A PORTRAIT OF DECEIT, OTHER AFFAIRS
Toni Howard
Scripps Howard News Service 10/02/98 By MICHAEL HEDGES
WASHINGTON -- Investigative documents released Friday paint a vivid
portrait of deceit -- ranging from President Clinton's efforts to
mislead his wife and closest friends, to the betrayal of Monica Lewinsky
by her friend Linda Tripp, and Secret Service agents speculating that
Clinton was having a half dozen affairs.
The documents give a voyeuristic look into the mind of Monica Lewinsky
during and after the affair with Clinton. And they give the most candid
view yet of a White House in turmoil and confusion as the scandal broke
and the president denied any wrongdoing.
Key evidence that may become important in potential impeachment hearings
include:
-- Lewinsky told Tripp that she had been ordered to lie about the affair
and urged Tripp to do the same. ``What he has told me is there is no way
to get caught in perjury in a situation like this,'' Lewinsky said.
The ``he'' is not identified. Clinton told the grand jury that he never
told Lewinsky to lie.
The documents also show how the White House staff viewed the president.
Secret Service officers talked about persistent rumors that Clinton was
having sexual affairs with several women, including Lewinsky.
Secret Service Officer Brent James Chinery told the grand jury, based
``partly on observation and partly on rumor and speculation,'' that he
and his colleagues believed Clinton had sexual trysts in the White House
with at least six women, whose names are blacked out of the documents.
Chinery also described how White House steward Bayani Nelvis carped
about having to clean up after Lewinsky's visits to the president's
study. ``Nelvis was telling me that he was tired of cleaning up the
dirty tissues in the garbage can from the president and Monica.''
-- White House deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles told the grand jury
that Clinton had approached him in the ``summer or fall'' of 1997 and
asked him to try to find Lewinsky a job back inside the White House
complex.
Clinton did not mention Bowles when asked in his grand jury testimony if
he'd tried to get Lewinsky a job back in the White House. He did say he
instructed his secretary Betty Currie and aide Marsha Scott to help
Lewinsky get back to the White House from her assignment at the
Pentagon.
-- Clinton desperately tried to reach Lewinsky around midnight after the
first news reports of the affair. When secretary Betty Currie finally
reached Lewinsky the next morning, Lewinsky said, ``I can't talk to
you,'' then hung up.
-- Clinton's long time adviser Bruce Lindsey continued to refuse to
answer grand jury questions about whether he helped hide the affair even
after Clinton admitted an ``inappropriate relationship.''
-- Lewinsky spoke of Clinton's efforts to steer her to a United Nation's
job in New York. Lewinsky said Clinton told her that her reputation
around the White House as a ``stalker'' would not hurt her at the U.N.
``He said that is the good thing about (Ambassador Bill) Richardson,
that he doesn't get spooked.''
Those details could contribute to House Republicans' efforts to prove
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's charge that Clinton engaged in a
broad cover-up of the affair that constituted obstruction of justice.
The documents include hundreds of pages of transcripts capturing the
weird phone calls taped by Tripp -- in which the duo ramble about
mundane topics but return repeatedly to Lewinsky's affair with the
president.
Revealed in the documents is a web of deception -- and in some cases
apparent self deception -- that pervaded the White House.
Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to the president, told the grand jury
of Hillary Clinton insisting that her husband was ``being attacked, in
her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled
person.''
Blumenthal told the grand jurors that Mrs. Clinton said, ``The president
ministers to troubled people all the time, and he does so out of
religious conviction and personal temperament.''
He added, ``The First Lady said he had done this dozen, if not hundreds
of times...the president comes from a broken home and this was very hard
to prevent him from trying to minister to these troubled people.''
Several of Clinton's advisers told the grand jury that the president had
told them there was no truth to reports of the sexual encounters with
Lewinsky.
Bowles recalled Clinton using the precise words he would later tell
America, ``I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky...''
Linda Tripp described to the grand jury what she said could have been an
effort by Clinton adviser Lindsey to smear of Kathleen Willey, a woman
who said Clinton groped and propositioned her in the Oval Office.
``The party line I got was 'this did not happen, this did not happen,'''
said Tripp, describing a conversation she had with Lindsey. She said
Lindsey told her, ``Surely you would agree, would you not, that Kathleen
Willey is, of course, unstable.''
The tapes contain more details that will further embarrass Cllinton.
On the tape, Lewinsky quotes Clinton saying, ``I have an empty life
except for my work, and it is a (expletive) obsession.'' Lewinsky added,
``I think he likes to feel sorry for himself, and it was like...this is
the thing to say to drive home the point.''
These highlights are buried in an avalanche of banal woman-to-woman talk
-- as when Lewinsky interrupts Tripps' ramble about her cat Cleo to
blurt out ``God, (model) Claudia Schiffer is so pretty.''
At another point, Lewinsky is reading Tripp a draft of a letter to
Clinton imploring him to help her find a job in New York. Lewinsky
starts her narrative: ``Dear Handsome...''
Tripp interrupts, ``Isn't there anything else you call him? I mean that
is just another enough-already thing.'' Lewinsky offers that she
sometimes calls Clinton ``Boo Boo'' and that she knows Clinton called
Gennifer Flowers ``Pooky.'' ``God, one does not even want to wonder what
that meant,'' Tripp said.
Large sections of the tape transcript released Friday were blacked out,
especially when Lewinsky described her sexual phone games with Clinton.
In one, Lewinsky told Tripp about consummating phone sex with Clinton
merely by talking about her trip to Bosnia.
``Now what does that tell you?'' Tripp offered. ``Your voice can do
it.''
Tripp appeared throughout to coax revelations from Lewinsky. When their
conversations stall over talk of clothes or food, Tripp steered it back
to intimate details about ``Handsome'' or ``Creep'' or ``The Big He'' as
Lewinsky variously called Clinton.
(Mike Hedges is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service.)
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