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Monica Lewinsky is back: Says Clinton lied

by John Gerstein and John F. Harris - Dec. 17, 2009

In the years since their bitter battle, both former President Bill Clinton and independent counsel Ken Starr have predicted they'd be vindicated in the history books.

Now the first definitive history of the Clinton scandal is about to arrive – and neither man can be completely happy about his portrayal in its pages.

"The Death of American Virtue," due out in February, asserts that Clinton had yet another extramarital affair, with Susan McDougal of Whitewater fame. Also in the book, Monica Lewinsky tells author Ken Gormley that she believes the president lied under oath when he described their encounters.

At the same time, Gormley offers a harsh portrait of Starr as a man out of his depth and who lost all sense of proportion. His interviews offer new ammunition to critics who contend the Lewinsky investigation was marred at its outset by improper questioning of Lewinsky in January 1998 by Starr's lieutenants, who continued to grill her even after she asked for a lawyer.

Two presidents later, the saga feels like a far-off chapter in the nation's history but the book makes clear that the principals, including Clinton himself, remain keenly interested in squaring the historical record to their liking.

In three interviews with the author, Clinton makes clear – to no surprise of longtime observers of the 42nd president – how aggrieved he continues to feel over the whole episode, unspooling a stream of choice invective about his other accusers. In Clinton's telling, the head of the House impeachment team, Henry Hyde, is a "bitter right-winger" and "hypocrite," and the judge who cited Clinton for civil contempt was merely currying favor with the conservative wing of the GOP.

Through 769 pages, Gormley, a Duquesne University law professor, offers a detailed, even scholarly retelling of an epic saga of grand jury depositions, fevered partisans, and a single stained blue dress that once transfixed a nation — but which many Americans are surely eager to leave in the past.

Even so, the book represents an attempt by a law professor and prominent legal pundit to write what he is billing as the most complete and even-handed account of the tumultuous criminal investigation that explored Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, nearly ended his presidency and ultimately boomeranged on Starr, staining the professional reputation of one of America's foremost constitutional scholars.

But with one of the principals still very much in the public eye – the former president turned globe-trotting chief of his own foundation — the revelations are sure to dredge up the unpleasant details of a president and prosecutor locked in legal combat.

Among the book's most attention-grabbing claims:

-- Confirmation of a long-rumored romantic affair between Clinton and McDougal, an Arkansas woman who spent 18 months in jail for refusing to answer questions from Starr's prosecutors before a grand jury, and later received a presidential pardon from Clinton. Gormley writes he is now certain "some intimate involvement did occur," though he will not say precisely how he knows it to be true.

"I feel very, very comfortable with that conclusion after having conducted extensive interviews and seen documents that were not generally accessible to the public," Gormley told POLITICO.

While Gormley says his evidence confirms the longstanding suspicions of Starr's prosecutors that McDougal had a secret extramarital affair with Clinton, the author says he does not believe that entanglement, which took place years earlier, had anything to do with her refusal to testify about Bill and Hillary Clinton's involvement with the Whitewater land deal or with the president's decision to pardon her in 2001.

McDougal has previously denied any affair with Bill Clinton. Efforts to contact her for this article were unsuccessful.

-- Lewinsky now believes Bill Clinton lied about their relationship during his grand jury testimony. "There was no leeway [there] on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully," she wrote to Gormley earlier this year. Longtime Clinton attorney David Kendall declined to comment.

-- Starr's successor Robert Ray was prepared to indict Clinton soon after he left office if he did not agree to admit that he made false statements about Lewinsky under oath and accept disbarment. Ray "was ready to 'pull the trigger' if the conditions he imposed were not satisfied," Gormley writes, and had to be "cajoled" by a colleague into signing off on the final deal.

"President Clinton would never fully grasp how close he came to being indicted," Gormley writes.

-- Prosecutors on the case clashed with a special counsel who sharply criticized them for questioning Lewinsky without her attorney present during a pivotal January 16, 1998, interview at a Pentagon City hotel .

"I wouldn't have touched her with a ten-foot pole," said the lawyer hired to examine the episode, Jo Ann Harris, breaking her silence her findings about the effort to lure in Lewinsky for questioning. "The minute she says, 'Can I call my lawyer?' you stop….And when she says it for the sixth or seventh time you really stop….There are limits."

Harris conceded that the department's formal policies on the issue were "all over the place," but she maintained that Starr's deputies had been less than forthcoming with the Justice Department's inquiry into the matter and that at least one prosecutor showed "poor judgment" in the confrontation of Lewinsky.

Gormley also reports that Harris accused Ray of mischaracterizing her findings. However, in an interview with POLITICO Thursday, Ray said, "I don't believe I misrepresented what she said….It's not how I characterized it. It's that I didn't agree with it."

Ultimately, one of Starr's prosecutors hired an attorney who successfully persuaded a court panel to keep Harris's assessment of the episode under seal.

--Secret Service director Lewis Merletti grew deeply suspicious and distrustful of the FBI as the investigation unfolded, believing that the agency was trying to entice him to conspire with Clinton.

Merletti claims that at an August 1998 conference a senior FBI official shared negative lab results about a dress suspected of being stained with Clinton's DNA. "There's nothing there…that thing's clean," Merletti said the official told him without prompting. The Secret Service chief felt the comment was a deliberate effort to see if he would pass the pivotal test results to the White House.

"They're either trying to set me up, or they're trying to set the president up, or they're setting both of us up," Merletti told Gormley. The top secret service agent said he resolved at the time not to mention the episode to anyone.

Later, Merletti was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury two days before Clinton left office and just as Ray was still trying to hash out a deal with the departing president. The Secret Service head recalls an unusually-confrontational interview at the Justice Department where FBI agent accused him of covering up Clinton's trysts with Lewinsky in exchange for the director's job and help procuring women for himself.

"There's only one person left who can give us the president of the United States and that's you. And we know that you were involved in a conspiracy with him and we want to hear it today," Merletti recalled agent Jennifer Gant telling him.

Gormley reports that Gant denied making such accusations, but Merletti said he left the encounter "insulted" and offended.

-- Starr deputies prepared a draft indictment of Hillary Clinton and her former law partner, Webb Hubbell, but it was unanimously rejected by prosecutors more focused on the Lewinsky case.

"The object of the conspiracy was to conceal, by unlawful means, the true facts relating to Hillary Rodham Clinton's and Webster Lee Hubbell's relationship with….Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Madison Financial Corporation…[to] avoid and evade political criminal and civil liability, fraudulently secure additional income for the Rose Law Firm and safeguard the political campaigns of William Jefferson Clinton," said a "theory-of-the-case" memo distributed in advance of prosecutor Hickman Ewing Jr.'s three-hour presentation to Starr and other prosecutors on April 27, 1998.

However, Gormley reports that the session ended with a unanimous vote against an indictment.

"The pattern was fairly damning in a lot of ways," said one member of the team, Paul Rosenzweig. "But she [Mrs. Clinton] wasn't a mafia figure; she was a sympathetic figure. We were going to have to do it in Washington or Arkansas, where the juries didn't like us…So we were going to get our asses kicked."

No indictment was ever brought against Hillary Clinton.

--While Bill Clinton was steaming mad about Judge Susan Webber Wright's decision to cite him for civil contempt in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and accused her of political bias, Clinton and his defenders failed to acknowledge that Wright "could have ended his presidency with the stroke of a pen" by initiating criminal contempt proceedings against him while the impeachment case was still pending. Gormley cites a source that said she weighed a criminal citation against Clinton but decided against it.

Wright declined to comment for this article.

The book is also replete with quotes from key political players venting their grievances, regrets and convictions about the showdown.

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said he remains baffled by the public response to impeachment despite clear evidence that Clinton "demeaned the office."

"That doesn't jibe with all the other stuff I hear about women's rights and feminism and, you know misconduct in the office place and workplace and all that. It's one of the real anomalies, I think, of American political history."

Hyde (R-Ill.), who headed up the House impeachment team and died in 2007, expressed no regrets. "Bill Clinton is making the most of his retirement. I'm glad he has no more pardons to sell. The country is safe to that extent. Bill Clinton could have been one of our great presidents. I think he had the brains and the energy and the ambition but he lacked the vision. And the character. And that's the sad part. What might have been," Hyde told Gormley.

Clinton retorts: "They were disgraced and he [Hyde] knows it. They ran a partisan hit job run by a bitter right-winger, Henry Hyde, who turned out to be a hypocrite on the personal issues….Yeah I will always have a asterisk after my name but I hope I'll have two asterisks: one is 'They impeached him," and the other is 'He stood up to them and beat them and he beat them like a yard dog.'"

Starr has expressed some regrets about taking on the Lewinsky aspect of the case, but he still seems rankled by Clinton's lack of abject contrition.

"Everybody's been saying, 'Stop it. Stop it. Admit it. Get it behind you.' And he will not do it," Starr said in the book. "It is shocking that the president of the United States would conduct himself as a witness in such a way to essentially 'lie till he dies.' We all know the truth. And yet here he is [still] mocking the system."

The author, Gormley, said the title and cover art are deliberately ambiguous, allowing readers to decide whether Clinton or Starr did more to besmirch American values.

By and large, Gormley avoids sweeping judgments about the central figures but he occasionally tips his hand as he tackles specific issues. The author calls the prosecutors' approach to Lewinsky "botched" and says Starr should have begged off of the Lewinsky inquiry. The professor also scores Clinton for "blatant violations" of Wright's orders in Jones case and scoffs at claims that the president never lied to the grand jury.

"There's no question that he very skillfully cleaned up and kind of fixed some problems that originally existed with the Jones deposition, in the grand jury—that was artfully done, but when it came to certain things there was no way to conclude they were not false," Gormley said in an interview.

However, Gormley also suggests the August 1998 testimony should never have happened because Starr should have pursued his inclination to turn the entire matter over to Congress several weeks earlier. Instead, he deferred to aides who wanted to keep control of the probe.

"In one of the great tragedies filled with many catastrophic moments, Ken Starr was overwhelmingly outvoted by his staff," the author writes. "His penchant for deferring to his prosecutors and seeking consensus like a wise judge finally led to his own professional meltdown."

Gormley met four times with Bill Clinton and spoke with Starr eight times in preparation for the book. The most notable omission on Gormley's list of interviews: Hillary Clinton. Gormley said he asked repeatedly to speak with her for the book but was never offered a meeting.

The Arizona Republic is a member of the Politico Network.