you you hug. could i have ever touched her? well, yeah, i guess that s possible. ly on august 17, a mia swarm enveloped the white house, anously awaiting the drama that was sure to unfold inside. just before noon, the independent counsel team arrived. once inside, ken starr was approached by david kendall, the president s lawyer, and given a stark warning about what would happen if the president was asked humiliating questions. we re only gonna answer certain things, and if you try to get us to do more, we ll fight you to the knife. my reaction was, this is one great defense lawyer, but we have a job to do. by the time we went in and spoke to the president, we had a lot of information, and the picture that we had was not a pretty one. they now knew that monica lewinsky s blue dress could be conclusively linked to the president by dna. the blue dress obviously made it impossible for the president to deny that he had had some
ken starr s office was very leaky, as well, and this became a major controversy. the president s attorney lashed out and blamed independent counsel kenneth starr for the leaks. we ve seen leak after leak. these leaks make a mockery of the traditional rules of grand jury secrecy. there was this feeling that investigators and lawyers were talking to the press. in my experience, that just wasn t the case. i can t say for certain that we had nobody who leaked information. some information that you leak is okay to leak if you are being pummeled with untrue stories by the administration, which we were, and you want to correct the record, either publicly or privately, as long as you don t leak something you shouldn t be leaking, right? prosecutors and their staffs and the investigators and the grand jurors who get information in secret in a grand jury are bound to grand jury secrecy. if you violate that rule, you can be held in criminal
decided that their lawyer was perhaps not serving monica as ably as was wise. so by early june 1998, ginsberg was out. there never would have been an in-person proffer with monica lewinsky if she hadn t got new attorneys. less than two months later, on july 27th, prosecutors secretly met with monica and her legal team at the new york city apartment of ken starr s mother-in-law. the purpose of the meeting in new york was really twofold first, to determine whether or not monica was going to be truthful. the second purpose was to determine how far she would go, because she could be truthful but not tell us everything that she knew. monica was nervous. you know, this this had been a very rough time after a number of false starts and with the whole world glaring down on her. monica, during that session, was, uh. cooperative.
investigator? there was a very full investigation, and that process ended in, if i may say so, complete vindication of the integrity of our office, including my own integrity. look what it did to ken starr. it derailed his investigation. he became the sex police, he became the bad guy and bill clinton, once again, the victim. starr s team was taking fire on another front, as well. what had begun four years earlr as the whitewater investigation had morphed into something very different. we got all involved talking about sexuality and sex and blowing up issues that really had very little to do with him being president. it was sort of a game-changer in terms of the investigation. you know, that s the way these independent counsel, special counsel, things work. you re appointed to do a, and you wind up to z. the investigation into president clinton was, in fact,
party of investigation, and the rest of it. ken starr was widely regarded, at least by democrats, as a partisan. if you have the facts, emphasize the facts. if you have the law, emphasize the law. if you don t have the law or the facts, then attack the prosecutor. ken starr was a respected judge. he was doing his job. but i knew that he would have little chance against the clintons. they went into full-on attack mode, and look how successful that was. they threatened his reputati, his credibility. he was castigated for being a puritan who, had an agenda. mike, you did say that the president has to proceed cautiously. why, if he s done nothing wrong, does he have to proceed cautiously? he is in a very hostile proceeding in which his lawyers recommend that he proceed in that fashion. you re saying ken starr has hostile intent?