High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton

  Though Willey never landed an ambassadorship, in 1995 the former airline stewardess without a college degree was sent by the president on two international junkets with the State Department. Willey was the only participant in the two conferences “with no apparent expertise in the issues under discussion”—biodiversity and social development.20 Then, on September 20, 1996, President Clinton appointed her as a member of the United Service Organization’s Board of Governors.

  Soon such international junkets became the enterprising soccer mom’s taxpayer-funded Club Med. One of her letters to the commander in chief about one such boondoggle sounds like a letter from widows’ summer camp:I learned so much and made many new friends…. I also spent one day in a rain forest, followed by a day diving the coral reef on the island of Sulawese, experiences which I will never ever forget.… While I am very much in need of employment, I think that the Clinton-Gore campaign needs me too.

  I am free to travel and work on your behalf for the next year.… Fondly, Kathleen.21

  Willey is either a woman of incredible cheek, or she had something on the president. In any event, the letters sure weren’t the exculpatory evidence the White House thought they would be.

  A few days after releasing Willey’s oddly presumptuous letters to the president, the White House turned up its opposing witness. Any woman who accuses Clinton of sexual impropriety can expect some distant relative or erstwhile friend to start telling the most hideous stories about her. Just as not all accusers are necessarily to be believed, not every accuser of an accuser is to be believed. The negative character witnesses produced by the Clinton team often have credibility problems of their own. Former Willey friend Julie Steele was no exception.

  Steele attacked Willey’s credibility by claiming that Willey had asked Steele to lie for her on several occasions; Steele claimed she had lied for her friend. Supposedly, Willey first asked Steele to lie to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff by exaggerating Willey’s distress about the presidential grope.22 Then Willey asked Steele to tell a boyfriend of Willey’s that Willey was pregnant with his twins, as some complicated form of retaliation no one can understand. By her own account, Steele unhesitatingly told both lies.

  Assuming the imaginary pregnancy story was true, it certainly seems peculiar and disreputable. (You wouldn’t think Clinton’s defenders would have the cheek to be commenting on anyone else’s disrepute.) But even if true, neither the bizarre pregnancy story nor even the claim that she asked Steele to embroider her distress are particularly relevant to the truth of Willey’s claim that Clinton groped her. Steele’s material information to Jones’s lawsuit was that Willey told her about the grope soon after it occurred.

  That much, Steele stands by. For obvious reasons, such contemporaneous accounts are important evidence in harassment cases. But even if Willey never said anything to Steele about the incident, there is another even more contemporaneous witness: Linda Tripp. Tripp saw Willey emerge from Clinton’s office in a state of disarray immediately after Willey’s November 29, 1993, encounter with the president and moments later stepped outside with Willey for a cigarette, where she got the full account.

  Then it was gleefully reported that Willey had floated her story as a book proposal, requesting $300,000 as an advance. The proposal, however, was declined. Being a woman who has been groped by Clinton was evidently not a big story. Most absurdly, Steele herself thought that being the friend of a woman who had been groped by Clinton might be: She tried to sell her story to Star magazine, some months before concluding that Willey was not so credible, after all.

  Like Willey’s effusive personal letters to the president, the fact that Willey may have tried to peddle her story might have worked to impugn her credibility in some contexts, but not in this one. Willey had not come forward voluntarily. Left to her own conscience, Willey was perfectly happy to allow the White House to smear Paula Jones as a lying, white-trash slut, even though Willey had to consider it likely, on the basis of her own experience, that Jones was telling the truth.

  The court in the Jones case had compelled Willey’s testimony because her own encounter with Clinton was relevant evidence in Paula Jones’s legitimate constitutional claim against the president. Still, Willey had done everything in her power to avoid giving Jones’s lawyers her deposition. Her stonewalling answers in the deposition could not make her reluctance to come forward more clear. Moreover, as for the credibility of Willey and Clinton lawyer Bob Bennett on 60 Minutes, only one of them was getting paid to say what he said. Bennett isn’t working pro bono.

  The White House made known the crazy phone calls Willey made to her husband’s creditors late at night in the days after his death. She had been married to a thief.

  But by the time Willey stepped forward, denouncing the various Jane Does as lying, lunatic gold-diggers was beginning to lose its sting. The Clinton campaign had once launched the same attacks on Gennifer Flowers—who, as Clinton had now admitted, had been telling the truth all along.

  GOOD TRIPP

  Contrary to attacks on Tripp’s motives (for instance, the pro-Clinton “fact sheet” that said Tripp was “Thought by Neighbors to Be a Republican”), Tripp was not a Bush Republican spying on the Clinton White House. Contrary to White House-propelled leaks of Linda Tripp’s background file, she was not a thief. Contrary to the implicit point of both attacks, it would be irrelevant to the question of whether Clinton obstructed justice if she were a conservative Republican or a reformed teenaged thief.

  Tripp was a career civil servant, which is why she stayed on to work in the Clinton administration until August 1994, when she was assigned to the Pentagon Press Office. As her former lawyer, Jim Moody, said, “She is not enemy of this [Clinton’s] administration. She is a proponent of the truth.”23

  The next Clinton administration attack on Proponent-of-the-Truth Linda Tripp took the preposterous form of accusing her of a “contradiction of the truth,” as Secretary of Defense William Cohen put it.24 Suddenly the Clinton administration was acutely interested in the truth.

  A career employee at the Pentagon, Clifford Bernath, leaked information from Tripp’s personnel file to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, telling Mayer that Tripp had denied ever having been arrested for a crime on her security clearance form.25 The release of this datum seemed to establish that Tripp had lied on her security clearance form: Mayer had already located a thirty-year-old arrest for “grand larceny,” when Tripp was seventeen years old.

  Leaking this information to a reporter was a bald violation of the Privacy Act. The Clinton administration may have become interested in the truth, but it remained cool toward the law.

  For a while, countless newspaper headlines blared that Tripp had “lied” in her security questionnaire about a grand larceny charge. Tripp stood accused in the media of having committed two felonies—the original “grand larceny” charge as well as the felony offense of making false statements to the government in her 1987 security form. Secretary Cohen assured anxious truth-lovers that Tripp’s malefaction would “be the subject of some inquiry.” Lying in the Clinton administration, Cohen said, was “a very serious matter.”26

  The Clintonian code of ethics was getting confusing. If it was okay to lie under oath about adultery, why wasn’t it okay to lie in a security clearance form about an alleged theft that occurred thirty years ago? Youthful delinquency was not the sort of thing that was typically held against upstanding citizens thirty years later. In some circles, adultery, to say nothing of perjury in a civil rights case, still was.

  In any event, the accusation turned out to be false in material details: the larceny charge had been thrown out, and the judge had told Tripp to forget about it. Legally, it had never happened. Within a week the Pentagon had cleared Tripp of any wrongdoing.

  According to the uncontradicted explanation given by Tripp’s lawyer, the entire incident resulted from a “prank” played on Tripp by her friends—which should also be in quotes. While generally misbehaving at a hote
l with a group of her teenage peers, someone in Tripp’s crowd had lifted some jewelry and money and planted it in Tripp’s purse, a fact duly noted by the judge, who threw out the larceny charge and reduced Tripp’s charge to “loitering.” The friends admitted to the felony larceny charge. The judge assured Tripp it would not go on her permanent record, and told her to forget about it,27 which manifestly, she had.

  In the end, there was no “grand larceny” charge and there was, consequently, no lie on her security form, as the Pentagon concluded. There was, however, a pretty clear violation of the Privacy Act by the Clinton administration’s releasing information from Tripp’s personnel file.

  How had such outlandish charges been unleashed? There were a number of suspicious details.

  Linda Tripp was not just any government employee. She was the woman who had revealed the biggest political scandal at least since Watergate and perhaps—for people who know what “Watergate” actually was—in the history of the Republic. The tapes she kept demonstrated not only that the president had lied to the public, but also that he had lied under oath in a lawsuit accusing him of violating a citizen’s constitutional rights. Billy Dale may have been inconvenient, but Tripp was radioactive. It was hard to explain this as anything but a targeted political hit.

  Moreover, the trumped-up larceny story came out at a propitious moment for President Clinton, coinciding with two severe PR setbacks for the defendant in Jones v. Clinton. As luck would have it, the Tripp smear broke the same weekend Kathleen Willey told her story of her encounter with the president on 60 Minutes. Two days earlier, on Friday, Paula Jones’s lawyers had released the depositions of Clinton’s various distaff accusers, including Willey, Dolly Kyle Browning, and other “Jane Does,” as they were called in their depositions. (Further confusing the Clintonian code of ethics, Clinton lawyer Bennett denounced the “Jane Doe” depositions as “a pack of lies”28—even though the sworn statements to which he referred were only about sex.)

  More insidious, though, discovering who in the Clinton administration had broken the law by releasing information from Tripp’s file soon became a shell game. No one has been fired. No one has been held accountable.

  Initially, Clifford Bernath, the Pentagon flunky who had released the information to Mayer, insisted to the press that he alone was responsible for the leak. But, in a deposition on April 30, 1998, he admitted under oath, “I didn’t do it on my own.” Rather, he said his boss, Ken Bacon, had specifically directed him to release the information from Tripp’s 1987 security clearance form. In his contemporaneous notes, Bernath wrote that Bacon had “made clear it’s priority.”29

  Bacon, too, at first told the press that Bernath’s testimony was “not accurate.” But then, when called upon to give statements under oath, he recanted the “not accurate” part. In his own deposition on May 15, Bacon admitted that he had directed Bernath to provide the sensitive information to The New Yorker’s Mayer.

  Bacon had been called upon by the Clinton administration to help out with nettlesome Clinton women before. He was the Clinton appointee who allowed for the Pentagon press office to be used as a dumping ground for women in the White House—which had brought Tripp and Lewinsky together.

  EARNING HER PRESIDENTIAL KNEEPADS

  As a matter of course, when the Lewinsky story broke, it was quickly made known that she used to wear low-cut blouses. The day after his deposition, Clinton was in the White House coaching his personal secretary, Betty Currie, to recall that he had resisted Lewinsky’s sexual advances toward him.30 Man of God Billy Graham quickly excused the lovable rogue: “The ladies just go wild over him.” Graham and Elizabeth Ward Gracen could form a tag-team defending the president’s promiscuity.

  If Lewinsky hates Linda Tripp for allegedly betraying her, wait until she sees what “the Big He” has in store for her if she ever starts talking. Then she will really start earning her presidential kneepads.

  Chapter Eight

  Persecuting the Prosecutor

  Denouncing Clinton’s women as gold-digging whores—one once convicted of “loitering”—was not the only renewed attack. On the Flowers tapes Clinton says, “It would be extremely valuable, just to have, like I told you before… an on-file affidavit explaining, you know, you were approached by a Republican and asked to do that [allege a sexual relationship].”

  The Republican attack machine excuse was reinvigorated to the point of comedy on NBC’s Today show when the first lady spoke of the “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband.”1

  STARR’S REINCARNATION AS A HARDLINER

  Descriptions of Starr—by those who know him, not those who fear him—invariably make him sound like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Until he was secretly inducted into the vast right-wing conspiracy (presumably the same day as Monica Lewinsky, the Washington Post, and the New York Times), conservatives never fully trusted him. He had that Supreme Court aspirant’s gleam in his eye. He tried to walk away from this investigation in 1997, it was assumed, to preserve his viability as a High Court nominee. One of Starr’s prosecutors resigned in disgust when Starr issued a report—unsigned—concluding that Vince Foster’s death was a suicide, with very little new investigation.

  Lawyers from the Bush Justice Department laugh at Starr’s media reincarnation as a hard-liner. “His brief in Cruzan, for example,” one lawyer remarked, speaking of the Supreme Court’s right-to die case, “refused to denounce substantive due process root and branch. It was the work of a Powell-ite, or of someone who had seen what happened to the great man [Robert Bork].” As a federal judge, he once wrote an opinion in favor of the Washington Post in a libel action (Tavoulareas v. Piro) that some lawyers viewed as an Establishment suck-up. So much for the vast right-wing conspiracy’s small tent.

  Even his conservative critics, though, say his ethics are unimpeachable. Many of Starr’s colleagues have remarked upon what a shock it must have been for him to descend into Clinton’s Potterville and discover that not every man’s word is his bond.

  Clinton flacks Paul Begala and James Carville’s efforts notwithstanding, the legal community seemed not to have even noticed that the Clinton attack squad had trained its sights on poor honest Ken. The president could have resigned, and federal prosecutors would still have been too busy talking about William Ginsburg’s aberrant behavior to notice. “Starr has got to be going nuts, dealing with such an idiot. He’s never dealt with someone like this.” The reason for lawyers’ obsession with Ginsburg was this: Starr didn’t need Monica any more; about twenty-four hours into the investigation, Monica needed Starr. A credible threat of prison awaited Lewinsky whether she chose Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3.

  It is a mark of Starr’s old-school rectitude that his reaction to Ginsburg’s bizarre tactics was austerely described in the Washington Post simply as “los[ing] patience with the young woman and her lawyers.”2 It is a mark of Starr’s dangerousness to the administration that the White House started screaming about leaks from Starr’s office. (If the “leaks” distraction ever fades, perhaps James Carville will reinstitute his December 1996 threat that Starr was “one more mistake away from not having any kneecaps.”)

  CLAIMS OF “LEAKS”

  The “leaks” story, like the vast right-wing conspiracy story before it, was complete lunacy. For openers, the leaks kept throwing a monkey wrench into Starr’s investigation. Just as Starr was trying to wire Monica, presumably to send her on another limo ride with “the other one,” as she refers to Vernon Jordan on the tapes, the story broke. At that point, Starr’s prosecutors walked away from Lewinsky, saying, “We’ve blown the opportunity to wire her. She’s radioactive because of the Drudge Report.” (This is according to Ginsburg’s self-leaked information in Time magazine.3)

  The nuclear bomb in terms of leaks was the one about Betty Currie, loyal Democrat and personal secretary to President Clinton. According to the New York Times, Currie told Starr she was called into the office by Clinton
the day after his deposition in the Jones case, whereupon Clinton coached her to say she had never seen him alone with Lewinsky. Worse, Clinton instructed Currie to retrieve the gifts he had given Lewinsky—consistent with Lewinsky’s taped remarks that Clinton had told her if she didn’t have the gifts, she wouldn’t have to turn them over to Jones’s lawyers. Currie retrieved the gifts all right. Then she apparently took them straight to Starr.

  The moment the New York Times (newly inducted vast right-wing conspirator) printed this front-page story on Currie’s testimony, she lost all her value to Starr as a source. (She must have also lost the warm sense of camaraderie around the office. Currie still sits outside the president’s office.) Perhaps most devastating, Starr lost the invaluable element of surprise in producing the gifts during Lewinsky’s, and perhaps Clinton’s, grand jury testimony.

  Despite claims in the media that Starr’s office was leaking this information, there was precisely zero evidence to support the allegations. Stuart Taylor of the National Journal (formerly a legal reporter for that right-wing conspirator, the New York Times) stated on national television that “any number of [the leaks], I’ve heard from the lips of witnesses and lawyers who aren’t connected to Judge Starr’s office, more or less verbatim, the way they were published in other publications.”

  Michael Isikoff of Newsweek (formerly of that right-wing conspirator, the Washington Post) is probably responsible for reporting more of the Lewinsky story than any other single reporter. Isikoff said of the leaks issue on NBC, “We don’t discuss where [leaks] come from. I will say in this particular case of the—of the new White House aide, we do source it to sources close to the president’s defense. So that may help you on that one small matter.”