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The Blumenthal subpoena was partly a brushback pitch--if you throw at our hitters, Starr's lawyers apparently figured, we'll throw at yours. But it also served a larger strategy that has driven Starr's efforts from the outset. He and his prosecutors have long believed that Clinton loyalists get to witnesses and neutralize their testimony before they can be of help to prosecutors. Starr suspects that in the Whitewater matter, Clinton's team tried to shut up potentially damaging witnesses like Webb Hubbell through hush-money payments. Pleadings filed by Paula Jones' lawyers suggest they have evidence that some of the women allegedly propositioned by Clinton to make denials in depositions. Starr wants to know who might have paid for any such intercessions and how any results were circulated to the White House.
Lenzner is a good candidate to have done the digging. He is known to have done work for the firms of Clinton's private lawyers, Robert Bennett and Kendall. All last weekend Clinton's aides denied hiring Lenzner, but by Monday they admitted he was indeed working for Kendall, collecting "background" on the prosecutors. Lenzner was subpoenaed early last week; a subpoena was also prepared for Mickey Kantor--who is helping Clinton's defense in the Lewinsky case--but was dropped after the former Commerce Secretary insisted that he is shielded by the attorney-client privilege.
And so by midweek Starr, put on the defensive, was busy trying to pivot back to his earlier Lewinsky inquiry--the relationship between the President and the intern. Starr focused on Lewinsky's career path, looking for fingerprints and favors, anything to support the notion that she was rewarded for her silence. Among the Clinton aides questioned before the grand jury Wednesday was Timothy Keating, who until last year was chief of staff in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. "I made the decision to hire her because she had performed her assignments well as an intern," he said afterward. "She was transferred because of dissatisfaction with her performance in the correspondence section." A source familiar with the testimony said Lewinsky had a way of spending more time wandering the West Wing and crashing photo ops than answering mail. "Letters she was supposed to have done for OMB [the White House's Office of Management and Budget] were left undone for months."