On November 14, 1995, the United States experienced a dramatic and unprecedented government-wide shutdown as a result of a spending dispute between the Clinton White House and the Republican-led United States Congress. All but the most essential government services—the postal service, armed forces, air traffic controllers—ran out of the funds needed to operate. This shutdown was yet another telling sign of the growing divide between the two major parties in Washington.
At the White House, many “nonessential” members of the staff were relieved of duty, as determined by the Office of Management and Budget, and sent home. Picking up the slack in some White House offices were interns, which, in 1995, included a young woman with dark hair and a penchant for dramatic gestures of her own.
In the spring of 1996, my office was contacted by a lawyer in California who was involved in a divorce case. He represented a prominent doctor who was seeking information about his ex-wife and her economic situation. The client was well known in California, but his name meant nothing to me. It was a rather run-of-the-mill case. We tracked down some information on the ex-wife, including the fact that she was living with their daughter in an apartment at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
This was a simple exercise for a modest amount of time and expense. I promptly forgot about the case—and didn’t remember it even when the client’s last name came up prominently later, in a spectacular way. The Watergate apartment his ex-wife was living in was shared by their daughter, Monica, who, the world learned eighteen months later, was then involved in a difficult relationship of her own.
• • •
In early 1998, when I was in Moscow on a case, I received an unexpected phone call.
“Is this Terry?” asked a familiar voice.
“Yes.”
“Terry, this is Bob Bennett.”
Robert S. Bennett is a Washington superlawyer who is sought after by politicians, government officials, and corporate executives to help them deal with serious legal and public relations issues. He’s who the major players call when they get into trouble. Bennett had represented former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger during the Reagan administration over a scandal involving selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. In general Bob usually represented Democratic clients, though his brother, Bill, who had been Reagan’s secretary of education, was a well-known conservative author, pundit, and consultant.
I liked Bob. I knew him as a smart lawyer, and we’d worked together on a number of cases. I had no idea why he was calling now, but it must have been pretty important to track me down across nine time zones.
“Terry, have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky?”
On January 17, 1998, a fledgling website called the Drudge Report aired allegations about an affair President Clinton was said to have had with a then twenty-two-year-old former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. This was followed a few days later by a front-page article in the Washington Post, “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie.” The article said that Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who had been appointed to investigate allegations of the Clintons’ financial misconduct, was now expanding the inquiry to include charges that the president had encouraged Lewinsky to lie under oath. Mentioned as a witness to this was a woman who had worked with Lewinsky at the Pentagon. Her name was Linda Tripp.
Bob Bennett asked IGI to find out what we could about Lewinsky and Tripp through public information available on various electronic databases. He wanted to determine how credible they were and whether they had been influenced by Clinton haters. According to the Post, Ms. Lewinsky had given an affidavit in a lawsuit that Paula Jones brought against Bill Clinton for sexual harassment when he was governor of Arkansas. In her deposition, Lewinsky denied having had an affair with the president.
I knew the Jones case pretty well. IGI had been hired by Clinton’s defense lawyers to look into Mrs. Jones’s background. We searched public documents, especially those that might relate to her economic situation and sources of income. We conducted a database search for her name, finding various news articles about her and her associations. I learned that she had in fact received support from a group of conservative individuals as she pursued her legal case against the president. I knew this information would be used by the president’s lawyers to question her credibility. That’s when I first became involved in the fiasco that would draw the president, and the entire country, into the second impeachment scandal in which I was involved. Unlike the Nixon case, where the president resigned before impeachment, this time the president would be impeached.
My role in the Clinton situation was minor. But the media’s hyped-up determination to find scandal and identify conspirators targeted me. I was portrayed as the leader of President Clinton’s secret police. During these events and since, I have been called “the head of Clinton’s KGB,” one of “Hillary’s private investigators,” and part of Mrs. Clinton’s “banana republic auxiliary police.” The Baltimore Sun labeled me Bill Clinton’s “private eye.” Newsweek magazine had a double-page spread showing me in the center with links to all sorts of people.
The fact is that I don’t know the Clintons at all. The closest I ever came to the president was across a crowded room at a private party early in his administration, and I shook hands with Hillary Clinton at another social event. Contrary to assumptions made by the media, readers may be surprised by how benign, ethical, and appropriate was the inquiry IGI conducted through analysis of publicly available documents.
• • •
When he was elected in 1992, Clinton was seen as a new kind of Democrat, not wedded to old party ideas. He was charming, appealing, and confident. But his openness and casual style rubbed many people, especially conservatives, the wrong way.
Clinton’s detractors became obsessed. They suspected the Clintons were up to no good and were responsible for all sorts of crimes and mysterious coincidences. Like Nixon, Bill and Hillary became the poster children for duplicity, unethical conduct, and maybe even pure evil. While Nixon had imagined legions of enemies, Clinton had real enemies. The Clintons were accused of being behind drug running in Arkansas. George H. W. Bush questioned Clinton’s patriotism, and Republicans were convinced there was a picture somewhere of Bill or Hillary burning an American flag. An official in the Bush Justice Department was caught rifling through Clinton’s passport files, presumably to follow up on a rumor that Clinton once tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
In July 1993, Vincent Foster, a longtime Clinton associate who had come to Washington to be deputy White House counsel, was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot. Clinton antagonists suspected murder, and publicized their suspicions through magazine articles and even a movie, despite the fact that clear evidence from four separate investigations ruled the death a suicide. A torn-up suicide note found in Foster’s briefcase had a cutting, and telling, last line. “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington,” he apparently wrote. “Here ruining people is considered sport.”
The Clinton White House tried to ignore these allegations, but in January 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske. Fiske was a skilled trial lawyer who had been U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He had experience dealing with organized crime, financial misconduct, and a host of other activities. If the Clintons had been involved in anything illegal, Fiske would probably find it. Reno charged Fiske with investigating Vince Foster’s death and the Whitewater controversy.
Whitewater was another of the supposed scandals that clung to the Clintons. It involved a complicated land purchase in Arkansas that had come under investigation before the president was inaugurated.
Fiske’s interim report was released on June 30. Having interviewed more than one hundred witnesses, Fiske said he found no evidence that Vince Foster was murdered. He also cleared the Clintons of wrongdoing in meeting with regulators from the Treasury Department over the Whitewater investigation. But the Clinton’s critics were not satisfied.
On the same day as the report’s release, the Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act replaced the position of special prosecutor with a new position of independent counsel to be appointed by a three-judge panel instead of by the attorney general. Attorney General Reno recommended that Fiske continue his investigation with the new title, but she was overruled. Ten Republicans in the House and a conservative activist wrote to the three judges on the panel, all Republican appointees, charging that Fiske had a conflict of interest because he had worked with Democratic lawyers on past cases. They clearly wanted someone who would be more aggressive against the Clintons, and Judge Kenneth Starr was selected.
Judge Starr had been solicitor general of the United States under President George H. W. Bush, and then appointed to a federal appellate court. Because of his ties to the Republican Party, Starr was easy to portray as someone with a political agenda. Starr hired a team of lawyers with varying degrees of investigative experience. He also hired Sam Dash, the Ervin Committee’s chief counsel, as a special advisor. Undoubtedly Starr saw an advantage in bringing in someone with Watergate credentials, but it was to little avail. From the outset Starr was seen as a right-wing partisan.
• • •
In 1996, IGI had been retained to investigate sources of contributions made on President Clinton’s behalf. The Democratic National Committee asked me to conduct an investigation of thousands of dollars of contributions to the DNC that might have come from foreign sources, which was a violation of federal law. I was also retained by the Clinton legal defense fund, which had been set up to pay for the Clintons’ defense costs in responding to investigations and lawsuits against them. Some of the contributions to the fund appeared suspect.
About $450,000 in defense fund contributions had been rounded up by a longtime Clinton associate, Charlie Trie, a Little Rock restaurateur who delivered the donations in two envelopes filled with checks and money orders. The defense fund immediately suspected about $70,000 of the contributions and returned them to Trie. They hired me to look into the rest. I could see why they were concerned; red flags were obvious. For example, the money orders had different names on them, but the word “presidential” was misspelled on all of them—in the exact same way and in the same handwriting. We started tracking down the alleged donors one by one. We found that many of the large contributions were actually from people with annual incomes of only $20,000 or $30,000. When I presented my findings to the defense fund trustees, they agreed with my recommendation to return all the Trie contributions.
The president initially was reluctant. I learned to my surprise that Clinton didn’t want to return any of the money, and maintained that position until the two chairmen of the fund, Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame University and my former boss Nicholas Katzenbach, threatened to resign and make their objections public. In the end, the supposed donors whom we could locate received checks from the fund. I supposed a number of them might have been baffled receiving thousands of dollars in refunds that they’d never actually contributed themselves. Charlie Trie received whatever was left over.
In 1996, the year of Clinton’s reelection, the Republican-controlled Congress decided to hold hearings on Clinton’s foreign money contributions and their links to China and the Far East. A controversial Republican congressman, Dan Burton of Indiana, led the House investigation. Burton was known for his attacks on Clinton. He had asserted on the House floor that Vince Foster was murdered, and even described how he had reenacted the alleged crime in the back of his house, shooting a pistol at a pumpkin that was supposed to be Foster’s head.
Having learned of my work on the DNC and defense fund contributions, Burton’s committee issued a subpoena asking me broadly for any materials related to investigations IGI had done on behalf of political clients. I phoned a member of the committee and told him that, as a matter of fact, I’d had more Republican clients than Democrats. If I were to comply with the subpoena, I’d have to turn over all the information I’d collected on behalf of Republican clients, information that might be leaked to the media. I didn’t hear another word from Burton on the matter after that.
Putting someone that partisan and prone to caricature in charge of a serious investigation was political malpractice by the GOP. With some justification, the media labeled the hearings a “travesty” and a “cartoon” and did not seem to take any of it very seriously. Thus there was little impetus for the Clintons or the Democrats to cooperate with Burton—and so they didn’t.
A Senate committee also held hearings in July 1997 on illegal contributions to Democrats. The committee was chaired by Fred Thompson, who had been elected to the Senate from Tennessee in 1994. If Thompson intended to recapture the bipartisan spirit of the Watergate inquiry, he was thwarted by his Democratic co-chairman, John Glenn Jr. of Ohio, who had no interest in cooperating with the Republicans. Thompson and Glenn feuded in public on various occasions. (Later, some claimed that Glenn had done the Clintons’ bidding in exchange for permission to make one last historic flight into outer space at the age of seventy-seven.)
The hearing also did not attract much media attention or scrutiny. Reporters did not follow the case with the zeal they did every twist and turn of Watergate. Little was said of the fact that as many as ninety-four people either refused to be questioned, pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, or left the country altogether.
Thompson also made a mistake, announcing at the start of the hearings that there was evidence that the Chinese government had used campaign contributions to interfere with the 1996 election. It was as if Sam Ervin had announced at the beginning of the Watergate investigation that he intended to prove Nixon committed impeachable offenses. An investigator should never make such a prejudgment. Trie had left the country and was unavailable to testify. In a highly partisan atmosphere, Thompson was never able to prove his allegation. (After Trie returned to the United States in 1998, he was convicted of violating campaign finance laws and sentenced.)
Because of IGI’s investigation of campaign finances, I was asked to testify. Senator Thompson acknowledged our past acquaintance with affection, noting in his deep Tennessee drawl that he and I were “young snappers” on the Watergate Committee back in the day. But soon the hearing went completely off the rails.
The same week as my appearance, Newsweek published an item linking me to an investigation of Republican senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, who was on the Thompson committee. A Native American tribe in Oklahoma had approached me with their suspicion that Senator Nickles was involved in efforts to deprive them of revenues from oil wells on reservation land. I was not hired and did no investigation, but Nickles decided to turn the hearing into an attack on me. When I finally got a word in edgewise, I told the irate senator that I had never initiated an investigation for the tribe, but he went on and on, chastising me and asserting that members of the Senate ought to be above scrutiny by private investigators.
At one point I turned to Fred to ask him to refocus the committee on why I was called to testify in the first place. He shrugged, which I took as a signal that there wasn’t much he could do about the ravings of his colleague.
What any of this had to do with Charlie Trie or Clinton was beyond me. It seemed obvious to me that neither Thompson nor anyone else had much control over the proceedings. I was amazed that the Clinton White House managed to get away with receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal foreign money—including from a guy in Little Rock who knew Clinton when he was governor. A clear attempt by foreign interests to influence our political process was greeted with a shrug. It was a brutal indictment of both parties. Partisan rancor in Washington was such that neither side was even interested in finding the truth.
Clinton’s reputation as a womanizer got him into trouble from the very beginning. During his 1992 election campaign, a model/actress named Gennifer Flowers claimed to have had a twelve-year relationship with Clinton. In 1994, another woman, Paula Jones, filed a sexual harassment suit against the president. She accused Clinton, who was then governor of Arkansas, of demanding oral sex in a Little Rock hotel room. The Jones lawsuit was stalled in the courts until May 1997, when the Supreme Court determined that a civil suit could go forward against a sitting president. Monica Lewinsky had been deposed by Paula Jones’s lawyers, and had signed a sworn affidavit denying a sexual relationship with the president. As a father and husband, I found the allegations disturbing, particularly those involving a young intern.
On January 26, 1998, President Clinton addressed the allegations of an affair with Lewinsky before cameras at the White House. “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.”
When I saw that statement on television, I wanted to believe that the allegations were nonsense. It was hard to imagine that the president, already under attack for womanizing, would be so stupid as to have had a sexual relationship with an intern. But at the time, I was assembling information on Lewinsky and Linda Tripp for the Clinton lawyers. We pursued the same lines of inquiry for Tripp as we had for Lewinsky, examining various court records and her links to Republicans. Linda Tripp had worked for the Clinton White House as a holdover from the Bush administration. She had been transferred to the Pentagon public relations office, where Lewinsky also worked after she left the White House in 1996. I found there were definite issues relating to Tripp’s credibility, including her connection to Lucianne Goldberg, a woman who tipped off reporter Mike Isikoff to the Lewinsky-Clinton affair. We were asked to investigate Goldberg’s background as well.
In addition to knowledge about Lewinsky’s relationship with the president, Tripp had also claimed to have witnessed another event involving a Clinton accuser. She said she saw Kathleen Willey leaving the Oval Office with her makeup and clothing in disarray—the result of an alleged Clinton advance. It seemed a little too convenient that Tripp had been in the right place at the right time to know of two instances of impropriety. Tripp had been employed in the Bush White House prior to working for the Clinton administration, which didn’t necessarily impugn her capacity for honesty, but it was worth looking into.
As for Lewinsky, we conducted a standard database search on her, finding her Social Security number, residences, date of birth, and driving records. We searched various states in which she had resided for civil and criminal records and any bankruptcy proceedings—finding none. We tracked down the names of her friends and associates and compiled a list of news stories in which she or her friends were quoted. We tracked links between donors to conservative political organizations and various publications that trumpeted allegations against the president. We were asked to investigate the background of a retired Secret Service agent, Lewis Fox, who had told the Washington Post that he had seen Clinton and Monica alone together, contrary to what Clinton was then claiming. Lewinsky did show signs of naïveté and a capacity for exaggeration. That initially was the stance the White House took against her, and a storyline advanced for reporters.
We also constructed a chronology of Lewinsky’s recent activities that might relate to her credibility, much of which was compiled from published reports. We included, for example:
1991: Graduates from Beverly Hills Prep. Attends Santa Monica Community College.
SUMMER 1992: Begins affair with married professor Andy Bleiler while student at Santa Monica College.
SPRING 1993: Moves to Portland to attend Lewis & Clark College. So do Blielers, though there are contradictory reports regarding sequence.
JUNE 1995: Graduates Lewis & Clark; moves to WDC and joins White House as unpaid intern. Reportedly tells Bleiler, “I’m going to the White House to get my presidential kneepads.”
What I didn’t know then was that Starr had detailed evidence of Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. Linda Tripp had taped hours of phone conversations with Lewinsky during which the former intern described her encounters with the president, gifts he had given her, and the blue dress stained from one of their dalliances, which she had saved and never washed. Tripp gave the tapes to Paula Jones’s lawyers, and to the independent counsel’s office in mid-January.
For the next several months, rumors and salacious speculation headlined news reports, while Lewinsky refused to testify to the grand jury. Many Clinton loyalists steadfastly refused to believe their president would have been so reckless. But on July 28, after she was granted immunity against prosecution for her previous perjury in denying an affair under oath, Lewinsky testified to the grand jury about her affair with Clinton and turned over the semen-stained blue dress. In grand jury testimony that was taped on August 17, the president admitted to “an improper physical relationship” with Lewinsky.
When the famous blue dress emerged, the one allegedly stained by the president, it became clear that something inappropriate had indeed happened between the two. Based on the Tripp tapes and the blue dress, Ken Starr concluded that the president had committed perjury.
Had Robert Fiske still been the independent counsel and come across this information, I think he would have sent a private message to the president to stop fooling around with interns. Then he would have handed him a subpoena asking for his campaign contribution records and demanding his prompt and complete compliance. In other words, an effective prosecutor would have used the president’s vulnerability about the tangential Lewinsky affair to pursue the more serious, and potentially fruitful, investigation that I believe the questions about campaign finance deserved.
That’s not what Ken Starr did. Maybe he felt pressured to finally get the goods on Clinton and thought he had all he needed for that. For whatever reason, Starr turned the tawdry Lewinsky business into a national obsession, totally eclipsing any other aspect of his investigation.
As Judge Starr’s tactics and preoccupations came under increased scrutiny, he became increasingly defensive, almost paranoid. When news reports offered unflattering descriptions of some of his deputies, he went ballistic. He became convinced that some sort of cabal was digging up dirt on his office and that I was the guy in charge of it. A Republican lawyer who likes to make headlines, Joseph diGenova, went on Meet the Press and claimed that I was investigating him and his wife. I had no idea who the diGenovas were, and no idea what he was talking about. White House press secretary Mike McCurry called the assertions “blatant lies.” But, of course, people like diGenova and his supporters, blinded by their hatred of the Clintons and mass paranoia, would never believe that.
On February 23, 1998, I was at home in Washington when our doorbell rang. Before long, Margaret came to find me.
“There are two FBI agents here to see you,” she said. I was as baffled as she was.
“Must be traffic tickets,” I joked.
I went to the door. Neither of the men looked like FBI guys I’ve known—who were always clean-cut, professional, tough guys. These were scruffy looking, neither wearing a jacket or tie.
“Mr. Lenzner,” one of them said, “this is for you.”
I was handed a subpoena instructing me to appear before the Starr grand jury the next day, and to produce any and all documents “referring or relating to the Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr,” and “any contact, directly or indirectly, with a member of the media which related or referred” to Starr and his team. This was completely wild—Ken Starr was asking me for information, not about the Clintons or their activities but about Ken Starr himself and his staff.
As I studied the subpoena, I was struck by the signature at the bottom. It was that of a Starr deputy named Robert Bittman. His name rang a bell. Bob’s father, Bill Bittman, was a criminal defense lawyer who’d represented E. Howard Hunt during Watergate. When Tony Ulasewicz delivered hush money to Hunt and other plumbers, Bill Bittman was one of the couriers. Ulasewicz had testified that he went to Bittman’s office building near the White House, entered a phone booth in the lobby, and taped under the seat envelopes of cash for the Watergate conspirators. He then called up Bittman’s office, left the phone booth, and watched until Bittman himself came down and retrieved the hush money. During the Watergate hearings, my public interrogation of Bill Bittman about this infuriated and embarrassed him.
I didn’t want to be as paranoid as Starr was, but in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder if Bill Bittman’s son, Bob, was trying for a little payback here.
I read in the newspaper that a White House aide, former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, had also been subpoenaed to testify about his possible involvement in the stories about Starr’s deputies. When reporters asked Starr about the subpoenas, Starr said he was responding to an “avalanche of lies” about him and his team and he was using the grand jury to get to the source. He released a statement to the press. “This office has received repeated press inquiries indicating that misinformation is being spread about personnel involved in this investigation,” the statement said. “We are using traditional and appropriate techniques to find out who is responsible and whether their actions are intended to intimidate prosecutors and investigators, impede the work of the grand jury, or otherwise obstruct justice.” Apparently, Starr thought Blumenthal was doing this from the White House.
The whole thing was bizarre, and I was hardly the only one who thought Ken Starr was widely off track. The always colorful James Carville immediately went after Starr, labeling him a “thin-skinned fool.” “This man is out of control,” he said. Rahm Emanuel, another Clinton advisor, called Starr’s inquiry an “abuse of power.” It was painfully obvious to me that Starr had violated a rule of investigations: never make it personal. And another, more important rule: never decide the results of an investigation before you gather the facts. He was obsessed with the idea the nefarious Clintons and their all-powerful KGB network were snooping through his garbage and his underwear drawer. Back at the White House, they must have been laughing at their good fortune. How in the world had a case about Bill Clinton become focused on Ken Starr?
When word of my subpoena leaked, I became the subject of a slew of news stories investigating me. Most of them were silly and irrelevant. Some described details of my mundane personal life, which was hardly newsworthy, including my marriage, my kids, the price of my home, my relationship with my dad, and my “fanatical” diet. Articles discussing my professional life were usually loaded with error, false accusations, and innuendo. William Safire dusted off the columns he’d written about me during the Watergate hearings, calling me a “bully” and a “gleeful” savage. None of the articles had anything to do with the Starr investigation or campaign finances. In this atmosphere, the fact that I had investigated illegal contributions to the DNC and Clinton’s legal defense fund were totally ignored. Though I personally had serious misgivings about the president and his behavior, I was now considered part of the Clinton tribe, by Clinton fans as well as by his opponents.
While my unwelcomed notoriety did attract some new clients to IGI, I did not appreciate the attention. I had always prided myself on the discreet way my firm operated. And I was distressed by articles that mischaracterized IGI as partisan. My involvement with the Clinton matter all but wiped out any work for Republican clients. To them, I was now an untouchable.
Some assumed falsely that I knew the Clintons well and was taking orders from them. There was an allegation that IGI’s contract to train police in Haiti was “proof” of a payoff to assure my allegiance. This too was a total misconception. We were, in fact, hired for that job because of Ray Kelly, my deputy at the time. Kelly was the former New York City police commissioner and a former marine. The marines were desperate to have his expertise. Besides, if the Clintons were really going to buy my complicity, I’d like to think I’d be smart enough to ask for more than that.
Credulous partisans believe only what they want to believe, and they can cite “evidence” to support their beliefs. Whole books about the Clinton-Starr fiasco have been published with absurd claims—even about me. Kathleen Willey—whose maybe intimate encounter with Bill Clinton gave her fifteen minutes of fame—wrote in a 2007 book about my “long, intertwined history with the Clintons, especially Hillary.” She wrote that I’d served with Hillary Clinton on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. (I was never on that board; the corporation was created after my time at OEO.) She claimed that I worked with Hillary on the Watergate Committee. (Mrs. Clinton never worked on the Ervin Committee; she was a young lawyer on the Rodino Committee in the House and I never met her then.) I had no connection to Hillary Clinton at all.
The stories and rumors kept gathering momentum. At one point I ran into a friend who had been a member of the news media. When she saw me, she whispered, “Terry, are you going to be okay?”
I was surprised. This woman had been in Washington for decades and saw the place at some of its roughest moments. Why would this be such a big deal?
“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I’ve been hearing things,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Finding myself in a witness seat was a new experience for me. The grand jury room—some wag called it the Starr Chamber—was at the end of a hall on the fourth floor of a federal courthouse. A few other witnesses were seated on benches in the hall—waiting to be grilled as well.
The grand jurors were seated in chairs watching me come in. None of them asked a question, as is sometimes common. Starr’s team was running this show.
It seemed that the Starr prosecutors had not done any of the open-minded background research that I always did before putting on a witness when I was a prosecutor. It was clear they thought they knew all about how the Clinton White House operated, were confident that I was part of that, and were not prepared for any inconvenient facts that contradicted their assumptions.
One of the prosecutors asked me when I had last reported to President Clinton. I responded, to apparent surprise, that I’d never met him. Another asked something to the effect of, “Mr. Lenzner, when Judge Starr was working on behalf of the cigarette industry, it says here that you were compiling negative information about him on behalf of your client. Could you comment on that?”
I looked at him incredulously. “As a matter of fact, I can comment,” I said. “At the time Ken Starr was working for the cigarette companies, my firm was conducting an investigation of one of their whistle-blowers.” My inquisitor looked shocked by my response. It hadn’t occurred to him that IGI had the same corporate clients that Starr had.
I was shocked too—shocked that supposedly professional prosecutors would ask a question based on such ignorance of transparent facts. They should have known that IGI’s client was Brown & Williamson, one of the biggest tobacco companies, and we would have had no reason to investigate the cigarette companies’ lawyer. To the grand jurors, the Starr people must have looked as foolish and inept as I thought they were.
When it was Bob Bittman’s turn, he was clearly annoyed with me. He asked me questions that had no real point—one being whether or not I knew what “the fraud exception rule” was. I had no idea, and said so. The question meant nothing to the grand jurors either.
During a break in my testimony, I went out and sat on one of the benches in the hall. A few minutes later a tall man with curly dark hair and glasses approached me.
“Terry Lenzner?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Sid Blumenthal.”
I said hello to him and we shook hands.
“Ken Starr believes we are in a conspiracy together,” he said with a smile. He told me he was fighting a subpoena from Starr that asked for all of his contacts with reporters going back years.
I pointed back to the grand jury room. I said I just met with Starr’s people. As Blumenthal recalled it later, I told him, “They’re insane. Stupid and insane.” Even if I had reason to damage Starr, why would I bother to go after him when he was doing such a good job of damaging himself?
When I returned to the grand jury room, one of the prosecutors fortuitously asked me when I had first met Sid Blumenthal. They believed that we were in cahoots.
In response to the question, I barely concealed a smile. Then I looked at my watch just to rub it in. “I just met him outside,” I said. “About twelve minutes ago.”
A few of the grand jurors laughed, but I don’t think the prosecutors did. So much for their conspiracy.
A few months later, during the impeachment trial of President Clinton in the Senate, attorney David Kendall queried Starr about information that Starr had allocated funds for private investigators as part of his office’s budget. What, Kendall queried with relish, were Starr’s men snooping for? Were they digging up dirt on Clinton’s former girlfriends?
Starr flipped out at the assertion. “We never hired Terry Lenzner,” he snapped disdainfully. I had become his bogeyman.
The report of the independent counsel’s investigation—the Starr Report—was submitted to Congress on September 9, 1998, and Starr posted it on the Internet two days later. It included intimate details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair—almost soft porn. It went well outside the bounds of what a professional investigator would do, and was roundly criticized. On October 5, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to recommend an impeachment inquiry and held hearings over four weeks. The hearings began in the lame duck session, after the Republicans lost a net of five seats in the November congressional elections. In contrast to the Watergate proceedings, the House of Representatives conducted no serious independent investigation of its own, and voted on December 19 to impeach the president for perjury and obstruction of justice. On February 12, 1999, after conducting a trial, the Senate voted against the impeachment charges and the president was acquitted.
• • •
The impeachment of a president of the United States is the most powerful responsibility given to the House of Representatives under the Constitution. The process should be handled soberly and dispassionately, without concern for party or personal interest. When the House’s articles of impeachment are referred to the Senate for trial, conviction requires a two-thirds majority. Presidential impeachment has been attempted only three times in our history, and has never resulted in a conviction.
In 1974, President Nixon resigned, escaping the House’s impeachment and trial by the Senate. Fifteen years later, President Clinton was impeached, tried, and acquitted. But these two impeachment events were vastly different.
One critical difference is the intentions and motivations that drove the Congresses toward impeachment. Sam Dash told Senator Ervin that his goal for the Watergate hearings was to “tell the story” of what happened through factual evidence obtained in public. In contrast, Starr’s intention was to impeach the president; he had less regard for the evidence. As Starr said, “Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.”
The conservatives’ determination to nail President Clinton fatally flawed Starr’s investigation. Assuming the desired result of impeachment early in his investigation, Starr damaged his credibility and infected the inquiry with a terminal disease. The Watergate investigation in 1973 was the gold standard by comparison. Impeaching Richard Nixon, much less convicting him, had never been a goal of the Ervin Committee. We followed facts to discover what had happened. When the Ervin Committee first convened, none of us seriously considered that the Watergate scandal would implicate the president, or even his most senior aides. Every discovery, every revelation, was a shock. When the facts led to the Oval Office, we were as surprised, and sorry, as every other patriotic observer. Never did we recommend, support, or involve ourselves in Congress’s decision to impeach Richard Nixon.
The quality and integrity of the leaders of the Watergate investigation in the Senate and in the House’s impeachment inquiry were remarkable. Like Senator Ervin, Representative Peter Rodino was under the radar in national politics before he became chair of the House Judiciary Committee in 1973. When he organized the Nixon impeachment inquiry early in 1974, he said, “When this is done, the American public must be confident that this was a fair undertaking.” Both chairmen recognized the need for transparency, high-mindedness, and bipartisanship. That’s not to say that there weren’t partisans on the committees, but all final votes of the Senate Committee were unanimous, as was the final vote of Rodino’s Judiciary Committee to recommend impeachment to the full House.
The Rodino Committee appropriately did its own investigation of facts uncovered by the Senate committee hearings, with a staff of more than one hundred poring over documents for months. In contrast, the House of Representatives in the Clinton impeachment depended on the controversial Starr Report. When Sam Dash belatedly resigned as advisor to the independent counsel in December 1998, he admonished Starr: “You have no right or authority under the law, as independent counsel, to advocate for a particular position on the evidence before the Judiciary Committee.” Dash’s admonition helped to redeem his reputation, which had been badly tarnished by his work with Starr. But it had no impact on the House’s decision to impeach President Clinton a week later. Dash’s denunciation underscored my conviction that Judge Starr’s appointment was the best thing that could have happened to the Clintons.
If Starr had been smart, he would have concentrated his investigation on Whitewater and campaign finance. It made sense to pursue some of the issues before Fred Thompson’s committee—the lax fundraising rules, the suspect donations from the Chinese, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions. Having looked into some of those matters myself, I sensed there was more to find. A shrewd, seasoned litigator like Fiske—or an experienced investigator like me—would know where to look and how to go about it. Instead the Starr team went off on a completely different tangent.
Two other fundamental differences between the impeachment efforts were the nature of the offenses, and the role of the media. The Watergate issues—obstruction of justice, blatant misuse of presidential authority, and subversion of the democratic process—were huge, well documented, and obvious. There was little doubt that Richard Nixon’s offenses met the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Even the most defensive Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were persuaded to vote for impeachment when the president admitted, late in July 1974, to having halted the FBI’s investigation of the break-in.
In contrast, Clinton’s impeachers allowed the process to devolve to a focus on the president’s intimate relationship. Their two charges—for perjury and obstruction of justice—stemmed from Clinton’s attempts to conceal that relationship. The contrast between Nixon’s crimes and Clinton’s actions is stark. In Watergate, we would never have allowed our work to devolve into something so small and tawdry as a presidential dalliance with a young woman.
The role of the press and media were significant in both impeachments. In Watergate, live broadcasts of the Senate Committee’s hearings brought the American people in on the investigation from the outset. Press and public could see for themselves what we were learning. They had the opportunity to judge a witness’s credibility, to hear the discrepancies in various statements, to watch our investigation unfold and gather steam. In contrast, Starr acted mostly out of the public eye. As accounts of his investigation were leaked, Starr’s covert operation allowed the White House and Clinton’s supporters to characterize Starr successfully as a creepy monster looking for sexual secrets.
Television was fairly novel in 1973, but most Americans had access to it. The three commercial networks, plus the new Public Broadcasting System, carried staid, straightforward broadcasts of Watergate hearings, and the evening news shows reported similar accounts and commentary. We were all, in a manner of speaking, on the same page back then. Viewers weren’t merely observers—they were participants. The hearings became a national quiz show of consequential proportions. Every day, we received hundreds of letters critiquing the previous day’s proceedings and offering suggestions for follow-up. Of course, the print press was enormously important in pursuing leaks and other leads for investigation. Woodward and Bernstein’s early coverage of the break-in and trial of the Watergate burglars in the Washington Post—and that of other major papers that began soon thereafter—was essential. But the success and celebrity of investigative journalists in Watergate also had unintended consequences.
By the time of Clinton’s presidency, reporters everywhere were looking for the big story—a something-gate scandal. The 24/7 news shows encouraged by the advent of cable television needed shockers to attract viewers. When Fox News began broadcasting in 1996, it offered competition to the supposedly liberal bias of other networks and provided an ideal outlet for Clinton’s opponents. Print journalism was not immune to this new atmosphere. Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, for example, was relentless and creative in developing the Clinton-Lewinsky story for months before it became known. The bombshell revelations of that story were what redirected the independent counsel’s inquiry away from the more serious, and perhaps more substantial, investigation of campaign financing.
In the Watergate investigation and subsequent consideration of impeachment, Democrats and Republicans were looking for the truth and willing to expose it. There was only one truth back then, one set of facts. To learn the truth, members of both parties had to acknowledge the same facts.
In the Clinton case, Republicans got rid of a first-rate litigator with a strong background in investigations in favor of people who were inexperienced, unprofessional, and seemed to have an ax to grind. Starr’s bias and methods alienated Democrats who might have been otherwise inclined to cooperate, and discouraged their pursuit of the facts or even rational concerns about financial contributions or other misconduct. Both sides rushed to judgment—one side believing the president was guilty of every allegation and rumor, the other that he was an innocent victim of overreaching opponents. Neither of those extremes was likely to be true. If the facts didn’t support one’s assumptions, an alternate “truth” was out there to be embraced. By the time Clinton was impeached, “truth” had become relative. That impeachment inquiry was more theater than the pursuit of facts. The Clintons were criminals because Republicans decided they were, just as they decided I was in charge of the Clinton secret police because that’s how they believed the Clintons operated. A sober, Watergate-style investigation was not possible in the highly charged, partisan political environment of 1998. It would be even less possible now, when partisan gridlock has rendered Congress impotent. This was the legacy of the Republican-Clinton battle. Neither side really cared about what was true. Each wanted to see what they could convince enough of the country to believe was true.