January 12, 1999

ABROAD AT HOME / By ANTHONY LEWIS

The Knock on the Door

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W ASHINGTON -- In his speech to the House urging impeachment of the President, Henry Hyde said that our safety depends on respect for the law. "The rule of law," he said, "protects you and it protects me from . . . the 3 A.M. knock on our door. It challenges abuse of authority. It's a shame 'Darkness at Noon' is forgotten."

But the knock on the door is here. Abuse of legal authority is occurring in the very process that Hyde and his colleagues are so zealously pressing.

On the day that the Senate began its trial of President Clinton, Kenneth Starr had a grand jury indict Julie Hiatt Steele. She is a remote, peripheral figure in the Starr campaign against the President, and a single mother without resources. Yet the independent counsel, unaccountable and obsessed, has set out to grind her to dust.

The indictment of Julie Steele was more telling than all the solemn repetitions of "William Jefferson Clinton" in the Senate. It was a frightening symbol, a metaphor for a process run riot.

Ms. Steele is a target of Kenneth Starr for one reason: She will not support the story of Kathleen Willey, a woman who said President Clinton made a pass at her in the White House in 1993. Ms. Willey said she immediately went to the home of Ms. Steele, then a friend, and told her about the episode. In 1997 Ms. Steele told Newsweek that she had had that visit from Kathleen Willey. But later that year, long before the Monica Lewinsky story broke, she told Newsweek that the tale was untrue -- that Ms. Willey had asked her to lie. She has held to that position ever since.

In an attempt to break Ms. Steele, Starr has called her before two grand juries -- and called her brother, daughter and former lawyer. His agents have gone around Ms. Steele's neighborhood in Richmond, Va., questioning neighbors about the adoption of her son, Adam, in Romania eight years ago.

Starr was asked by members of the House Judiciary Committee whether his office had raised the adoption to pressure Ms. Steele to change her testimony. He said that was "absolutely false."

But not only did agents ask neighbors about the adoption. At the grand jury Ms. Steele's brother and daughter were asked about it. Where did she get the money for it? Whom did she talk to? The questions assumed that there was something wrong about the adoption.

Not many of us could stand up to pressure like that. Ms. Steele's reward is an indictment that repackages her refusal to support the Willey story into four counts of obstructing justice and making false statements. The indictment's 20 wandering, unprofessional pages include a charge that she spoke falsely on "Larry King Live." Characteristically, the Starr office leaked word of the indictment before it was handed down.

I did not believe that even Kenneth Starr would actually indict Julie Hiatt Steele. It seemed so gratuitous, so indecent. But I was naïve. For him, everything must yield to the aim of destroying Bill Clinton. And if he could steamroll Ms. Steele into supporting the Willey story, it would be something else for Hyde & Co. to use against the President.

It is not irrelevant that Julie Steele is a lonely woman, financially vulnerable. Starr and his brutal deputies have a thing about women. They kept Susan McDougal in prison for 18 months because she would not testify as they wanted. They ruined the life of another Arkansas woman, Sarah Hawkins, by menaces and threats of indictment. And there was the bullying of Monica Lewinsky and her mother.

We all tend to ignore abuses directed at others. Conservatives overlook the abuses of Kenneth Starr now as liberals overlooked the dangers of the Independent Counsel Act when the Supreme Court in 1988 upheld its use against Theodore Olson, a Reagan Administration official. Only Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, saw what is evident today to all but the willfully blind: An unaccountable prosecutor menaces the Constitution and, for all of us, freedom under law.

It is hard to find words for Kenneth Starr's behavior as a prosecutor. The ones that seem to me to fit are the adjectives Hamlet had for his murderous uncle: "remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless."