by Ann Coulter
When Clinton personal attorney David Kendall filed a court motion under seal to protest the alleged “leaks,” his court papers were immediately leaked to the press. As a consequence, the Currie bombshell took second place to Kendall’s allegations of Starr’s leaks on the evening news. Clinton administration officials have admitted that they routinely contact lawyers for witnesses before the grand jury (who, like Clinton, are not subject to any grand jury secrecy rules) to ask about their testimony. Clinton’s lawyers, not Starr’s, have both motive and opportunity to leak.
There is simply no conceptual framework under which leaking important information like this would constitute good legal strategy for Starr. And Ken Starr was no William Ginsburg.
OUTING STARR’S DEPUTIES
As with the smeared Jane Does, the White House did not limit its attacks on Starr’s office to legitimate, if groundless, criticism. Soon Starr’s deputies would find their sex lives under attack. The White House was trying to smear members of Starr’s staff with embarrassing personal stories—including trying to out a closeted homosexual. This wasn’t a matter of a “two-way street,” as Bennett had said when he threatened to go after Paula Jones’s sexual history. Neither Jones nor any members of the independent counsel’s office were being sued for sexually assaulting a subordinate on the job, nor were they being investigated for perjuring themselves about their personal sex lives in order to obstruct justice. This was pure political blood sport.
According to Doug Ireland, reporting in The Nation, “Three members of the media confirmed to me that [White House media counsel] Sidney Blumenthal… had indeed been spreading” rumors about the homosexuality of a Starr staffer. Reporters refusing to out the independent counsel staffer were threatened with their own outings.4
Michael Kelly wrote in early March that in “the past month, Starr’s Washington office has logged what Starr’s chief deputy, Jackie M. Bennett, Jr., says are close to a hundred calls from reporters inquiring about false and damaging accusations against the independent counsel’s prosecutors…. Other recent calls to Starr’s office from journalists reportedly have concerned such pertinent matters as whether a member of the investigation was a closeted homosexual and whether another person was involved in a sexual relationship with a reporter.”5
The White House first denied and then admitted that the president’s personal lawyers had retained Washington private investigator Terry Lenzner to dig up dirt on Starr and his staff. Bennett claimed this did not constitute investigating “personal lives” on the preposterous grounds that the investigator would not be using any illegal methods of gathering evidence: “There is public information available,” Bennett said, “which, of course, it is our duty as counsel to research and gather.” Divorce records, police reports, and statements from disgruntled acquaintances are “public,” but why is it Bennett’s “duty… to research and gather”? Suppose Starr and his deputies were drug-addicted sexual perverts. What does that have to do with whether Clinton committed perjury, suborned perjury, or obstructed justice?
Blumenthal said the allegation that he was trying to out members of Starr’s staff and reporters was “totally false.”6 He attributed the story to a “smear” campaign, according to the gay and lesbian weekly the Washington Blade, “though he was not willing to speculate who might be waging such a campaign.” So now, The Nation and the Washington Blade have been inducted into the vast right-wing conspiracy, too.
Chapter Nine
Starr Turn: The White House’s Secret Weapon
Whenever Clinton goes, just remember, it might have happened four months earlier had it not been for Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg. Shortly after Ginsburg was replaced with two lawyers, it was reported that the president was “preoccupied and depressed.”1 No big surprise there. Ginsburg had presumably contracted Judge Ito disease and lost his mind with all the publicity. Apart from Lewinsky ridiculing the president’s manhood, Ginsburg provided the major comic relief of “Tailgate.”
In a brief, shining moment of lucidity, when the story broke in January, Ginsburg said: “If the president of the United States did this—and I’m not saying he did—with this young lady, I think he’s a misogynist.” He was soon perseverating retractions. On further reflection he apparently concluded that if the president of the United States was being serviced by an unpaid intern in the Oval Office, he’s a fine man. (At least Lewinsky’s “libido” wasn’t “imprisoned” while she was servicing the president, as Ginsburg later said it was.2)
Everything Ginsburg did seemed calculated to harm his client. As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said, Lewinsky was going to need a replacement lawyer “who is prepared to charge Ginsburg with ineffective assistance of counsel.”3
Months earlier, Ginsburg’s peculiar strategy had already set off quiet but incessant murmurings among criminal lawyers. “It’s mind-boggling what a poor attorney [Ginsburg] is, and equally mind-boggling is the public’s lack of realization [of that fact].” “Ginsburg has a very bizarre view of how these things usually work. He appears to have learned criminal law from a 1950s crime movie.” “[Starr] offered her immunity [on the first day] if she wore a wire—what lawyer in his right mind would turn that down?!” “[Ginsburg] has done such an awful job, blabbering like he’s some brilliant technician. But all the talking heads are fawning over him because they want to interview him.” “He looks a lot like my Uncle Irv. I think that’s the only thing that explains it. This is probably what my Uncle Irv would do.”
These were just some of the comments from criminal lawyers on the strange behavior of William Ginsburg. Naturally, therefore, the media was focused like a laser beam on the legal behavior of... Independent Counsel Ken Starr. To set the record straight, Starr had Lewinsky over a barrel. Lewinsky had only one defense, which her own lawyer almost completely sabotaged.
It was a common misconception that fickle little Monica held the whole ball of wax with her decision about whether to make a clean breast of it, and that if she pleaded the fifth, everyone would pack up and go home. If Starr wanted her testimony, he would get it. Starr could have compelled her testimony before the grand jury (and in any trial other than her own). He could have simply unilaterally imposed limited federal immunity on her testimony, forcing her to waive her Fifth Amendment rights.
All the Fifth Amendment requires is that a person not be compelled by the government to give self-incriminating statements and then be criminally prosecuted for those very statements. Any immunity granted pursuant to a compelled waiver of the Fifth Amendment simply returns things to the status quo ante. Any evidence the government knew about or later learns about—independent of Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony—could be used against her in a criminal prosecution.
If Lewinsky was compelled to testify and she did not tell the whole, complete truth in her compelled testimony, she could have faced additional prosecutions for perjury or false statements in that testimony. Starr can also compel her testimony in any subsequent prosecution against, say, Vernon Jordan or President Clinton. Moreover, since Starr is the independent counsel he has all the powers of the attorney general. If he alone decided he needed her testimony, he would get it, or she would go to jail—just as another Clinton “close friend,” Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, did when she refused to testify.
If Lewinsky had had an attorney who knew something about criminal law, he would have immediately demanded that she throw herself on Starr’s mercy and sing her little heart out to the grand jury for days on end. Even if she had done all that, she would still have had to keep her fingers crossed. As with compelled testimony, all she would have immunity from is Starr’s use of her own testimony before the grand jury in any subsequent prosecution against her. He could still have prosecuted her for perjury, suborning perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice, with all the evidence he had, apart from her own statements to the grand jury.
The “full immunity” Ginsburg kept demanding on television talk
shows doesn’t technically exist under federal law. It exists in 1950s crime movies. The only advantage Lewinsky would have gained by cooperating was that Starr might have agreed to sign an informal letter agreement stating that he personally would not prosecute her for certain crimes. Typically, such letter agreements do not forswear prosecution for all of a witness’s crimes, just the most serious ones. It is a myth that people who commit crimes can walk away scot free if they turn state’s evidence. Generally, the most they can hope for is leniency in a plea bargain.
That was the closest Ginsburg was ever going to get to “full immunity,” and he wasn’t likely to get it after spending eighteen hours a day on TV denouncing Starr. Starr didn’t need Lewinsky or her loopy publicity-seeking attorney. So why wasn’t Lewinsky’s lawyer finding out what Starr’s favorite chocolates and flowers were, rather than criticizing Starr on national television?
Until the Beverly Hills 90210 girl figured out that her lawyer was yet another older man in her life willing to sell her down the river, Lewinsky was in trouble. On the basis of just the evidence Newsweek had, to say nothing of what Starr had—the dress, the brooch, the hair pin, the twenty-plus hours of tape, the talking points, the testimony of Linda Tripp, Ashley Raines (a White House staffer who heard Lewinsky describe her relationship with the president), Secret Service agents, and her mother—Lewinsky’s own statements before a grand jury were not going to make or break any criminal case against her—or the Big Creep.
Remember: Lewinsky was alleged to be on tape, first, babbling to Linda Tripp about Lewinsky’s affair with the president and, second, pleading with Tripp not to tell Jones’s lawyers about those earlier conversations. That is suborning perjury. Lewinsky was the one who handed off the “Points to Make in an Affidavit” document to Linda Tripp. That is witness tampering. Lewinsky, according to press leaks, had taken gifts given to her by the president to Betty Currie—so that they were not in her possession when Jones’s lawyers requested them. That is concealing evidence. Three felonies, even if she were fantasizing an oral-sex-only affair with the president.
No wonder the president was “depressed” when she got rid of Ginsburg.
Chapter Ten
A Cancer on the Country
John Dean warned President Nixon of a “cancer” growing on his presidency on account of some bad apples who had worked their way to positions of influence in the Nixon administration. This time around it’s a little difficult to conceive of the cloud following Clinton from Little Rock to Washington as a staffing problem. Trouble follows Clinton whether he is in the Excelsior Hotel or the Oval Office, whether his associates are James and Susan McDougal (his Whitewater partners) or Vernon Jordan and Betty Currie, or whether his subordinates are Arkansas State Troopers or former bar bouncer Craig Livingstone. It’s hard to explain this as a coincidence.
Clinton’s defense is essentially that he is not impeachable because his conduct is so disreputable that the framers could not have conceived of it. This is the important part of the incessant claim that the president is not subject to impeachment or indictment and that “no one cares” because his offenses are only “about sex.”
The framers never expected a man like Clinton to become president. Rather, they anticipated, with “great probability,” that any man elevated to the presidency would have certain characteristics; he would be “a man of abilities, at least respectable.” The office of the president—and to some extent the Senate—would require men of “character” notable for their “wisdom” and “integrity.”1 But they also assumed that the office would elevate the man; it would “naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation.” This was, in fact, one of Hamilton’s arguments for a single president in opposition to a populace fearful of getting another king. Vesting all the executive power in a single man, Hamilton argued, would cause him to “feel himself under stronger obligations.”2
The “stronger obligations” and “lively sense of duty” the framers counted upon were obligations and duties to the entire country. In this regard, the president was quite unlike members of Congress, who would carry their local “prepossessions” or biases with them, as James Madison said in Federalist No. 46.3 When the president has an impaired sense of duty and obligation to the nation, and absolutely no “regard to [his] reputation,” the infirmity would naturally be expected to infect the entire country.
Instead of reflecting Americans’ virtues and aspirations, President Clinton reflects the country’s dark side. He has debased the White House, the administration, and the entire country, not only by what he has done but also by how he has defended himself. Nixon was almost impeached in part for lying to the American people and for engaging his White House intimates in a pageant of obfuscation. Clinton has done worse than lie: he has told lies that no one can believe, and forced those around him to lie as well. And then he and his cronies have denied not only the facts but even basic standards of decency.
Nixon eventually resigned in shame; Clinton’s legacy is that he has no shame, no sense of duty or obligation to the country, and no concern for his own reputation. O.J. is the model for Clinton’s second term. He has no alibi, no story whatsoever, and he has left a trail of DNA across a string of Jane Does. He just says he didn’t do it and refuses to explain anything further.
In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have to have a national debate about whether he “did it,” even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate. Or the relative merits of the terms “scumbag” and “pervert.” No one believes he’s not guilty, except the usual 30 percent of people who remain willfully ignorant on every subject.
Clinton’s shameless refusal to leave office voluntarily has led directly to monstrous “factions” of hypnotized zombies spouting the absurd. Like a cancer, his own lack of integrity has infected the nation. By refusing to go gracefully—as gracefully as is possible under the circumstances—he has dragged the whole country into a public debate about the indefensible. “Parties more or less friendly… to the accused” are forced into taking absurd positions. People who used to say controversial, but not preposterous, things are now having to twist themselves into pretzels to defend him. The line of defense shifts away from protests that the president is innocent to charges that the accusers have bad motives. (Even if their accusations happen to be true.) The cost of not impeaching him is to see Clintonesque arguments become standard political dialectic.
More is at stake than how we define fitness for office: it’s how we define politics. Or, finally, how we define truth. There has always been a certain amount of disingenuousness in politics, but now that’s all there is. Ruthless political gamesmanship has overtaken the law and finally overtaken the truth. Politicians are allowed to reshape our understanding of facts and truth, because it’s all just political spin.
Clinton draws on every sick theme of our culture to win politically. He has such mastery of popular psychoses, he could be Jerry Springer. Under Clinton the country has grown accustomed to believing that there is no truth. Deconstruction has escaped from the twilight zone of the Ivy League and taken hold of our political life. Truth is political. Law is political. The law is a hook that you use, but, really, it’s all about your feelings. Motives are the only things that exist, the only things that can be discussed. Paula Jones has a bad motive, Ken Starr has a bad motive, so the truth is secondary. Half the country is perfectly comfortable with the idea that since Starr is out to “get” Clinton, it doesn’t matter that Clinton’s guilty.
This obsession with “motives” is repeated by Clinton’s flacks—Starr is out to get the president; it’s just about sex; he’s spent $40 million . Instead of plausibility, the issue is loyalty. Even if Clinton takes a demonstrably counterfactual position, his partisans rally to him because he said it. They have become Clintonized to say there are no facts, no evidence, the president is telling the truth. The president said it is not true
. We must believe what the leader says. It has become a game to see who can say Clinton is innocent with the most sincerity. Eleanor Clift and Lanny Davis march forth like robots, saying anything their leader tells them to say because they are loyal. They may as well tell us South Korea invaded North Korea. It makes you want to slap them to break the hypnotic trance.
The contradictory claims of the two Clinton camps illustrate the reduction of truth to spin. The first lady and Eleanor Clift scream that the charges are false, thrown by scummy people. Geraldo Rivera and Bill Maher say they don’t doubt the allegations, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about sex. If truth were still the standard, the contradiction would be unsustainable. But both make good spin. Meanwhile Starr’s great—and only—crime, apparently, is that he can’t spin. Starr’s critics’ mantra, endlessly repeated, is that he has no feeling for public relations; he’s very clumsy. Just as the truth doesn’t count against Clinton, it doesn’t count for Starr. When the framers said a republic cannot be sustained without virtue, this is more or less what they had in mind.
In early February Human Events called Gloria Steinem’s office for a comment on the Lewinsky allegations. A spokesman for Steinem explained that “laryngitis prevents her from responding at this time.”4 Later she recovered her voice. It was a mistake.
On the op-ed page of the New York Times about a month later, once the laryngitis had lifted, Steinem announced the new Clinton-era standard of sexual harassment: The boss gets one free grope. Referring to Kathleen Willey’s allegations during the 60 Minutes interview, Steinem wrote:The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took “no” for an answer.5
