High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (13 page)

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Authors: Ann Coulter

BOOK: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
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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.
Though Willey never landed an ambassadorship, in 1995 the former airline stewardess without a college degree was sent by the president on two international junkets with the State Department. Willey was the only participant in the two conferences “with no apparent expertise in the issues under discussion”—biodiversity and social development.
20
Then, on September 20, 1996, President Clinton appointed her as a member of the United Service Organization’s Board of Governors.
Soon such international junkets became the enterprising soccer mom’s taxpayer-funded Club Med. One of her letters to the commander in chief about one such boondoggle sounds like a letter from widows’ summer camp:
I learned so much and made many new friends…. I also spent one day in a rain forest, followed by a day diving the coral reef on the island of Sulawese, experiences which I will never ever forget.… While I am very much in need of employment, I think that the Clinton-Gore campaign needs me too.
I am free to travel and work on your behalf for the next year.… Fondly, Kathleen.
21
 
Willey is either a woman of incredible cheek, or she had something on the president. In any event, the letters sure weren’t the exculpatory evidence the White House thought they would be.
A few days after releasing Willey’s oddly presumptuous letters to the president, the White House turned up its opposing witness. Any woman who accuses Clinton of sexual impropriety can expect some distant relative or erstwhile friend to start telling the most hideous stories about her. Just as not all accusers are necessarily to be believed, not every accuser of an accuser is to be believed. The negative character witnesses produced by the Clinton team often have credibility problems of their own. Former Willey friend Julie Steele was no exception.
Steele attacked Willey’s credibility by claiming that Willey had asked Steele to lie for her on several occasions; Steele claimed she had lied for her friend. Supposedly, Willey first asked Steele to lie to
Newsweek
’s Michael Isikoff by exaggerating Willey’s distress about the presidential grope.
22
Then Willey asked Steele to tell a boyfriend of Willey’s that Willey was pregnant with his twins, as some complicated form of retaliation no one can understand. By her own account, Steele unhesitatingly told both lies.
Assuming the imaginary pregnancy story was true, it certainly seems peculiar and disreputable. (You wouldn’t think Clinton’s defenders would have the cheek to be commenting on anyone else’s disrepute.) But even if true, neither the bizarre pregnancy story nor even the claim that she asked Steele to embroider her distress are particularly relevant to the truth of Willey’s claim that Clinton groped her. Steele’s material information to Jones’s lawsuit was that Willey told her about the grope soon after it occurred.
That much, Steele stands by. For obvious reasons, such contemporaneous accounts are important evidence in harassment cases. But even if Willey never said anything to Steele about the incident, there is another even more contemporaneous witness: Linda Tripp. Tripp saw Willey emerge from Clinton’s office in a state of disarray immediately after Willey’s November 29, 1993, encounter with the president and moments later stepped outside with Willey for a cigarette, where she got the full account.
Then it was gleefully reported that Willey had floated her story as a book proposal, requesting $300,000 as an advance. The proposal, however, was declined. Being a woman who has been groped by Clinton was evidently not a big story. Most absurdly, Steele herself thought that being the
friend
of a woman who had been groped by Clinton might be: She tried to sell her story to
Star
magazine, some months before concluding that Willey was not so credible, after all.
Like Willey’s effusive personal letters to the president, the fact that Willey may have tried to peddle her story might have worked to impugn her credibility in some contexts, but not in this one. Willey had not come forward voluntarily. Left to her own conscience, Willey was perfectly happy to allow the White House to smear Paula Jones as a lying, white-trash slut, even though Willey had to consider it likely, on the basis of her own experience, that Jones was telling the truth.
The court in the
Jones
case had compelled Willey’s testimony because her own encounter with Clinton was relevant evidence in Paula Jones’s legitimate constitutional claim against the president. Still, Willey had done everything in her power to avoid giving Jones’s lawyers her deposition. Her stonewalling answers in the deposition could not make her reluctance to come forward more clear. Moreover, as for the credibility of Willey and Clinton lawyer Bob Bennett on
60 Minutes
, only one of them was getting paid to say what he said. Bennett isn’t working
pro bono
.
The White House made known the crazy phone calls Willey made to her husband’s creditors late at night in the days after his death. She had been married to a thief.
But by the time Willey stepped forward, denouncing the various Jane Does as lying, lunatic gold-diggers was beginning to lose its sting. The Clinton campaign had once launched the same attacks on Gennifer Flowers—who, as Clinton had now admitted, had been telling the truth all along.
GOOD TRIPP
 
Contrary to attacks on Tripp’s motives
(for instance, the pro-Clinton “fact sheet” that said Tripp was “Thought by Neighbors to Be a Republican”), Tripp was not a Bush Republican spying on the Clinton White House. Contrary to White House-propelled leaks of Linda Tripp’s background file, she was not a thief. Contrary to the implicit point of both attacks, it would be irrelevant to the question of whether Clinton obstructed justice if she were a conservative Republican or a reformed teenaged thief.
Tripp was a career civil servant, which is why she stayed on to work in the Clinton administration until August 1994, when she was assigned to the Pentagon Press Office. As her former lawyer, Jim Moody, said, “She is not enemy of this [Clinton’s] administration. She is a proponent of the truth.”
23
The next Clinton administration attack on Proponent-of-the-Truth Linda Tripp took the preposterous form of accusing her of a “contradiction of the truth,” as Secretary of Defense William Cohen put it.
24
Suddenly the Clinton administration was acutely interested in the truth.
A career employee at the Pentagon, Clifford Bernath, leaked information from Tripp’s personnel file to Jane Mayer of
The New Yorker
, telling Mayer that Tripp had denied ever having been arrested for a crime on her security clearance form.
25
The release of this datum seemed to establish that Tripp had lied on her security clearance form: Mayer had already located a thirty-year-old arrest for “grand larceny,” when Tripp was seventeen years old.
Leaking this information to a reporter was a bald violation of the Privacy Act. The Clinton administration may have become interested in the truth, but it remained cool toward the law.
For a while, countless newspaper headlines blared that Tripp had “lied” in her security questionnaire about a grand larceny charge. Tripp stood accused in the media of having committed two felonies—the original “grand larceny” charge as well as the felony offense of making false statements to the government in her 1987 security form. Secretary Cohen assured anxious truth-lovers that Tripp’s malefaction would “be the subject of some inquiry.” Lying in the Clinton administration, Cohen said, was “a very serious matter.”
26
The Clintonian code of ethics was getting confusing. If it was okay to lie under oath about adultery, why wasn’t it okay to lie in a security clearance form about an alleged theft that occurred thirty years ago? Youthful delinquency was not the sort of thing that was typically held against upstanding citizens thirty years later. In some circles, adultery, to say nothing of perjury in a civil rights case, still was.
In any event, the accusation turned out to be false in material details: the larceny charge had been thrown out, and the judge had told Tripp to forget about it. Legally, it had never happened. Within a week the Pentagon had cleared Tripp of any wrongdoing.
According to the uncontradicted explanation given by Tripp’s lawyer, the entire incident resulted from a “prank” played on Tripp by her friends—which should also be in quotes. While generally misbehaving at a hotel with a group of her teenage peers, someone in Tripp’s crowd had lifted some jewelry and money and planted it in Tripp’s purse, a fact duly noted by the judge, who threw out the larceny charge and reduced Tripp’s charge to “loitering.” The friends admitted to the felony larceny charge. The judge assured Tripp it would not go on her permanent record, and told her to forget about it,
27
which manifestly, she had.
In the end, there was no “grand larceny” charge and there was, consequently, no lie on her security form, as the Pentagon concluded. There was, however, a pretty clear violation of the Privacy Act by the Clinton administration’s releasing information from Tripp’s personnel file.

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