House Sends Lewinsky an Interrogator in White Hat

WASHINGTON —  Note to Monica S. Lewinsky: Don’t worry about your deposition Monday for President Clinton’s impeachment trial. As far as House prosecutors are concerned, it’s No More Mr. Bad Guy--Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.) will do the questioning.

That’s the message that House managers wanted to send when they chose Bryant to interrogate the 25-year-old former White House intern in an effort to resolve inconsistencies in previously garnered evidence. Word from Lewinsky’s friends is that the already much-deposed young woman from Beverly Hills was apprehensive, to say the least, about the combative style of some of the other House prosecutors.

But GOP insiders say Bryant seemed to “connect” with Lewinsky when the low-key, soft-spoken Tennessean and two other House managers--Reps. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) and Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.)--interviewed her Jan. 24 in advance of any possible deposition.

“They seemed to build up a good rapport,” a House strategist said.

That doesn’t exactly mean that Lewinsky or her attorney, Plato Cacheris, can relax.

While Bryant, 50, may seem a little less intense than some of the other House managers, he is a former federal prosecutor who is regarded as both methodical and precise, and is just as convinced as the others that Clinton deserves to be removed from office.

Bryant, a native Tennessean who spent two years as U.S. attorney in Memphis, was elected to Congress as part of the Republican “revolution” of 1994 that gave the GOP control of Congress. He was a staunch supporter of the GOP “contract with America.”

Before his election, his stint as a prosecutor had gained him valuable visibility. Bryant won convictions in the state’s biggest mass murder case on record and in the nation’s first civil rights case involving harassment from a sitting judge.

But his career took a bad turn when his prosecution of then-Rep. Harold E. Ford (D-Tenn.) on mail and tax-fraud charges resulted in a hung jury. When the Justice Department backed Ford on a request for a new jury, which acquitted him, Bryant resigned in protest. (Ford was succeeded in office by his son in 1996).

Bryant has told reporters that the way the department handled the Ford case gave him a glimpse of how the Clinton administration operates--and convinced him that he could successfully stand up to the Democratic president.

When the House approved the impeachment articles against the president, Bryant in mid-December, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, was chosen to be one of the 13 managers who would present the case on the Senate floor.

Since then, Bryant has been immersed in the impeachment trial. The preliminary interview with Lewinsky on Jan. 24 came at a time when his district had been battered by tornadoes. Bryant showed up for the interrogation, passing up the chance to score points at home. He did, however, return to the district late last week.

Bryant hasn’t been talking about the Lewinsky deposition, but there’s little doubt he has few illusions about what prosecutors can hope to get through such sessions.

“I don’t think there are any surprises here--certainly no smoking gun,” he said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” program last autumn. “Those Americans who expect this to end up like a Perry Mason [novel] where you have someone confessing . . . are going to be disappointed.”

House managers also have been made painfully aware of the reluctance of senators of both parties to have the depositions explore potentially “salacious” issues, such as who touched whom where.

As a result, it is expected that the video of the Lewinsky deposition will show a Bryant who, as always, is thorough but gentlemanly.

Times staff writers Marc Lacey, Geraldine Baum and Richard A. Serrano contributed to this story.