Monic Lewinsky refused FBI request
The Clintons may not see it this way, but there is a sense in which they were lucky that Lewinsky, of all people, was the woman to whom Bill had effectively entrusted his political career. A clutch of F.B.I. agents accosted her in a Virginia mall on January 16, 1998, and brought her to a hotel room, where they confronted her with Tripp’s tapes. They told Lewinsky that she was facing more than twenty-five years in prison, mostly for submitting a false affidavit in the Jones case. (She’d sworn that she had no evidence to offer about Clinton and sex in the workplace.) Her only hope of having a normal life was, she later recounted, to “place monitored calls” and “wear a wire,” to get the President on tape. After a twelve-hour stretch that included bullying, sobbing, calls to her mother, and dinner with an F.B.I. agent and one of Starr’s deputies at Mozzarella’s American Grill, she refused.