For the third time in as many weeks, the House on Friday released voluminous detail about the tangled relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, highlighted by taped talks between Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, salacious gossip from Secret Service agents and former interns, and other testimony that added context but little revelation about the scandal.
The documents, some 4,600 pages in three bound volumes, represent the last of the material from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that the House Judiciary Committee will release before it votes next week on whether to call for a formal impeachment inquiry against the president.
In sworn grand jury testimony, in raw and unsubstantiated FBI interviews, and in transcripts of the now-famous recorded conversations between Lewinsky and Tripp, a jumbled plot line rather than a tight narrative emerges about Lewinsky’s relationship with the president and efforts to conceal it.
The documents released Friday bolstered the manipulative image of Tripp, the former White House and Pentagon co-worker of Lewinsky who secretly recorded her conversations with the trusting younger woman and informed prosecutors of Lewinsky’s affair with the president.
This second mountain of material, supplements to Starr’s formal report to Congress, also included the transcripts of grand jury testimony from key players in the investigation who have otherwise remained largely silent about their roles, including the president’s personal secretary Betty Currie, his confidant Vernon Jordan and a host of other White House aides.
Taken together, their stories show that many people in the White House, from the Secret Service to top White House staff, seemed to know there was something unusual about the president’s relationship with Lewinsky.
Memos were written with thinly veiled suggestions, agents openly referred to Lewinsky as Clinton’s mistress, and other interns said that she left the White House under a “cloud” and that they heard she was “sleeping with Clinton.” Lewinsky said she knew she was referred to as a “stalker” and a “clutch.” She also told at least 11 other people besides Tripp intimate details of her relationship with the president.
But for all of their heft, the documents leave unanswered the critical questions of whether the president and possibly others lied under oath, obstructed justice or tampered with witnesses. In Starr’s impeachment referral report to Congress, he contended that there were 11 possible counts for which lawmakers could remove Clinton from office.
Clinton was out of town Friday, traveling to campaign fundraising stops in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The White House dismissed the disclosures as additional evidence of the biased nature of Starr’s investigation.
Much of the material released Friday bordered on the banal, from the innocuous musings of Tripp and Lewinsky to the testimony of senior presidential adviser Sidney Blumenthal, who told the grand jury that Clinton called to ask him the name of cartoon character Porky Pig’s wife to solve a crossword puzzle.
Notable by its absence was evidence not contained in the documents released Friday, including the transcript of testimony by Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer who claimed she was the recipient of an unwanted sexual advance by the president, and that of Nathan Landow, a Maryland Democrat who talked to Willey about her story. Starr’s grand jury is continuing to hear evidence, and it was unclear why their testimony was not given over to Congress.
Although the mound of transcripts was considered critical to the investigation, the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes, now laid out in 322 pages of transcripts, formed the legal basis for Starr’s inquiry and Clinton’s travail.
In the recordings, the women discuss Lewinsky’s attempts last autumn to enlist the president and his friends in her efforts to find a job in New York. Lewinsky had hoped to get a job at the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, which she later decided against, and then at several companies. Vernon Jordan, a prominent Washington lawyer and a Clinton confidant, helped Lewinsky gain entree to major New York businesses, including Revlon and American Express.
More Top Picks Best Multifocal Reading Glasses
Jordan’s influence, however, proves less than helpful when Lewinsky is brushed off by one potential employer, doesn’t hear from another and goes without contact with Jordan’s office for a frustrating two weeks.
Much of the chatter between the women focuses on Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton and her inability to let go. She recalls how she fell in love with the president, his late-night phone calls, how they engaged in phone sex and his failure, later on in their 16-month affair, to call when he had the opportunity.
Tripp comforts and at times cajoles Lewinsky and repeatedly reminds her that she would never betray her trust. That pledge erodes quickly, however, after Lewinsky receives a subpoena to testify in a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought against Clinton by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones.
The last of the taped transcripts released Friday is a lengthy Jan. 13 face-to-face meeting between Tripp and Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, just across the Potomac River from Washington. This time, FBI agents working for Starr had rigged Tripp with a concealed microphone. The women discuss the Jones case and a sworn affidavit that Lewinsky had agreed to sign in which she denied having had a sexual relationship with Clinton.
“It’s for the country,” Lewinsky says after discussing how to shape her testimony in the Jones case. “Every president, every (expletive deleted) president we have ever had, has always had lovers because the pressure of the job is too much.”
At another point, Lewinsky tells Tripp that she would refuse to sign an affidavit denying a relationship with Clinton until the president’s people had secured a job for her, a statement that she later recanted unequivocally under oath.
Currie’s role, the documents indicate, remains central to several aspects of Starr’s investigation and Congress’ consideration of impeachment. The president’s secretary clearly appears aware that Lewinsky had some personal relationship with Clinton, but at the same time, she befriends the young woman and tries to help her at several important junctures.
In her testimony, Currie acknowledges that Lewinsky’s relationship with the president was unlike any other intern’s, but she professes that she never wanted to know any details.
Starr’s report to Congress suggests that Clinton tried to shape Currie’s recollection of the relationship by saying the day after his deposition in the Jones case, referring to Lewinsky, “We were never alone, right?”
Though vague on specific recollections of her talks with the president, Currie counters that while Clinton might have wanted her to agree with him, his statements also were factually accurate in that Currie was most generally nearby when Clinton and Lewinsky were together.
Currie also says it was she, not the president, who contacted Jordan to try to help Lewinsky get a job in New York. “I was doing it on my own,” Currie said.
In his testimony before the grand jury, Jordan said that “Betty Currie called to say: `Would you help Ms. Lewinsky?’ “
Starr’s prosecutors also pressed Currie on the issue of why she went to Lewinsky’s home to retrieve gifts that Clinton had given Lewinsky, items that would likely have been subject to subpoena from Jones’ lawyers.
Currie says Lewinsky asked her to hold the gifts and notes that she could not remember Clinton mentioning the gifts to her. Currie says Lewinsky’s request seemed simple and straightforward and she was happy to accommodate her.
Jordan, whose possible involvement was cited by Starr’s investigators as a principal reason for investigating the president’s private conduct, acknowledges helping Lewinsky get jobs, but notes that his assistance began before she had been subpoenaed as a witness in the Jones case.
During several grand jury appearances, Jordan was courtly but also deftly deflects his interrogators’ assertions that he and Clinton had sought a job for Lewinsky as a way to keep her quiet.
Jordan told the grand jury that he asked Lewinsky explicitly whether she had a sexual relationship with Clinton and that the former White House intern said no. Prosecutors then tried to pin Jordan down on what he meant by “sexual relationship” and whether it included oral sex.
“Relationships are relationships, period,” Jordan said. “Did they hold hands? Did they kiss? Did they dance? Did they stand on top of the table? I didn’t get into that because that’s not for me to define.”
On one key question, Jordan seems to contradict himself. In a March grand jury appearance, Jordan said he did not necessarily believe that Currie had discussed the matter with Clinton before she asked Jordan to find a job for Lewinsky.
But in a May session, when a prosecutor asked him, “You think that the president told Ms. Currie to call you?” Jordan replied, “Oh, I do believe that. Yes.”
Within the White House, the testimony of Clinton aides underscores the level of deceit by the president in attempting to hide his relationship with Lewinsky.
When White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles testified before the grand jury in February, he indicated that even then he was unaware of Clinton’s illicit conduct with Lewinsky.
“All I can tell you is this guy who I’ve worked for looked me in the eye and said he did not have sexual relationships with her,” Bowles told the grand jury. “And if I didn’t believe him, I couldn’t stay. So I believe him.”
Blumenthal told the grand jury that the president had denied to him any relationship with Lewinsky. Blumenthal recalled the president saying, “Monica Lewinsky came at me and made a sexual demand on me. . . . I’ve gone down that road before, and I’ve caused pain for a lot of people.”
The aide also said that when he talked to Hillary Rodham Clinton about Lewinsky, the first lady assured him that the president was just trying to help a troubled young woman.
Bowles’ testimony was important because he said the president had asked him to help secure a job for Lewinsky in the fall of 1997, months before she was named as a potential witness in the Jones case.
Inside the Secret Service, agents buzzed with reports of a Clinton-Lewinsky affair and a rumor–never confirmed–that the president and Lewinsky had been caught in a “compromising” position in the White House theater by a staff member.
Uniformed officer Steven Philip Pape, one of those officers who reported these rumors to Starr’s office, said that while manning the southwest gate one weekend as Lewinsky approached, he advised trainees with him to be careful how he handled her “since she was the president’s mistress.”
White House intern Jamie Beth Schwartz told the grand jury that when Lewinsky showed up at a Christmas party, two agents rushed up to Schwartz and asked if she had seen “her,” meaning Lewinsky. One of the agents said breathlessly, according to Schwartz, “we have to find her before Mrs. Clinton sees her.”
More Top Picks Best Cordless Tool Combo Kits For Home Use
Lewinsky’s relationship with the president also was the subject of discussion within her family. Her mother, Marcia Lewis, who later received immunity from prosecutors along with her daughter and former husband, Bernard, denied knowing many of the details of her daughter’s relationship with the president, though she said she eventually surmised that her daughter had a romantic interest in Clinton.
“I was very concerned and not happy,” Lewis said.
While Lewis said her daughter did not confide in her, Lewinsky told several of her friends in lurid detail of her trysts with the president.
Given the sweeping scope of Starr’s inquiry and the fact that many lawmakers find his allegations credible, Congress appeared poised to go forth with a resolution of inquiry to start hearings that could lead to Clinton’s impeachment. The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin debate on a formal inquiry Monday, and the full House is expected to vote soon after.
At that point, Congress is expected to recess until after the midterm elections Nov. 3, making that vote, at least in part, a referendum on whether Americans want to see the impeachment process move forward.