Moving swiftly Friday on independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s appeal for a special hearing, the Supreme Court set a Monday deadline for the White House to respond in a dispute over President Clinton’s claims of executive privilege in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.
The court is expected to announce later next week whether it will hear Starr’s appeal and delay its summer recess until the justices rule in the case in early July.
In asking the court Thursday to bypass the normal appeals process, Starr recalled President Richard Nixon’s failed attempt in 1974 to withhold Oval Office tape recordings from the Watergate special prosecutor. Starr cited only five instances in the last 50 years, including the Nixon tapes case, when the court has granted such a request.
“It is strongly in the nation’s interest that the case be resolved quickly so that the grand jury’s investigation can move forward at the earliest practicable date,” Starr told the court. “If the decision were allowed to proceed through the normal processes of appellate review, important portions of this investigation would be substantially delayed.”
Starr’s appeal concerns recent rulings by U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson requiring presidential assistants Bruce Lindsey and Sidney Blumenthal to answer questions about Lewinsky, a former White House intern and employee. The White House filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and also asked Johnson to reconsider her ruling.
Starr proposed that the high court set deadlines of June 15 for both sides to file their briefs, June 22 for the responses and June 29 for oral arguments before justices.
In a related development, a Washington bookstore said it would fight Starr’s subpoena for records of Lewinsky’s book purchases.
Sources familiar with Starr’s investigation say Lewinsky received a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” from Clinton, and that prosecutors are trying to determine whether her own purchases included Nicholas Baker’s novel about phone sex, “Vox.”
Bill Kramer of Kramerbooks & Afterwords said that despite a partial victory last month, he would fight “the government’s invasion of our customers’ privacy” and appeal a judge’s ruling.
The partial victory came in an order from Judge Johnson narrowing Starr’s broad original subpoena, which apparently sought a list of books charged to Lewinsky’s credit card since November 1995.
The judge quoted Supreme Court Justice William Douglas’ 1963 opinion that “once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears.”
