eight-page memo on March 30 warning against complacency.
The conventional wisdom promoted by the White House that the Lewinsky affair would never proceed to impeachment was deeply flawed, Bauer argued in the memo. A case put forward by Starr could achieve credibility with a mainstream press distrustful of Clinton and then build momentum. Moreover, Bauer pointed out, removing the president might not be the real goal for Republicans pursuing impeachment. It can be used to bleed the President of credibility, divert our resources as a party, and weaken our ability to prepare for both this Falls elections and the Presidential in 2000, Bauer wrote. Gephardt was urged to begin looking for a chief counsel for the Judiciary Committee but not to think of the matter in purely legal terms. To win, we have to be smart about politicsabout message and positioning, and the possession of legal ability in the right quarters is helpful but will not in any way be decisive, Bauer wrote. Perhaps more important was to begin formu lating a plan for procedures in any impeachment inquiry, not because we would ever win on such issues, but because the battle over process will have a major impact on the politics and flow of the entire proceeding. . . . Forcing the Republicans to contend with our criteria for a fair process is good politics, and process in any event is centrally important to our ability to affect the course of events in the House.
Gephardt concurred. Process would be their battleground. The search began for a chief investigator who would help wage that battle. Normally, that prerogative would fall to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, but in Gephardts office John Conyers was viewed as a wildly unpredictable old man. They could never leave a matter as important as this in his hands. Moreover, Gephardts chief of staff, Steve Elmendorf, did not get along with Conyerss top aide, Julian Epstein, a crafty political operative with GQ looks who essentially ran the committee with Conyerss proxy and once was dubbed Machiavelli in Armani. So Gephardt decided early on that he would have to take charge for the Democrats himself, and he began meeting personally with committee members on June 5 to plot strategy over pizza and Diet Coke.
Tension among the Democrats escalated over the next three months. Conyers and Epstein resented Gephardt inserting himself into their business, but the minority leader steamrollered over them. On Gephardts instructions, Bauer considered several possible chief investigators, including prominent Democratic attorneys Michael Zeldin, Tom Green, and Abbe Lowell. Zeldin was ruled out because he was perceived as Epsteins favorite and besides, had already been on television too much defending the president, which might compromise the independent image Gephardt wanted. Green turned out to be the candidate of the president, who lobbied on his behalf. Clinton told Conyers directly that he wanted Green and sent Gephardt a backdoor message by promoting the attorney with intermediaries who then passed along his preference to the minority leader. That was enough to sink Green. The choice came down to Lowell, a scrappy forty-six-year-old former Justice Department lawyer who enjoyed the spotlight and had represented clients in virtually every major political investigation in Washington over the last decade, including former House Speaker Jim Wright and former Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski.
Gephardt, though, continued to run into resistance from Conyerss office. Epstein had taken phone calls from associates warning him about Lowells ego and volatility. Abbe is all about Abbe, he was told. Epstein worried that Lowell might come along and make life difficult with a bomb-throwing performance; when impeachment was all over, Lowell could go back to his lucrative private practice, but Epstein would still be on the Hill, still having to work with the Republican majority to get anything accomplished. Epstein shared his concerns with Gephardts office as well as important Democratic members of the committee such as Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Howard Berman of California. Lowell could be a tinderbox, Epstein warned them.
While Gephardt and Elmendorf pushed to get Lowell on board, Epstein stalled, suggesting more vetting before a decision. Finally, in August, five months after Schippers was hired by the Republicans and with time running short before Starr was expected to send a report, Gephardt pushed Conyers into signing off on Lowell, who was given an $18,000-a-month contract. Democrats would spend the fall charging that Newt Gingrich was secretly masterminding the impeachment and pulling the strings at the Judiciary Committee, but in fact, Dick Gephardt quietly asserted control on his side of the aisle.
Once he was finally installed, Lowell went straight to work. As soon as they were allowed into the vault with the secret information on Friday, September 11, Lowell immediately began devouring it as quickly as possible. This was the evidence not included in the now-public Starr report, answering all the questions that had obsessed Washington for months. Did Betty Currie rat out the president? What did the Secret Service agents see and hear? Lowell and his team devised a system for reviewing the material and marking useful sections with colored adhesive paperyellow for privacy issues that might merit redaction, pink for exculpatory information helpful to the president, and blue for examples of prosecutorial misconduct by Starrs office. No one bothered to come up with a color for evidence implicating Clinton.
True to Epsteins fears, it did not take long for the pugnacious Lowell to get into a scrap with the Republicans. After complaining vigorously about office space, supplies, and staff contractsLowell drove to a store on Capitol Hill to buy pens and pads with money out of his own pocketthe Democratic investigator was outraged to discover that the Republicans had imposed a midnight closing time on the vault. With fewer people at his disposal, Lowell wanted to continue reading through the night and protested in vain.
But Gephardt tried to keep Lowell focused on the big picture. As the chief investigator prepared to dive into the evidence, Gephardt summoned him to issue instructions: Were relying on you to tell us whether the presidents committed an impeachable offense, Gephardt told Lowell. Because if we conclude that he has, its going to be my job and Tom Daschles t
o go to the White House and tell him he has to resign.
Gregory B. Craig was sitting on the porch having dinner with his wife, Derry, and a few friends when the telephone rang. It was Saturday night, Sep tember 12, the day after the Starr report hit the Internet. This is the White House operator, the voice on the phone said. Please hold for the president.
On the line came that familiar voice. Greg, asked the president, could you come down to see me? Craig, a Yale Law School acquaintance of the Clintons and now a high-ranking official in the State Department, knew what this was about. John Podesta, the deputy White House chief of staff, had been talking with him for several weeks about coming on board to coordinate the presidents defense in the impeachment proceedings that seemed almost certain to be launched on Capitol Hill. Craig had written a freelance memo offering the White House advice after Joe Liebermans speech on the Senate floor, but he had not immediately jumped at the chance to join the presidents defense team. Youll forgive me if Im not overly enthusiastic, he told Podesta the first time he called in late August. At the time, Craig was the director of policy and planning at the State Department, an enviable perch once held by George Kennan.
But when the president called, people answered, and so Craig excused himself from his dinner guests, piled into a car, and drove from his home in northwest Washington down to the White House.This was not the first time he had been drawn into a volatile, high-profile case. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s, Craig was part of the legal team that had defended Ronald Reagans would-be presidential assassin John W. Hinckley Jr. and won a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. After serving as a foreign policy adviser to Ted Kennedy, Craig was tapped to represent the senator during the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith. That experience helped make Craig attractive to the White House now. So did his telegenic good looks, affability, and infectious smile, all of which would help the White House put a friendlier face out to the public. At fifty-three, Craig actually looked like a Kennedy.
Bill and Hillary Clinton had first gotten to know Craig at Yale in the early 1970s. Craig took a seminar on corporate responsibility with Bill Clinton, but Craig was closer in school to Hillary Rodham. He had kept a certain personal distance from Bill Clinton after an eye-opening conversation early in the future presidents political career. As Craig related it to colleagues at the White House, he had run across a Little Rock aide to the Arkansas governor who warned ominously that while Clinton was talented enough to be president, he had no core and his womanizing was out of control. Ultimately, the aide had believed, Clintons personal recklessness could destroy him. All these years later, Craig had a new appreciation for the prediction.
On this warm, late-summer evening, Craig approached the White House gate and told the Secret Service officer he had an appointment. Craig was escorted inside the private residence and brought up to the second floor, where he found Clinton alone. The president took him outside on the Tru man Balcony overlooking the South Lawn with a stirring view of the Washington Monument. Clinton looked exhausted. He had not gotten much sleep the last two nights. For the next hour and forty-five minutes they talked. The president was philosophical, emotional. He spoke of making mistakes and seeking forgiveness, much the same as he had at the cabinet meeting and prayer breakfast.
Look, I cant make any decision about this, Craig finally said. He had to go home and talk about it with his wife. With a family of five children, this move could turn their lives upside down. Id like to help you. But Ive got to tell you, I too am absolutely livid about what you did.
The reason the president needed someone like Greg Craig became painfully apparent the next morning, Sunday, September 13. In the wake of the Starr report, Podesta and other top aides decided to abandon their usual practice of keeping Clintons attorneys off the talk shows and instead opted to mount a full-scale television defense. Chuck Ruff, David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Special Counsel Lanny A. Breuerall inside players who eschewed the limelightwere booked on the major Sunday network talk shows, along with Podesta himself. The defense they offered might have been effective in a court of law but immediately fell flat in the court of public opinion. Tom Daschle and other senior Democrats around town watched with increasing exasperation as the lawyers did what lawyers do and fell back on legalistic answers. The president did not lie under oath to Joness attorneys, they said; he simply evaded and gave technically accurate half-answers. He was not trying to tamper with a witness when he fed false stories to Betty Currie because she had not yet been called to testify. He did not commit perjury because he did not consider oral sex to be sexual relations.
I think under that definition, which is a very contorted definition, the presidents interpretation was good faith and correct, and he testified according to that, Kendall said on ABCs This Week. Perjury prosecutions normally involve acts. They dont involve interpretations of a contorted definition.
Clinton tried to influence one of the other talk shows directly that morning. Worried that pressure would build on him to resign, he tracked down Senator Orrin Hatch just before the Utah Republican went on the air on CBSs Face the Nation. Hatch sat in his car outside the television studio for twenty minutes talking with the president on his cellular phone before going inside.
Well, was my apology Friday enough? Clinton asked, referring to his musings at the White House prayer breakfast.
Yes, Mr. President, it was for me, Hatch answered. But, you know, true repentance is more than just being sorry. There are the four Rs. Hatch, a devout Mormon who had put out recordings of himself singing Christian music, proceeded to outline his understanding of true repentance: the first step was to recognize that such conduct was wrong, the second was to feel remorse for it, the third was to refrain from repeating it, and the fourth was to make restitution.
After hanging up and heading inside, Hatch went on the air and repeated his praise for the presidents performance on Friday, saying it might have changed everything had Clinton done that back in January when the story had first broke or even as late as August when he had finally admitted having a relationship with Lewinsky. But Hatch firmly warned Clinton against relying on the legalisms and word-parsing that Kendall and others were voicing on other networks.
He ought to quit splitting legal hairs, Hatch said. He is being very badly served with this legal hairsplitting. Nobody believes that. Nobody wants to hear that. What they want to hear is the president who is truly contrite. I think he went a long way last Friday towards that. He ought to continue that. He ought to get rid of this legalism stuff. The American people are a lot smarter than these four-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers think they are, and I think they ought to get the heck out.
So? asked Dick Gephardt. Is there really the cigar thing?
Gephardt was not asking out of prurient interest. He was truly appalled. After escaping Washington for his sons wedding in Atlanta, Gephardt returned to the Capitol on that Sunday to hear the verdict of his investigators: Was there a case there or not? It had been clear as early as Friday evening that Starrs main report did not have more than previously advertised, but Abbe Lowell and his staff spent the weekend poring through thousands of pages of testimony that had not yet been released to make sure.
Yes, Lowell said, the cigar thing was in there. And so was plenty of other untoward behavior by the president. But there was no list of other interns, no explosive revelation that they had found ready to blow up in their faces. Despite all the rumors, the Starr report had showcased the worst of it. More important, Lowell said, he could win this case with a jury in a courtroom. In some instances, Starr had stretched the evidence beyond what it really showed. In others, there was at least a reasonable debate about whether the conduct was really serious enough to be impeachable.
Lowell ranked the allegations for Gephardt. The toughest was the perjury in the Paula Jones deposition. Theres no doubt he wasnt telling the truth, Lowell said. It was blatant. But they could make the case that the whole Lewinsky issue was not material t
o the case and therefore not perjury as defined under federal statute. In the grand jury, it was a closer call whether Clinton had told the truth, Lowell said, but the presidents answers were so careful that the only real way to sustain a perjury charge was to prove that he had another interpretation of sexual relations rather than the definition he professed to believe. On obstruction, Lowell concluded, the evidence had significant holes. The most serious charges concerned whether Clinton had instructed Lewinsky or Currie to lie. If that held up, Lowell warned, it could be impeachable. But there was some exculpatory material for the president on those counts, namely Lewinskys own statement that she was never told directly to lie, and Curries testimony that she did not feel intimidated when Clinton ran through his false version of events with her. The easiest to dismiss were the charges that Clinton had abused the power of his office by lying to his aides and frivolously asserting executive privilege. Those were just preposterous arguments, Lowell said. Whatever the propriety of Clintons doing those things, they were hardly high crimes.
What Lowell did not mention to Gephardt was that he was convinced the one person who had clearly lied before the grand jury was Vernon Jordan. None of the committees Democratic lawyers who had reviewed his testimony considered his story plausible. Still, Lowell had concluded that most of Jordans statements that seemed to be obvious lies were not about central events.
Gephardt thanked Lowell for the report. Taken as whole, it sounded like reasonably good news. There was no smoking gun. Best of all, there were no more smoking interns.
At 4 P.M. that day on the other side of the Capitol, a group of senior Democratic aides gathered in Tom Daschles office. Attending were Pete Rouse, Daschles chief of staff; Ranit Schmelzer, his press secretary; Laura Nichols, Gephardts communications director; and Bob Bauer, the Washington attorney who was counseling Gephardt and also advising Daschle. The consensus among the group formed quickly: the performance by the presidents lawyers on the talk shows earlier that day had been abysmal. If that was the defense Clinton planned to raise, then they would all sink with him. Daschle wanted a statement put out distancing himself. I want to make clear I wont put up with this line of argument, Daschle told them by phone from home. Gephardt, who had decided to stick close to Daschle throughout the crisis, agreed to put out a critical statement as well.
