Testifying under oath only three days later, on Aug. 20, Lewinsky complained that the president’s description of no-hands sex “suggests some kind of service contract–that all I did was to perform oral sex on him and that’s all this relationship was.” Though she testified that she wasn’t sure Clinton knew her name until after the third sexual encounter (he had been calling her “Kiddo”), Lewinsky described him as an avid lover. On Aug. 26, she testified how many times the president “touched and kissed her bare breasts” (nine); how many times he “stimulated” her genitals (four), and how many times he brought her to orgasm (three; once multiply). Then there were the 15 episodes of phone sex, and the cigar. The intimate particulars were so lurid that Lewinsky was spared from stating them directly to the grand jury. She was allowed to give her sworn testimony privately, in the office of the independent counsel, under questioning from female prosecutors.
Now that these details are available on the Internet, they may shock–or merely disgust–the world. But are they grounds for impeachment? Special prosecutor Ken Starr clearly thinks so. His friends and colleagues say that the independent counsel is genuinely appalled by the president’s alleged conduct, both the sex and the lies, and that he believes Clinton should be removed from office. A deeply conservative Christian, Starr has a missionary’s faith in his cause. Even at the lowest moment of his investigation last June, when press critic Steven Brill was accusing Starr of illegally leaking to reporters and his own staff was worrying whether they would all be fired or disgraced, Starr remained resolutely upbeat. In July, when Lewinsky unexpectedly turned over the stained dress (DNA tests gave 7 trillion-to-1 odds that the semen belonged to Clinton), Starr was exultant. During the round-the-clock race to produce a report, the independent counsel became a hands-on editor, insisting on more sexual detail. He said he wanted all the facts out. From time to time, his staff had to explain to him exactly what acts Clinton and Lewinsky were engaged in.
But some members of Starr’s own staff quietly fret that the 445-page report is perhaps too prurient. They fear a backlash and another round of Starr-bashing. In any case, it seems doubtful that Congress will remove Clinton for lying about sex alone. The House is not likely to impeach and the Senate is not likely to convict the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors” without overwhelming evidence that Clinton obstructed justice and abused the power of his office. On this score, Starr’s case is strong–but possibly not strong enough. The independent counsel has assembled compelling circumstantial evidence, an accumulation of small and sometimes telling detail, that the president sought to keep Lewinsky quiet in the Paula Jones case. But Starr uncovered no “smoking gun,” no clear-cut presidential command to lie. There is also some evidence that Clinton or his aides sought to impede Starr’s own criminal inquiry. But the proof of witness-tampering and subornation of perjury is far from airtight. The president’s clever lawyers were issuing rebuttals even before the report was released. They will be able to poke holes and exploit inconsistencies once they start poring over the 18 boxes of grand-jury testimony, most of which is scheduled to be made public by the end of the month. Real-life cover-ups are rarely straightforward. The question is whether Congress and the public will, in the end, believe that the president was trying to subvert the judicial system, or merely spare himself from personal humiliation.
Starr’s report does a fairly effective job of cutting through the president’s flat-out denials and shifty equivocations. Throughout his testimony, and again in his public statements, the president has repeatedly said, “I never asked her to lie.” In his deposition last January in the Jones case, he said he couldn’t even remember speaking to Lewinsky about her possible testimony in the Jones case. Questioned by the special prosecutor before a criminal grand jury seven months later, the president’s memory improved somewhat. He recalled that Lewinsky herself was eager to avoid testifying, but he denied any attempt to sway or silence her. Lewinsky’s recollection was more explicit and damning. One scene stands out. On Dec. 17, at about 2 a.m., the president telephoned her at home at her Watergate apartment, she told the grand jury. Clinton informed Lewinsky that her name had appeared on a list of possible witnesses in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case. It “broke his heart,” she quoted the president as saying, that Lewinsky might have to testify. According to Lewinsky, he suggested that she could avoid being deposed by signing an affidavit. She could say that she had come to the White House to visit Betty Currie, the president’s secretary, or to drop off some papers for the president. The ruse, testified Lewinsky, was “instantly familiar . . . I knew exactly what he meant.”
The president, the Starr Report maintains, was invoking a cover story they had used before. For months, Lewinsky had tried not to arouse the suspicion of the Secret Service by pretending that she was visiting the Oval Office to deliver or pick up papers. The president’s guardians were apparently not fooled. “From radio traffic about the president’s movements, several officers observed that the President often would head for the Oval Office within minutes of Ms. Lewinsky’s entry to the complex, especially on weekends, and some noted that he would return to the Residence a short time after her departure,” states Starr’s report. “Visiting Betty” was likewise a sham. The president’s secretary often sneaked Lewinsky in and out of the Oval Office, signing the former intern in under Currie’s name and not logging her calls to the president. Currie admitted to the grand jury that she “had concern” that Clinton was “spending a lot of time with a 24-year-old young lady.”
In his own testimony, Clinton acknowledged that he was trying to hide his relationship with Lewinsky to avoid “embarrassment.” But he may have been driven by other concerns as well, worries that may have pushed him to obstruct justice. On May 27, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the Paula Jone case could go forward, which meant that her lawyers could begin looking for “other women” who might have been sexually harassed by Clinton. The president had just terminated his sexual involvement with Lewinsky, and he had reason to worry about her discretion. Frustrated by Clinton’s failure to get a job for her back at the White House after the 1996 election, Lewinsky wrote Clinton a peevish “Dear Sir” letter on July 3, 1997. She had been a “good girl,” she wrote, and kept their relationship a secret. Clinton apparently smelled a whiff of blackmail. “It’s illegal to threaten the president of the United States,” he seriously scolded Lewinsky, according to her testimony. Nonetheless, Clinton soon set about getting her a job, enlisting the help of the White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles. Offered a job at the United Nations, Lewinsky decided she wanted a private-sector job instead. In her very persistent way, she asked Clinton if his friend superlawyer Vernon Jordan might help. She sent the president a “wish list” of PR jobs in New York, along with a postcard featuring a “very erotic” Egon Schiele painting and a note with her thoughts on education reform.
According to Starr’s report, Jordan’s job search for Lewinsky intensified after her name showed up on the witness list in the Jones case on Dec. 5. On Thursday, Dec. 11, Jordan met with Lewinsky. Later the same day, he called the chairman of Young & Rubicam and top executives at American Express and MacAndrews & Forbes, owners of Revlon, to arrange job interviews for her. On Jan. 8, when Lewinsky’s interview went poorly with MacAndrews & Forbes, Jordan called the chairman, Ron Perelman. The next day Lewinsky got a job at Revlon. Jordan called Clinton and declared, as he later testified, “Mission accomplished.”
Jordan’s name was a red flag to the Office of the Independent Counsel. Earlier in his four-year, $40 million Whitewater investigation, Starr had been extremely frustrated when former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton’s former law partner, had clammed up on matters relating to Arkansas bank fraud and land swindles. Starr’s men strongly suspected that Jordan, acting on Clinton’s behalf, had bought Hubbell’s silence by getting him a consulting contract with Revlon. Starr’s team eagerly probed Jordan’s role in the Lewinsky matter. They brought no charges against him–and Jordan stoutly maintains his innocence–but there are some strong indications that Jordan may have helped conceal Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. Less clear is whether Jordan really knew exactly what that relationship was.
ON DEC. 19, WHEN LEWINSKY received her subpoena in the Jones case, she says she burst into tears, ran to a pay phone and called Jordan. He summoned her to his office, where she arrived at 4:47 p.m. Ten minutes later, the Starr Report notes, Jordan called Clinton and told him that Lewinsky “had a subpoena” and was coming to see him. Jordan added that he was getting Lewinsky an attorney named Francis Carter. “You think he’s a good lawyer?” asked Clinton. In his deposition in the Jones case, only three weeks later, Clinton didn’t recall talking to anyone, other than his lawyers, about Lewinsky’s subpoena.
Jordan later testified that he had asked both Clinton and Lewinsky if their relationship was sexual, and that both denied it. But Lewinsky said that she assumed Jordan knew “with a wink and a nod” that she was having sex with president. She interpreted his questions as “what are you going to say?” in the affidavit, not a sincere attempt to learn the truth. At one point, she fretted to Jordan that someone might have eavesdropped on her phone conversations with the president. Jordan asked why she was worried. Lewinsky said she replied, “Well, we’ve had phone sex.” On Dec. 31, Lewinsky had breakfast with Jordan at Washington’s Park Hyatt Hotel and told him that she had kept notes that she had written to the president. According to Lewinsky, Jordan told her: “Go home and make sure they’re not there.” Later that day, Lewinsky returned to her apartment and threw out 50 draft notes she had written to Clinton. (Jordan testified that the breakfast never happened.)
Starr’s report is also suggestive–and ultimately inconclusive–on the question of whether Clinton helped Lewinsky hide some gifts rather than turn them over to Paula Jones’s lawyers. The fact that Clinton and Lewinsky had exchanged dozens of trinkets and mementos over an 18-month period (a few of them racy, like “Vox,” a novel about phone sex bought by Lewinsky) could signal Jones’s lawyers that Clinton’s relationship with the former intern called for a closer look. Deep-sixing them would be obstruction of justice.
Lewinsky’s subpoena specifically requested “all dresses, accessories, and jewelry, and/or hat pins . . .” The hat pin “screamed out at me because that was the first gift that the president had given me,” Lewinsky testified. On Sunday, Dec. 28, she visited the president at the White House. She told him that she was worried about the gifts. She suggested that she remove them from her house, or perhaps give them to Betty Currie. According to Lewinsky, the president was noncommittal. “I think he said, “I don’t know,’ or “Let me think about that’,” she testified.
Later that same afternoon, however, Lewinsky says she got a call at home from Betty Currie. According to Lewinsky, Currie said, “I understand you have something to give me.” Currie then drove over to Lewinsky’s apartment to pick up a box of gifts. Called to testify before the grand jury by Starr, Currie had trouble remembering. “Did the president know you were holding these things for Monica?” the prosecutors asked. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” replied Currie. “Didn’t he say to you that Monica had something for you to hold?” Currie: “I don’t remember that. I don’t.” The prosecutor: “Did you ever talk to the president and tell him you had this box from Monica?” Currie: “I don’t remember that, either.” Pressed again, Currie finally said that Lewinsky “may remember better than I. I don’t remember.”
Currie is, of course, a critical witness whose testimony could sink or save the president if Congress decides that obstruction is impeachable. Overwhelmed by the media onslaught when the Lewinsky story first broke last January, she moved out of her house to a hotel. There, over the course of four days, FBI agents intensively questioned her. At first, Starr’s men were delighted with Currie’s cooperation. But over time, after she returned to her post outside the Oval Office, the president’s secretary became vaguer and more helpful to her boss. Testifying before the grand jury on Jan. 27, she told the grand jury that Clinton and Lewinsky had been alone in the Oval Office for 15 to 20 minutes on many occasions. Yet testifying six months later, on July 22, she stated that the president, “for all intents and purposes is never alone. There’s always somebody around him.” On May 6, she testified that she sometimes came to the White House for the sole purpose of admitting Lewinsky and bringing her to the president. By July 22, she could no longer recall any such occasions.
Her testimony is particularly crucial–and maddeningly ambiguous–on the critical question of whether the president tried to tamper with her as a witness. On Jan. 18, the day after his deposition in the Jones case, Clinton called Currie at home and asked her to come into the White House. He began asking questions about Lewinsky. “You were always there when she was there, right? We were never really alone,” said Clinton (who just the day before had said as much under oath in his deposition). “You could see and hear everything . . . Monica came on to me, and I never touched her, right? . . . She wanted to have sex with me, and I can’t do that.” Currie indicated to the grand jury that these remarks were “more like statements than questions.” She concluded that Clinton wanted her to agree with him, but that he was testing her reaction. She answered yes to each–even though, she testified, she knew the president and Lewinsky had in fact been alone, out of sight and beyond easy earshot. The president, she said, seemed “concerned.” Clinton later testified, implausibly, that he was just trying to refresh his own recollection.
Over the next two days, the president repeatedly tried to find Lewinsky. On Monday, Jan. 20, Currie made seven unsuccessful attempts to page Lewinsky between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. The next night, the president learned that the Lewinsky story was breaking in the press. At 1:16 a.m. he called Currie and spoke to her for 20 minutes. The president was concerned, Currie testified, that her name was surfacing in that morning’s Washington Post. Currie also told the grand jury that she met again in person with the president in the Oval Office. “It was sort of a recapitulation of what we had talked about on Sunday–you know, “I was never alone with her’–that sort of thing.”
The meeting took place, Currie said, either on Tuesday, Jan. 20, or Wednesday, Jan. 21; she couldn’t remember which. The difference is very important. On Wednesday–after the story emerged–Clinton knew Starr was conducting a criminal investigation into obstruction of justice in the Jones case. Clinton’s thinly veiled attempts to coach her could amount to evidence of witness-tampering. But if the meeting took place on Tuesday–before the story broke–then the meeting between Clinton and Currie seems less serious. As far as Clinton knew, Currie was only a potential witness in the Jones case, not a criminal inquiry.
Clinton himself refused to testify before Starr’s grand jury for the next seven months. He did, however, lie to senior White House aides, who, as Starr’s report puts it, “then conveyed the President’s false story to the grand jury.” Chief of staff Bowles and senior aides John Podesta, Harold Ickes and Sidney Blumenthal all told the grand jury that the president had denied any sexual involvement with Lewinsky. With Podesta, he was explicit that he had not had oral sex. To Blumenthal, he apparently portrayed Lewinsky as a “stalker.”
The president’s legal team will now mount an all-out defense. The temptation will be to depict Lewinsky as a mendacious vixen. In light of Clinton’s prayer-breakfast plea for forgiveness from the Lewinsky family, the character attacks will have to wait. A larger target is Starr himself. He is being cast as a sex-obsessed zealot who, unable to find anything else wrong with the Clintons after years of digging, pried into the president’s private life. Starr is not likely to be fazed. He truly believes, his friends say, that he is upholding the law and the Constitution. Unless Congress can find a compromise to make the whole mess go away, Starr v. Clinton will drag on.
