O.C.’s Top Federal Prosecutor Joins Starr

Orange County’s top federal prosecutor has been hired by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to help investigate allegations of sexual misconduct and perjury involving President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Thomas H. Bienert Jr. will take a leave from his job as head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Santa Ana and travel to Washington today to join about a dozen other prosecutors now working on the case. He declined to elaborate on his new job.

Bienert, 36, went to Washington last weekend and met with Starr, who offered him a job as associate independent counsel.

Bienert recently helped to get a conviction of Dr. Sergio C. Stone, one of three UC Irvine doctors indicted for insurance fraud and conspiracy.

Bienert directed the massive federal investigation into allegations that doctors at the clinic, also including Ricardo H. Asch and Jose P. Balmaceda, had stolen eggs and embryos from some women at the university’s now-closed fertility clinic and implanted them in other women, some of whom gave birth.

Stone’s sentencing is scheduled for March 11. Asch and Balmaceda have left the country.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Wayne Gross, who also helped prosecute Stone, said Bienert’s absence from Santa Ana will be felt by co-workers.

“It’s a big loss for our office,” Gross said. “He’s one of the best trial attorneys we have. He really knows how to get to the essence of a case.”

Even Stone’s attorney, John D. Barnett, who sparred with Bienert during Stone’s trial, praised the prosecutor’s skills.

“He’s a very honest, ethical prosecutor,” Barnett said Wednesday. “He’s got very good work ethics and great common sense. He has this disarmingly folksy manner about him” that is among his greatest strengths as a prosecutor.

In Washington, Bienert will work alongside his former colleague, associate independent counsel Michael W. Emmick, who is also on leave from his job as head of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section in Los Angeles.

It was Emmick who conferred for hours with Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 16. During that period, Emmick and an unnamed FBI agent took Lewinsky to lunch at the Pentagon City mall to interview her, with the hope of winning her cooperation--including her permission to tape-record one or more conversations with unspecified figures in the investigation.

Bienert and Emmick have teamed up on other high-profile cases, including one of the worst corruption scandals in local law enforcement history.

In that case, federal prosecutors obtained 11 convictions, including four guilty pleas from Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies accused of skimming drug money, beating drug dealers and planting cocaine on suspects.

Times staff writer Thao Hua contributed to this report.