The Clintons' War on Women (10 page)

“Oh God! The realization suddenly exploded into my consciousness. He means me harm! He means my loved ones harm!” Willey recalled.
99
She backed away from the man, shaken, as her legs felt almost paralyzed.

“As I backed up, he walked toward me. He was closer now. He looked at me, hardness in his eyes. He spoke deliberately and quietly.

‘You’re just not getting the message, are you?’”
100

Willey, still wearing the cervical collar, broke out into a full sprint toward her home. She ran all the way home without thinking about potential damage to her neck.

“I started to understand,” Willey said. “He was there to scare me, to let me know that I was being watched. But it was more than that. I realized that Bullseye’s disappearance was part of it, that the damage to my tires was part of it. And the noises on my phone. It was all part of their message:
Keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk about the incident in the Oval Office.”
101

Palladino’s possible role in the Willey terror campaign invited even more suspicion in 2003 when Melanie Morgan, a conservative activist and former talk radio host, talked with Palladino and his business partner’s wife, Sandra Sutherland, at the Passage Mystery Writers Conference in California.
102

Morgan
told her account of this meeting to Art Moore of
World Net Daily
in November 2007. This account is revisited in Willey’s book.

Morgan, then a budding mystery author, sidled up to Palladino, engaged him in conversation and established a friendly connection. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself with the business you did for Hillary Clinton?” Morgan eventually asked Palladino. “You know, come on. That stuff with Kathleen Willey was pretty outrageous. What was that? You guys ran over her cat? What was that all about?”
103

“Well, I’m not really going to comment about that, but let me say this,” Palladino answered. “The only regret that I had about the whole thing was that Hillary did not pay me in a timely fashion.”
104

Sutherland then made some vicious comments about Hillary. As Morgan told
World Net Daily,
“It was crystal clear to me at the time that he was bragging about the fact he had done it. Literally, his body puffed up, a slow grin spread across his face. I could see conflicting emotions playing out: ‘Should I say anything?’”
105

“He definitely acknowledged that there was something that had transpired there with Kathleen Willey and her cat and that his biggest regret was that he didn’t get cash up front from Hillary Clinton!” Morgan recalled. She quoted Palladino as saying “I saved Hillary Clinton’s ass. You’d think she’d be more grateful to me.”
106

Willey knew that Hillary had initiated the baneful attacks. “She’s worse than he is,” Willey told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto. “She’s behind the secret police.”
107

For the two days before her deposition, Willey could not sleep. On January 10, 1998, she testified. The scare tactics had worked. Willey answered sixty-three times that her memory of the Clinton assault was hazy. Candice Jackson pointed out that Willey’s testimony was probably indeed affected and softened by the months-long intimidation campaign directed toward her, the previous comments of Clinton’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, who told Kathleen to get a criminal lawyer
if she were deposed, and “the terrifying verbal threat made against Willey and her children by a thug just two days earlier.”
108

Seven days later, President Clinton gave his deposition in the Jones case and flatly denied making a hard and crude sexual pass. He said nothing about trying to kiss Willey, nothing about putting his hand up her skirt, nothing about putting her hand on his erection.

“All I can tell you is, in the first place, when she came to see me she was clearly upset,” Clinton said while deposed. “I did to her what I have done to scores and scores of men and women who have worked for me or been my friends over the years. I embraced her, I put my arms around her, I may have even kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it. I was trying to help calm her down and trying to reassure her.”

The recollection by Clinton was particularly interesting when held against the statement of his lawyer, Bob Bennett, five months earlier that he had “no specific recollection” of meeting with Willey.

January of 1998 was a rough time for the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition about not having an affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky; it was also when
Drudge Report
scooped the mainstream media on January 17, letting folks know that
Newsweek
was not allowing Michael Isikoff to run a story that would expose the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.

On January 26, Bill, with Hillary at his side, told some forceful lies about his relationship with Lewinsky. “I want you to listen to me,” Clinton professed. “I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”
109

The next day, Hillary sat down with Matt Lauer on NBC’s
Today Show
. “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for the presidency,” the First Lady said.

By
late January, the Clinton presidency hung in the balance. Bill had lied in his deposition that he had never had sex with Monica Lewinsky, but the Paula Jones lawyers were aware that intern had kept a blue dress stained with the presidential semen. Clinton had not only lied in a court case, but also to the American people. A judge subsequently fined Clinton $90,000 for giving false testimony and he later had his law license suspended in Arkansas.

The Clintons decided to buckle down, maintain the lies, and try to intimidate any other women who could damage the president. In hindsight, it seems that the booming stock market and favorable economy of the late 1990s ultimately saved Clinton from either being kicked out of office or forced to resign. Most Americans thought that with the economy so flush that it was not worth having Congress impeach and convict Clinton of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Private investigator Jared Stern said that in March of 1998 he was asked by Robert Miller (then head of a private investigation firm, Prudential Associates) to do a noisy investigation of Willey meant to scare and intimidate her—looking at her phone records, finding if she took medication, going through her trash. Miller was working at the behest of the lawyer of Nathan Landow (a huge Democratic fundraiser). Miller told Stern that the “White House” was behind the intimidation campaign request.
110

In 2007, as Willey was writing her book, intimidation tactics turned up again. Willey’s home was burglarized and nothing but the book manuscript was stolen.

World Net Daily
reported in an article, “Kathleen Willey: Clintons Stole My Manuscript,” at the time:

The Powhatan County Sheriff’s Department confirmed there was indeed a break-in at a home in the vicinity of Kathleen’s home on early Saturday morning, September 1, 2007, and that there was an investigation.

Willey told
World Net Daily
that she believed the break-in was specifically to steal her manuscript and was designed to look like a burglary. She pointed out her home is very isolated, hard to find, and is out on a gravel road on ten acres. Willey went to bed and woke to find a missing manuscript that she had printed out and a missing purse. Her laptop, which she kept running, had been turned off. “Also her car was keyed, the antenna broken and her DirecTV satellite system was ‘messed with.’”
112

In 2008, Willey penned an open letter to Senator Barack Obama, who was challenging Hillary for the Democratic nomination for president. Willey warned the candidate about “the Clintons’ secret private-
investigator army, which no doubt has already been deployed to counter the threat that you present. I know that army’s tactics well. They have threatened my children and my friend’s children. They’ve threatened and killed my pets. They’ve vandalized my car. They’ve entered my home and stolen my book manuscript.”
113

iii
Rosenfeld, Seth. “Watching the Detective.”
San Francisco Gate.
January 31, 1999.

CHAPTER 6

POUND OF FLESH

I
n December of 1993, the
American Spectator
published a report by David Brock, “His Cheating Heart: Living with the Clintons: Bill’s Arkansas bodyguards tell the story the press missed,” which went into detail on Bill’s sexual promiscuities. In the piece, a woman named “Paula” was described as meeting Clinton in a hotel room at the
Excelsior. She said afterward that she was available to be Bill’s regular girlfriend.

The faulty account enraged Paula Jones.

In pre-lawsuit filings, Jones did not ask for any money. Instead, “Clinton would just admit that he didn’t challenge her claim that the two had met in a hotel room, state that Jones did not engage in any improper conduct, and express regret about any aspersions on her good name.”
114

After she received no apology, Jones retained more legal help and filed suit for sexual harassment just before the three-year statute of limitations ran out on her tort. In response, the White House hired Robert Bennett, who started “investigating” Jones and began a rumor campaign that targeted her as a gossipy slut.
115

“Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” Clinton loyalist James Carville quipped.

When White House intern Monica Lewinsky later asked Clinton why he didn’t settle the Jones case, his reply was ominous. “You don’t understand. I can’t. There are hundreds of them,” Clinton said.
116

Following the 1996 general election, legal journalist Stuart Taylor examined the Jones case for
American Lawyer
and concluded in a 15,000-word article that she might be telling the truth. The article prompted some members of the media to believe Jones.

The testimonies of Willey, Flowers, and Jones were not enough. The president’s denials held strong until revelations about his affair with a young intern, ignored by the mainstream media, were published on a little-known political website.

Here is the post that made the career of Matt Drudge: