A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  As Danny Traylor saw it, though, the problem was that Porter and Marcus weren’t doing enough. He valued their private assistance, but he needed a lawyer to stand up and take over the case for him. “When are you gonna stop chicken-shittin’ around and get me a lawyer?” Traylor would ask the pair during their frequent phone calls in the spring of 1994.

  Finally, though, Traylor did get a call from someone who wasn’t just chicken-shittin’ around. The lawyer searches led to Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata, who would remain anomalies during their three years of work for Paula Jones. Though virtually everyone else who participated in the case operated with a political agenda foremost among his or her priorities, the two of them behaved, in an old-fashioned sense, like lawyers. And though they resembled a mismatched comedy team—Davis the big and beefy Southerner, Cammarata the wiry and intense New Yorker—they acted with a degree of professionalism that was uncommon among the lawyers in the case. All they tried to do was help their client—and they were ultimately driven from the case because of it.

  Their initiation to the case, however, revealed its political roots. To be sure, Davis was a Republican. He had served as a junior federal prosecutor during the Nixon years, and he was in the process of planning a run for the Republican nomination to be Virginia’s attorney general. (He finished fourth in a primary in 1997.) But Davis was more iconoclast than ideologue, and the proudest achievement of his legal career was his twenty-year battle on behalf of a hillbilly farmer who won $39 million from Bethlehem Steel on a claim that the company had stolen the coal from underneath his land. (Davis made $6.5 million from the case, a fee that allowed him to dabble in politics and causes like Jones’s.) It was the kind of David-and-Goliath struggle that appealed to Davis—which is how he saw Paula Jones’s situation when he first heard about it in the last week in April.

  Davis had sublet an office to Cammarata in his suite in Fairfax, a suburb of Washington. Though also a Republican, Cammarata had even fewer political ties than Davis. He had served as a lawyer in the tax unit of the Justice Department under George Bush, but his work involved the routine kind of litigation that carries over from one administration to the next. Cammarata wanted a little more excitement than he found in tax cases, so Davis agreed to share a few personal injury trials with him. On Monday, May 2, 1994, Davis told his younger colleague that he might have something more piquant than a slip-and-fall case to share.

  The following day, Davis called Danny Traylor for a briefing. The most important thing he heard concerned the statute of limitations. The upcoming Sunday would mark three years since the alleged incident in the Excelsior Hotel, and that meant that Paula would have to file her case by Friday, May 6, or lose her right to do so. (Most sexual harassment cases are filed under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but that law’s 180-day statute of limitations had long since expired. Most other possible claims had three-year statutes of limitations.) Almost as an aside, Traylor mentioned that he (actually the elf Marcus) had prepared a complaint for a lawsuit against Clinton. Traylor had already alerted the press that he was probably going to file it the next day. Davis asked him to fax it to his office so he could look it over.

  Davis exuded laconic calm, while Cammarata nearly vibrated with nervous energy, and after they spent almost the entire Tuesday night reviewing Traylor’s draft complaint, they had characteristic reactions to it. Davis thought it could use some work. Cammarata called Traylor on the phone and said, “Cancel the goddamn press conference. If you file that piece of shit, it’s going to get thrown out.” Then he turned to Davis and said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re getting on a plane to Little Rock.”

  On Wednesday morning, May 4, they caught the first plane to Little Rock—but they received an important boost when they picked up the newspaper on the way to the airport. That day, the Post finally ran Isikoff’s story, which bore Shepard’s and LaFraniere’s bylines as well. As the Los Angeles Times did with the trooper story, the Post used a pretext other than the underlying event as an excuse to publish the story. Clinton had just hired Robert S. Bennett, a well-known Washington litigator, to represent him in the case, and the Post made Bennett’s hiring the focus of the piece. “Over the past three months,” the front-page story read, “The Washington Post has interviewed Jones extensively about what she said happened in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel. She said she was alone with Clinton in the room—making it impossible to independently resolve what, if anything, happened between them.” Bennett was quoted as saying, “This event, plain and simple, didn’t happen.” Davis and Cammarata had been on the fence about whether to go through with filing the suit. The imprimatur of the Post on the story nudged them closer to proceeding.

  The combination of Traylor’s announced press conference, the appearance of the Post’s story, and the looming statute of limitations prompted a horde of journalists to descend on Little Rock. After Davis and Cammarata (along with their paralegal, Bill Stanley) landed, they made it to Traylor’s shared office suite around noon Wednesday, and they found Traylor as relaxed as ever. The Arkansas lawyer was fingering an inch-high stack of telephone messages, noting with amusement all the famous newspapers and networks that were calling him. (Bob Bennett had called several times, but the lawyers felt they’d gain a strategic advantage if they waited awhile before returning his call.) As it happened, the three men could see out the window to the front door of the federal courthouse, and they watched with astonishment as the crowd of journalists there swelled to more than a hundred.

  Davis and Cammarata asked to meet their putative new client, and Paula and Steve Jones joined them later Wednesday afternoon. After Paula recited her story for the three lawyers, Cammarata asked to speak to her privately. He asked her something that Traylor had never thought to do in the four months he had represented her.

  “Paula,” Cammarata asked, “is there anything unusual about the way the president looks, you know, in his genital area?”

  During the course of the day, Davis and Cammarata spoke to Debbie Ballentine and Pam Blackard—the woman who had heard from Jones on the day of the incident—as well as Jones’s mother and sisters. This was the lawyers’ due diligence check, to make sure they had a legal basis to proceed with the case. One thing they didn’t do was revealing as well. Davis and Cammarata never spoke with anyone at AIDC, the agency where Jones worked. They never asked whether Jones was demoted or denied raises or promotions because of the incident. From the start, Jones’s lawyers saw the case as about a crude pass, not employment discrimination.

  On Thursday morning, May 5, Davis finally got around to returning Bennett’s call. The two men knew each other vaguely from the time when they were both federal prosecutors in the early seventies, and so spent a few minutes on small talk. Finally, Davis said they would be filing Jones’s case against Clinton by three o’clock that afternoon.

  “I’ve talked to the president about this for hours and hours,” Bennett said, “and this just didn’t happen. You have no case.”

  The two men sparred inconclusively for a few minutes, and then Bennett raised the stakes. “Did you know there are naked photos of your client?” (The president’s lawyer had heard the same rumor Mahoney had.)

  Davis said he didn’t know about any naked photos, but he would be interested to see them if they existed. Bennett said he had not seen them yet. Then it was Davis’s turn to spring a surprise.

  “My client says your guy has a unique mark on his penis, and she can identify it.”

  What followed was a considerable silence.

  By afternoon, Bennett had traveled the short distance between his office and the White House, and had camped out in the office of George Stephanopoulos, just down a small corridor from the Oval Office. Conferring moment by moment with the White House aide—and checking occasionally with the president himself—Bennett struggled for a way to avoid the filing of the lawsuit. What, he asked Davis, would it take to get Jones not to file her case? Davis said she wante
d no money, no apology, just a statement clearing her name. So that afternoon, Bennett (with Stephanopoulos’s assistance) and Davis spent much of the day trading drafts of a proposed statement to be made by Clinton. The last version read:

  I have no recollection of meeting Paula Jones on May 8, 1991, in a room at the Excelsior Hotel. However, I do not challenge the claim that we met there and I may very well have met her in the past. She did not engage in any improper or sexual conduct. I regret the untrue assertions which have been made about her conduct which may have adversely challenged her character and good name. I have no further comment on my previous statements about my own conduct. Neither I nor my staff will have any further comment on this matter.

  The artful wording implied, but did not state, that Clinton had behaved properly, and it cleared Jones of her purported request to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend. (Since that request was supposedly made to Danny Ferguson, Clinton could never have known whether it was made anyway.) As the negotiations continued that afternoon, Bennett said he would have to consult his client, and he went to the Oval Office. Bennett didn’t tell Davis and Cammarata where he was going, but in their last conversation, Davis asked whether he had been able to reach his client.

  “He’s in the room,” Bennett said.

  Davis, Cammarata, and Paula and Steve Jones traded astonished looks. He’s in the room?

  Paula’s lawyers had more or less agreed to the text of the statement, but they wanted to make sure that Clinton himself read it, not a White House spokesman. Was that okay with Clinton?

  “I don’t know,” Bennett said. “Hold on.”

  Clinton told Bennett he would read the statement.

  The two sides were very close. The one unresolved issue was a six-month “tolling” agreement in the statute of limitations. “We want to make sure that you don’t take potshots at us in the press after we settle this thing,” Davis told Bennett. “So we want to be able to reopen it if you do.”

  “No way,” said Bennett. “No tolling agreement. It’s a deal breaker.” Davis wanted to close the deal or file the case before the court clerk closed at five o’clock. Finally, Bennett said, “Gil, we are talking about the president of the United States. You owe him every courtesy you could give him.”

  “You pushed the right button with me,” Davis told him, and the two men decided to speak Friday morning.

  Davis and Cammarata then sent their paralegal, Bill Stanley, to deliver a press statement to the throng of reporters who were gathered in the wilting heat in front of the Little Rock federal courthouse. Cammarata had written out a statement for Stanley to read: “For reasons I can’t disclose, we shall file something tomorrow.” But a moment before Stanley left, Cammarata crossed out the word “shall” and substituted “may.” From their vantage point in the office tower, the lawyers watched the reporters envelop their paralegal as he waded into their midst with his script. Though he had only a single sentence to read, Stanley was jostled, questioned, and probed in so many ways—one reporter appeared to use Stanley’s back as a writing surface—that it took him forty-five minutes to extricate himself from the scrum.

  Overnight, however, the deal began to fall apart. The reason was Steve Jones. In a pattern that would recur throughout the case, Steve thought his wife’s lawyers weren’t fighting hard enough for her. Steve wanted an apology from the president—and he wanted money. The presidential statement that Bennett had agreed to amounted to a smidgen of the former and none of the latter. Steve wanted to sue the bastard. By Friday morning, Paula informed her lawyers that she did, too.

  Davis did have a pretext for breaking off negotiations. In the course of the evening, CNN had broadcast claims by unnamed administration officials that Paula had backed off from filing her lawsuit because she knew she had no case and because her family opposed the lawsuit. Davis was sophisticated enough in the ways of Washington to know that in a White House with more than a thousand employees, it would be impossible to police what all of them said. Once more, Davis asked Paula, “Is there anything in your background you don’t want to go into here? Because it’s all going to come out.”

  Paula quietly said no.

  So, in his way, did Clinton. He endorsed Bennett’s decision to let Jones sue rather than agree to the tolling agreement. In light of all that followed from the filing of the Jones case, this decision has to rank as a monumental miscalculation. In six months, Davis and Cammarata might have lost interest and the case might have slipped quietly away. But six months would have put the decision at the beginning of Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, when Clinton (and Stephanopoulos) thought it would generate even more attention. Clinton was also fatalistic about the inquiries into his past, with a substantial overlay of self-pity as well. No president, he said at the time, had been examined the way he had. If she wants to sue, the president said, let her sue.

  On the morning of Friday, May 6, Davis sat down with a yellow pad and scratched out a letter to Bennett. “Bob,” Davis wrote under the double-underlined “Confidential” at the top of the page, “I appreciate your efforts to resolve this dispute amicably.” Though the letter nominally invited Bennett to resume negotiations, Davis knew that he had pushed Clinton’s lawyer as far as he was going to go. “Further efforts to resolve these matters seem fruitless, as the tolling agreement is unfortunately a ‘deal breaker,’ as you have said,” Davis concluded. “Therefore, the complaint will be filed today.”

  Cammarata had been polishing the complaint while Davis negotiated with Bennett. In the end, there were four counts. First, the lawyers claimed that Clinton denied Jones “equal protection of the laws” under the United States Constitution by “sexually harassing and assaulting her on May 8, 1991,” and by creating “a hostile work environment” for her. Second, they said Clinton, Danny Ferguson, and others had “conspired” to deprive her of her constitutional rights. The third claim was “odious, perverse and outrageous” conduct—a seldom-used tort under Arkansas law. Finally, both Clinton and Ferguson, as well as the president’s “agents and employees,” had defamed Jones. The lawyers issued a statement that Jones had filed the lawsuit “with regret,” adding that “any proceeds from this litigation, above the costs of the case, will be donated by my husband and me to a Little Rock charity.”

  It was late afternoon on Friday, May 6, when copies of the complaint were finally distributed to the journalists who had been waiting for three days in the stifling heat in front of the Little Rock courthouse. One reporter for a British tabloid even did a dramatic reading of selected portions to his exhausted colleagues.

  “ ‘… Clinton then approached the sofa and as he sat down he lowered his trousers and underwear exposing his erect penis and asked Jones to “kiss it.” ’

  “And hey, mates,” this refugee from Fleet Street bellowed into the Arkansas sun, “don’t forget paragraph twenty-two. ‘There were distinguishing characteristics in Clinton’s genital area that were obvious to Jones.’

  “Christ,” he said. “I wonder what they were.”

  3

  Party Girl

  Before he was hired to defend President Clinton in the Paula Jones case, Bob Bennett never had a job interview with his prospective client. Rather, the lawyer was interrogated by his prospective client’s wife.

  That division of labor reflected the critical role played by Hillary Clinton in the long siege of her husband’s presidency. The first lady had played a similar role in the hiring of David Kendall, the private lawyer who was originally hired to defend her and her husband in matters relating to Whitewater. But Kendall didn’t believe in holding press conferences or attacking the Clintons’ enemies in public, and Mrs. Clinton thought that was the kind of aggressive action that was needed by the spring of 1994.

  In light of the portfolio the first lady wanted filled, it was no surprise that she turned to Bennett. He was fifty-four years old and the proprietor of one of the most glamorous and lucrative law practices in the country. Like many entrepreneurs, B
ennett owed his success to a curious mixture of skill, timing, and luck. In the 1970s and 1980s, prosecutors began sending subpoenas to large corporations in investigations of defense-contractor fraud, corrupt campaign practices, and other complex offenses. Until this time, criminal defense work had been something of a backwater in the legal community, the province of the slick and often sleazy. But as Bennett and a handful of other lawyers recognized, the prosecutors’ new targets could afford the fees that previously had been the exclusive province of Wall Street corporate lawyers. Because he was smart, resourceful, and happy to surround himself with the best younger talent—and because he had secured the Boeing Corporation as an early and loyal client—Bennett profited more than almost anyone else from the white-collar boom.

  By the mid-nineties, Bennett was a senior partner in the Washington office of the colossal New York firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he charged about $475 an hour and took home well over $1 million a year. He had grown up in Brooklyn, big brother to William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education and drug czar, who was among Bill Clinton’s most vociferous Republican critics. Bob was educated at the law schools of Georgetown and Harvard and served an apprenticeship at the United States Attorney’s Office in Washington before he joined a law firm. In 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee hired Bennett to investigate five senators who were accused of intervening with federal regulators on behalf of the corrupt financier Charles H. Keating, Jr. He developed the consummate insider’s law practice—a dollop of public service here, a touch of punditry there, and a host of big, unglamorous corporate clients to pay the bills. Perhaps Bennett’s waistline did keep expanding so that he ever more closely resembled a Daumier villain, and he could never finish a meal without depositing a portion of it upon one of his expensive ties. He had a great life—and he knew it.