The Clintons' War on Women (46 page)

Jones became the central figure in the extraordinary scandal that engulfed the Clinton White House and almost led to his removal from office when she accused him of sexual harassment. The incident had taken place in 1991 when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and Jones a twenty-four-year-old clerk with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. She claimed he propositioned her in a hotel room at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, dropping his trousers and asking her for oral sex.

She had asked to meet him because it would be “exciting” to meet the governor, and she hoped it might lead to promotion. Instead, she said in court, she found herself telling him she was “not that kind of girl.” It was a brief encounter, and she alleged that Mr. Clinton took her hand, pulled her towards him, then said: “I love your curves.” She tried to walk away, she said in a deposition, but “Mr. Clinton then walked over to the sofa, lowered his trousers and underwear, exposed his penis (which was erect) and told me to ‘kiss it.’”

Jones told her sisters and mother about the incident but took no further action. It wasn’t until two years later, in 1993, when former Clinton bodyguards spoke in a magazine interview about escorting a woman called “Paula” to his room in May 1991 that she was advised to go public.

She
hired a lawyer and in 1994 sued Clinton and asked for $700,000 in damages, claiming she suffered emotional trauma. Clinton denied the claims, or even that he had met Jones. He dismissed her as an opportunist out for money and to damage him politically.

He asked that the civil suit be put off until he left the White House, but in January 1997 an appeals court ruled the trial should go ahead.

A year later, Judge Susan Webber Wright tossed out Jones’s case, saying she had not suffered any damages. She ruled that even if Clinton’s behavior had been “boorish and offensive” it did not amount to sexual harassment under the law.

Jones appealed and the Supreme Court reinstated her case leading to the unprecedented step of President Clinton being forced to make a deposition.

While working on the Paula Jones investigation, independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr uncovered Clinton’s alleged affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was asked if he had sex with Lewinsky—and he denied it. He would make the now infamous statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” but would later go on TV to admit to an inappropriate relationship with the twenty-one-year-old.

Hillary stood by him, although former White House staff have recently said she used a book kept on her bedside to bash her husband around the head so hard it caused him bleed. Staffers told Kate Andersen Brower for her book
The Residence: Inside the Private World of The White House
how they heard loud arguments coming from the private quarters of the White House around the time of the Lewinsky affair.

During the Clinton sex scandal Jones became a side show as Linda Tripp produced a semen-stained blue dress and audiotapes of she secretly recorded of her conversations with Lewinsky.

It was the president’s original statement to lawyers for Jones that almost led to his downfall, as he had denied any improper relationship
with Lewinsky, which was found to be untrue. Having been accused of perjury, charges were drawn up and impeachment proceedings begun. Although Democratic leaders preferred to censure the president, Congress began the impeachment process against Clinton in December 1998.

A divided House of Representatives impeached him on December 19 and the issue then passed to the Senate, where after a five-week trial, he was acquitted.

Clinton survived the political fallout what became known as the “Lewinsky affair.” His marriage to Hillary also survived. By the time Lewinsky was headline news, Jones had already reached an out-of-court settlement with the president. Despite denying her claims he agreed to pay her $850,000, but did not offer an apology. One of his attorneys said it was simply to end the case, and move on with his life.

Legal fees ate up over $600,000 of the award, and the pressure of being in the spotlight for almost four years caused her first marriage to end.

It also resulted in Clinton agreeing to be stripped of his license to practice law in Arkansas starting five years after he left the White House, having been found in contempt of court in 1999 for misleading testimony and reported to the state bar over the finding.

Her experience is likely to shape her views of the Clintons—especially her view of the nature of their marriage. “He is going to be telling her what to do,” she said. “It is a partnership. They have a political relationship, that is all it is.”

While countless books and articles have been written about the dynamics of the Clinton marriage, Jones is insistent that Hillary was fully aware of what her husband was like, saying, “I believe she knew all about it. Theirs was a political relationship and not a normal relationship that a man and a wife have. They did not have a normal relationship…. If she is for the everyday person why did she not stand up for the women when she knew what her husband did?”

There
is no way that she did not know what was going on, that women were being abused and accosted by her husband. “She knew what was happening and just to ignore it. It was a political relationship and suited them both,” Jones said.

Jones added: “The Clintons don’t care what they do, who they run over to get to the top. It is all about political status.”

Unsurprisingly, Jones has little respect for Bill Clinton, as she maintains he is a liar who was happy to pay her close to $1 million but would not apologies for his actions. Her scorn for his wife is equally ferocious, and she shudders at the thought of Bill back in the White House—even if it is as playing Hillary’s helpmate. Wiley Bill has told at least one senior Democrat advisor that he will co-opt and control a Hillary presidency. “He assured me he could handle Hillary and take control to provide a third term for William Jefferson Clinton,” the advisor told Roger Stone.

EPILOGUE

A
t the time
The Clintons’ War on Women
went to press, legitimate concerns had begun to arise in the Clinton campaign. The controversy that arose over Clinton’s emails is now much more than a “witch hunt” concocted by the GOP.

Major newspapers have begun to pursue the story with fervor, and Democratic Party heavyweights are questioning her legitimacy as a candidate. The Obama administration’s Justice Department has also opened up an official investigation into what was contained on Clinton’s private server. A slow panic has crept into the campaign itself.

“They’re worried about it,” a longtime Clinton adviser told the
Washington Post
. “They don’t know where it goes. That’s the problem.”
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On August 11, the media reported that two emails on HRC’s private email address were classified as “Top Secret” information. Clinton also admitted in an affidavit that Huma Abedin had an account on her personal server. Abedin, as we know, worked several assignments of interest for the Clintons aside from her official job at the State Department. The most notorious of these was Abedin’s designation
as a consultant to Teneo, a New York–based firm of which Bill Clinton’s former personal assistant Doug Band is founding partner and president. This, of course, opened the door to many potential conflicts of interest.

One juicy tidbit garnered from the Abedin emails thus far is the revelation of a dinner Huma arranged between Declan Kelly, a Teneo executive, Hillary Clinton, Clinton Foundation donors, and State Department officials during an official State Department trip to Ireland in late 2012. Abedin had previously stated in a letter that she “was not asked, nor did [she] provide, insights about the Department, my work with the Secretary, or any government information to which I may have had access.”
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Unsurprisingly, despite this unsavory and questionable arrangement, Abedin has denied any and all wrongdoing.

The other three aides who have turned over emails are Cheryl Mills, Philippe Reines, and Jake Sullivan.
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On August 12, Clinton “finally produced to the FBI her server and three thumb drives. Apparently, the server had been professionally wiped clean of any useable information, and the thumb drives contain only what she selectively culled.”
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The server was originally located in the Clintons’ Chappaqua estate. It was “wiped clean in June … but nonetheless stored at a data center in New Jersey.”
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The data center is Platte River Networks, which also set up Clinton’s server.

On August 14, the Associated Press reported that the two classified emails “deemed ‘top secret’” include a discussion of a news article
detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that could point back to highly classified material in an improper manner or merely reflect information collected independently.”
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That same day Jon Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, reported that the most recent batch of released emails show “Clinton asking to borrow a book called
Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better
, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Clinton has not said why she requested the book, but it includes some advice that is particularly interesting in light of the controversy over her unconventional email arrangement at the State Department and her decision to delete tens of thousands of emails she deemed to be purely personal.”
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One chapter “advised that to truly delete emails may require a special rewriting program ‘to make sure that it’s not just elsewhere on the drive but has in fact been written over sixteen or twenty times and rendered undefinable.’”

Also on August 14, former attorney general Michael Mukasey wrote an opinion piece in the
Wall Street Journal
that outlined the severity of the crimes that Clinton may have committed:

On August 16, Platte River Networks, the company that set up Hillary’s server, said it is “highly likely” that a full backup was made.
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It was also reported by the
Washington Times
on August 16 that “the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60.”
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It is certain that the Clinton campaign is in turmoil. The cavalier dismissal of the email controversy by Hillary Clinton early on in her campaign
has turned serious as the egregious mishandling of government property is threatening her presidential aspirations.

Adding to the turmoil in the Clinton campaign, we have also learned there has been a concerted effort by Hillary and Chelsea to distance Bill from the campaign. A highly placed Democrat in Hillary’s entourage told us that Bill is slipping mentally and has been sidelined as a result. This is coupled with new information that DNA lab samples suggest that Chelsea Clinton may indeed be the daughter of Clinton law partner Webb Hubbell.
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Despite the Left’s and Hillary’s claims of a “war on women” by Republicans, the real war on women has been from the Clinton tag team. Bill abuses them physically, often in freakishly violent ways. Hillary abuses them mentally.

No one knows the devastating effects of Bill and Hillary’s war on women better than Kathleen Willey. “This woman wrote the book on terrorizing women, on terrorism,” said Willey. “Her tactics and the things that she set in motion against all the women like me, the ones you have heard of and the ones you haven’t heard of, and the ones who are so scared that they fled the country, are terrorist tactics like I’ve never seen before. I went through them. I lived through them. And I know exactly what I am talking about. She is the war on women. I don’t care what anybody says.”
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Willey took great exception to comments made by Hillary on the campaign trail in August of 2015, in which she compared the GOP’s treatment of women to that of Islamic terrorists. Willey fired back, “This is a woman who is comparing the Republicans to terrorists. Terrorists who behead women, who deface women, who burn women alive…. And I can tell you, knowing what I know, and reading what I’ve read, and having talked to people, other women, who have been in the same boat that I have been in, basically in the crosshairs of the Clintons. The one difference between me and the poor
women who are the victims of ISIS and all the other terrorist groups is that our heads are still attached. That’s the difference.”
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