Intermezzo for my five-part series about Ken Starr and the OIC leaks

A prosecutorial goon squad targets President Clinton after Vince Foster's death

To establish my credentials for this MOBOLOGY site on Substack, I have created an archive of my work that details the research behind my books, articles, and investigations, hoping to earn the loyalty, respect, and trust of my subscribers as I present new content.

(Return to The Works of Dan E. Moldea)

For more context of this section about Ken Starr and the OIC leaks, please see my six earlier vignettes about the death of Vincent Foster: “Politics as organized crime.”

     Through my investigation of the suicide of Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993, I realized what President Clinton had been up against since his first inauguration in 1993:  His political enemies were prepared to do anything—and use anything—to remove him from office. 

     Consequently, when the Lewinsky scandal erupted in January 1998, I decided to take sides and became an uninvited bit player in the war between the President and his avowed enemies.  Upon the release of A Washington Tragedy, my book about Foster's suicide in April, I publicly announced my support for the President, along with my criticism of Ken Starr and his Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), during radio and national television appearances.

     On May 19, 1998, during a speech at the Martin Luther King Library in downtown Washington, which was later broadcast by CNN, I alleged that the OIC routinely leaked non-public information on an off-the-record basis to a selected group of journalists, many of whom had become shills and stalking horses for Kenneth Starr and the OIC.  I based these charges on my on-the-record conversations with members of the OIC staff during the research for my book about Vincent Foster’s death.

     Like me, these journalists had taken sides in the dispute; but, unlike me, they did not announce their biases, continuing instead to hide behind the First Amendment and to report for their news organizations under the false guise of objectivity.

     On May 27, during a television appearance on MSNBC, I said, “I insist that this is not a fair investigation [of the President], and I believe that many reporters are becoming complicit in this particular situation.”  I also charged that some journalists had become “cheerleaders” for Starr’s investigation and needed the President’s removal from office in order to justify their abuses and excesses.

     On June 6, the National Journal reported:  “Indeed, President Clinton believes that the independent counsel is breaking the law with leaks to reporters—and that the Washington Post and the New York Times are covering it up, [White House press secretary Mike] McCurry said in an interview.  ‘[President Clinton] asked me the other day why do the Washington Post and the New York Times cover up Dan Moldea and not write about that?’”

     Meantime, I had promised that, if subpoenaed, I would cooperate with any investigation of the leaks, including the OIC’s own reported internal review.  Not surprisingly, the OIC, which claimed to be in the midst of an investigation of the illegal leaks, never contacted me.

     Then, after the release of an article in Brill's Content in mid-June, evidence evolved, showing that some of these journalists had taken information from their own sources and actually fed it to the OIC, which later identified these reporters in court records as confidential informants.

     In late July, in response to what many now considered a cooperative effort between OIC prosecutors and this group of Washington journalists, I reluctantly revealed that I had legally tape-recorded my on-the-record conversations with Starr's two deputies, Hickman Ewing and Jackie Bennett, upon whom I had based my original allegations about the OIC leaks.

     On August 24, 1998—a week after the President's appearance before the OIC's federal grand jury—I attached the transcripts of these two conversations to my affidavit on OIC leaks that I filed with U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson.  She had already ordered that Starr and the OIC be investigated for 24 allegedly illegal leaks to its stable of reporters.

     In his 1998 bestseller, And the Horse He Rode In On, Clinton defender James Carville wrote:  “One journalist finally had the temerity to step forward and explain how all this sensitive information had been coming out into the light of day.  Dan Moldea, a respected crime reporter with more than seven exhaustively investigated books under his belt, heard one of Starr’s emphatic denials and was so disgusted that he told his tale."

     Here is a catalog of the five-part series about my investigations of Ken Starr and the OIC leaks, excerpted from the third edition of my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.

Preface

1/5: The Monica Lewinsky scandal

2/5: Ken Starr and his bad behavior

3/5: Openly taking sides

4/5: The secret tapes

5/5: Heresy

* SEE:  The Clinton Impeachment and The Flynt Project