A shocking new book on Sexgate claims that nearly every lawyer in prosecutor Ken Starr’s office believed Hillary Clinton lied under oath about her role in the Whitewater scandal – but knew they couldn’t pin it on her.
The book, detailed in today’s Washington Post, says the probers thought Clinton lied about her work as a lawyer for the Arkansas savings-and-loan caught up in the scandal.
Hickman Ewing, Starr’s deputy in Little Rock, Ark., spent three hours making his case to the special prosecutor’s whole staff in April 1998 – then admitted a major snag: that their star witness, James McDougal, had since died.
“Virtually everybody concluded that the first lady had lied but that the evidence was not strong enough to convict her,” say the journalist authors of “Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton.”
“No one was in favor of going forward with an indictment, including a somber Ewing.”
When asked for comment on the book’s claim, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart only said:
“We have no comment on the substance, but I believe this book will only appeal to those Americans who felt the Starr report didn’t contain enough details.”
The book, written by veteran reporters Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post and Time magazine’s Michael Weisskopf, also reveals:
* The president was angry over having to leave a White House dinner party in August 1998 to give a blood sample to his doctor for a DNA test that compared it to the semen on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.
* Starr’s Sexgate staff felt it had been taken in by a conniving Linda Tripp, whom they griped had too close of ties to Paula Jones’ legal team. Tripp’s lawyer insisted his client was “always truthful” to prosecutors.
* Starr drafted an indictment of President Clinton on a perjury charge over Sexgate as far back as late 1998, but left the pursuit of it to his successor.