Here's another
By TIM WEINER with NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON -- Shortly after 10 a.m. on Jan. 17, a Saturday, the president of the United States stepped out of the White House into the back of a black limousine and rode a block to his lawyer's office to undergo a six-hour grilling in the case of Paula Jones vs. William Jefferson Clinton.
For six weeks, the president's lawyers had known that he might be asked a startling question: Did you have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky? When the question came, the president's body tensed and his jaw tightened, said a lawyer involved in the case, and, under oath, he denied it.
The questions continued: Had the president been alone with Lewinsky? Had he given her gifts? He said he might have been alone with her briefly while she performed some clerical task, and he might have given her some presidential souvenirs, the lawyer recalled.
The deposition ended, President Clinton returned to the White House, canceled dinner plans with his wife and called his personal secretary, Betty Currie, asking her to meet him at the White House the next morning.
When they met, the president asserted that he had never been alone with Lewinsky at the White House, said lawyers familiar with Mrs. Currie's account. But that assertion did not square with Mrs. Currie's recollection.
In addition, Mrs. Currie had turned over to investigators a hat pin, a brooch and a dress she retrieved from Lewinsky, the lawyers said, items that are believed to have been given to her by the president but which do not fit his description of White House souvenirs. It is not clear who, if anyone, instructed Mrs. Currie to retrieve the gifts.
Was Clinton less than truthful about his relationship with Lewinsky, the 24-year-old former White House intern? Was he using his trusted secretary to hide evidence from Mrs. Jones, the former Arkansas state employee suing him over what she says was a crude sexual advance nearly seven years ago?
The president's battle with the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr -- and, perhaps, Clinton's place in history -- may depend on the answers. If he lied, or if he urged others to lie or conceal evidence, he could face the threat of impeachment.
How did Clinton become the first president forced to testify under oath about his private life? How did the Jones case -- once demeaned by the president's lawyers as third-rate "tabloid trash" -- come to threaten Clinton's presidency? The answers lie in a detailed look at the recent past.
When Mrs. Jones' lawyers learned of Lewinsky's existence, it was as if two live wires had met in an incendiary tangle.
The lawyers' hunt for information about Lewinsky, which they sought to buttress Mrs. Jones' charge of sexual misconduct by Clinton, led directly to Starr's investigation into the possibility of perjury and obstruction of justice at the highest levels. Now Starr is demanding that Mrs. Jones' lawyers turn over everything they have learned in their search for women who contend they have had sexual encounters with Clinton.
The two cases merged that Saturday morning. As the president testified, with Mrs. Jones staring him in the face during the deposition, Lewinsky was at home at the Watergate, recovering from the shock of her life.
Twelve hours earlier, she ended an intense encounter with federal investigators pursuing the president on Starr's behalf. The investigators confronted Lewinsky with the devastating news that her colleague and confidante Linda Tripp had been taping their intimate telephone conversations for months.
Tripp had told Starr's investigators that Lewinsky lied in her affidavit in the Jones case by denying that she had ever had sex with Clinton. While Tripp was working undercover for Starr, she was preparing to file an affidavit in Jones vs. Clinton, swearing that Lewinsky "had a sexual relationship with President Clinton."
The tapes presented the threat of prison for Lewinsky unless she disavowed her affidavit and cooperated with Starr. The tapes recorded Lewinsky saying that the president "won't settle" the Jones case because "he's in denial," according to published excerpts of the tapes. If so, his refusal had turned that private lawsuit into a potential personal and political disaster.
Conservative Group Offers to Help Jones
The miasma enveloping the White House began rising four months ago.
On Oct. 1, the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal center in Virginia, publicly offered to help Mrs. Jones. The institute found Mrs. Jones new lawyers from the Dallas firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke and offered to pay her legal expenses.
In the first week of October, a woman telephoned the Rutherford Institute with an anonymous tip: a woman named Monica had had sex with the president in the White House. The same tipster, described by the man who took the call as "a nervous young woman," called back in late October, providing a surname: Lewinsky.
Days after the first tip, the Dallas lawyers telephoned Tripp. Newsweek quoted her in its Aug. 11 issue as a witness to a supposed sexual encounter between the president and Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer. A lawyer involved in the chain of events said Tripp later gave the lawyers Lewinsky's name. Tripp's lawyer, James Moody, denies that. The question is unresolved.
Lewinsky Gets Help With Job Interviews
On Oct. 7, Lewinsky sent the first of nine packages from her office at the Pentagon to the White House and to the office of Vernon Jordan, Clinton's friend and confidant. The packages contained, among other things, letters and documents relating to her search for a new job. A key question for Starr is whether the White House and Jordan helped her find a job for reasons beyond altruism.
Two weeks later, Lewinsky secured a job interview with Bill Richardson, the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, arranged by a White House deputy chief of staff, John Podesta, at Mrs. Currie's request.
On Oct. 22, Richardson had a 40-minute interview with Lewinsky in Richardson's living room at the Watergate apartment and hotel complex, where she lives and where he maintains an apartment. In November, Lewinsky was offered a job on Richardson's public relations staff.
But Lewinsky eventually declined the offer. She wanted a better-paying position in the private sector in New York.
In early December, Jordan talked to Lewinsky about helping her find that job. The go-between for their discussions was again Mrs. Currie. Jordan set up interviews for Lewinsky at three companies where he had personal and corporate connections: Revlon, American Express and Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency.
Dec. 5 was the deadline for submitting witness lists in the Jones case. And on that list, on that day, the president's lawyers saw Lewinsky's name for the first time.
From that moment on, the paths of two people from two different worlds -- Paula Jones from Lonoke, Ark., and Monica Lewinsky from Beverly Hills, Calif. -- were on course to collide at the White House.
Subpoena Seeks Gifts to Lewinsky
Dec. 19, a Friday, Mrs. Jones' lawyers served Lewinsky with a subpoena requesting information, including any gifts from the president. She called a Washington lawyer, Francis Carter, on Jordan's recommendation.
Christmas Eve was Lewinsky's last day of work at the Pentagon. She still did not have a new job.
On or about Dec. 28, a Sunday, she had a private talk with Clinton at the White House, said lawyers in the case. The president told her not to worry about being drawn into the lawsuit and advised her to describe her earlier White House visits as meetings with Mrs. Currie, the lawyers said.
As for the subpoenaed gifts, the president said Lewinsky could not produce them if she no longer had them, according to the lawyers' account. Mrs. Currie has told investigators that she retrieved a box of gifts from Lewinsky -- including the dress, the brooch and the hat pin -- and subsequently turned the items over to Starr.
Affidavit Includes Denial of Sex
On Jan. 7, a Wednesday, Lewinsky completed an affidavit saying she never had sex with the president, said her lawyer William Ginsburg. The affidavit was not immediately filed with Mrs. Jones' lawyers.
The judge in the case had suggested that testimony be limited to accounts of sexual favors received by Clinton in exchange for government jobs. Lewinsky contended she knew nothing of the sort, Ginsburg said; her affidavit was intended to keep her out of the Jones trial.
Tripp has suggested to lawyers in the case that Lewinsky did not intend to file the affidavit until she had secured a job. That suggestion has not been independently corroborated by Lewinsky or anyone else.
On Jan. 8, Lewinsky had a final job interview at Revlon, and Jordan made telephone calls on her behalf to the company, where he serves as a director. One of those calls went to Revlon's chairman, Ronald O. Perelman. A few days later, Revlon offered Lewinsky a job.
Now events approached critical mass.
On Jan. 12, Tripp made contact with Starr's office, saying that Lewinsky had had an affair with the president and that she, Tripp, had secret tapes to prove it. The same day, Carter told Mrs. Jones' lawyers that Lewinsky had denied any sexual relationship with the president in her affidavit.
On Jan. 13, Tripp, with a tiny tape recorder provided by Starr's office, met Lewinsky for a long lunch, during which Lewinsky is said to have described her conversations about her affidavit with Jordan.
On Jan. 14 or Jan. 15, Lewinsky handed Tripp three pages of "talking points," aimed at persuading Tripp to deny any knowledge of sexual impropriety by Clinton in the Jones lawsuit. It is unclear who wrote the document.
On Jan. 15, Starr's office told the Justice Department about Tripp's accusations. A panel of federal judges authorized Starr to investigate whether Clinton and Jordan had encouraged Lewinsky to lie under oath in her affidavit.
On Jan. 16, a Friday, the case reached an explosive state. The Federal Bureau of Investigation confronted Lewinsky. That day and the next, reporters began asking White House officials pointed questions, including whether the president had tried to influence other people's testimony in Jones vs. Clinton, a former White House official said. News of Starr's expanded investigation had already leaked.
Clinton knew none of this. Nor did he know, as he confronted Mrs. Jones on Jan. 17, that he would be so extensively questioned about Lewinsky. Mrs. Jones' lawyers appeared to know more details about Lewinsky than the president's lawyers had anticipated.
The next morning, Clinton summoned Mrs. Currie to the White House and reviewed with her some of the questions and answers he had given the previous day about Lewinsky, said lawyers familiar with Mrs. Currie's account. The president told her he had never been alone with Lewinsky and that he had resisted her sexual advances, these lawyers said.
If this was an effort at damage control, it failed. The story of Tripp's tapes was already leaking out, and Starr was already aiming his investigation directly at the White House, preparing to summon a parade of aides, including Mrs. Currie, to a grand jury.
On Jan. 21, a Wednesday, the inquiry was national news. That day, Tripp signed an affidavit for Mrs. Jones' lawyers. It said Lewinsky had "revealed to me in detailed conversations that she has had a sexual relationship with President Clinton since November 15, 1995."
If that is so, the president "committed perjury" in his sworn deposition, and "embarked on a very aggressive cover-up campaign" afterward, one of Mrs. Jones' lawyers, Donovan Campbell, said in court papers filed last Thursday.
Those charges are now at the heart of one of the strangest investigations ever carried out against a president of the United States.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/...ton-recap.html
__________________________________________________
Boy that Vernon Jordan sure is a helpful so and so to one, and apparently only one, intern
