Trust and Confidence

📖 The Scoop

Think you know the full story of the Starr investigation and President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky? 

In 1998, for the first time in our nation’s history, the director of the United States Secret Service was asked to testify against a sitting president. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr wanted to question Director Lewis Merletti about President Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. Starr issued a motion to compel Merletti, and agents protecting the president, to testify as to what they may have seen or heard regarding Clinton and Lewinsky’s intimate liaisons. Merletti argued that if agents were permitted to testify about anything other than criminal acts, it would compromise the trust and confidence tenet critical to the mission of the Secret Service and thus jeopardize the safety of the presidency and the country.

But there was something more to the story. An anonymous source inside the Service—self-identified as “Deep Throat”—falsely alleged that Merletti not only facilitated the Clinton/Lewinsky relationship but had a deal with the president: keep quiet about Lewinsky, and in return, become the director of the Secret Service.

Drawn from interviews and previously unreleased documents from the National Archives, Trust and Confidence is the only inside account of the battle between the Secret Service and the independent counsel as well as the important connection between the Secret Service and Monica Lewinsky.

Genre: Political Science / American Government / Executive Branch (fancy, right?)