My life

At the end of the month Madeleine Albright and I hosted a conference at the State Department to support economic development for the Palestinians, with Yasser Arafat, Jim Wolfensohn of the World Bank, and representatives of the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia. The Israeli cabinet and the Knesset had supported the Wye River accord, and it was time to get some investment into Gaza and the West Bank to give the beleaguered Palestinians a taste of the benefits of peace. While all this was going on, Henry Hyde and his colleagues kept pushing their agenda, sending me eighty-one questions that they demanded be answered with “admit or deny,” and releasing twenty-two hours of the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes. Tripp’s taping of those conversations without Lewinsky’s permission, after her lawyer explicitly told her the taping was criminal and she should not do it again, was a felony under Maryland’s criminal law. She was indicted for it, but the trial judge refused to allow the prosecutor to call Lewinsky as a witness to prove the conversations occurred, ruling that the immunity Starr had given Tripp to testify about her unlawful violation of Lewinsky’s privacy prevented Lewinsky from testifying against her. Once more, Starr had succeeded in protecting lawbreakers who played ball with him even as he indicted innocent people who would not lie for him. During this period Starr also indicted Webb Hubbell for a third time, claiming that he had misled federal regulators about work he and the Rose Law Firm had done for another failed financial institution. It was Starr’s last, almost desperate attempt to break Hubbell and force him to say something damaging about Hillary or me.

On the nineteenth of November, Kenneth Starr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, making comments that, like his report, went far beyond the scope of his responsibility to report the facts he had found to Congress. The Starr report had already been criticized for omitting one big piece of evidence helpful to me: Monica Lewinsky’s adamant assertion that I never asked her to lie. Three surprising things came out of Starr’s testimony. The first was his announcement that he had found no wrongdoing on my part or Hillary’s in the Travel Office and FBI file investigations. Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts asked him when he had reached those conclusions. “Some months ago,”

replied Starr. Frank then asked him why he waited until after the election to exonerate me on these charges, when he had submitted his report “with a lot of negative stuff about the President” before the election. Starr’s brief response was confused and evasive.

Second, Starr admitted he had talked to the press, on background, a violation of the grand jury secrecy rules. Finally, he denied under oath that his office had tried to get Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire to record conversations with Vernon Jordan, me, or other people. When confronted with the FBI form proving that he had, he was evasive. The Washington Post reported that “Starr’s denials . . . were shattered by his own FBI reports.”

The fact that Starr had admitted violating the law on grand jury secrecy and had given false testimony under oath didn’t slow him or the committee Republicans down a bit. They thought different rules applied to the home team.

The next day Sam Dash resigned as Starr’s ethics advisor, saying that Starr had “unlawfully” injected himself into the impeachment process with his remarks at the congressional hearing. As my mother used to say, Dash was “a day late and a dollar short”: Starr hadn’t cared about the lawfulness of his behavior for a long time.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, the House Republicans returned to Washington to elect Bob Livingston of Louisiana, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, as the new Speaker of the House. He would take office in January when the new session of Congress began. At the time, most people thought the movement to impeach me was stalled. Several moderate Republicans had said that they were opposed to it, and that the election had been a clear message that the American people wanted the Congress to reprimand or censure me and get on with the public’s business.