The Clinton administration on Wednesday night asked Chief Justice William Rehnquist to intervene in its battle to keep Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr from forcing Secret Service agents to testify before the grand jury investigating the relationship between President Clinton and a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Unless Rehnquist or the U.S. Court of Appeals acts on the extraordinary motion from the administration, filed after a district judge refused to block their testimony, the agents are scheduled to appear before Starr’s grand jury on Thursday morning.
The heated struggle over Starr’s demand for testimony by the agents guarding Clinton goes to the heart of the delicate and at times difficult relationship between the president and his bodyguards.
Clinton–like all presidents–chafes at the invasion of privacy that Secret Service protection demands as the price of protection.
With his latest subpoena of eight Secret Service officers, including Larry Cockell, the head of the plainclothes detail guarding the president, Starr is seeking the testimony of those with the most intimate knowledge of Clinton’s movements and his meetings to provide corroboration of other witnesses’ accounts.
The Justice Department and the White House on Wednesday challenged those subpoenas, saying they would intrude on a relationship that demands implicit trust and confidentiality. Breaking that bond could imperil the president’s life, they say.
They said that any testimony by the agents should be deferred until completion of the government’s appeals of two federal court rulings requiring testimony by Secret Service personnel.
But their arguments, made in a secret court session, failed to persuade District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, administration officials said late Wednesday. Johnson repeated her assertion from her May ruling that there was no legal basis for the Secret Service claim that agents had an untested “protective function privilege” not to testify, they said.
A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals last week unanimously upheld her May ruling requiring the agents’ testimony; the administration is appealing.
Earlier Wednesday, White House spokesman Mike McCurry and Clinton’s private attorneys attacked the latest subpoenas as a potential violation of attorney-client privilege and a breach of the confidentiality that presidents expect of their agents. Until now, the White House refused to discuss the Secret Service issue, saying it was being handled by the Justice Department and the service’s parent agency, the Treasury Department.
But McCurry struck out at Starr Wednesday, calling him an “overzealous prosecutor” who “seems to be throwing subpoenas at anything that moves.”
“If the head of the president’s detail has heard the president talking to one of his attorneys, in what is presumed to be a privileged conversation, the government has the right to come and take someone who by law has to be in the car to protect the president and try to find out about that conversation?” McCurry said. “Those are tactics that are certainly questionable.”
Starr has served subpoenas on about 10 Secret Service employees–Cockell, several members of its uniformed division, and the agency’s general counsel, John Kelleher.
Cockell is the head of the Presidential Protective Detail, the plainclothes agents who provide immediate physical protection to the president and his family.
When Clinton first moved into the White House in 1993, there were persistent reports of friction with agents assigned to guard him. Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton bristled–as all new White House occupants do–at the round-the-clock protection and its inevitable infringement of personal privacy.
———-ON THE INTERNET:
Background on President Clinton’s legal problems at
chicago.tribune.com/go/clinton
