Team Lewinsky Tells Art of the Deal

Five days after issuing a subpoena for President Clinton’s testimony, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr moved quickly to obtain Monica S. Lewinsky’s full cooperation by arranging a pair of secret meetings in private homes that led to the former White House intern receiving a grant of full immunity from prosecution, her attorneys said in interviews Saturday.

Veteran defense lawyers Plato Cacheris and Jacob A. Stein said Starr clearly was in a hurry to wrap up a deal that would produce Lewinsky’s sworn testimony about her relationship with the president as well as important physical evidence, including a blue dress, which may contain semen stains, and tape-recordings of brief telephone messages left by Clinton.

In their first on-the-record interviews, Cacheris and Stein provided accounts of the ticklish negotiations leading up to a critical immunity agreement that could spell legal and political trouble for the president. The agreement is a significant development in Starr’s investigation of Clinton because over the last six months Lewinsky had failed to obtain immunity through her previous attorney, William H. Ginsburg of Los Angeles.

An atmosphere of mistrust had developed between Starr and Ginsburg, a medical malpractice lawyer whose television appearances became so frequent that some prosecutors felt he was representing Lewinsky chiefly to enhance his own reputation. Moreover, Ginsburg did little to assuage doubts about Lewinsky’s credibility in the face of published reports that she had told her onetime friend Linda Tripp in a tape-recorded phone conversation, “I have lied my entire life.”

The hiring of Cacheris and Stein in June confronted Starr with two experienced Washington attorneys with an accomplished track record in criminal law and a knack for negotiating with federal prosecutors.

Starr’s office could not be reached for comment on the deal leading to immunity.

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Beginning on July 22 with an hourlong discussion at the suburban Washington home of Starr’s ethics counselor, Sam Dash, and continuing on July 27 through a five-hour session at a New York City apartment, Starr and his prosecutors emphasized that they were “interested in the truth as Lewinsky recalled it,” Stein said.

He added that Dash, who knew the defense lawyers from the roles all three played in the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, “assured Starr that Plato and I would not sponsor someone who would manipulate the facts.”

On July 21, Starr broke a weeks-long impasse in immunity talks for Lewinsky by telephoning Stein at his office. According to Cacheris, Starr simply said, “Let’s meet.” The lawyers were unaware that Starr had recently subpoenaed Clinton, but in retrospect the independent counsel wanted to lock up Lewinsky’s story to prepare for Clinton’s eventual testimony, legal experts said.

The next day, the defense lawyers found themselves sharing bagels with Starr in the family room of Dash’s home. Cacheris described the gathering as “extremely friendly, relaxed and informal.”

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The three men are well-acquainted. Dash served as chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee 25 years ago, Cacheris represented former Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell in the scandal and Stein defended Dwight Chapin, a senior Nixon White House aide, and later Kenneth Parkinson, a Nixon campaign official.

At the conclusion of the initial meeting, Starr proposed a “queen for a day” session for Lewinsky--legal jargon for an interrogation that allows prosecutors to evaluate a potential witness without using any of the information to bring a case against them.

Starr told Lewinsky’s lawyers, “ ‘If this works, she will be out of harm’s way,’ ” Cacheris said.

Cacheris and Stein readily agreed. “We wanted to have Monica protected,” Cacheris said. “We were agreeable to it because our client had nothing to lose and she wasn’t at risk.”

Cacheris said he asked Starr, “What’s your time frame for interviewing Monica?”

Starr’s reply: “Now.”

The session, in which Lewinsky would meet face-to-face with Starr’s prosecutors for the first time, was promptly arranged to be held in five days.

“Both sides wanted this session to be confidential, but if we had our client fly to Washington from California it would raise suspicions,” Cacheris said. “So Starr picked New York as the site.”

One source said Lewinsky wore “a simple disguise” when she left Los Angeles.

Representing Starr at this meeting in the Manhattan apartment of a relative of the independent counsel was Robert Bittman, a top Starr staff member whose father, William O. Bittman, was a friend of Cacheris and Stein from Watergate days as the lawyer for former White House operative E. Howard Hunt Jr.

Sydney Jean Hoffmann, a lawyer in Cacheris’ firm who had been chosen to debrief Lewinsky in June, at first led the 25-year-old woman through her entire account for Bittman.

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“It was a 30-minute direct examination, as in a courtroom,” Cacheris said. “But it was more informal because we were just sitting around a table.”

Then Bittman spent about four hours posing his own questions to Lewinsky.

“At the conclusion, I said that we wanted a written immunity agreement,” Cacheris recalled. “Bittman replied, ‘You mean signed?’ ”

The room erupted with laughter.

The light moment reflected the fact that Lewinsky’s previous lawyer, Ginsburg, had gone to court earlier this year to try to enforce what he claimed was an unsigned agreement that Starr had disavowed. Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson refused to honor the agreement because it did not contain Starr’s signature.

This time the immunity negotiations went smoothly. The next day, Starr phoned Stein to arrange for the defense lawyers and the independent counsel to sign an official “letter agreement” spelling out Lewinsky’s immunity.

In their interviews Saturday, Cacheris and Stein refused to disclose specific terms of the agreement or to discuss any physical evidence Lewinsky turned over to Starr last week. According to sources familiar with the negotiations, Lewinsky provided prosecutors with a navy blue dress and tapes from her telephone machine.

Law enforcement sources said the dress was still being analyzed by the FBI for any DNA markings that could be compared with Clinton’s genetic makeup. Contrary to earlier reports, the unlaundered dress has at least one visible stain of unknown composition, a legal source said.

Lewinsky was undergoing more closed-door interrogation by Starr’s prosecutors over the weekend, with no date yet established for her first grand jury appearance. The president is due to testify in a videotaped session at the White House on Aug. 17.

In another development Saturday that raised further doubts about Lewinsky’s credibility, the Oregonian newspaper in Portland quoted from a letter she allegedly forged three years ago on behalf of a married man with whom she was sexually involved.

In 1995, Lewinsky was reportedly in a sexual relationship with a Lewis & Clark College drama department employee. In order to help the man find additional employment, the Oregonian reported that Lewinsky drafted a letter of reference and signed the name of David Bliss, another theater department worker.

Bliss eventually obtained the letter and turned it over to Starr’s team in January when Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton first became known. This week, Bliss released the letter to the Oregonian.

Lewinsky later wrote Bliss a letter of apology for forging his signature. In that letter, she wrote that she never imagined the episode “would turn out to be one of the biggest nightmares of my life thus far.”

Times Staff Writers Ronald J. Ostrow and Richard A. Serrano contributed to this story.