To me, the only logical way to carry out the investigation and insulate it from political influence was through invoking the independent counsel statute. Janet Reno and I happened to disagree on that. She felt the investigation could be left in the hands of a special prosecutor appointed by and responsible to the attorney general. We hashed the matter over in the way we hashed over many matters during our joint tenures: very civilly, very thoroughly, very legally tethered. We both felt strongly about the matter—we both felt strongly about many matters—but it was never personal with either of us.
I happen to think Janet got bad advice on the matter from her Public Integrity Office. Others, including Pat Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, agreed with me. In effect, sticking with a special prosecutor meant that the attorney general and the director of the FBI would be simultaneously investigating the president and vice president and reporting to them, and I didn’t see how we could do that. Furthermore, the law provides a reasonable alternative in such dilemmas: independent counsels who are appointed by and report to the courts.
That’s the route I thought we had to take with Campcon, and finally, after much debating back and forth, I wrote a twenty-seven-page memo plus cover letter (and I literally did write most of it myself) stating as much and summing up the case as I saw it. That, of course, is the document that found its way to the press and set Janet at odds with Dan Burton, touching off yet another firestorm that never should have been. (Another thing that’s impossible to understand until you actually sit in one of Washington’s hot seats is how much leaks drive the news cycle in the capital and in the nation as a whole.)
Was I right, even though I didn’t prevail? Maybe not, if outcome is the only measure. Although a grand jury did meet on Campcon, although indictments were issued and cases brought and made, the president and vice president were never charged; and I have no reason to think they might have been, had an independent counsel handled the investigation instead of a special prosecutor. To that extent, my argument was largely academic. But process counts, too, and maybe counts more in the long run than outcome. An independent counsel would have given the public confidence that the case had been seen through in the right way, not in a political vacuum—there is no such thing with matters like this—but at least within a reporting hierarchy that encouraged free and open investigation. To me, that was the point: not the journey’s end but how we got there. This time, I lost.
The last thing in the world I would have wanted going into the office of director of the FBI was to conduct a criminal investigation of the president. I never considered it a possibility when I was weighing whether to take the job, never contemplated it, never threw it into the balance. The lost resources and lost time alone were monumental. There was always this cloud of confusion about how to insulate my office and the Bureau and the Justice Department from the president to whom we reported. Under the shadow of the almost constant investigations, so much that should have been straightforward became problematic in the extreme.
We were in the midst of Campcon when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asked for a briefing on our case findings prior to a trip she was about to make to China. The request was perfectly appropriate. China was obviously under our scrutiny. What’s more, we had uncovered in the course of the investigation information that a secretary of state should know. Everything we were learning suggested that the Chinese intelligence services, presumably with support from the highest reaches of the PRC government, had devised and liberally funded a campaign to influence and compromise elected American officials. That’s a big deal, with potentially big consequences, but for Janet Reno and me, Madeleine’s request was also a big headache. Although she had never been part of Campcon—indeed, hadn’t been a part of the Clinton administration until after the 1996 election was over—Madeleine Albright reported to the president just as we did. How much could we tell her, then, about an ongoing criminal investigation into the activities of her boss? Finally, we gave her the briefing she requested but refrained from disclosing what would be grand jury material.
We went through basically the same song and dance a second time with Jamie Gorelick, then the deputy attorney general. Jamie took the stance that we had to share everything we were learning in the course of Campcon with the White House because national security was at stake. I found her request completely inappropriate, way out of line. I was in Egypt when all this came to a head, so Jamie, Janet Reno, and I hashed it out over the phone. My argument was simple. We couldn’t be put in the position of sharing the details of an ongoing criminal case with the subjects of that investigation. Janet struggled with the matter but came down on my side, so we constructed a compromise briefing that gave the White House the necessary national security information but excised the criminal elements.
As part of that decision to keep the president’s people in the loop on our investigation, we sent two fairly senior FBI agents over to the National Security Council to bring Rand Beers up to speed on our findings. (A council member under multiple presidents, Beers in all likelihood would have become national security adviser had John Kerry won the 2004 election.) Sometime afterward, Bill Clinton wandered into the White House press room and got asked by a reporter how his administration could have allowed the Chinese government the opportunity to influence an American presidential election. Granted, the president must have been feeling under siege by then. Ken Starr had begun his investigations. We were still doing ours. But his answer that day in the press room was a miracle of dissembling. If the FBI had just told us about what was going on, he said, we would have taken steps to make sure there was no undue influence. Next thing I knew, the reporters were on my doorstep, wondering why the FBI had been so derelict in its duty.
It’s not in my character to lose my temper. I don’t yell, scream, pound the table, curse. I have never done that, as everyone who has ever worked with me knows. That’s just not my personality. But I came awfully close to doing all those things when I heard about the president’s response. First, I called in the two agents who had briefed Rand Beers. Listen, I said, this is very important. What did you tell him? They said, we told Beers the Chinese Ministry of State Security—their CIA—had formulated a plan to influence the U.S. elections. Are you sure? I asked. They were. Then, since it was inconceivable to me that Rand Beers wouldn’t have conveyed what he had been told up the chain to the president, I helped to draft a press statement that said, in effect, the White House was lying.
“Are you sure you want to go with this?” one of my top aides asked as were looking over the statement. “Maybe we should just forget about it.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to let it go.” And I didn’t. We issued the press release as drafted. Later the White House corrected its earlier statement with as little fanfare as possible.
I felt as if I had gotten myself involved in some schoolyard drama: Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Then, just when I thought things couldn’t get any more outlandish, along came Monica Lewinsky and turned the White House into a theater of the absurd.
Monicagate, or whatever you want to call it, was in Ken Starr’s bailiwick, not mine. He had been the court-appointed independent counsel for several years by then, and as mandated by law, he carried out his investigation independent of any government agencies. The FBI detailed agents to Starr’s office. We continued to pay their salaries while they worked for the independent counsel, and we determined their next assignments when they were through. But so long as they were assigned to Ken Starr—and so long as they felt that nothing in the investigation was compromising their own ethics or integrity—the agents reported to him, not me. I have always had tremendous respect for Ken Starr and never more so than during those most challenging times when he proved himself a lawyer of great integrity and trustworthiness.
It was FBI agents assigned to Ken who grilled Monica Lewinsky at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton Hotel on January 16, 1998, a moment that some still smolder over. For the most part, i
t was also these specially assigned agents who pursued the case although the Bureau itself was catching enormous flak along the way. I don’t write that to pass the buck or to disavow the conduct of the agents involved. In fact, I can’t say for certain how they did behave. I never debriefed them later, and the firewalls erected between the Bureau and independent counsel’s staff forbid the sort of regular briefings I might otherwise have expected. I’m very proud, though, that so far as I know, no charges were ever filed with the Bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility about the behavior of the agents on loan to Ken Starr, either from Monica’s camp or from the president’s side. That’s a rarity in any circumstance. I mention the whole business here only to clear up the record because I’ve been asked more than once how the FBI could have allowed itself to be drawn so deeply into the scandal. We weren’t, and we didn’t. But we also weren’t completely out of the loop or immune to the craziness that followed.
One story should suffice to catch the spirit of those times. In addition to agents, we were statutorily obligated to provide the independent counsel’s office with support services—laboratories, technicians, and the like, as needed. It was in that capacity that Ken called me one day. The infamous semen stain had been discovered on Lewinsky’s little blue cocktail dress. His investigators needed a DNA sample from President Clinton to see if the two matched up, and he wanted us to obtain one.
“Wait a minute,” I can remember saying to Ken. “This is ridiculous. We’re talking about taking a DNA sample from the president of the United States to compare with semen on a dress? This is like something out of a bad movie!”
But the bad movie was just beginning. We were obliged to honor the independent counsel’s request, so we opened negotiations with the president’s people and put together a plan. We would send over to the White House our chief DNA scientist from the lab, along with an FBI agent to serve as a witness, and one of Ken Starr’s lawyers just to make sure everything stayed on the up-and-up. To assure this was done in as confidential a manner as possible, the White House insisted that there be no obvious deviation from the president’s public activities. Our team was to arrive unannounced, well in advance of a scheduled dinner, and hide itself inside a little antechamber near the dining room. At some point during the meal, the president would excuse himself, presumably to answer a call of nature, and slip into the room where the guys in the lab coats were waiting. They would obtain Clinton’s DNA material and send him back to his dinner with no one the wiser. Then our team would wait until everyone had left the White House and sneak out into the night with its tiny portion of DNA from the president of the free world.
It sounds almost simple as I tell it, but it wasn’t that at all. The Secret Service had to be involved because they would be expected to accompany Clinton when he left the dinner and because you don’t jab a needle into the president of the United States without clearing it first. The White House is also under constant surveillance. Smuggling anyone in and out of it takes intricate planning. Just to make sure nothing went wrong, I asked our chief DNA scientist to come see me in my office shortly before the Great Event.
“Listen,” I said, marooned somewhere between dismay, anger, and involuntary humor, “if this thing leaks out, we’re all going to be fired. I’m going to fire you, and then I’m going to fire myself. Don’t talk about this to anybody. Don’t mention it anywhere!” No one did, but the logistics just to achieve what never should have had to be done were unbelievable.
Decorum, reasoning, the dignity of the office—the longer the Clinton second term dragged on, the more farcical it became and the more ass backward everything seemed to get.
As a former prosecutor and federal judge, I take claims of executive privilege very seriously. Just like any citizen, a president has to be free to communicate with his attorney in the knowledge that whatever is said between them will remain confidential. He ought to be able to get the best advice he can on a variety of matters without expecting what’s asked and what’s said to spill out into the public domain. But Bill Clinton and his lawyers seemed to be inventing some new executive privilege every fifteen minutes or so, both to keep the wraps on potential witnesses and to forestall turning over documents.
It’s hard to say when the claims hit rock bottom—there were so many of them—but to me, I think that moment came when the president tried to invoke an “executive protection privilege” to prevent Secret Service agents from testifying before a grand jury during the Campcon investigation. According to the claim, an agent could not testify about what he or she heard the president say or saw him do even if it was criminal because requiring an agent to do so would compromise the security and protection of the president since, in the future, a president might not want to have the Secret Service around when he’s committing a crime.
The argument was pure craziness. A dozen comedy writers couldn’t invent anything more ludicrous, but of course, the Secret Service had to lend its support and the president’s lawyers had to do their bit for it and the court had to waste its own time considering the matter before it did the obvious, which was to throw the “executive protection privilege” out the door. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. Claiming so many different and novel executive privileges weakened the existing and necessary ones by stretching the entire concept of executive privilege to the breaking point. And the battles went on, right to the bitter end.
Throughout all this, I continued to have the greatest regard for Clinton’s lawyer, the legendary Bob Bennett. One of the best lawyers of our times, Bob’s honesty, skill, and humanity was always at its best. We later became good friends.
Given the state of my relationship with Bill Clinton, it was no surprise that the Bureau was kept in the dark about the pardons and commutations the president intended to issue on his last day in office. But that didn’t stop us from worrying about what he might do.
Of particular concern was a Native American named Leonard Peltier. By January 2001, Peltier had spent a quarter century in jail, serving two life sentences for the 1975 murders of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. The murders had taken place during the siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, on the same Pine Ridge Reservation where the U.S. Cavalry had confronted the Lakotas’ ancestors more than eighty years earlier. I remembered the murders well—Coler and Williams were gunned down while I was doing my Quantico training to be an agent—and I remembered the manhunt that netted Peltier and his trial and imprisonment, and his 1979 escape and recapture.
In the years since, Peltier, like the siege at Wounded Knee itself, had become a left-wing cause célèbre: Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg, and Nelson Mandela had all called for Peltier’s release. Even Mother Teresa had put in a good word for him. I didn’t discount their concerns, and I knew that Wounded Knee was a convoluted story. But about Leonard Peltier I had, and still have, no confusion. He murdered those agents, and he deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail. But I also knew that Bill Clinton loved the grand gesture and was particularly susceptible to the tug of the Hollywood crowd.
Back in 1994, when we got word that the Peltier lobby was leaning hard on the president for his release, I prepared several memos for the attorney general to send over to the White House. I wanted to be sure that Janet saw them, that she was familiar with our reasoning, that she knew why we opposed any kind of leniency in Peltier’s case. I took the argument public, just to be certain there was no confusion anywhere, and we also spoke to the pardon attorneys, who assured us they would send notice if anything was about to be done. As for myself, I was ready to submit my resignation as director the moment Peltier was freed, whenever it happened. I never told the president that, or sent word through someone who could have told him, but I knew that I could not in good conscience continue to serve under those circumstances.
When the drumbeat on Peltier’s behalf ebbed, I breathed a sigh of relief, but as the president neared his last hours in office, many of us in the Bureau worried that he might, in fact,
finally free Peltier, this time to get back at what he considered his own abuse at the hands of the FBI. He didn’t, but he didn’t stint on other insults.
I look back now on the 177 pardons and commutations Clinton issued as his final act of office, and I’m still stunned by the fact that neither the FBI nor the attorney general of the Department of Justice was ever consulted about a single one of them. Clinton pardoned his own brother, Roger, on a 1985 cocaine conviction. He pardoned former Arizona governor Fife Symington, whose high school roommate had later been Bill Clinton’s roommate when he was attending college at Georgetown University. Closer to home, he also pardoned his former coinvestor in the White River land deal, Susan McDougal, though not her husband, Jim.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution gives the president “the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States,” but giving reprieves and pardons out almost as party favors and to some of those closest to him wasn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Just as he had tainted the concept of executive privilege through his frequent and inventive use of it, so Clinton now tainted the old and honorable tradition of presidential mercy by his inability to rein in his own instincts, by his penchant for excess.
One name on the pardon list floored me far more than any other: Marc Rich. Along with his partner, Pincus Green, Rich had fled to Zug, Switzerland, nearly two decades earlier, hard on the heels of being indicted on more than fifty counts of fraud, racketeering, and tax evasion. Rich had rigged up an oil-price-fixing scheme during the energy crunch in the early ’70s. Later in the decade, he had illegally sold oil to the Iranians when they were holding U.S. citizens hostage in Tehran. He’d cooked his own books and evaded paying taxes on something like $100 million in illegal profits. If he’d been given the maximum sentence on all the counts against him, he would have been serving three hundred years in prison—multiple lifetimes. Instead he was living in the scenic Alps. Nor was he at death’s door, which would have at least introduced an element of compassion into Clinton’s pardon. Rich was sixty-five years old, in the pink of health, and now he was free to come and go in the United States as much as he wanted and thumb his nose at all those who had spent years trying to get him behind bars.
My FBI Page 27
