Day Of Deliverance

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A senior White House official said he was convinced Wright's ruling would sink Starr's investigation as well. "It's over," the official said. "Ken Starr was on thin ice anyway. The public isn't going to tolerate his hauling witnesses before the grand jury and continuing his investigation when the case that got this whole thing started has been thrown out." Just to help things along, the surprised White House quickly regrouped and sent its heralds out to draw attention to new charges, that conservative groups paid off David Hale, a key witness in the ongoing land-scam probe in Arkansas.

It has been White House strategy for months to tie the Jones case as tightly as possible to Starr's operation and then take them down, one at a time if necessary, together if possible, so that the House Judiciary Committee would be hard pressed to take up his recommendations. This has worked far better than even the White House had expected; in fact the linkage has been so effective that some in Starr's office were actually delighted to have Jones and her handlers wiped away.

Starr for his part was quick to say his case never depended on Jones', and the collapse of the civil case would do nothing to his criminal case. The White House machinists, he said, were trying to use the Wright ruling to spin a false sense of vindication. He plans to press forward with his probe into whether Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and tried to cover it up. But it said much about his team's p.r. problems that even before the Wright decision came down, Starr had reached out to Stuart Taylor, the lawyer and journalist who had legitimized the Jones case in a landmark 1996 piece for the American Lawyer, and asked him to write Starr's report to Congress. Taylor turned him down on Monday. On Wednesday the Jones' case was dismissed, and then came more bad news the next day. Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, who is presiding over Starr's grand jury in Washington, is considering referring some of his top aides to the Office of Professional Responsibility for not letting Lewinsky talk to her lawyer right away on the day she was caught in an FBI sting at the Ritz Carlton and was pressed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. That same day, Attorney General Janet Reno announced an investigation would be launched into the Hale payoffs. Said a White House staff member, bending if not breaking the no-gloat rule: "I don't know much, but I know that all makes for a bad day."

Starr was at home taking out the trash that morning, when he decided to offer a long press conference that revealed as much about his moral outlook as his legal one. There is "no room for white lies" in sworn testimony, even if the case is thrown out, he asserted. "In that civil case, you cannot defile the temple of justice." Starr recalled fondly the Joe Friday character on Dragnet who was interested in "just the facts, ma'am." His rambling sermon was so defensive that White House staff members started paging one another, asking, "Are you watching this?" A staff member said, "It was like Captain Queeg. All that was missing was the metal balls and the strawberries." He added, "Who would have thought at the end of this, Starr, not Clinton, would have been the one acting like Nixon?"