25 years ago: How Larry Flynt and I helped to save The Clinton Presidency (Part 1)
Going after the U.S. House Speaker-Designate
* In his bestselling book, American Rhapsody (Knopf, 2000), author Joe Eszterhas published a chapter, "Larry Flynt Saves the Day," in which he declared:
The pornographer saved the president by threatening to reveal other acts of pornography committed by—this time Republican—politicians. Larry Flynt was a hero, a self-appointed, self-financed Kenneth W. Starr. . . . He'd brought in a crack investigative reporter, Dan Moldea, who'd exposed Ronald Reagan's questionably close ties to Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman and Teamster money, to run his million-dollar project.
* In his widely-respected book, Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong (Portfolio, 2007), author Eric Dezenhall addressed the 1998-1999 impeachment battle, writing:
The Republicans' worst nightmare came when Flynt retained investigative reporter Dan E. Moldea, who had been standing up to Mafia kingpins, assassins, and corrupt union bosses for decades. Moldea, who made no bones about sympathizing with President Clinton's struggle, proceeded to systematically expose the sex lives of Republican congressional leaders on the grounds that they were not qualified to judge Clinton's morality. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum and the techniques employed on both sides of the Clinton wars, one thing soon became clear: The strategy worked.
Twenty-five years ago this week, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton on December 19, 1998, setting the stage for a trial in the U.S. Senate. However, coming out of nowhere, porn king Larry Flynt 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 first of a series of columns about a little-known backstage drama in the Clinton impeachment battle, focusing on December 16-19, 1998. The series—featuring updated excerpts from my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer—will resume during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Senate trial, which began on January 7, 1999, and ended with the President’s acquittal a month later on February 12.
Larry and I were part of the action from beginning to end, and we made a difference.
The road to the impeachment
During the fall of 1998, President Bill Clinton’s impeachment appeared inevitable over what many considered the criminalization of his personal life amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
At that time, I had recently published my 1998 book, A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, an exhaustive investigation of the 1993 suicide of the late deputy White House counsel. For several years, right-wingers in and out of Congress attempted to make the case that Bill and Hillary Clinton had played roles in what they claimed was Foster’s murder.
In my book, I proved that many of those same right-wingers were using false and misleading information and even fabricating evidence in their cynical and malicious efforts to incriminate the Clintons and/or to undermine the President’s overall authority.
In fact, Foster did it, and he did it alone. The Clintons were innocent of any wrongdoing.
However, the Lewinsky situation posed other, more daunting, challenges for the President.
On August 24, 1998, I filed an affidavit with the federal judge overseeing the investigation of Clinton’s behavior. In my sworn declaration, I revealed details of allegedly illegal leaks against the President that had originated from Kenneth Starr’s Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), which conducted the official probe of the Lewinsky matter and the overall assault against the President.[1]
These selective leaks served no purpose other than to pressure future witnesses to slant their testimonies and influence public opinion shaped by the same journalists who were the beneficiaries of the allegedly illegal OIC leaks while serving as “confidential informants” for Starr’s prosecutorial goon squad. Indeed, a stable of reporters privately fed information to the OIC based on intelligence they received from sources who refused to speak to prosecutors.
Consequently, the Republicans’ high confidence in their efforts to remove President Clinton from office was not without foundation. With the mid-term elections approaching in early November, the pollsters and media pundits universally predicted that the Republicans would surely increase their majorities in both the House and the Senate.
But the Republicans and the press underestimated the President's continued strength in the polls. According to the American public, President Clinton was still performing effectively despite an impeachment-obsessed Republican majority in Congress.
While the President appeared to be working hard for the American people, the Republicans continued trying to destroy him.
U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich made the President's personal behavior “Issue Number One” during the mid-term election campaign, encouraging the GOP to run television ads that condemned the President for his allegedly immoral acts. Attacking the President’s sexual relationship with Lewinsky, Gingrich called Clinton “a misogynist.”[2]
But, on November 3, the Democrats stunned the Republicans and the political pundits by picking up five seats in the House while maintaining the status quo in the Republican-controlled Senate. In addition, two of the Republicans' biggest Clinton haters, Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina and Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York, who headed an earlier Senate investigation of the Clintons, went down in flames.
Three days later, after the Democrats' remarkable performance, Gingrich—whom Republicans principally blamed for their poor showing at the polls—announced his resignation as both Speaker and a member of the House.
On November 18, 55-year-old U.S. Representative Bob Livingston of Louisiana, another ultra-conservative Republican, was selected by the Republican majority to succeed Gingrich as House Speaker. Significantly, Livingston had allowed his office to be one of the site locations during the filming of a 1994 anti-Clinton video promoted by Reverend Jerry Falwell, The Clinton Chronicles, which accused the President of drug trafficking and murder, among other farfetched charges.
House Republicans anticipated formally electing Livingston on January 6, 1999, when the new 106th Congress arrived in Washington. Until then, he accepted the role as the “designated” House Speaker while making no secret of his intentions to go for the President’s throat.
In a desperate effort to help save The Clinton Presidency, porn king Larry Flynt—the owner of Hustler magazine and an unlikely hero to many advocates of strong First Amendment protections—placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post, offering "up to a million dollars" to those who could provide proof of Republicans hypocrisy.
On November 23, 1998, Allan MacDonell, one of Flynt’s top lieutenants, contacted me with an offer to serve as Flynt’s lead investigator for his anti-hypocrisy campaign against the President's critics. Specific targets were those who had conflicting standards of private behavior for public officials: One for those they liked and another for those they didn't like.
Even though it was a life-altering decision, I accepted the assignment.
Among other discoveries, I obtained information linking Newt Gingrich—during his second marriage—to a young congressional staffer.[3] This was the same Gingrich who, two months earlier, dared to describe President Clinton as "a misogynist."
Specifically, in my status report to Flynt on December 7, I wrote:
“[A source] alleged that Newt Gingrich had an affair with [Wisconsin Republican Representative Steve] Gunderson's secretary, who now works as a scheduler for the House Agriculture Committee.”
Through my research, I identified the woman as Callista Bisek, an assistant hearing clerk and scheduler for the committee. She later became Gingrich’s third wife.
Remarkably, because Gingrich had already left Congress earlier in the month, Flynt decided not to expose his relationship with her—at least not immediately.
Flynt was more interested in Gingrich's successor, Bob Livingston, the new speaker‑designate.
I had already developed some preliminary information about Livingston, provided by a Republican source in Louisiana who was not romantically involved with him but knew a woman who might be. However, because of this Republican source's connections to the Louisiana gambling community—which I had discovered in my own personal files—I had difficulty, at first, trusting the information provided, even though the source was not asking for any reward money.
Also, because of Livingston's new high-profile role as U.S. House Speaker-Designate, I was particularly concerned about the fallout that could result from investigating him. Could we be accused of blackmail or obstruction?
On the other hand, if a trap had been laid for us, this Republican source with the gambling connections, I feared, could be the trap setter. Accordingly, I had initially balked at an aggressive investigation of Livingston's alleged activities.
Then, on December 12, Livingston announced that he would vote for the President's impeachment and block the Democrats from voting on a censure resolution, a punishment Flynt said he could accept.
After Livingston's announcement that he was going for the gold, Flynt called and instructed me to move on him immediately—regardless of my reservations about the informant's gambling connections. In effect, Flynt made Livingston my top priority.
I contacted my source in the Louisiana gambling community—but the source did not have any contact information for Livingston's alleged mistress.
Then, after receiving a still-untold lucky break that night, I located the woman, a lobbyist involved in Deep South politics, and cold-called her. After our conversation, I wrote and faxed a memorandum to Flynt:
I spoke with [the woman] tonight. She is very sharp.
As I gave her my intro, she complained that I had called her with a Caller ID block. I apologized and offered to call her back without using the block. She invited me to do that, and I did.
She asked me every conceivable question about who I worked for. I explained that I was an independent contractor who had been hired by . . . Larry Flynt Productions.
I asked her no questions but told her that we had received an anonymous call, telling us that she had been Rep. Livingston's lover. She neither flinched nor scoffed at that—but wanted to know more. . . .
I told her that I wanted to send her a confidentiality agreement, which I invited her to show to her attorney. I told her that I was willing to come and meet with her, assuming that she would tell me her basic story before I made the trip.
She gave me her fax number, and I faxed the confidentiality agreement at the conclusion of our call.
During our conversation, she volunteered that she was very upset with what was happening in Washington—especially with the hypocrisy among the President's critics, even though she is a Republican.
Either she is setting me up or she is thinking about cooperating.
During my second conversation with the woman on the morning of Wednesday, December 16, I confronted her again about her alleged relationship with Livingston. To my surprise, almost matter‑of‑factly, she admitted it. But, although her admission was good, it was not good enough. I still needed evidence of the relationship to satisfy Flynt's high standards of proof.
To her credit, the woman never asked for any reward money or even ballpark figures—only for more information about me and Flynt's project. However, she still refused to sign our confidentiality agreement, making me wonder, once again, whether I had walked into a trap.
But, to keep everything honest and provable, I invited her to record our conversations. And, of course, I memorialized them, as well.
On the night of December 16, 1998—after I had faxed my daily report to Flynt, which included a statement about my conversation with the woman earlier that morning—she called me. Like the other two conversations, I taped this one as well, assuming that she was taping me, too.
When I answered the telephone, we immediately began discussing the President's bombing of Iraq earlier in the evening.
Moldea: I think it's so dramatic on the backdrop of impeachment. I mean just remarkable. If you sent a proposal for a book up to New York, talking about how, the day before the impeachment vote, the President invaded another country, they would say, "Oh, this is too unbelievable."
The woman: The problem with that is that there will probably be too many [books] published. You know?
Moldea: Yeah, probably true.
The woman: And that's why I called you.
Before she detailed the reason for her call, I stopped her and read the memorandum I had sent to Flynt just an hour earlier. In that report, I had quoted the woman, asking: "How can a lamb walk through a forest filled with wolves and come out alive?"
Moldea: So talk to me “little lamb.”
The woman: I thought about something that was an option in discussion but might not be for reality. . . . You've talked a lot about history being made. What if history was to be changed and the impeachment was delayed? Another way to phrase it would be: What if the impeachment failed by one vote as a result of someone's leadership? That would make a good story, wouldn't it?
Moldea: That's a fact. But, at the same time, I don't want to be the person who makes the decision to try to change votes. I just . . ."
The woman: That's not in your hands or mine. I'm only . . .
Moldea: Well, if we released this material early, it could have an impact on that. And there could be a reaction.
The woman: What if nothing got revealed? This is a scenario: What if a lot of faces were saved, and it failed by one vote because of leadership, quiet leadership. . . .
Moldea: Well, I know a lot about what's going on right now over in the House. And this is a runaway train. And there is nobody who could step in and say, "This stops now." Not Livingston. Not Gingrich. Not Tom DeLay. Nobody. . . . I don't want to affect the history of what's going on. After the vote is cast, then let the chips fall where they may. But, like I said, I don't think anything can stop what's going on. Nothing can stop it.
The woman: That's interesting, because you're certainly closer to it than I am.
Moldea: I'm real close to it. Nothing can stop this. I'm watching the news right now. . . .
The woman: It [the impeachment vote] will be delayed, you know, [because of the bombing of Iraq].
As I reported to her what I saw on the television news, it seemed clear that she was right: The U.S. House was going to postpone its vote. After briefly discussing the delay, she asked again whether I was interested in "changing the course of history."
Moldea: Well, let me tell you how I would interpret what you just said. It sounds to me as though there is somebody who would go to somebody in power and say, "Listen, I want you to stop this," or "I want you to influence enough votes so that this doesn't happen." And, I'm telling you, if that happened, the messenger would be handled in a situation like that. That's the reason why I won't go to anybody right now, because I'm afraid of influencing this vote in any way. I think that we have to allow this vote to happen. [Someone I knew] asked me to go to [a specific] congressman and say before the [impeachment] vote, "Hey, I've got you, and [we're] going to call a press conference in six hours," or whatever.
The woman: Well, I don't think that's how it would be handled. To me, the message would simply be, "This is scorched earth. This is going to hurt everyone. There are some folks who are looking for a life raft. Certainly, Mr. Speaker, do whatever you think you need to do, but all of this will go away if it fails by one vote."
Moldea: Like I said, I don't know that that's true. I would kind of hope that it was true. But I think we have to allow things to develop. . . .
The woman: They're going to ruin the Republican Party is what they're going to do.
Moldea: I think that's exactly right. [New York Times columnist] Maureen Dowd wrote that this was tantamount to the Republicans getting ready to drink their "Kool-Aid in Paula Jonestown." And that's exactly what's going on. This is Jonestown 1978.
The woman: They're walking over each other to get there first.
Moldea: What you have are a bunch of congressmen from conservative districts who have constituencies that want the President out, who have safe seats, and aren't really concerned about much—who are just taking this hard line. And these right‑wingers, they bedevil not just the liberal Democrats but the moderate, responsible Republicans who want an end to this madness and want a proper punishment for the President.
The woman: You're probably right about the runaway train. Instinctively, I don't agree with you, but I have nothing to base that on. I happen to think that a quiet consultation would [end the matter].
Moldea: No, no. Anyone who comes in right now and tries to be reasonable will receive the full wrath of the hard right. That's a fact.
The woman: No, I'm not talking about the high road where they declare themselves. They could easily vote "yes" to it. I'm saying that that's not where this conversation takes place anyway. . . .
Moldea: This is what I interpret you saying; you tell me if I'm wrong: "I will pick up the phone. I will call Bob Livingston. And I will tell him, 'Listen, I don't want this [impeachment] to happen. And, subtly, through diplomacy and negotiation, I sure want to see this thing fail. And, if this thing fails, a lot of things that were going to happen probably won't happen. And then all will be right with the world. And we will have peace in our time.'" That's essentially what it sounds like to me.
The woman: I wouldn't say that to him, but I'm certain that there are people who would.
Moldea: Right. That's why I'm saying: I don't think you want to do that, because you will have your head handed to you if you do that. All the things you are afraid might happen to you could happen to you after that scenario. . . . These guys are going to do what they're going to do now. That decision is made. They have declared themselves. You're going to see a vote; I betcha it could be as many as 228 votes for impeachment. And that's a lot. Everyone is thinking it's going to be close. I don't think it's going to be close at all. . . . [But] even if the President is impeached, it's still not checkmate. I mean, it’s damn close, but it's still not checkmate. And, so, what we're doing is we're just trying to be as responsible as we can in this thing. I know I am. I'm not going to be part of any irresponsibility because I know that my name is going to get dragged into this thing, sooner or later. And I want to make sure that I have a clear conscience about what I've done and how I've handled this.
The woman: I want to make sure that my name doesn't get dragged into this.
Moldea: And that is one of my considerations. I'm not just protecting you; I'm protecting a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons why I might want to write [the Flynt Report], because, if I do, then I know that all of the sources are protected—because I will never give up their names.
After listening to my pitch for her complete cooperation with us, the woman informed me that she had already talked to her attorney about my offer—but was still inclined not to cooperate. "My attorney was very uncomfortable," she said.
Moldea: So you've talked to your attorney then?
The woman: Yeah.
Moldea: Oh, okay, I didn't hear that. Okay, fine. You've talked to an attorney. Great. And you trust this man, right?
The woman: Oh, yeah.
Moldea: Okay, fine. He's not going to pick up the phone and call his old friend, Bob [Livingston], and say, "Hey, Bob, guess what?"
The woman: Oh, no. I have leverage there. He wouldn't do that.
By the end of the conversation, the woman was still not interested in accepting reward money. However, she genuinely appeared to be considering singlehandedly correcting the country's direction, regardless of the clear and present risk to her personally.
When I spoke with Flynt that night and expressed my admiration for this woman, he asked me if there was any chance she was simply a mercenary playing me.
"No," I replied, "I think she views herself as a patriot. And I'm not going to disagree with that."[4]
Next. . . . Part 2: The phone call, the bombshell
ENDNOTES
[1] Starr’s two top deputies introduced me to their alleged designated leaker, Brett Kavanaugh, a young and talented attorney with the OIC who became a Supreme Court Associate Justice in 2018. I did not name Kavanaugh in my first affidavit in 1998, identifying him only as “OIC #2.” As the Senate confirmation hearings opened twenty years later, I executed a second affidavit in which I named Kavanaugh as the OIC’s alleged “designated leaker.”
[2] David Espo, Associated Press, “Gingrich: Clinton’s account makes him ‘misogynist,’” September 16, 1998.
[3] Three years earlier, Vanity Fair had published an article that was widely discussed in 1998, indicating that U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, while married to his first wife, had an affair with Anne Manning, one of his married campaign workers. Manning told reporter Gail Sheehy that she never had intercourse with him, adding that he preferred her to perform oral sex. At the time of the magazine's publication, Gingrich was on tour, promoting his new pro-family book, To Renew America, in which he condemned sex outside of marriage.
[4] Allan MacDonell published a book in 2006 that provided an error-ridden account of our work together during the impeachment drama. The most egregious mistake was MacDonell’s statement: “Bob Livingston, if you’re out there, know that some people did their best to cover up for you. When Moldea finally called in to report his progress, I was sure that Livingston had slipped away. At my insistence, Dan contacted the alleged other woman. She told him to fuck himself and clicked the phone down, refusing to answer again. . . . The truth is that we [had] nothing on Livingston. We bluffed; he folded.”
This account—which was also featured without my name by Charles “Chip” McGrath in his article about MacDonell in the New York Times on April 29, 2006—is completely false. Not only did I speak to the woman on several occasions—during which she confessed her relationship with Livingston—I tape-recorded all but one of those conversations. I wrote and gave reports of these encounters to Flynt who apparently did not share them with MacDonell.
In short, MacDonell, an essential member of our team in 1998-1999, went over the top in his book as part of his apparent effort to seek revenge on Flynt, the man who had fired him from his job.
Fascinating, thanks! I just read your 3rd part, and now this one. I look forward to reading your Hoffa piece.
Thank you for writing details of critical information about these events not documented by the media during that time.