L. Jean Lewis: Back to the source

In discussing L. Jean Lewis, I've been somewhat remiss in mentioning the work of Gene Lyons, whose reportage is responsible for a lot of what we know about the woman. Atrios cites Lyons' seminal work, Fools for Scandal, but there's quite a bit else out there. Of special note is some of Gene's work for Salon:

See some evil, hear some evil

Lewis was supposed to be Whitewater's Joan of Arc. A low-level investigator [emphasis mine] for the Resolution Trust Corporation in Kansas City, Mo., Lewis took it upon herself during the 1992 election campaign to file "criminal referrals" with the FBI and the U.S. attorney in Little Rock listing both Bill and Hillary Clinton as potential suspects in the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Thanks to reporter Mollie Dickinson's recent story in Salon, we now know that sworn depositions from the Senate Whitewater committee prove that the Bush White House was actively involved in attempts to force the Justice Department to take action on those referrals in time to affect the November election.

So was Lewis herself. FBI agents and federal prosecutors who testified before Sen. Alfonse D'Amato's committee said that Lewis had made dramatic pronouncements to them about altering the course of history, prompting them to suspect her motives. The form and content of Lewis' criminal referrals, moreover, struck every Justice Department official who examined them as factually deficient and legally incompetent. Then-Attorney General William Barr got nowhere in his attempts to push them through the federal bureaucracy. Little Rock U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks, a Reagan appointee, wrote a blunt letter refusing to be a party to what he viewed as a politically inspired smear.

In sworn testimony before both House and Senate Whitewater committees, Lewis denied making any pre-election attempts to pressure the FBI and U.S. attorney, claiming she'd had no conversations with anybody about her criminal referrals until December 1992. But FBI agents testified otherwise, and had contemporaneous records to support them. In fact, the records show, Lewis had hounded them repeatedly. Within a week of her initial September 1992 referral, for example, Lewis left a taunting message for FBI Special Agent Steve Irons at his Little Rock office. "Have I turned into a local pariah," Lewis asked, "just because I wrote one referral with high-profile names, or do you intend on calling me back before Christmas, Steven?" A few days later, she showed up in Irons' office in person to urge him onward. The agent testified that her partisanship had the opposite effect.

Lewis had also made a secret, and potentially illegal, tape recording of a meeting with an RTC colleague named April Breslaw, then testified inaccurately as to the import of their conversations. She blamed the inadvertent recording on a worn-out cassette recorder that had spontaneously activated itself without her intervention. Confronted with inconsistencies in her testimony by Democratic counsel Richard Ben-Veniste, Lewis appeared to faint and had to be assisted from Senate chambers, never to return (a startling development not reported by either the New York Times or the Washington Post). Investigators subsequently found evidence that Lewis had, in fact, bought a spanking new tape recorder only days before her meeting with Breslaw. They passed it and a copy of her "accidental" tape recording along to Starr's office for analysis.

At the time Starr took over the independent counsel's job in August 1994, Lewis was also being investigated by the RTC's inspector general for the above infractions as well as several others -- including illegal leaks of confidential financial records to the press and using her government office to market a line of "Presidential BITCH" T-Shirts and coffee mugs mocking the first lady. One of Starr's first actions as independent counsel was to assume control of that investigation. Nothing has been heard from the independent counsel's office regarding L. Jean Lewis since that day. Perhaps it is time for the bulldog scandal hunters in the press corps to ask Starr why that is.

Gene puts this into the broader context of the press' behavior in Whitewater in another piece:

The New York Times: All the facts that are fit to omit

Thousands of viewers watching the hearings live on C-SPAN witnessed this amazing spectacle, but Labaton's story in the next day's Times contained not one word about the incident. Not then, nor since. But a Times editorial a few days after Lewis' appearance referred to her, apparently without irony, as the Senate Whitewater hearings' "star witness."

Interestingly, the Washington Post's "Clinton scandals" ace correspondent, Susan Schmidt, also failed to report Lewis' dramatic swoon -- much as Schmidt saw fit earlier this week to leave out exculpatory information from her "exclusive" story about a former Secret Service agent who said he'd seen Monica Lewinsky enter the Oval Office alone in the fall of 1995 carrying a stack of documents. Omitted from Schmidt's story was what the Secret Service agent, Lewis Fox, had earlier told the Observer-Reporter of Waynesboro, Pa., that the constant bustle around the president's office, not to mention the Oval Office's open windows, made the notion of a sexual relationship there all but impossible to imagine. Fox's lawyer has since told reporters his client had no evidence Clinton and Lewinsky were ever alone. Like several putative "witnesses" who've surfaced in the Washington Post and elsewhere over recent weeks, Fox had seen no evidence of impropriety between the president and the intern. Absent Schmidt's tactical omission, there would seem no "story" at all.

Also worth adding to the list is this 1996 piece in The Nation by Joe Conason and Murray Waas, which examines Ken Starr's legal conflict of interest in his hardball dealings with the RTC:

Troubled Whitewater: A secret conflict calls Kenneth Starr's role as special prosecutor into question

The first reported action taken by Starr after he replaced Fiske was to subpoena records from the R.T.C. regarding its treatment of L. Jean Lewis and two of her fellow investigators in the agency's Kansas City office who also had worked on the Whitewater matter. Only ten days after Starr's appointment, the three R.T.C. investigators had been placed on a two-week administrative leave by the agency's top officials as punishment for what was described as "noncompliance with R.T.C. policy and procedures." Lewis had, among other things, secretly taped a conversation with another R.T.C. official regarding Whitewater, and then provided that tape to Republicans in Congress, which was revealed at a public hearing. Upon learning of the suspensions, Republicans charged that Lewis and the others were being punished by Clinton appointees because they had vigorously pursued Whitewater leads and had provided information to those on the Hill who were also looking into Whitewater.

Within a week after the temporary R.T.C. action against Lewis and the others was announced, Starr requested that the Whitewater grand jury in Washington issue subpoenas to the R.T.C. for all documents relating to their suspension. The purpose of the subpoenas, according to newspaper reports at the time, was to determine whether R.T.C. or other federal officials had attempted to obstruct justice by intimidating Lewis and her colleagues.

That August 24, R.T.C. general counsel Ellen Kulka faxed a letter to Starr offering her agency's full cooperation with his efforts, including any matters involving the Kansas City office. "We are very willing to arrange that they respond to any request you make of them to provide information and to travel upon your request at R.T.C. expense to meet with you or your staff," Kulka wrote. She also offered to assign the three investigators to work with Starr. Kulka's letter was copied to acting R.T.C. chief John Ryan; the agency's deputy general counsel, Andrew Tomback; and its assisant general counsel, Thomas Hindes.

Nearly a year later, when Tomback testified before the House Banking Committee about the R.T.C.'s role in Whitewater, he said that Starr had never responded in writing to Kulka, although a telephone call was received from a Starr aide declining the help of Lewis and her colleagues. On August 9, 1995, Starr explained why: It was, he wrote, "for the sole reason that the administrative leave of these three employees was, and remains, under active investigation."