by Ann Coulter
Clinton can be heard on the Flowers tapes saying, “I just think that if everybody’s on record denying it you’ve got no problem…. If everybody kinda hangs tough, they’re just not going to do anything. They can’t.” Any woman ungrateful for the opportunity to have accommodated Clinton’s sexual needs would have to hang by herself.
Soon after Monica made headlines in January, Clinton aide Paul Begala indicated the White House would be reviving the Clinton scandal management technique of total stonewalling combined with attacks on his accusers. He commented, “It got us through the snows of New Hampshire, it’ll get us through this.”1
About a week later, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos posited a “different, long-term strategy,” saying people around Clinton were “already starting to whisper” about deploying an “Ellen Rometsch strategy” to deal with the Lewinsky scandal.2 Stephanopoulos was referring to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s reported use of damaging information contained in the FBI files of various congressmen to scare them off an investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s liaison with Ellen Rometsch, an East German spy. Apparently, the former presidential aide was suggesting, the White House would find dirt on Clinton’s detractors to shut them up.
Stephanopoulos’s claim was alarming. A few years earlier, in 1995, the Clinton White House had been caught with about nine hundred FBI files containing sensitive background information on former White House employees. It was known that the White House had not hesitated to plumb the files for dirt on at least one White House enemy, Billy Dale. Some former White House employees whose files may have been illegally obtained by the Clinton White House had gone on to jobs with Congress and with the press. Stephanopoulos said, “I think some around him [Clinton] are willing to take everybody down with him.”3
According to former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, the White House “secret police” in all likelihood put the screws to Assistant Defense Secretary Kenneth H. Bacon to force the release of embarrassing information about Linda Tripp, a clear violation of the Privacy Act. The employee who actually leaked the private background data on Tripp has stated under oath that he did so on orders from Bacon, a Clinton appointee who had done favors for the White House in the past.
Clinton’s defenders claim they are waiting for the process to play itself out, waiting for more evidence. But meanwhile, Clinton interferes with the process by using his office to throw muck at his accusers. Americans are allowed to say unpleasant things about their leaders. Americans are allowed to go to court to redress grievances. If he has no comment, he has no comment. But the president shouldn’t be poisoning the well against people with grievances against him.
Trashing the women seemed almost acceptable in an era in which everything, including the law, is political spin. But Paula Jones wasn’t Bob Dole. None of these women was a political candidate running against the president; all were witnesses against him.
BIMBO ERUPTIONS DURING THE 1992 CAMPAIGN
The media smear strategy was old hat for the Clinton team. Back in 1992 investigative reporter Michael Isikoff elicited this priceless phrase from top Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright: “If the campaign needs a hatchet woman, I am more than willing to be it.”4 As it happened, the soccer mom’s favorite candidate did need a hatchet woman, a couple of hatchet men, a whole hatchet team, in fact, to quell—also in Wright’s famous words—“bimbo eruptions.”
Wright told Isikoff that almost $28,000 in payments to a law firm listed in the Clinton campaign’s Federal Election Commission report for the month of May actually paid for a private investigator, Jack Palladino. The campaign soon abandoned the law firm as a front for payments to the private eye and simply listed his fees as “legal expenses.” Isikoff reported that Wright admitted to him: “I don’t think I’ve used him [Palladino] on anything except bimbo eruptions.” In retrospect, Palladino’s “legal fees” were a real bargain compared with the ones Clinton has been paying Bob Bennett.
Palladino scoured the women’s backgrounds in hopes of getting family members or old friends to malign the girls or, barring that, uncovering Republican affiliations to support the first lady’s theory that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was out to get the president.
NO MORE FLOWERS
Though he once had sweet nothings to whisper in her ear, after Gennifer Flowers told the world of her affair with Bill Clinton, he reportedly denounced her to his troopers in terms unbecoming the president who claims credit for the Violence Against Women Act. He called her a “f—ing slut,” and demanded to know “What does that whore think she’s doing to me?”5
That isn’t how he always talked to her. On the tapes of their telephone conversations she produced to prove the affair, she was “baby.” Back when he needed her silence, he also made sure Flowers was set up with a nice government job with the state of Arkansas. On the tapes, after Clinton assures her that their affair would be unprovable “if they don’t have pictures,” Flowers worries, “the only thing that concerns me… is the state job.” No problem for Slick Willy. He advises her, “Yeah, I never thought about that, but as long as you say you’ve just been looking for one, you’d check on it. If they ever ask you if you’ve talked to me about it, you can say no.” Good thing he’s now admitted to the Flowers affair. The tapes alone were completely mystifying to American journalists.
Things changed for Flowers when she decided to tell the truth. Suddenly she wasn’t “baby,” but a bimbo and gold-digger: When asked on 60 Minutes about Flowers’s allegation, Clinton said, “That allegation is false.” The next day he called her a liar and questioned her motives, saying, “She didn’t tell the truth. She hired a lawyer a year ago, a year and a half ago, to say that anybody that said that was a liar and would be sued. And she admitted that she changed her story for money.”6 He explained the “baby” tapes by admitting that their relationship was “friendly.”
Then the Clinton campaign P.I., Palladino, went to work on discrediting Flowers, in the end producing, according to Betsey Wright, “an affidavit or two” that would allegedly link Flowers to a right-wing conspiracy.
Flowers’s former roommate, Lauren Kirk, corroborated Flowers’s story in an interview with the New York Post’s Cindy Adams during the 1992 campaign (“There can be no doubt that she and Bill Clinton had sex with one another”). Thereafter, Kirk lost her job.
PERDUE CHICK
Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, is another woman who claims to have had an affair with Clinton. After rumors circulated just before the 1992 Democratic National Convention that the fifty-three-year-old Perdue was about to go public with the affair, Palladino sprung into action.7
He called around to Perdue’s family members, friends, and acquaintances until finally locating one single estranged relative who was willing to malign Perdue. Palladino made sure the disgruntled relative was known and available to the press. Thereafter, Perdue was largely ignored by the press—when not mentioned in passing as a bimbo gold-digger—save one appearance in July 1992 on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show.
Perdue soon began receiving a series of threatening visits, phone calls, and letters. Perdue claims to have been visited by a man on August 19, 1992, who informed her that “keeping [her] mouth shut would be worthwhile.” Perdue said she was told: “If I was a good little girl, and didn’t kill the messenger, I’d be set for life: a federal job…. I’d never have to worry again. But if I didn’t take the offer, then they knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn’t guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs.” She didn’t take the job and was soon fired from her job in the admissions office of Lindenwood College (Missouri).8
KEEPING UP WITH JONES
Paula Jones has of course endured every trick of the Clinton “bimbo eruption” task force. Remember, it wasn’t Ken Starr who brought the lawsuit that threatened to destroy Clinton’s presidency.
Of course, no one in Clinton’s camp dared say the president would never, never do such a thing as Jones alleged. Wh
at they did say was that Jones was trailer-park trash and had a few skeletons of her own. Clinton lawyer Bennett has managed to produce two women loyal to Clinton, but barely acquainted with Jones, who claim Jones was thrilled—full of “bubbly enthusiasm”—after her encounter with Clinton. Poor little Paula was so reviled with the claim that she was doing it for money—unlike Bob Bennett, presumably—that she promised to donate any recovery to charity.
After Jones’s wholly predictable, but almost wholly unpredicted, 9-0 victory in the Supreme Court on Clinton’s frivolous “presidential immunity” claim, Bennett openly announced that his legal strategy of choice was to smear Jones. Comparing Jones to a dog on a Sunday morning talk show,9 Bennett declared that he would wage a war of personal destruction against Jones for presuming to exercise her constitutional rights. “We’ve thoroughly investigated this case. If Paula Jones insists on having her day in court and her trial, and she really wants to put her reputation at issue as we hear, we are prepared to do it.”
One doesn’t have to accept the feminist argument that a woman’s sexual history is never, ever relevant10 to a sex case to see that there was no legal justification for Bennett’s threat to delve into Jones’s sexual history.
Even if Jones were everything James Carville says she is, Clinton’s defense was that he can’t even remember meeting her—not that she consented. When Jones’s new lawyers dropped her defamation claim against Danny Ferguson, there was no possible legal basis for him to depose any of Jones’s disgruntled former suitors.11 Trashing Paula as a legal strategy had to be abandoned. Bennett would have to rely on Clinton’s handmaidens in the media to wage the smear campaign against Paula’s reputation.
WEE LITTLE WILLEY—INDUCING LARYNGITIS
Soon people around Clinton were behaving in a way that could easily be mistaken for attempts to buy Willey’s silence. As with Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, Willey was first approached with carrots. Willey told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley12 that she had been talked up “extensively” by Nathan Landow, the former chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and a major Democratic contributor. She said she could not elaborate because Landow’s dealings with her were being investigated by the grand jury.
According to leaks to Newsweek about Willey’s appearance before the grand jury, Willey testified that Landow told her, “Don’t say anything.” Taking a page from Clinton’s talking points on the Gennifer Flowers tapes, Landow told her that as long as she said “nothing happened,” they couldn’t prove anything.13
At first, Landow dismissed Willey as a “distant acquaintance.” But then it turned out he had chartered a private jet to fly Willey to his beachfront estate in Maryland in October 1997, at a cost of more than $1,000. Willey also testified that she had been offered an all-expenses-paid trip to New York for a Christmas shopping spree. Landow said the only reason “distant acquaintance” Willey had come to his estate by chartered plane was to visit his daughter, Harolyn. Landow also said the suggestion that he tried to influence Willey’s testimony was “totally false.”14 Between Harolyn Landow and Betty Currie, women seemed to be constantly causing Clinton no end of trouble.
When it looked like Willey might be planning to tell the truth, the White House wasted no time in applying the screws to their very own soccer mom. On 60 Minutes, Willey said Bob Bennett met with her before her deposition in the Jones case. After telling her that the president “just thought the world of [her],” Bennett said, “now this was not sexual harassment, was it?” When she failed to provide the proper assent, Bennett said “Well it wasn’t unwelcome, was it?” Willey says she told Bennett “it” was unwelcome. (In another week Bennett would sit through Clinton’s deposition listening to the president say there was no “it”—welcome or otherwise.) She told Bennett that she intended to testify truthfully in Jones’s civil case against the president. Then, in what Willey said she believed was meant as a threat to persuade her to lie, Bennett advised her to get a criminal lawyer.
The day after Willey’s 60 Minutes interview, the White House tried to dig Clinton out of the hole but only managed to dig him in deeper. The White House produced ten private letters Willey had sent the president between May 1993 and November 1996. Willey’s incident with the president had taken place on November 29, 1993. The White House intended the letters to be exculpatory because they included sentiments such as “Take heart in knowing that your number one fan thinks of you every day”(November 1994). Why would she write so warmly to a man who had sexually assaulted her?
That would have been an excellent point to make—had Willey been suing Clinton for sexual harassment. But she wasn’t. Willey could have done cartwheels out of the Oval Office and high-fived everyone in the hallway after being groped by the president of the United States, and it would not have diminished her value to Paula Jones as a witness. The only legally relevant question about Willey’s allegations to the Jones lawsuit was whether it happened, not Willey’s personal reaction to it.
Willey was giving testimony—had been forced by the court to give testimony—in someone else’s lawsuit for sexual harassment. So the credibility issues that are normally raised when a woman sues for sexual harassment alleging an offensive act were irrelevant. This wasn’t a “He said/She said” issue; it was a “He said/They forced me to tell the truth under oath” issue.
Willey’s forced admission that Clinton had groped her and placed her hand on his genitals when she came to ask him for a paying job was probative evidence tending to support Jones’s claim that he had done “the same thing” to her.
Because she was a witness and not a party to a sexual harassment lawsuit, the letters tend to support Willey’s story because they suggest that Willey believed the president owed her something. Before Willey’s November 29, 1993, encounter with Clinton, her letters are standard, besotted soccer mom letters to the liberal savior. Only after the alleged presidential groping do her letters to the president contain job requests. Extravagant job requests.
The White House said it had provided all the letters from Willey it could find. In a typical pre-grope letter she gushed, for example, “I watched you at the press correspondents’ dinner on Saturday evening you were hilarious at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor! Thanks again for all your help don’t let the bastards get you down!”15
At the time of the presidential grope, Willey was a volunteer at the White House, and her most urgent need was money. She was liable along with her husband Ed Willey on a note repaying $274,000 he had stolen from his clients. She had come to Clinton to ask for a paying job because of her family’s financial difficulties.
It soon turned out, however, that money would not be a major concern. Willey’s husband had committed suicide the same day she asked the president for a paying job. Ed Willey’s insurance company settled her claims on the policy for about a million dollars. That would have been more than enough to repay Mr. Willey’s clients. But the defrauded clients would never receive the money they were owed from the insurance company’s payout. Willey’s lawyer shielded the bulk of the insurance settlement from her creditors by transferring it to Willey’s children, who had not cosigned the note promising repayment. Willey was not going to be out on the street.16
Since most of her future earnings would go toward paying her creditors, her job requests to the president after the groping incident tended to focus on glamourous jobs that would give her credibility, such as international junkets and ambassadorships, rather than high-paying jobs. Though Clinton did not comply with Willey’s absurdly presumptuous request for an ambassadorship, he did appoint her to positions on international delegations and prestigious government organizations that would normally go to scholars, lobbyists, lawyers, and major campaign contributors.
About two weeks after the distressed Willey met with Clinton to ask for a paying job—only to be groped instead—Willey met again with Clinton. Soon thereafter she was offered a part-time job in the White House Counsel’s Office as a “staff assistant.�
�� She started the job some months later, in April 1994, and was fired six months after that for “lacking the necessary skills”—she couldn’t type.17
Being fired from a secretarial job in October 1994 apparently struck Willey as an excellent stepping stone to an ambassadorship in the Clinton administration. She promptly dashed off a letter to the president requesting one. On October 18, 1994, Willey wrote to Clinton:Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. Since I’ve seen you, I have had the opportunity to talk with [various aides in the Clinton administration.] I have invested almost three years with your campaign and administration and am not very willing to depart yet. I would like to be considered for an ambassadorship or a position in an embassy overseas.…
I don’t need to remind you of my willingness to help you in any way that I can.
Several months later, Willey had toned down her ambitious career plans, informing the president: “I would very much like to be considered for” a position on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.18
Clinton wrote a note to his staff on the back of this letter: “Is this what Shelia Lawrence did? Can we do this for her?”19 Shelia Lawrence was the fourth wife and widow of Clinton donor/ambassador Larry Lawrence, who later would have to be disinterred from Arlington Cemetery for lying about his nonexistent war record. She would later bring a lawsuit against Arianna Huffington for claiming Shelia was one of Clinton’s mistresses.
