Five more pages down the toobs

Whoops! I slipped since last week's column and read another few pages of Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy, and happened upon another pack of inaccuracies.

Good thing Toobin concludes that Clinton is "the good guy in this struggle"-albeit on the basis of his error-ridden book. Otherwise Toobin might have been denounced and discredited like Gary Aldrich, who got one fact wrong. (Aldrich falsely accused a man with a sexual addiction-as the man's wife put it in an interview with Talk magazine-of adulterous liaisons in a Marriott Hotel when, in fact, there is no evidence that the sex addict ever committed adultery in that particular venue.)

But since Toobin praises Clinton, he can write a book shot through with errors and still be an ABC "legal analyst."

On page 214, Toobin describes the activities of Tripp lawyer Jim Moody on Thursday, Jan. 15, 1998-activities that, Toobin sinisterly states, were "unknown" to one of Paula Jones's lawyers, Wes Holmes: "Unknown to Holmes, Moody was just that day collecting the [Tripp] tapes from Kirby Behre, playing them for Isikoff, and his colleagues at Newsweek, and then taking them to Ann Coulter's apartment to listen to them,

It's true Homes didn't know that, but only because that's not what happened.

Isikoff Right, Toobin Not

This chronology is false. Indeed, Toobin's chronology makes no sense, except as an effort to suggest some sort of dark-and incomprehensible-motive on the part of Tripp lawyer Moody. I don't know what the diabolic motive might be, though my guess is it somehow inures to the greater glory of Bill Clinton. I'm not really interested in reading the surrounding sentences to find out. Suffice it to say that Toobin's timeline is incorrect.

In a series of other inconsequential but false references to Moody, Toobin states 'Moody lived by himself' and "despised Democrats in general" (pp. 185 and 187). Moody has not lived by himself since graduating from college, and the woman he current lives with is a liberal Democrat. (For some reason, almost all his friends are.)

Moody came into the case, Toobin says, when George Conway "remembered an old friend in. Washington`@--Jim Moody (p. 184). In fact, George Conway barely knew Jim Moody; the two had met only briefly once or twice before in group settings. It certainly was not George Conway who thought of suggesting Moody's name to Tripp.

In one of his most bizarre errors, Toobin says Moody engaged in a series of evasive maneuvers after he finally retrieved the Tripp tapes, before returning to his office. The accurate version, reported by Isikoff, is this: "Moody, the ex-spook, grabbed a cab and took it to Capitol Hill. He had the taxi stop in front of the Hart Senate Office Building-a building you can enter and exit using different doors. He walked briskly though the building, his heart pounding, and left from the other side. Then he hailed another cab and took it across town to the upscale Georgetown Park shopping mall. He wandered around the shops for a half hour, clutching his briefcase with the tapes, furtively looking over his shoulder every now and then to detect with his imperfect eyes his imagined pursuers. Finally, he took a third cab back to his office at 24th and N Street; NW."

Moody gave this colorful story to Michael Isikoff exclu sively, it has been reported by no one else. Indeed, Moody never talked to Toobin about it.

Toobin apparently must have gotten the story from Isikoff's book, but ftm@ peculiarly, changed the Hart Senate Office Building to die Russell Senate Office Building: "[Moody] took a cab to the Capitol and walked through one entrance to the Russell Senate Office Building and out the odier. He stopped at another Senate office. Then he took a cab to (wn, talked on a pay phone for a while, and finally took another md to his office"(p. 199).

Anyone who has ever been to Washington, knows that one cannot walk fiom one entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building to another without enormous difficulty The Russell building is a complete maze with entrances on different floom and no central lobby that can be crossed, at all. People who have worked on the Hill for years can get lost in that building.

The Hart building, however, has a wide-open lobby that can be traversed easily.

That's why Moody cut through the Hart Senate Office Building. That's why Isikoff wrote that Moody cut through the Hart Senate Office Building. It's anyone's guess why Toobin absurdly changed "Hart Senate Office Building" to Russell Senate Office Building," without even talking to Moody. (Moody also did not stop at "another Senate Office Building" and made no phone calls from Georgetown that day, either, in case you needed to ask.)

On page 187, Toobin asserts: "[O]ver dinner at Deux Cheminees, a fancy French restaurant, [elf Jerome] Marcus told [his law school classmate and Starr prosecutor Paul] Rosenzweig about Monica Lewinsky." This is false and, one would think, obviously so.

There were four people at that dinner, one working for Ken Starr. No one was going to put Rosenzweig on the spot, or discuss a rather important matter cavalierly over dinner with waiters scurrying about (if you were alive in 1998, you might recall that the Lewinsky affair got Clinton impeached, and wrecked his presidency. If information about Linda Tripp and her tapes had somehow come out before the President's deposition in the Jones case, the world would be a very different place right now) Marcus had told Rosenzweig about Lewinsky privately in his office, before anyone else had arrived. The President was referred to only obliquely over dinner.