Scrutinize the Hunters Along With Hunted

Are all prosecutors inveterate bullies? Are the heavy-handed actions of Kenneth Starr’s office the norm, as some legal experts have insisted?

Must we live in constant fear that our closest friends are wired by the feds to betray our most intimate thoughts? Or that questionable testimony in a civil suit will leave us, or our children, open to an inquisition without an attorney by 10 federal agents? If the treatment accorded Monica Lewinsky and her mother is the norm, we are in serious trouble.

In all the massive coverage of the presidential sex scandal, the comments of Dr. Bernard Lewinsky on his daughter’s treatment are the most disturbing. In an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters last week, he painted a picture of his daughter’s abuse by Starr’s agents that suggests a far more dangerous transgression of justice than whatever impropriety his daughter or the president may have engaged in.

“She was in tears, she was frightened,” Lewinsky said, recalling his telephone conversation with his daughter. “She had been with approximately five FBI men and five prosecutors in the hotel room for about nine hours. And they were threatening her with a 20-year jail sentence.”

Starr’s attempt to bargain an immunity deal with Monica Lewinsky without a lawyer present violates the ethics code of the American Bar Assn., according to its president, Jerome Shestack, who warned last week that basic legal rights are “being whittled away.”

We aren’t at war and, as Dr. Lewinsky noted: “She’s not a murderer, she’s not a spy. There was an alleged involvement in a civil case, I don’t understand what this is all about.”

What this is about is the zeal to “get” Clinton by any means necessary. Starr is a political activist who is using the independent counsel’s powers to accomplish what his right-wing allies failed to do in the presidential election. In his eagerness to eject Clinton from office, he has lined up a team of the country’s most aggressive prosecutors, who are treating the president as if he were a leader of organized crime.

Most zealous is one Michael W. Emmick, lead inquisitor during Lewinsky’s ordeal. It was Emmick who alternately cajoled and intimidated the young woman, knowing she was without the legal counsel accorded by our justice system. Emmick is on leave from the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, where he developed a reputation for tough handling of witnesses.

It was Emmick whom Starr assigned to interrogate Susan McDougal, who has been incarcerated for 17 months for refusing to provide what she claims is false and damaging testimony against Clinton. McDougal refused Emmick’s offer of a deal, saying: “He was hired by Kenneth Starr because he’s the man for the job. He is known . . . for his way of intimidating witnesses. I would not speak with him.”

One incident of possible intimidation involved L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy Christina Townley, who refused to testify against her then-husband, an L.A. police officer, in a federal corruption case prosecuted by Emmick. During the trial, U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi criticized the prosecution for withholding key evidence helpful to the defense, noting, “We haven’t achieved [a fair trial].” The husband, Stephen W. Polak, was acquitted.

Emmick’s staff then went after Townley, wiring a police lieutenant to tape her admitting to an extramarital affair in an effort to prove perjury. “We weren’t just trying to bloody her nose,” Emmick told Martin Berg of the L.A. Daily Journal. “I wouldn’t regard that as sleazy,” Emmick said of his questioning about her sex life. “It’s always distasteful. But you do what you have to do.” The perjury charge collapsed. But then Townley and Polak were indicted for filing a false 1986 income tax form.

The tax charge angered Takasugi, who in 1994 had chastised the prosecution for using “threats, deceit and harassment techniques to compel her to cooperate.” Takasugi dismissed the tax case, calling the prosecution “callous, coercive and vindictive.” After more than five years of prosecution, the 13 felony counts against Polak were dropped; he pled guilty to a misdemeanor and was fined $50.

Did Starr know this history when he picked Emmick to be his emissary to McDougal and later to Lewinsky? Why haven’t the media been more interested in the background of Emmick and other prosecutors involved in this case against our country’s highest elected official?

Starr’s prosecutors assume they have the right to scurry after every scrap of information relating to the personal lives of Clinton and his associates. Surely the media have a similar obligation to turn the spotlight on the hunters as well as the hunted.