Clinton Cornered
Clinton Cornered On Friday, March 13, Paula Jones's attorneys filed several hundred pages of sworn testimony and corroborating evidence with Judge Susan Webber Wright's U.S. District Court in...
...Gennifer Flowers, for her part, swears that, with Clinton's collusion, she secured a public post in Arkansas under false pretenses...
...But somehow, nevertheless, irresistible to the ladies...
...He says he's "not sure" whether he has ever mentioned subpoenas and testimony to this young lady...
...Trooper L. D. Brown, again under oath, has an equivalent tale to tell about a scene outside a Florida discotheque...
...He sent Perry to chat her up...
...He discussed Lewinsky's possible testimony with her only before he knew for sure she would be called...
...Both those friends confirm her story under oath...
...She was mad at me because I'd never been her lover...
...He could...
...Dolly Kyle Browning says Clinton urged her to move to Washington in 1994: "You can live on the Hill...
...Here's the president trying to thread this needle: "Seems to me the last time she was there [at the White House] to see Betty before Christmas we were joking about how you-all [Paula's attorneys], with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I'd ever talked to . . . and so I said you [Lewinsky] would qualify, or something like that...
...Pasty...
...John B. Thompson is lying...
...They are all lying...
...But the cover-up is not always so gentle...
...And two other members of Clinton's Arkansas gubernatorial security detail confirm the basic technique...
...Kathleen Willey, of course, was also "very upset" before the now-infamous West Wing encounter during which the president mashed her hand onto his privates...
...According to Bill Clinton...
...First of all, there's the fact of Bill Clinton's animal grip on the female sexual imagination...
...Paula Jones confided in two close friends immediately after Clinton exposed himself to her in Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel on May 8, 1991...
...That's what Clinton's onetime friend and self-described mistress Dolly Kyle Browning, in another sworn deposition, says he told her during a 1987 conversation they had in Texas...
...And if he has mentioned such stuff to her, the mention was something merely offhand, speculative, jocular...
...Later on, Perry briefed the governor on his reconnaissance...
...At one point in the transcript of his January 17 deposition, Clinton is asked whether he has ever talked to Monica Lewinsky about her possible testimony in the Jones lawsuit...
...Clinton may appear serene on the outside...
...She has that come-hither look...
...According to Thompson, Samuel Jones told him more than once that it was his job to "make them go away," these bimbos—a job that included paying the women for silence...
...Browning and the president had a long conversation at their 1994 Hot Springs High School reunion...
...Roger Perry says—"and I'm under oath here, and I swear on my mother's life"—that Young was even more brutal with him: If you talk, Young promised, "you will be destroyed, your reputation will be destroyed, and I represent the president of the United States...
...And Danny Ferguson says that Young then approached him—and offered the troopers federal jobs...
...All the women are lying, under oath...
...Under oath, Gennifer Flowers says oral sex was a common element of their relationship...
...Women are everywhere," Browning testifies he told her...
...How could they not have talked about it...
...Next there is the matter of, well, fellatio...
...The man has already painted himself into an eensie-weensie corner...
...Did she tell you anything else about his anatomy, Bal-lentine was asked in her October 1997 deposition...
...Larry Patterson's deposition says that it was Clinton's common practice to ask his troopers, "Would you get me her name and her phone number...
...One other woman's daddy got a Clinton nomination to the Arkansas state highway commission...
...It's an infuriating thing to watch media commentators—and timid congressional Republicans—pretend that the facts are still in some dispute, and that those facts will become a problem only "if and when" they are finally proved...
...But before he does the feeling, he likes to have someone else do the feeling-out and facilitating...
...State trooper Danny Ferguson, co-defendant in the Jones lawsuit, acknowledges under oath that he delivered Paula to Clinton's private room after the governor told him she had "that come-hither look...
...Yeah, right, Mr...
...An attorney named John B. Thompson declares, under penalty of perjury, that his law-school buddy, M. Samuel Jones, worked the bimbo patrol for the Clinton campaign during 1992...
...It's an infuriating thing to be told by the White House and its agents that several dozen people are perjuring themselves and that only Bill Clinton is telling the truth...
...Dolly Kyle Browning says that her brother, working for the Clinton campaign in January 1992, called her on the phone and said, "If you cooperate with the media we will destroy you...
...She was getting a divorce...
...It's a whopper...
...He fudges...
...Can we do this for her...
...Clinton cannot say no, because he knows that any such denial will be thoroughly incredible...
...The "witness list" reference, in short, is testimony, by the president, that he has recently been smack in the middle of what he knows will look to any objective observer like an obstruction of justice...
...That's what all the subsequent gobbledy-gook over chronology is about...
...Maintaining a lie of such scale and complexity is a task beyond normal human capacity...
...They were encouraged to be as negative as possible," Clinton testifies, "they were told they didn't have to tell the truth, they were told all they had to do was to get two or more people to agree," and "there was a lot of money in it for them if they did it...
...Sooner or later, we wager, one way or another, he will be cornered for good, and his dishonesty will stain him, indelibly, for all the world to see...
...That's what took me so long...
...ABC videotape of this event shows Clinton doing just that...
...I can't even walk down the street without someone literally trying to pick me up...
...Brown says another Clinton crony, Skip Rutherford, once threatened him this way: "You don't want your credit card receipts all over the front page, do you...
...Larry Patterson says Buddy Young, on four separate occasions, told him to "keep your mouth shut" if you "know what's best for you and your career and your family...
...The troopers would comply...
...Lydia Cathey, Jones's sister, is lying...
...Yeah, sure, Mr...
...I can help you find a job...
...Any story...
...Though his lawyer initially announced that the president had no memory whatsoever of this meeting, Clinton now remembers Willey "very vividly"—because "she was so agitated...
...Kathleen Willey says that just before the 1992 presidential debate in Richmond, Clinton noticed her in a welcoming crowd of Democratic activists and asked then-Virginia lieutenant governor Don Beyer for her name and phone number...
...District Court in Arkansas...
...That was "the procedure I used," Patterson reports, on at least "fifteen, twenty occasions...
...Job offers figure prominently in the president's past adventures...
...State trooper Larry Patterson swears that he dropped Clinton off at this woman's Little Rock house one evening, took measures to hide the governor's license plate, and then waited outside...
...Remember: At this point, January 17, only a handful of people know that the president's friends have just spent several weeks making unusual efforts to spirit Lewinsky out of town...
...The president acknowledges talking to his troopers' former supervisor, Buddy Young (himself now a regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration), about their public statements...
...Kathleen Willey sought and received more than one job assignment from the White House after the president "hugged" her...
...Her name was Holly Cain...
...She's wanting a state job...
...Those words constitute an admission that he knew Lewinsky would be called for testimony before he raised the possibility with her directly—and, it would soon turn out, before people like Vernon Jordan began their most intensive job-placement activities on her behalf...
...I don't, I don't think we ever had more of a conversation than that about it, because when I saw how long the witness list was, or I heard about it, before I saw, but actually by the time I saw it her name was on it, but I think that was after all this had happened...
...If he discussed it with her at all...
...So Clinton pulls a Clinton...
...The men are lying, too...
...Clinton's eyes fell on an attractive young woman...
...Monica Lewinsky, most infamously, told Linda Tripp that oral sex was all she did with the president...
...It comes when Clinton begins to talk about "how long the witness list was...
...A long time...
...Peculiar...
...Jane Doe #2 was appointed to the Arkansas Court of Appeals after Clinton's alleged affair with her...
...Monica Lewinsky got a White House job and later offers from the United Nations and Revlon...
...He knows there are records of White House meetings he's had with Lewinsky—meetings that post-date her subpoena from the Jones attorneys...
...And it is an infuriating thing that ordinary Americans continue to tell pollsters they approve of the pretender-in-chief...
...And so, therefore, is he...
...Even Danny Ferguson admits to having warned Paula Jones about what would happen to her if she pursued her complaint against Clinton in public: "You better think about your family, because I've been through it, and they was starting to dig up dirt...
...I might have said something like that, so I don't want to say for sure I didn't, because I might have said something like that...
...Pamela Blackard, another Jones friend who confirms Paula's account of the Excelsior Hotel harassment, is lying...
...Clinton's response: "All right...
...Linda Tripp and Kathleen Willey and Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones and Dolly Kyle Browning and Debbie Ballentine are lying...
...President...
...L.D...
...It was a 1989 or 1990 public appearance in Augusta, Arkansas...
...Browning has falsely claimed to have been his mistress, Clinton insists, to punish him for being an unattainable object of uncontrollable lust...
...This effort often involves an offer of employment or something else of value...
...In his sworn deposition, the president restates this point more forcefully...
...So they're horny and hysterical, and he feels their pain...
...We wouldn't be so sure...
...Patterson says he also personally witnessed two similar episodes involving yet another woman, once in a Little Rock elementary-school playground and once in the traffic circle behind the governor's mansion...
...But we can take some comfort in human nature...
...Moreover, Clinton claims to believe that Rempel "threatened" the troopers about what would happen if they didn't cooperate with this Los Angeles Times conspiracy...
...In February 1995, for instance, she sent Clinton a handwritten request for appointment to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature...
...In any case, Browning "had been through some very tough times in the last several years," and "she was very upset...
...President...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Did you catch his mistake...
...As soon as the "witness list" business comes out of his mouth, Clinton realizes he's goofed and immediately tries to backtrack...
...I had to comfort her...
...Trooper Roger Perry's deposition contains an account of one particularly telling incident...
...He's no dope...
...Under oath, Larry Patterson says Clinton and Jane Doe #2 were once together in a car, but that you could see "only one head in the car, and that was Bill Clinton's, driving...
...And any journalist who has reported what these witnesses have said is lying...
...She said he was really white and really overweight...
...You can almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he tries to figure out the right answer...
...It is bound to fall apart...
...Dolly Kyle Browning swears that she got some free, unsolicited help from the president's lawyers at Washington's Skadden, Arps: a formal motion, prepared for her signature, asking Judge Wright to quash Browning's Paula Jones subpoena...
...He's "not sure...
...Conventional wisdom in Washington now has it that Clinton will ultimately get away with all this nonsense...
...And "you're going to like this," Governor...
...All right, indeed...
...Clinton made extensive notes about this talk and kept them "in a briefcase that was always either under my desk in the White House or in my little private office...
...Could Clinton really believe this, the hoariest of all lecher's self-justifications: that they want it...
...One woman named in court documents—not the "distraught" press aide, someone else—worked directly for Clinton while they were reportedly having a dalliance...
...At the same time, though, Clinton cannot offer an uncomplicated acknowledgment that he has talked to Lewinsky about her potential testimony, because that might make it appear that he has tampered with a witness...
...Confronted with potential disclosures like these, Bill Clinton seems to have an automatic instinct...
...There is a truly surreal moment in the president's deposition when he suggests, at great length, that Bill Rempel of the Los Angeles Times offered the troopers several hundred thousand dollars for their story...
...When all else fails, of course, Clinton simply asserts that his accusers are lying...
...He sends emissaries to hush the witnesses up...
...Clinton's notes say Browning was frustrated because he never had sex with her...
...All the troopers are lying...
...Judy Stokes, who testifies that former Miss America Elizabeth Ward once tearfully confided to her that she'd had sex with Clinton, is lying...
...On that letter, routed to his aides, there is a notation from the president that reads: "Is this what Shelia Lawrence did...
...When Clinton finally emerged, smeared with makeup at 4:30 in the morning, he told Patterson that his host "was really distraught . . . and I just had to stay...
...Reread Clinton's answer...
...One of them, Debra Lynn Ballentine, reports that Paula told her there was something peculiar about Clinton's genitals...
...An Arkansas-era press aide to Clinton, one of the Jones lawsuit's "Jane Does," was agitated once, too...
...Inside, he must be going near berserk...
...There's a lot to be learned from these documents...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 28
