A Vast Conspiracy Page 30

  “I have done everything I could to avoid the kind of questions you are asking me here today, so to talk about this kitchen as if it is a private kitchen, it’s a little cubbyhole, and these guys keep the door open. They come and go at will. Now that’s the factual background here.

  “Now, to go back to your question,” Clinton said, at long last, “my recollection is that, at some point during the government shutdown, when Ms. Lewinsky was still an intern but working the chief of staff’s office because all the employees had to go home, that she was back there with a pizza that she brought to me and to others. I do not believe she was there alone, however. I don’t think she was. And my recollection is that on a couple of occasions after that she was there but my secretary, Betty Currie, was there with her. She and Betty are friends. That’s my, that’s my recollection. And I have no other recollection of that.”

  This extraordinary monologue, full of both fact and fiction, could serve as a useful template of Clinton’s obsessions. He had conditioned himself to see the Jones suit, indeed the entire legal assault on his presidency, more as a metaphor than a reality. For him, the case served as a symbol of all of the outrageous accusations that he had fought off over the past six years. Their ends justified his means; his deceptions, the reasoning seemed to have gone, paled next to his enemies’ offenses. He had indeed removed the curtains and taken those other steps to free himself from suspicion. (That was why Clinton limited his trysts with Lewinsky to the study, bathroom, and hallway, where they could not be seen through the windows.)

  But thanks to Tripp’s briefing, Fisher was not as easily dissuaded from pursuing the Lewinsky matter as he was about Willey. “At any time,” Fisher asked, “have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?”

  “I think I testified to that earlier,” Clinton said. “I think that there is a, it is—I have no specific recollection, but it seems to me that she was on duty on a couple of occasions working for the legislative affairs office and brought me some things to sign, something on the weekend. That’s—I have a general memory of that.” Another clear lie.

  Then, a real surprise to his lawyers, if not to Clinton. Fisher asked about any letters that were sent by Lewinsky to Currie for Clinton. (On Thursday, two days earlier, Isikoff had called Currie to ask about these letters.) Clinton hedged, said it was possible. The questions grew more specific. Had Clinton met with Lewinsky at the White House between midnight and 6 A.M.? (This was based on faulty information from Tripp and Goldberg, because Lewinsky never claimed any such late-night encounters.) “I certainly don’t think so,” Clinton replied. Were any false records kept of his meetings with Lewinsky? Again, Clinton thought not.

  “Have you ever talked to Monica Lewinsky about the possibility that she might be asked to testify in this lawsuit?” Fisher asked.

  “I’m not sure, and let me tell you why I’m not sure. It seems to me the, the, the—I want to be as accurate as I can here. Seems to me the last time she was there to see Betty before Christmas we were joking about how you-all, with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I’d ever talked to, and I said, you know—”

  “We can’t hear you, Mr. President,” Bennett interjected. In his nervousness, Clinton had dropped his voice considerably.

  “And I said that you-all might call every woman I ever talked to …” Clinton resumed.

  This, too, was false. One month earlier, in the middle of the night of December 17, Clinton had called Lewinsky to tell her that Currie’s brother had died and that she was on the witness list. “It broke my heart when I saw your name on the list,” he had said.

  Fisher moved now to ask about how much Clinton knew about Lewinsky’s contacts with Vernon Jordan and Bill Richardson. Clinton parried, suggesting he had some vague knowledge of the meetings.

  “Have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?” Fisher asked.

  Clinton paused for an excruciating ten to fifteen seconds. His lawyers were dumbstruck.

  “I don’t recall,” Clinton said, then paused again. “Do you know what they were?”

  “A hat pin?”

  The previous night, Tripp had struggled to remember the gifts she had heard about from Lewinsky. Clinton had given Monica Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, but Fisher asked if he had given her “a book about Walt Whitman.”

  Clinton waffled again. “I could have given her a gift, but I don’t remember a specific gift.”

  What about anything from “the Black Dog store [actually a restaurant] in Martha’s Vineyard?”

  Clinton did remember such a gift. Currie had told him that Monica wanted something from the Black Dog. “I bought a lot of things for a lot of people,” he said, “and I gave Betty a couple of the pieces, and she gave I think something to Monica and something to some of the other girls who worked in the office.”

  At this point, Bennett was getting nervous. Ettinger was also fidgeting a great deal. What was going on? Fisher obviously had a wealth of detail about contacts between Clinton and Lewinsky. The lawyers were hearing a great many of these things for the first time from their client, who was obviously laboring. There had to be a source who was feeding this stuff to the Jones lawyers.

  Finally, Fisher came to the heart of his examination.

  “Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?”

  “No,” said the president.

  “If she told someone that she had a sexual affair with you beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?”

  “It’s certainly not the truth.”

  “I think I used the term ‘sexual affair,’ ” Fisher went on. “And, so the record is completely clear, have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court?”

  At the judge’s suggestion, Fisher handed the definition to Clinton so he could study it.

  “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky,” Clinton said. “I’ve never had an affair with her.”

  A moment later, Clinton couldn’t help but ask his own question.

  “Mr. Fisher,” he said, “is there something, let me just—you asked that with such conviction, is there something you want to ask me about this? I don’t, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I don’t think.”

  Fisher replied elliptically, and accurately, “Sir, I think this will come to light shortly, and you’ll understand.”

  The session broke for lunch. Ettinger whispered to Bennett, “Bob, they’ve got Linda Tripp,” and bolted to a phone.

  Fisher had been questioning the president for a little more than two hours—about half the planned length of the deposition—and he had spent about three quarters of his time on Monica Lewinsky. In all, Fisher did an inept job. Given the information available to him, he could have locked Clinton into a dozen false statements in about five minutes. Did Lewinsky perform oral sex on you? Did she ever touch your genitals? Did you touch her breasts? Did you ever call her on the telephone? Clinton would have had to answer these simple questions categorically, and he certainly would have lied. Instead, Fisher stuck with his convoluted definition of sex and left Clinton an escape hatch that he later tried hard to use.

  Still, the morning had left the Clinton team troubled, and Ettinger figured he had to do some investigating of his own. He knew that the Jones lawyers had subpoenaed Tripp, knew that she worked with Lewinsky, knew that she had been Isikoff’s source on the Willey story, and knew that she was angry at Bennett about his quotes in that piece. She had to be their source. So Ettinger frantically dialed the phone number of the man he understood to be Tripp’s lawyer—Kirby Behre. But it was Saturday, and there was no answer. Ettinger stewed on the issue for the remainder of the day.

  The remainder of the deposition was anticlimactic. Fisher skipped around a variety of topics—Clinton’s record-keeping as governor, his dealings with the Arkansas troopers, the events at the Excelsior Hot
el on May 8, 1991.

  “Now, seated to my right, two chairs down, is Ms. Paula Jones. Do you recall ever having met her before today?”

  “No,” Clinton replied. “I’ve said that many times. I don’t.”

  The Jones team’s vaunted examination of Clinton’s sex life had produced relatively little except Lewinsky and some old Arkansas gossip. There was, however, proof that Little Rock was a small town. Fisher at one point asked if Clinton had ever bought presents for other women at a store there called Barbara Jean’s.

  “Her name is what?” Fisher asked. “The woman that owned it.”

  “Barbara—I don’t know,” Clinton said.

  At this point, the judge jumped in. “I’m not here to testify. I believe it’s Barbara Baber.”

  “I think that’s right,” Clinton said with a smile.

  Fisher asked only a few harmless questions about Shelia Lawrence, Beth Coulson, and Marilyn Jo Jenkins. With Gennifer Flowers, Clinton admitted to a single sexual encounter, in 1977. Near the end of the day, Fisher asked two questions to which the judge sustained Bennett’s objections: “Please name every person with whom you had sexual relations when you were either governor of the state of Arkansas or president of the United States” and “Please name every person with whom you sought to have sexual relations when you were governor of the state of Arkansas or president of the United States.” If Judge Wright had not attended the deposition, Clinton might well have been forced to answer these preposterously broad and invasive inquiries, and his answers would certainly have been fodder for the Starr investigation that was already under way.

  Bennett had only a few questions of his own. He showed Lewinsky’s affidavit to Clinton, and he ratified once more its denial of any sexual relationship between the two of them. For his final question, Bennett followed up on something Fisher had asked about why Clinton had run for president in 1992, but not in 1988. The president said that he had been told in both elections that “the press” had decided he had no chance to win. Then he added, with his trademark sense of victimhood, “The press had to have somebody in every election, and I was going to be offered up, and they were so gullible about little states that they’d believe anything they were told about Arkansas, and if I ran, I’d be destroyed. That’s what I was told. And for six years they’ve worked very hard at doing it. But I’m very glad I did it anyway.”

  13

  The Richard Jewell File

  With the president’s deposition completed, the partisans on all sides sought to shape the public’s perception of this consummately political event. The Jones team tried first.

  Susan Carpenter-McMillan had waited not so patiently through the six long hours that Clinton was upstairs. She had promised the assembled throng of reporters that Jones would make a statement at the end of the day, but the lawyers hustled Jones back to their hotel. When McMillan tracked down her friend at the Hyatt Regency, she saw why. Jones was crying hysterically—just the weight of the accumulated tensions of the day, she told McMillan.

  McMillan didn’t like the image of Jones skulking away from the deposition, so she decided to make her own plan. “I don’t care whether you want to or not, but you are going to dinner,” McMillan told the lawyers. “You’re in my courtroom now.”

  She had arranged for a table in the window of the Old Ebbitt Grill, a famous Washington restaurant around the corner from the site of the deposition. McMillan assembled Paula, her husband, Steve, Paula’s hairdresser (who had traveled from California with them), and the legal team to make a quasi-public celebration of their success at the deposition. In truth, the lawyers were pleased. They had nailed down Clinton’s denials about Lewinsky, and they had succeeded in putting him on the record about the other women as well. As McMillan hoped, news of the Jones dinner party was included in much of the next-day coverage—although one important detail was omitted. None of the reports mentioned the one unfamiliar face at the Jones table. Chris Vlasto, a dogged producer for ABC News, had been pursuing Clinton scandal stories for almost as long as Isikoff. McMillan had invited him along, and he even paid the tab—a wise investment, as it turned out.

  Other Clinton enemies weren’t as pleased that Saturday night. After extended deliberations, the Newsweek editors decided to withhold Isikoff’s story from the issue that would be released the following day. As a courtesy, Isikoff let Goldberg, Moody, and Conway know that his story had been spiked. (Henceforth, Goldberg would enjoy teasing Isikoff with the nickname “Spikey.”) On that Saturday, Moody took the news with his usual distracted air, but Goldberg and the elves were furious, and they decided to do something about it. Having failed to plant their story in the mainstream press, they decided to go to their favorite journalist of second resort—Matt Drudge.

  In the days after the Lewinsky story made him famous, there was much debate about whether thirty-one-year-old Matt Drudge was a “journalist”—as if something of importance turned on whether he deserved that dubious honorific. In truth, Drudge resembled what might be called a metajournalist. He did journalism about journalism. For the most part, he relayed the scraps that were too sordid or too thinly sourced to make it into more conventional distribution channels. He was not always wrong—far from it—but he went faster, and with less compunction, than virtually anyone else with a wide audience. Drudge pushed stories in line with his proudly conservative orientation (at least in his politics), and he established contact early on with the elves and others associated with the pro-Jones and anti-Clinton cause.

  Drudge came to stand, for better or worse, as an icon of the Internet age: born to liberal parents outside Washington, D.C.; a news junkie at home, a misfit at school; found work on the swing shift at 7-Eleven. “So, in the famous words of another newsman, Horace Greeley,” he said in a triumphant speech at the National Press Club, “I, still a young man, went west.” To a dismal apartment in a crime-ridden section of Hollywood, employed folding T-shirts in the gift shop on the CBS lot. His father, in despair about his son’s prospects, bought him a computer in 1994. Matt discovered e-mail, chat rooms, an electronic community. He started sending out news of this and that—ratings, movie grosses, gossip—he had picked up on the lot. (Sometimes literally; that is, by rummaging through the CBS garbage.) He called it the Drudge Report and moved it to the infant World Wide Web, including easy-to-use links with scores of other news sources. By 1998, the Drudge Report had six million visitors a month.

  Drudge always walked the line between fame and notoriety, especially after he lobbed a false accusation of spousal abuse at the White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, in August 1997. But Drudge won a devout following among his own generation of conservatives—people like Ann Coulter and George Conway. In the summer of 1997, when Conway and others had grown frustrated that Isikoff was not reporting the Willey story as quickly as they would have liked, Conway leaked news of the story to Drudge. As was his custom, Drudge reported the Willey story as a press controversy—will Newsweek publish Isikoff’s article?—rather than on its own merits—are Willey’s charges true? As Conway had hoped, planting the Willey story with Drudge increased the chances that Newsweek would run it, which, of course, Newsweek did soon thereafter. Frustrated at the Newsweek editors’ refusal to go with the story on January 17, the elves simply tried to run the Willey play once more. Again, it worked.

  Drudge had heard rumors about the president and an intern for more than a month. In November 1997, he had received an anonymous e-mail with Lucianne Goldberg’s telephone number, but he had never followed it up. On the night of Saturday, January 17, Drudge woke Goldberg from a deep sleep and read her the item that he had written based on what he had heard from the elves. Goldberg confirmed the story. Then at 2:32 A.M. on the East Coast (three hours earlier in Los Angeles, where Drudge was composing), Drudge hit the send button on his computer. At that moment, he later said, he had tears in his eyes because of the magnitude of the moment.

  NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

  Blockb
uster Report: 23-Year-Old, Former White House Intern, Sex Relationship with President

  **World Exclusive**

  **Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

  At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

  The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the President’s sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in the White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last week.

  The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor to the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry [sic], 57.

  The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist.

  The relationship between the president and the young woman became strained when the President believed that the young woman was bragging about the affair to others.

  In retrospect, several things are notable about Drudge’s report. After the first paragraph, the story is filled with errors. Reports of the relationship had not spread to others at the White House; Lewinsky did not write “long love letters” to Clinton; Lewinsky did not visit Clinton “after midnight”; Clinton did not break off the affair because he feared Lewinsky was bragging. Drudge falsely implies that the “intimate phone conversations” were between Lewinsky and Clinton; the calls were between Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. Still, the gist was true. Newsweek was working on a story about a sexual affair between the president and a former intern.