The Clintons' War on Women (8 page)

The truth is the Clintons knew, despite Bill’s denial, that there was proof Clinton had regular contact with Flowers.

Flowers’s neighbor Gary Johnson had video evidence that Clinton was a frequent visitor to Flowers’s condo. Flowers said she did not know Johnson personally but she “had heard that he’d had a disagreement with the homeowners association of the building because he had installed a video camera overlooking the parking lot, and they told him he couldn’t do that. They explained that he didn’t own the exterior of the building, but he did own his portion of the interior. In response, Gary moved the camera from its perch overlooking the parking lot and placed it instead so that it had a view directly out his front door and down the hall. Because our doors were close together, he also got a very clear view of my apartment door.”
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Silencing Johnson at all costs became priority number one for the Clintons.

“Gary let it be known that he actually had a videotape of Bill coming to my apartment,” Flowers said in her book. “Big mistake. Not long after that, some large men forced their way into his place, beat him senseless and left him for dead. According to Johnson, they kept asking where ‘the tape’ was. Sure enough, the videotape of Bill disappeared. Johnson, it seems, was a double threat because he was also acting as counsel for Larry Nichols, the man who filed the lawsuit against Bill Clinton.”

According to Nichols, some of Clinton’s henchmen beat Gary Johnson to within an inch of his life and stole the incriminating tape.

“
Without getting into gory details, both elbows were dislocated, his collarbones were broken, his spleen and his bladder were ruptured with holes the size of half dollars in them, his nose and sinus cavities were all crushed,” said Nichols. “He had been beaten by Clinton’s people.”
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Nichols had been an ambitious young Democrat and a loyal soldier in Governor Clinton’s administration. Before long, however, he would learn that the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), a Clinton creation, was, like the Clinton Foundation decades later, a slush fund for the Clintons. The ADFA, created in 1985, had been promoted by Bill Clinton as a noble vehicle to give low-interest loans for schools, churches, and small businesses. Clinton gave “grants” to wealthy contributors with tax payer–generated money, with much of that money coming back to him in campaign contributions. Clinton himself wasn’t above dipping in to get cash from the agency. Nichols ran in the same circles as Bill, Roger, Hillary, and the Arkansas political insiders.

Nichols became the man who knew too much about the Clintons’ epic abuse of the ADFA, drug dealing and trafficking, Clinton’s personal sex and drug abuse, and the incredible tension between Bill, who sometime preferred partying to politics, and Hillary, who was so driven for political power she would endure her husband’s serial humiliations.

The Clinton spin machine would launch into high gear in an effort to discredit Nichols in the 1990s. Long before widespread video-watching on the Internet, Nichols produced a compelling documentary and book,
The Clinton Chronicles.
With some funding from evangelical minister Jerry Falwell, Nichols obtained rare footage from people who had seen Clinton’s drug and sex abuse in person, one of them in prison for thirty years in connection to what she saw Bill Clinton do. The authors have gone through Nichols claims and worked hard to corroborate his inside story of the Clintons and their drive for power. Joe Conason will foam at the mouth. James Carville will be outraged and David Brock will be in full attack, but
Nichols is credible and much of the case he presents in this landmark film is both accurate and compelling. It’s important to note that the production quality is hokey and the project is clearly low budget. But it is riveting and most of it, based on our research, is accurate.

After Bill Clinton dropped out of the presidential race in July, 1987, his handlers set about trying to “clean him up” for future political campaigns. Part of this process, even if Bill’s womanizing could not be stopped, was to send Bill off to a drug rehab clinic. In early 1988 (or perhaps late 1987) when Larry Nichols was looking for Bill and could not find him, he was told by Clinton’s chief of staff, Betsey Wright, that Bill had been sent off to a drug rehabilition clinic to get off cocaine. Nichols believes this was probably the Betty Ford Clinic in Minnesota, and Wright told Nichols that Clinton had been sent to drug rehab more than once. Nichols says that he heard an unconfirmed rumor from one of the Arkansas state troopers that Jackson T. Stephens (1923 to 2005), later a huge Clinton financial backer, was also addicted to cocaine. But Bill was the one they were supposed to get off drugs.
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Nichols said he went to work as the marketing director for the ADFA in summer 1988 and by December 1988, Nichols said he was kicked out after confronting Bill Clinton on the corruption in the ADFA. One of the things that Nichols noticed was that Bill’s friend Dan Lasater got almost all of the ADFA’s bond underwriting business. Nichols says that he started “prowling around, prowling around” to find out what was going on at the ADFA; he says that because he was “Bill Clinton’s man,” people such as ADFA director Wooten Epps would tell him things in confidence. Nichols says that he discovered two sets of accounting books, a classic sign of fraud, at the ADFA. Nichols says that every day at the end of work, he would make hard copies of critical ADFA documents just in case things went sour there.
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Nichols says that after he confronted Bill Clinton on the corruption at the ADFA, Clinton in retaliation fed derogatory information to Associated Press reporter Bill Simmons. The pretext for Nichols
dismissal was that he made hundreds of phone calls on state phones in support of the Nicaraguan contras. Of course Bill Clinton was illegally facilitating the CIA drug trade in Arkansas on behalf of the Nicaraguan contras, but somehow Clinton forgot to tell AP reporter Bill Simmons about that blockbuster crime. Nichols says that he met whistleblower Terry Reed and his investigator around 1990. Combining what they knew and what he knew, Nichols says that around that point he understood the ADFA had been laundering huge amounts of cocaine money with the help of Dan Lasaster’s bond company.
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Besides laundering drug money, the ADFA was basically a scheme set up to give dirt-cheap loans to any friend of Bill Clinton. Nichols wrote in
The Clinton Chronicles
:

Nichols says that back in the 1980s Dan Lasater would keep a big dish of cocaine in his office and that the Arkansas state troopers would often take Bill to Lasater’s office (or residence) and Clinton
would see Lasater for about ten minutes as he would get his cocaine hit.

Nichols told author Rodney Stich that “there was virtually no accounting of the money received by the ADFA, or the repayments of the loans. He said that money would appear in a particular account and suddenly disappear, a technique that IRS investigator William Duncan said was a zero-balance tactic commonly used in drug-money laundering.”
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In 1992, the Clintons were so concerned about their liability in the criminality that had gone on in the ADFA that they used Terry Lenzer’s Investigative International Group to snoop around and see if their political opponents were going to make a political issue of the ADFA.

Flowers and the people around her knew about the near murder of Gary Johnson. It served as a warning to anyone else in Little Rock who might possess unknown truths.

Flowers was next.

They started with breaking into her home. “A week or so after I spoke with Bill, I came home to my apartment at the Forest Place Apartments (where I had moved after Bill and I broke up) and found the dead bolt on my door locked,” Flowers recalled. “Since I wasn’t in the habit of locking the dead bolt I thought maybe maintenance had been in to fix something and had locked the dead bolt when they left. But when I went inside, nothing had been done. That was curious.”
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There was no receipt from a maintenance man, yet someone had entered her apartment. Shortly after the first break-in, a similar entry occurred, except the telephone had been moved and there was a dirty shoeprint on the floor. Flowers sent her apartment office a record letter of complaint, still believing it had been a maintenance man in her apartment. A few days later, Flowers would learn these were not routine house calls.

“I came home to find the door ajar,” Flowers warily recounted. “Puzzled, I pushed it open, and stepped in. I couldn’t believe my
eyes; my whole apartment had been ransacked—furniture turned upside down, drawers emptied onto the floor, linens stripped off the bed. I was stunned. I dropped to my knees in the doorway and started shaking uncontrollably. This wasn’t maintenance that had been inside my apartment. This was something much bigger, and I knew it had to be related to Bill. It scared me out of my mind.

“For some reason, I didn’t even think that someone might still be in my apartment. I just saw all the devastation and finally figured out just what was happening. I was so frightened and didn’t want to be alone, so I called a friend and kept her on the phone while I started going through my things to see if anything was missing. I still shudder to think what might have happened if someone had been waiting for me!”
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The break-in left Flowers psychologically broken. “It horrified and angered me to think that someone had touched and inspected nearly everything I owned. What a feeling of violation!” Flowers then had a chilling thought. “As I sifted through the mess, a chilling thought hit me: The person responsible for this might
not
be looking for something on Bill and me. This could be Bill himself, looking for what
I
had on
him.”
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Flowers had the foresight to remove her tapes of her recordings of Clinton before the break-in. Her house had been ransacked. All her clothes were tossed on the ground, every shoe inspected, boxes of photographs on the floor, her mattress overturned. The Clinton message had been sent to Flowers. “This was not a game—it was deadly serious. I didn’t know whom I could trust—including Bill. I knew then that my life was in danger.”
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Shortly after her home invasion, Flowers called Clinton. She recorded those conversations and based on Bill’s tone of voice and questions, she began to think
he
was behind the break-ins:

The Clintons stayed “all in” on the cover-up of the Flowers affair for the remainder of 1992. Clinton only changed his tune years later in his deposition for the Jones case in which he admitted to exactly one tryst with Flowers. Clinton, with knowledge that he had paid for Flowers’s abortion, feared she, or someone, might have records of it.

Outed by the tabloids, Flowers went public with her affair. “For twelve years I was his girlfriend and now he tells me to deny it—to say it isn’t true,” Flowers said.
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Flowers released some of her phone tapes with Clinton. The Clinton campaign countered by hiring investigator Anthony Pellicano to say the tapes had been “selectively edited.”
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Pellicano was more a pseudo thug than a private eye whose tactics included putting a dead fish with a red rose in its mouth along with the message “stop” on the windshield of a targeted reporter’s car.
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Pellicano was eventually convicted of illegal firearms possession, wiretapping, and racketeering.

Another Clinton PI, Jack Palladino, is said to have told James Lyons that he would “impeach [Flowers’s] character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”

“Is Gennifer Flowers the sort of person who would commit suicide?” Palladino asked Loren Kirk, a former roommate of Flowers.
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Another former Clinton conquest abused in 1992 was Sally Perdue, whose Jeep was smashed in and shotgun shells put on the
seat of the vehicle. Both Flowers and Perdue said they were in fear for their lives.

Perdue, now Sally Miller, was so scarred from the “Clinton treatment” that she refused an interview request. This is a symptom of many Clinton victims who still feel fear and watch as the Clintons are celebrated on the national and international stage. In their eyes, it is like watching Jack the Ripper receive humanitarian awards.