In her famous appearance on the Today show, Hillary Clinton had goaded journalists to explore the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was out to get her husband. Less than forty-eight hours after Starr voided Lewinsky’s immunity deal, the fax machine whirred to life next to Sidney Blumenthal’s office in the former White House barbershop. The messages he received would help Blumenthal assist his former colleagues in the news media to find the “great story” that he and the first lady had touted. Blumenthal would focus on Starr’s staff.
The faxed message was a clip from the front page of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a newspaper that serves the legal community in Southern California. STARR AIDE NO STRANGER TO SEX TAPE INQUIRIES, the headline read, and the story mentioned Mike Emmick. A little while later, Blumenthal received another fax, this one an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Constitution. STARR’S TAINTED LIEUTENANT, the headline to Martha Ezzard’s story read. “Georgians remember Bruce Udolf as a man who trampled a citizen’s rights; now he’s investigating the President.”
The concept of “opposition research” was a fairly old one in politics but something new in American law—and its deployment by Blumenthal offered a classic illustration of how law and politics merged over the course of the Jones and Lewinsky cases. With “oppo,” as it is often called, a political candidate attempts to learn embarrassing information about an opponent and uses the news media to spread the bounty to a wider public. In more genteel days, even as recently as the Iran-contra affair, no one thought to go after prosecutors in this way. But in this “war,” to use Harry Thomason’s description, there were new rules of engagement, and Blumenthal decided to put them to work against Emmick and Udolf.
Blumenthal’s oppo was such an organic process that it didn’t even require a formal mobilization. The troops simply knew their roles and went to work. The article about Emmick came to Blumenthal from Stanley K. Sheinbaum, a veteran liberal activist and fund-raiser in Brentwood; the piece about Udolf was sent by Jack Bass, a journalist and historian based in Atlanta. Blumenthal hadn’t asked them to conduct research for the defense of the president, but Sheinbaum and Bass assumed that Blumenthal was going to try to multiply these local stories into broader and more sustained critical attention to the Starr team—which was exactly what he did. Blumenthal sent the clips to Doug Kelly, the research director of the Democratic National Committee, as well as to some of the reporters Blumenthal spoke to on a regular basis. His faxes bore the heading FROM: SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL but omitted any specific reference to their origin in the White House.
Blumenthal took greater precautions when he was handling videotapes. At around this time, Nicole Seligman, a member of Clinton’s defense team at Williams & Connolly, passed Blumenthal a cassette of a local television report from Los Angeles about Emmick’s controversial case. Instead of using government facilities, Blumenthal asked a friendly political consultant, Robert Shrum, to make copies for distribution. Shrum’s firm made ten copies for Blumenthal, who passed one to the DNC and shared others with individual journalists. At the Democratic Party headquarters, Blumenthal’s media research was distilled into talking points, and Blumenthal, in turn, directed reporters to the resulting product. By his own account, Blumenthal shared the reports about Emmick and Udolf with “news organizations ranging from CNN, CBS, ABC, New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, New York Observer, L.A. Times.”
For Blumenthal, the timing of his oppo assault was propitious. By mid-February, many of the reporters covering the story needed a new angle, and the professional background of the president’s pursuers made an ideal sidebar. Calls from reporters about the prosecutors flooded into Starr’s offices, and not just about their job histories, either. Journalists dredged up rumors about drug use, sexual orientation, divorces, and school records, which the stunned prosecutors tried to shoot down as best they could. As Blumenthal later described his role, he was like the sorcerer’s apprentice. All he meant to do was raise a few questions about some controversial cases on the public record, and he couldn’t help it if those legitimate issues spiraled into something much more vicious and personal. He was, he explained, very sad about what happened to the prosecutors.
Blumenthal’s leak about Mike Emmick never bothered the prosecutor very much. It concerned a case that he hadn’t even prosecuted, so he dismissed the tempest as “water off a duck’s back”—a phrase he used often in those days.
Bruce Udolf, on the other hand, was taking it harder. For one thing, Udolf had a bigger skeleton in his closet. He had become an elected district attorney in a suburban Atlanta county at a young age, and on March 17, 1985—when he was thirty-three years old—he made a big mistake. Agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation mixed up some registration numbers and arrested a carpenter named Ronald Reeves for possessing a stolen gun—which was not, it turned out, stolen at all. Still, Udolf and the agents held him for twenty-four hours before they even arranged for bail to be set, and then they had it set at an unconscionable $100,000. In the end, the interrogation of Reeves went on for five days, until he was finally allowed to go home, with no charges filed against him. Two years later, Reeves sued Udolf in connection with the incident, and Georgia taxpayers were obligated to cover a $50,000 judgment.
It was a costly and embarrassing lesson, and the Georgia voters turned Udolf out of office. He decided to move to Miami and, in effect, start his legal career over again. This Udolf did, with some help from one of his adversaries in the Reeves case, who thought the prosecutor behaved honorably in sorting out the mess. However, in the fevered atmosphere in which he found himself in Washington, Udolf knew that his decade of impeccable service in the U.S. Attorney’s Office would count little against this black mark. The crush of press phone calls about the Reeves case grew to such a point that he felt he had to say something, so he issued a brief statement: “I accept responsibility for that, and I regret it.”
The unwanted attention Emmick and Udolf were receiving in the news media had a subtle but real impact back in the Starr office as well. As such things often do, an office joke revealed a great deal about the tensions roiling the office. Not long after the Lewinsky scandal broke, someone on Starr’s team put up a hand-scrawled chart in a normally vacant office in which each prosecutor was supposed to rate the chances that Clinton would survive in office and the reasons why. The trick was, no prosecutor wrote down his own views, but instead guessed at what others believed. The chart thus became a kind of stock market for perceived manliness. At the top of the list—at about 80 percent chance of removal—someone wrote the names of David Barger and Sol Wisenberg, who were close allies of Bennett and Bittman and were described on the chart as the “Likud.” (Among his Jewish colleagues, Wisenberg was sometimes referred to as “the most conservative Jew in America.”) Emmick and Udolf (“commie wimps,” said the chart) were at the bottom, at around 25 percent. As for the purported reason for Udolf’s lack of confidence, someone wrote “lawsuit.” In other words, the perception was that Udolf had backed down because he was intimidated by the disclosure of the Reeves case.
For Udolf, unlike his friend Emmick, this was not water off a duck’s back. Rather, it was torture. At the same time he was berated in the press as a thug, he was scorned by his colleagues as a coward. Udolf didn’t think either of the descriptions was fair, and he certainly didn’t think both could be true. And his internal exile in Starr’s office came about only because he wanted to give Monica Lewinsky immunity, which was, Bennett and Bittman notwithstanding, the only real way to get to Bill Clinton. If that made him a wimp, so be it.
Udolf had another responsibility—to help put Marcia Lewis in front of the grand jury. On February 10 and 11, Udolf brought several excerpts from the Tripp tapes to play for Marcia Lewis in the grand jury—in hopes of forcing her to admit that she indeed did know that her daughter and the president were having an affair.
But Lewis wouldn’t quite admit it. She testified that Monica told her she was “in love” with the president,
but as a mother, she didn’t want to know the details of her daughter’s sex life. It was a degrading, awful two days in the grand jury, and the office was pummeled for forcing a mother to testify against her daughter. Late on the second afternoon, Emmick asked a series of questions about the word “Babba,” which was how Monica, in her conversations with Tripp, had referred to Hillary Clinton.
“Has your daughter ever referred to Hillary Clinton as ‘Babba’?”
“I don’t remember that …” Lewis said.
“All right,” Emmick went on. “Then let me ask you this. Is there a Yiddish phrase for grandmother that sounds something like ‘babba’ or ‘bubba’ or something like that?”
“I think there is, yes.”
“All right. What is that phrase?”
“I think it’s ‘bubba’?”
“ ‘Bubba.’ All right,” said Emmick.
“But I’m not sure,” Lewis went on. “I don’t speak Yiddish.”
Wisenberg—the most conservative Jew in America—took over the questioning at this point.
“Have you ever referred to anybody to your knowledge as Babba or the Babba?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lewis replied.
“Okay, who would that be?”
“Oh, it’s just a silly family thing we say,” Lewis replied. “It’s not—it has nothing to do with this. It’s just—like our grandmother. We used to call her Babba.”
“Okay,” Wisenberg plowed on. “But it’s your family’s—different families have variations of Grandma, Grandmother, Granny, and, as I understand it, this was your family’s variation of the grandmother? Is that correct?”
“I think so, yes,” Lewis said, but then she simply broke down in tears and couldn’t go on.
Udolf stepped in and walked Marcia Lewis out of the grand jury room. He delivered her to her lawyer, and went back to his colleagues and said, This is it. She can’t continue. “Let’s shut this down,” Udolf said, and the questioning of Lewis was suspended.
But to Udolf, it had all gotten so absurd. This office would rather torment this woman about bubbas and babbas and grannies than do the one thing that would bring the case to an expeditious conclusion: make a deal with Monica and move on. Udolf’s health was not perfect, and the stress of the past month had made everything worse. Within a few days of Lewis’s grand jury testimony, Udolf found himself in the hospital with pneumonia.
Udolf never really made it back to Starr’s office. Bob Bittman absorbed most of his responsibilities. There was, Udolf decided, more to life than this case. Back in Florida, he had a wife and daughter he adored, and he was sick of commuting to see them. No one called it a resignation in protest, but that, basically, was what it was. Technically, Udolf stayed on the payroll until the end of April, but he was really gone much earlier. After spending his entire legal career as a prosecutor, he signed up as a partner in a private law firm in Miami. He and his wife even thought about adopting a child, and Udolf brought his résumé to meet with a counselor.
“The Starr office,” the counselor mused as she studied Udolf’s qualifications to be a father. “You weren’t involved in the abuses there, were you?”
16
“Eighteenth-Hand” Rumors
On February 5, The Washington Post disclosed the breakdown of negotiations between Ginsburg and the prosecutors in an article headlined STARR REJECTS LEWINSKY PROPOSAL ON IMMUNITY. The newspaper story, by Susan Schmidt and Peter Baker, showed how the mindless aggressiveness of the Starr lawyers carried over to their strategy with the news media, too. The article began by disclosing—accurately—that “Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr yesterday rejected a proposed cooperation agreement with Monica S. Lewinsky’s lawyers.” The reporters then went on to repeat several falsehoods that the Starr team fed to them. To be sure, the Post reporters and editors did not intentionally mislead their readers; they merely put their trust in the wrong sources. (Lewinsky’s lawyer Nate Speights recalled with amusement how, after his daily phone call with Jackie Bennett, the Post’s Schmidt would call him and invariably repeat what Bennett had just said to him.)
Most of the article concerned Lewinsky’s handwritten proffer, which Ginsburg had submitted to try to close the immunity deal. “Sources” told Schmidt and Baker that a “written statement from Lewinsky was not solid enough to form the basis of an agreement because it contained inconsistencies and contradictions.” This was false. The statement, which was later released by Starr, has no significant flaws of this kind. “In her statement,” the article went on, “sources said, Lewinsky asserted that she was not urged to lie to Jones’ lawyers, for example, but said that she was told to tell a certain version of events—one that did not actually happen.” This was a fantasy. The statement said no such thing.
The article went on to characterize the famous “talking points,” which were, in the press at least, long perceived as a linchpin of a criminal case against someone close to Clinton and perhaps against the president himself. “Individuals who have spoken to Tripp,” Schmidt and Baker wrote, “have said that … the talking points discuss how Tripp should deny any knowledge that Lewinsky had any sexual relationship with the President.” In fact, the talking points, which were also released later, said nothing at all about how Tripp should testify about Lewinsky. Finally, the article raised the rumor of the movie theater tryst. “Starr’s office this week questioned a Justice Department lawyer, who had told colleagues that he was aware of an agent who reportedly had said he guarded the door of the White House movie theater last summer while Clinton was inside alone with a young woman,” the Post story said.
All of this misinformation had a distinct purpose—to persuade official Washington, and Lewinsky herself, that Starr had a strong case. At the very least, the reporters seemed convinced. “Starr’s decision to reject the proffer may reflect confidence in the rest of the case he is building,” Schmidt and Baker wrote. “In recent days, his office has moved to find witnesses who may have seen Clinton and Lewinsky together, including White House valets and Secret Service agents.” But these leaks would ultimately redound to Starr’s detriment, when his evidence failed to deliver on the implicit promises in news stories like this one. Lewinsky’s written statement was both internally consistent and exculpatory for Clinton on the issue of obstruction of justice; the talking points did not counsel Tripp to lie about anything, much less about the president and the intern; there were no eyewitnesses to a presidential grope, in the movie theater or anywhere else.
Notwithstanding the tone of news reports like this one, the failure to close an immunity deal with the former intern left Starr’s prosecutors—not Lewinsky’s team—with the real problems. The entire OIC investigation was based on the premise that Clinton and Lewinsky had been sexually involved with each other. In order to bring any of the possible charges against the president—including perjury and obstruction of justice—the Starr investigators first had to establish that the sex had taken place.
It was unusual enough to have a criminal case based on a consensual sexual relationship between two adults. But here the prosecutors had to prove the sexual liaison without the testimony of either participant in it. As of early February, thanks to the breakdown of negotiations with Ginsburg, Lewinsky would not be testifying anytime soon. No one in Starr’s office held out much hope that Clinton would be a witness in the immediate future, either. Characteristically, the Clinton forces made this position clear in a provocative, disdainful way.
On February 2, Bittman wrote the first of a series of letters to Clinton’s lawyer David Kendall “inviting” the president to testify before the grand jury. The word was chosen with care. Starr did not want, at this point, to set off a constitutional confrontation over the unsettled issue of whether a president could be formally subpoenaed before a grand jury. Knowing that Bittman’s letters lacked the legal force of a subpoena, Kendall replied by stringing him along. For months, Bittman and Kendall exchanged letters about Clinton’s possible testimony, their co
rrespondence a symphony of passive aggression on both sides. Kendall carefully avoided saying anything that could be construed as Clinton taking the Fifth, which would have been a political disaster for him. But he didn’t say yes, either.
Instead, the defense lawyer sent replies to Bittman that radiated his client’s contempt for Starr. “I was unable to respond to your February 4 invitation by the Friday deadline you had indicated in your letter because I was in the process of dealing with prejudicial and false leaks of information about your investigation,” Kendall wrote in one such letter. “However, under the circumstances, it is impossible to accept this invitation. The situation in Iraq continues to be dangerously volatile, and this has demanded much of the President’s time and attention.” Bittman kept pursuing Kendall (“The situation in Iraq has, thankfully, eased,” the prosecutor noted on one occasion), but Kendall always came up with new reasons to say no. Notwithstanding his early promise of cooperation with the investigation—“more rather than less, sooner rather than later,” as Clinton had said at the Arafat photo opportunity—the president was not going to help make Starr’s case for him.
As always, the priority in Starr’s office was projecting toughness, even more so after the White House–sponsored attacks on the integrity of the prosecutors. Jackie Bennett had handled most of the fallout from the press inquiries—the phone calls from reporters, the staffers weeping in his office, the offers to resign from nervous prosecutors—and he, as always, favored a direct response. “If the Gambino family was using contacts in the press to intimidate prosecutors, we’d go after them, and that’s what we should do here,” he told his colleagues. Bennett often used the metaphor of the White House as an organized crime family, and on those terms the prosecutors’ next move made a lot of sense.
A Vast Conspiracy Page 37
