High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (5 page)

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Authors: Ann Coulter

BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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Even long somnolent Attorney General Janet Reno woke up and formally requested that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s jurisdiction be expanded to investigate whether the president perjured himself, suborned the perjury of others, and obstructed justice. Officials at the Department of Justice “were floored” by the allegations and evidence, according to a source quoted in the
Washington Post
.
6
For only the second time in the history of the country, the sitting United States president was under criminal investigation. Oh, yes, and Monica lived at the Watergate.
The morning the story broke, January 21, 1998, there was total shock. The independent counsel had tapes with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky unwittingly describing her repeated performance of (as Paula Jones had put it) a “certain type of sex” on the president in the Oval Office. And she was also captured on tape describing the red carpet treatment she had gotten from the president and the president’s men to induce her to lie about it under oath—as the president had done already.
But soon a predictable pattern began to take shape. While the country was still in shock, Clinton issued a series of fuzzy, disingenuous denials. He threw in his trademark escape hatches, holding in reserve the possibility of his later saying,
you can’t prove I lied
. Clinton has always been so disingenuous.
Then quickly, before the media could finish parsing his nondenial denials, the motives and tactics of the president’s opponents became the issue. And then it was yesterday’s news—
I’ve already answered that
. Soon half the American people were telling pollsters that they were totally copacetic with the idea of the White House as Animal House.
From nine hundred FBI files in the White House to a pattern of IRS audits of Clinton’s enemies to selling the Lincoln bedroom, Clinton had already done things Nixon only dreamed about. Now Clinton had leapt over a boundary of propriety Nixon
hadn’t even experienced as a constraint
. Behavior that wouldn’t have been tolerated in a presidential aide twenty-five years ago was now acceptable behavior for a president. It is difficult to imagine how Clinton could disgrace the presidency any further.
Clinton flacks have frequently made the preposterous claim that this whole degrading mess was the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing the Paula Jones suit to proceed. Implicit in the claim is that American presidents have always engaged in salacious, reprehensible conduct in the White House and White House interns have always talked about earning their “presidential kneepads.” It is as if somehow the Supreme Court had been holding back all this sewage from flooding onto the presidency, and by mere historical accident it all caught up with Clinton. In fact, of course, private civil lawsuits against presidents have always been allowed. They certainly have never been disallowed. Other presidents weren’t vulnerable because other presidents weren’t such pigs.
Clinton’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) demands that companies fire employees who are overheard calling women “broads.”
7
And now he was supposed to have gotten a “certain type of sex” from a twenty-one-year-old unpaid White House intern right there on the presidential seal. In the Clinton view, the president is not to be an exemplar but an exception: the rules that apply to all other Americans just don’t apply to President Clinton.
Two weeks after the scandal broke, Wolf Blitzer of CNN said to President Clinton at a press conference, “Mr. President, Monica Lewinsky’s life has been changed forever—her family’s life has been changed forever. I wonder how you feel about that and what, if anything, you’d like to say to Monica Lewinsky at this minute?” The president smiled as he mulled the question over and then said, “That’s good.” He chuckled with the rest of the crowd and continued, “That’s good, but at this minute, I’m going to stick with my position in not commenting.”
8
His whole presidency has been a complete mockery of the American people. Even now, it was all just a game.
THE UNDERLYING CASE:
JONES
V.
CLINTON
 
On May 6, 1994,
President William Jefferson Clinton was sued for sexual harassment by one Paula Corbin Jones for an incident that occurred when Clinton was the governor of Arkansas.
Reporters had been crawling all over Little Rock the first year of Clinton’s presidency looking for arcana on the new president. (They were all over Atlanta after Jimmy Carter became president, too, but the Georgia State troopers didn’t have such colorful stories to tell.) In December 1993 the former governor’s sexual exploits were exposed in an article in
The American Spectator
. Jones was outed as an attempted Clinton conquest. But according to an Arkansas state trooper quoted in the article, it wasn’t just an attempt—Clinton had scored with Paula. She denied the allegation and requested a public apology from President Clinton. When Clinton denied her allegations with the same sincerity he had denied Gennifer Flowers’s allegations, she sued.
Jones alleged that on May 8, 1991, when she was working at a conference for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission being held at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, a state trooper, Danny Ferguson, approached her, handed her a slip of paper with a hotel room number on it, and said “the governor would like to meet with you.”
He reassured Jones and her coworker and friend, Pamela Blackard, by saying, “It’s okay, we do this all the time for the governor.”
9
Ferguson then escorted her to a hotel room where the governor was alone. After some small talk in which Clinton informed Jones that her boss was Clinton’s “good friend,” Clinton began praising Jones’s “curves,” kissed her, slid his hand up her cullottes, and “lowered his trousers and underwear exposing his erect penis and asked Jones to ‘kiss it.’”
10
Jones leapt up to leave the room. Before she could make her exit, Clinton reminded her of his friendship with her boss.
Jones brought suit under a statute that prohibits gender discrimination by government officials
11
—which the courts have interpreted to include sexual harassment.
Evidence that Clinton had engaged in similar conduct with other women would be valuable for Jones’s case. Evidence of “other acts” is crucial in discrimination cases because, as the Supreme Court said, “[t]here will seldom be ‘eyewitness’ testimony as to the employer’s mental processes.”
12
As a result, presenting “other women” evidence is now
de rigueur
in sexual harassment cases.
Jones’s attorneys would have a lengthy period of time to ferret out all evidence they intended to use at trial. The process is called “discovery,” but ought to be called “obscurity,” since lawyers spend most of discovery trying to block the other side from acquiring relevant evidence. (Modern lawsuits have very little in common with Perry Mason’s TV trials, and not only because witnesses rarely blurt out confessions on the stand, but also because no surprise evidence at all can be sprung on the adversary.)
But Clinton, facing reelection, could not allow “other acts” to come to light. So his lawyers embarked on a three-year campaign of delay with a “trumped-up” presidential immunity claim.
13
But once discovery finally began in the
Jones
case, Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled—despite Clinton’s objections and the considered opinions of most TV lawyers—that Jones’s lawyers were entitled to take the depositions of witnesses to Clinton’s behavior with other women. Indeed, to exclude evidence of Clinton either making sexual advances toward subordinates or using government resources to pursue sexual conquests would almost certainly be reversible error.
14
The president’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, had conceded far more than that in oral argument before the Supreme Court. Bennett told the court that any other women Clinton “has come into contact with” could probably be deposed by Jones’s attorneys:
 
MR. BENNETT:
[Jones’s attorney], as he claims, [is] going to be deposing all of the troopers; and
any time the president of the United States has come into contact with a member of the opposite sex, he intends to inquire of that; this is a conspiracy complaint; they talk about pattern of conduct….
JUSTICE SOUTER:
Mr. Bennett, do you think all those events are relevant to this case?
MR. BENNETT:
[S]ome trial courts might say they are
[emphasis added]
.
15
 
Consequently, Jones’s lawyers followed up on leads to any woman who might be able to provide evidence in the Paula Jones case of such “prior acts” by defendant Clinton. This kept them busy. In addition to information about other women they elicited from the Arkansas State Troopers, the Jones team received some anonymous phone calls tipping them off to yet other women who may have been approached by Clinton since he lost the taxpayer-funded escort service he had had in the troopers. It was an anonymous phone call in January 1997, for example, that led them to a former White House volunteer, Kathleen Willey. The caller told Jones’s attorney, “I had a similar thing happen to me….”
Then, around October 1997, Jones’s new attorneys and their financial backer, the Rutherford Institute, received phone calls alerting them to a former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky,
16
who had been blabbing to former White House employee Linda Tripp—who had the conversations on tape. As luck would have it, Lewinsky’s claimed sexual relations with the president consisted exclusively of the “type of sex” Jones said Clinton urged on her.
Clinton’s evidently successful redeployment of the “kiss it” line with Lewinsky on the government’s time would help Jones’s lawyers establish Clinton’s
modus operandi
. But that was not Lewinsky’s only use to Jones. The president had also succeeded with Lewinsky in another matter: he had silenced her. This would go a long way toward explaining to a jury why several women who had already been deposed in the
Jones
case were admitting to solitary meetings with Governor Clinton in the wee hours of the morning, but only for… policy discussions. In December, Jones’s lawyers issued subpoenas to both Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp.
Jones’s attorneys hadn’t deposed either Lewinsky or Tripp on the eve of Clinton’s deposition. That night, however, one of Jones’s lawyers informally interviewed Tripp to fill in details of the anonymous phone calls.
Tripp had agreed to an informal meeting with Jones’s attorneys in hopes of avoiding a formal deposition. She had only recently discovered that her home state of Maryland was one of the few states that prohibit people from taping their own phone conversations without telling the other person on the line; she had not told Lewinsky. A formal deposition in the
Jones
case would thus have required her to state under oath that she had broken the law, unless she was prepared to lie about this or plead the Fifth. But she was one of the rare witnesses in this case who seemed to take things like sworn statements seriously. Since Jones’s suit was a civil rather than criminal case, her lawyers did not have legal authority, as a criminal prosecutor would, to grant Tripp immunity in exchange for her testimony about the tapes.
THE TAPES
 
Linda Tripp
had quite a few tapes—about twenty in all.
Tripp had developed a relationship with Lewinsky, a fellow Clinton White House expatriate, when they both ended up with jobs in the Pentagon press office. This was not a coincidence: The Pentagon press office had become a dumping ground for troublesome women in the Clinton White House, courtesy of a Clinton appointee, Assistant Defense Secretary Kenneth H. Bacon. Bacon would perform many favors for the man who appointed him.
Linda Tripp was a problem for the White House on account of her position as executive assistant in the White House Counsel’s Office, the locus of numerous Clinton scandals. As we will see, from the Travel Office putsch to the botched investigation of Vince Foster’s office, which led to the forced resignation of Tripp’s boss, Bernard Nussbaum, the Counsel’s Office generated crisis after crisis. Tripp had sat outside the offices of Bernard Nussbaum and Vince Foster.
Tripp’s bird’s-eye view of the office, combined with her penchant for wry observations—such as her e-mail missive referring to Nussbaum and two others as “the three stooges”—had put Tripp in the hot seat on more than one occasion. It was Tripp to whom Kathleen Willey had run immediately after emerging from a meeting with President Clinton in November 1993, claiming she had been groped by the commander in chief.
While Tripp had become a problem by earning spots before congressional investigative committees, Lewinsky had become trouble by earning her “presidential kneepads,” as Lewinsky herself put it. The two vexatious women were sent to the Pentagon press office, where they met and became friends. What happened after that seems almost inevitable in retrospect.
In numerous conversations, Lewinsky recounted to Tripp intimate and lascivious details of her two-year term as “Special Assistant to the President for B—J—,” as Lewinsky had proposed for her title. Lewinsky’s salacious confidences regarding her lengthy affair with the president would be red meat for Jones’s lawyers.

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