25 years ago: How Larry Flynt and I helped to save The Clinton Presidency (Part 4)
The US. Senate trial, January 7 to February 12, 1999
Twenty-five years ago today—January 7, 1999—the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate opened its trial of President Bill Clinton after he was impeached by the Republican-controlled U.S. House on December 19, 1998. The previous month, porn king Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, and I, two admitted sinners, entered the fray and helped to derail the dreams and schemes of the GOP and The Moral Majority to remove the President from office.
This is the fourth in a series of columns—featuring updated excerpts from my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer—about a little-known backstage drama in the Clinton impeachment battle. The first three focused on the impeachment in the U.S. House, December 16-19, 1998, during which we had a major impact.
This series resumes here and now, detailing our activities during the Senate trial—January 7 to February 12—where twelve U.S. House Managers acting as prosecutors presented their case against President Clinton to U.S. Senators who served as members of the jury. Conviction required a two-thirds vote of the full Senate.
Larry and I were part of the action from beginning to end, and we made a difference. See:
Part 1: “Going after the U.S. House Speaker-Designate”
Part 2: “The phone call, the bombshell”
Part 3: “The Speaker-Designate Bob Livingston resigns”
In the aftermath of my investigation of U.S. House Speaker-Designate Bob Livingston and his resignation—but prior to the trial in the U.S. Senate—I obtained evidence about Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson's affair with a young law student who had also worked as his legislative director in Arkansas.
I wrote a memorandum to Larry Flynt and his top lieutenant, Allan MacDonell, saying:
Tim Hutchinson has allegedly been having a long-term affair with [the woman]. He is the brother of Rep. Asa Hutchinson, a [U.S. House] manager in the Senate trial, who has been taking the legal and moral high ground against the President. . . . Allegedly, Hutchinson's wife became aware of the affair and created a scene in the office, causing [the woman] to quit. . . .
For the record, no one has signed a confidentiality agreement on this matter.
However, we were faced with the dilemma of what to do with information about a juror in the upcoming Senate trial of President Clinton. If we pulled the trigger on Senator Hutchinson, could we be legitimately accused of tampering with a member of the jury?
At that time, the identity of Flynt’s investigator who had brought down Speaker-Designate Livingston remained a mystery and was still the subject of widespread speculation. Mercifully, I still remained under everyone’s radar.
But, on January 5, Flynt gave my name and phone number to U.S. Representative Bob Barr, who had threatened to sue Flynt after hearing that he was next on our list as the case moved from the House to the Senate. Out of a sense of fairness, Flynt wanted me to answer any questions Barr needed to ask.
High noon had arrived for President Clinton's enemies as the Senate trial got underway on January 7, the culmination of years of vicious allegations, wild conspiracy theories, and wholly partisan investigations—all of which had gone nowhere. Now reduced to criminalizing the President's personal life by alleging that he had lied about sex, the Clinton haters were finally at center stage. The time had come for them to put up or shut up.
However, their earlier high confidence for the President's removal from office had dissipated considerably after the circumstances of Speaker Livingston's resignation on December 19—which I, working behind the scenes, had singlehandedly provoked—and was further diminished by Flynt's continuing crusade to expose hypocrisy in the wake of his revelations about Bob Barr, who, like U.S. Representative Asa Hutchinson, was a House Manager.
In fact, other than the unmasking of Kenneth Starr as a partisan sexual witch hunter after the release of the Starr Report in September 1998 and the excellent legal work performed by the President's attorneys before and during the Senate trial, there was no single factor that had a greater impact on the impeachment process than Larry Flynt.
Had Flynt and I not emerged in this drama, Bob Livingston would have become Speaker of the House and the impeachment of the President would have shifted from the House to the Senate with a tremendous, even a devastating momentum. At the very least, according to the New York Times, the pressure on President Clinton to resign from office would have been overwhelming.
Instead, with Livingston's stunning resignation and the hypocrisy of the President's enemies clear and present to the American public—who then, in response, gave President Clinton the highest approval ratings of his Presidency—the case limped to trial and conviction was a long-shot at best.
Consequently, the right‑wing media, which had invested so much time and energy trying to bring about the downfall of the President, turned their big guns on Flynt and anyone close to him. And, as with their other dead‑end investigations of the President—involving the circumstances revolving around the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate, among others—they did not allow the facts to get in their way of a good story.
On January 8—the day after the Senate trial opened—Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, with whom I had been acquainted for several years, called and asked me to confirm or deny that I was Flynt's mystery investigator. Deciding that I would get a fair shake from this one-time poker buddy, I admitted that I had handled the probes of Livingston and Flynt's other targets while reminding him about the sworn affidavit on my website about the OIC leaks and denying any White House involvement in our investigation. However, I refused to go into any further detail about my ongoing work with Flynt.
Hosenball's story, written with Andrew Murr—“Who’s on Larry List?", which identified me for the first time as Flynt’s mystery investigator—ran in Newsweek's January 18 issue, released on January 11, the same day that Flynt revealed our information about Bob Barr.
Hosenball and Murr reported:
An investigative crime reporter and author of controversial books about pro football and the O. J. Simpson case, Moldea is a Clinton sympathizer. Last year he approached the president's private lawyers [the law firm of Williams & Connolly] with a tantalizing story: in phone calls Moldea secretly recorded, two of Kenneth Starr's top deputies admitted that their office routinely briefed sympathetic reporters. Moldea later repeated the leak charge in a sworn statement to the judge overseeing the Starr probe. Moldea investigated the allegations against Livingston. He confirmed to Newsweek that he is continuing to investigate other Clinton critics. (Moldea and the president's attorneys deny there is any connection between the White House and Flynt.) [Emphasis added.]
However, the fact remained: I did not approach the President's attorneys; rather, they had approached me. Hosenball—who was trying to dismiss me as some sort of sycophant—had specifically asked me about this and even had a copy of my sworn affidavit to Judge Johnson in which I explained the innocent circumstances of my one meeting with Williams & Connolly. Still, he got the story wrong, and his error would start a chain of events that would cause me huge personal, professional, and legal problems.[1]
On January 13, 1999—the eve of the opening arguments in the Senate trial—the Washington Post, Newsweek's parent company, published its own article by reporter Howard Kurtz, repeating that I was Flynt's investigator. Authorized by Flynt to comment in the wake of the erroneous Newsweek article, I told Kurtz that, indeed, Flynt had several "big fish" on his plate. However, I added that some of them would not be made public, adding:
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill should be sending us flowers and thank‑you cards. They weren't going on TV talk shows shooting off their mouths [about Clinton], or going to the floor of Congress to seize the moral high ground. We've thrown them back in the river. We're not going to interfere with their lives.[2]
Actually, I had meant these remarks to be conciliatory.
That same day, Bill Sammon of the Washington Times, another right-wing Clinton critic with whom I had also agreed to speak, published a front‑page story, "Flynt sleuth dished dirt for White House," cynically using my role in the OIC leaks investigation as evidence of my—and, thereby, Flynt's—connection to the White House.[3]
Sammon wrote in his lead paragraph: “The investigator who dug up dirt on Republican Reps. Bob Barr and Robert L. Livingston for pornographer Larry Flynt is a Clinton sympathizer who has supplied the president's attorneys with evidence against independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.”
Although Sammon portrayed this as a major expose, he failed to mention that I had detailed all of this and more in my sworn affidavit.
Continuing his story, Sammon then quoted me about the Flynt investigation, saying: “I don't think there's anybody on our team who's getting much joy out of this. When you start hurting families, that's something that makes you pause and think about what's going on. But at the same time, I just haven't seen any mercy shown towards Clinton—I mean, none, zero.”
Using a version of the quote I had given to the Post about throwing non‑hypocritical, “big fish” Republicans "back in the river," Sammon gave this statement a nefarious twist, writing: “[Moldea] made it clear he has uncovered salacious material on more Republicans whose identities will remain secret as long as they refrain from speaking out against Mr. Clinton.”
As spun by Sammon, I appeared to be threatening or even blackmailing unnamed members of Congress! Although this allegation was nonsense, it quickly took on a life of its own.[4]
As the Senate trial of President Clinton got underway, Flynt and I were widely accused of political terrorism with our campaign.
Along with other members of Congress, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who would later have his own personal problems, insisted, "Intimidation is something we have to resist. You don't negotiate with terrorists. This is almost a terrorist‑like tactic being used here."[5]
Senator James M. Jeffords (R‑Vermont) told reporters, "I'm deeply concerned. I think any effort to blackmail a person . . . That’s very serious."[6]
Meantime, Senator Orrin Hatch (R‑Utah) continued to suggest a link between Flynt and the White House, using me as his foil on NBC's Meet the Press: "I don't know anybody who's hiring these tough, mean investigators like has been done for the President."[7]
On January 14, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) was asked by a reporter, "Any backlash about the Larry Flynt stuff in the Senate you heard today in the cafeteria or in the gym or anything, Senator? . . . Are the senators angry about it?"
"I might characterize some of them as pretty upset about it, yes,” Kyl replied.
"Was this going to influence the trial one way or the other in any way?"
Senator Kyl then said, "Well, you know what? I don't even want to talk about it because it simply gives [Flynt] credibility that I don't want to give him."[8]
The following day, responding to a question about Flynt's alleged threats against Republican senators, GOP consultant Heather Nauert said during a television appearance on Fox News, "I think the problem with that is that these members are keeping quiet—members that would normally be out front denouncing the President are now remaining silent because they're so afraid of this campaign that they've—that . . ."
"You really think so?" The host interrupted "You really think they're intimidated by it?"
"I absolutely do."[9]
Reporter Peter Baker of the Washington Post told Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air:
Well, there was a real atmosphere of fear among congressmen, particularly Republicans. Just the fact of Larry Flynt out there was terrifying to them. . . . [A] number of the managers, the people who would prosecute the president in the Senate trial, were convinced that they were the next target.
One congressman got phone calls to his office threatening to out him as gay, even though he says he, of course, is not. But the fact that he’s conservative and from a Southern district, just the whisper of that would be damaging. Another congressman feared that he was on the list and so he had sort of a cleansing conversation with his wife in which he sort of admitted all, all of the things that maybe she wouldn’t have liked to have known, just so she wouldn’t hear about them from anybody else. And, of course, it turned out he wasn’t actually on Larry Flynt’s list. So there was a real atmosphere of fear that these people were living through at the time.[10]
At the daily White House briefing on January 13, press secretary Joe Lockhart fielded a bullshit question from a reporter who asked, "Larry Flynt's investigator, Dan Moldea, says that he has uncovered information on additional Republicans, but is going to withhold it as long as they don't criticize the President. Does this strike you as blackmail and will the White House call for him to cease and desist?"
Lockhart simply replied: "Listen, the President has been as clear as possible that he thinks the politics of personal destruction should cease and desist, and should have ceased and desisted a long time ago. I don't know anything about this gentleman you're talking about. I believe, and the President agrees, that all of this kind of sleazy politics ought to stop and it ought to stop from the right, from the left, and from the people who create the market in this stuff. And it's our hope that it does."
Regardless of anything the White House said, the false and misleading claims that Flynt and I were linked to the President and his operatives continued and escalated—as both of us soon faced a boatload of criminal charges filed against us by the Republican National Committee with the U.S. Department of Justice.
* Coming on January 14: My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 3)
* January 21 to February 4: TBA
* Coming on February 11: The acquittal of President Clinton (Part 5)
ENDNOTES
[1] In short, this is what had happened: After I revealed my information about the OIC leaks during a speech in May 1998 that was covered by CNN, Max Stier, one of the President's lawyers called me and asked for a meeting—which was a perfectly proper and legitimate request. I replied that I wanted a subpoena before cooperating and gave him my attorney's telephone number.
The following month, after Steven Brill's controversial "Pressgate" article about the OIC leaks was released, my attorney, Roger Simmons, called me, saying that Stier had telephoned again and repeated his request for a meeting. When I said that I still wanted a subpoena, Simmons replied that the President's lawyers apparently did not have subpoena power and wanted to use my information to help them get it.
At that point, I agreed to the meeting—my first and only meeting with anyone from Williams & Connolly—which took place on June 26, 1998.
Just to be clear, I was never on the law firm’s payroll, and I never, directly or indirectly, received any money or favors from the firm or anyone associated with it.
[2] Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, “Airing on the Side of Caution; C-SPAN Delays Broadcast of Larry Flynt’s Revelation,” January 13, 1999.
[3] Bill Sammon, Washington Times, “Flynt Sleuth dished dirt for White House,” January 13, 1999.
[4] On January 24, Bill Sammon appeared on the Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, hosted by Bill O'Reilly. During the previous month, the hypocritical Clinton-bashing O'Reilly had promised "new revelations linking Flynt to those close to the White House." Using Sammon’s false and misleading January 13 story, I was as close as O'Reilly ever got to delivering on his promise.
[5] CNBC, The Tim Russert Show, “Senators Larry Craig and Robert Torricelli Discuss the Impeachment Trial of President Clinton,” January 16, 1998. Four days earlier, Bill O’Reilly interviewed Senator Craig about Flynt’s efforts to expose Republican hypocrisy, which O’Reilly described as “deplorable.” Craig replied, “I am angered by that kind of sleaze and the perpetuation of that kind of sleaze. I say to Larry Flynt: ‘Shame on you!’”
Notably, in June 2007, Senator Craig was arrested for lewd behavior, a felony, after allegedly making a pass at another man in an adjacent bathroom stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Two months later, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. He did not seek reelection in 2008.
[6] Sean Scully, Washington Times, “White House tacitly backs Flynt ‘blackmail,’ GOP says,” January 14, 1999.
[7] NBC News, “Meet the Press, “Senators Christopher Dodd, Orrin Hatch, [et al] Discuss the Impeachment Trial of President Clinton,” January 17, 1999.
[8] Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, “Interview with John Kyl,” January 13, 1999.
[9] Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, “Back of the Book: Women’s view on Senate trial,” January 14, 1999.
[10] NPR transcript, Fresh Air, “Peter Baker . . . Discusses the Politics of the Clinton Impeachment Trial,” September 28, 2000.