|
|
|
|
||
|
Emerging Details Suggest An Unusual Connection
CHRONOLOGY
By Amy Goldstein and Dan Balz The audiotapes may have been enough to trigger an investigation by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. But prosecutors knew they would need more. Two-and-a-half weeks later, much remains unknown about the extent and the nature of the relationship between President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky. Nevertheless, considerable information has emerged beyond the tapes to indicate a relationship that, on the surface anyway, seems highly unusual between a president and an intern. The information now comes in many forms, from White House logs to confirmation of gifts exchanged between Clinton and Lewinsky to new reports that the president discussed the young woman with his personal secretary the day after he had given sworn testimony about her in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct suit. "The first question that everybody wants to ask is, was there a relationship other than an intern relationship between the president and Monica Lewinsky," said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University. Yet, as additional facts have emerged, their value in understanding what transpired is tantalizing but fundamentally ambiguous. Many suggest a friendship between Lewinsky and the president -- but do not necessarily prove there was an affair.
As for Lewinsky, she has remained in seclusion. Her lawyers have been unable to reach a deal with investigators in which she would renounce her only sworn statement thus far in the matter -- an affidavit in the Jones case -- in which she denied having a sexual relationship with the president. Starr's investigation is aimed not only at establishing whether Clinton urged Lewinsky not to tell the truth in her Jones affidavit but at defining the relationship between the two. Starr said last week his team has made "significant progress," but would not elaborate on what it had learned. Saltzburg said that, so far, the information emerging about the relationship "is damning" and will begin to color how people interpret more nebulous elements of the puzzle. The most intriguing new elements have been furnished by Betty Currie, who works a few feet from the Oval Office as one of Clinton's two personal secretaries. By all accounts, she has been a trustworthy, aide to the president for the past five years. According to a person familiar with her account, Currie has told investigators that Clinton telephoned her the evening of Jan. 17, after spending several hours that day giving a deposition to lawyers who represent Jones, the former Arkansas state employee, who has sued him for sexual harassment. During the deposition, Jones's lawyers had questioned him about Lewinsky. During their telephone conversation that night, Clinton asked Currie whether she could meet him at work the next day, a Sunday, to discuss the matter. When she arrived at the White House the next morning, Currie has told investigators, Clinton explored her memory of his interactions with Lewinsky to learn whether they matched his own, according to the source. At one point, the president told Currie she always had been within earshot when Lewinsky was present, then asked Currie if he was right, the source said. Currie replied that she had been within earshot, although she later told investigators that she had not been in the same room at all times. She said she considered the president's statement "basically right," because she had always been in the office just outside his. Whether Currie's information will help investigators build a case against the president is not clear. Her account could be construed, as prosecutors apparently view it, as signifying that Clinton had been coaching his secretary and, thus, attempting to obstruct justice, in the event Currie ever was called to testify. On the other hand, one source close to Clinton has said the president was engaged in the more benign exercise of testing his own memory against hers to assure himself he had told the truth in his deposition. Also this week came more information from Linda R. Tripp, the former co-worker of Lewinsky's who secretly recorded her friend's conversations and thus triggered the current investigation. On Friday The Washington Post reported that the 48-year-old Pentagon employee had given Jones's lawyers a sworn statement, dated Jan. 21, in which she wrote that Lewinsky "revealed to me in detailed conversations on innumerable occasions that she has had a sexual relationship with President Clinton." Tripp's statement also contained the first known reference to a precise date on which the alleged sexual relations began: Nov. 15, 1995. It was a day on which Clinton had stayed at the White House and canceled travel to an economic summit in Japan, to deal with a budget fight with Congress so severe that the federal government temporarily had shut down. In one sense, the fact that Tripp has given a statement under oath means she stands firmly behind the version of events in the tapes. But once again, there is a less damning way to view her statement. It largely reiterates the contents of her secret tape recordings and it remains a second-hand account that she gleaned from Lewinsky. Tripp's account, in other words, is accurate only if Lewinsky herself was telling the truth to Tripp. As for Lewinsky herself, much remains uncertain about the veracity of her information. She left for her father's home in Los Angeles last Tuesday and has rarely emerged. In a written "proffer" given to Starr on Monday, her lawyer listed what Lewinsky could be expected to say if she eventually testified under immunity. She asserts in that statement that she did have a sexual relationship with the president, according to sources familiar with the document. She told something similar to at least one of her friends. Eleven days ago, Andy J. Bleiler, Lewinsky's former high school drama instructor, said he had a five-year affair with Lewinsky that ended last spring. In conversations with Lewinsky, Bleiler recalled, Lewinsky would boast that she was involved in a sexual relationship with a "high-ranking White House official." She did not name the official, Bleiler said through his lawyer, although she called him "the creep," the same term she later had used in referring to Clinton during her taped conversations with Tripp. Bleiler's role in understanding Lewinsky's credibility is intricate. On the surface, his account appears to corroborate the notion that there was an affair with Clinton. Yet he said through his lawyer that he and his wife, whom Lewinsky also befriended, often did not believe Lewinsky, saying she had a "pattern of twisting facts." Perhaps the most significant indication that there was at least some sort of relationship between Lewinsky and the president comes from the White House itself in the form of visitor logs maintained by the Secret Service. The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news organizations reported last week that the logs show that Lewinsky was cleared to enter the White House about three dozen times between April 1996 -- when she left her job there for a new position at the Pentagon -- and the beginning of this year. Although the White House has refused to make the contents of the logs public, previous reporting using unnamed sources has established that the logs show that up to a dozen of those visits occurred during the second half of 1997, and half of those visits occurring in the period from late October through the end of December. This was at a time when Lewinsky was both seeking employment outside of government and, in the latter stages at least, concerned that she was being drawn into the Jones lawsuit. In most cases, Lewinsky was cleared to enter the White House by Currie. Other reporting has established that Clinton and Lewinsky met at the White House on Dec. 28, the Sunday after Christmas. Whether they met alone or were joined by someone else has not been established in the public record. Overall, the logs suggest a frequency of visits unusual for any former White House employee. Appearing on CNBC's "Rivera Live" on Wednesday, former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said: "There's no way to convince the American public that 37 visits to the White House by a former intern is routine. That's extraordinary. It's out of the ordinary. And that raises a lot of questions. . . . I haven't visited the White House 37 times since I left. George Stephanopoulos hasn't visited the White House 37 times since he left a year ago." But there are limitations on what the logs can prove. For one thing, they are not a fully reliable accounting of the times Lewinsky entered and left the White House. She could have been cleared for entry without ever having actually gone in. She may have entered, but visited someone other than the president. And even if she visited the president, the logs offer no evidence of any sexual relationship. Almost from the day the Lewinsky story broke, there have been reports that someone -- a Secret Service agent, a White House official, a low-level assistant, a steward -- may have seen the president and Lewinsky alone together in a compromising position. If there is a witness who can place them alone together, such testimony could prove especially damaging to Clinton, particularly if it ever comes down to her word, under oath, that they had intimate relations, against his denial. Starr's prosecutors have spent hours before a grand jury over the past two weeks questioning witnesses, including Currie, about who might have seen what around the Oval Office. They have asked about access to the president's private study. They have asked about doorways and entrances and who stands where at different times of the day and night. They have inquired about various lines of sight from different points around the Oval Office and the private suite of rooms adjacent to it. One White House steward who staffs a pantry-kitchen adjacent to the president's private study has been to testify before the grand jury twice. Other witnesses have been asked whether the steward would have been in a position to have seen the president and Lewinsky alone. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Internet site that White House steward Bayani Nelvis had testified to a grand jury that he had seen the president and Lewinsky alone in the study. Nelvis's lawyer, Joseph T. Small Jr., called the report "absolutely false and irresponsible." In its print edition the next morning, the Journal said that Nelvis had made the claim not to a grand jury but to a Secret Service agent. Independent sources told the Post the report was incorrect. According to sourced reports that have been carried by many news organizations, Clinton denied, in his deposition in the Jones case, that he had been alone with Lewinsky after she left her White House job. From the beginning of the story, there have been reports of gifts the president gave Lewinsky and packages Lewinsky sent to Currie at the White House, claims made in the taped conversations between Tripp and Lewinsky. On first blush, the reports of gifts seemed potentially explosive. Over time, their significance has become less clear. Lewinsky's attorney, William H. Ginsburg, has confirmed the existence of presidential gifts to his client -- as well as gifts from her to Clinton -- while at the same time attempting to play down their importance as evidence of a personal relationship between the two. Based on reports over the past 2 1/2 weeks, Lewinsky received a variety of things from the president. They include a hat pin and a brooch; a copy of Walt Whitman's book of poetry, "Leaves of Grass"; a dress or, as Ginsburg described it, a long T-shirt; a sleeve of golf balls; items from a popular shop on Martha's Vineyard. Ginsburg said in a television interview the gifts were "small and inconsequential," nothing he said that "you couldn't buy in the White House souvenir shop." Current and former White House officials say it was common for the president to present gifts to members of the staff, from senior officials to interns. Young aides working long hours for little or no pay were often rewarded with presidential gifts, sometimes several gifts. Still there are unanswered questions about whether the pattern or kind of gifts Lewinsky received was out the ordinary. Between October and December of last year, Lewinsky sent more than a half-dozen packages from her Pentagon office to the White House, addressed to Currie. In the tapes, Lewinsky reportedly claimed she had sent letters or messages for the president, and an early report indicated that one package may have included a sexually explicit tape. There has been nothing since to determine the accuracy of that. Starr's office subpoenaed the courier's receipts and has interviewed two White House interns who signed for the packages when they arrived at the White House. Starr also has subpoenaed from the White House any correspondence from Lewinsky, but it is not known what, if anything, the White House produced in response to the request. Lewinsky also gave the president a necktie, which Ginsburg has confirmed. So far, the president has declined to address any of this information in statements to the public. The claim that Clinton and Lewinsky often talked by telephone -- reportedly made by Lewinsky on the Tripp tapes -- could provide, if true, another indication of a relationship that went beyond the bounds of what people would consider ordinary or understandable. Starr has subpoenaed White House telephone records, which might shed light on the veracity of these assertions. Tripp, in the statement she signed Jan. 21, said that Lewinsky played three tapes for her that had the president's voice on them. Tripp issued a statement through her lawyers Jan. 30 in which she said she had overheard one side of a conversation between Lewinsky and the president. She said the call took place about 2 one morning when she was spending the night as a guest at Lewinsky's Watergate apartment. Lewinsky's attorney, Ginsburg, initially disputed Tripp's claim of the late-night phone call. Two days later, he backed away slightly from his firm dismissal, leaving open the possibility that it might have occurred. But Ginsburg has offered a description of the telephone calls between Lewinsky and Clinton that is far more benign than any description reportedly on the tapes or by Tripp. Ginsburg said there was no sexual innuendo in the conversations and said the calls were more along the lines of, "Hi, hello, how are you, fine." He summed them up by saying they were the kind that are routine among "colleagues," a choice of words that seemed an unusual description of the relationship between a president and a low-level employee. The phone calls, depending on their frequency, may prove nothing more than a limited friendship. On the other hand, the fact that the White House has not made public records that might disprove the suggestions that there were frequent calls adds another important item to the list of unanswered questions for the president. One of the questions that is of keen interest to Starr is why Lewinsky received so much high-level help at finding a job once she decided last fall to leave the Pentagon and move to New York. The investigators believe that evidence of such help is important to determining whether there was an attempt to cover up a Clinton-Lewinsky relationship by buying her silence. Top Clinton aides and a close friend assisted in the effort to find Lewinsky a job, and prosecutors want to know if they acted at Clinton's behest. At the least, Lewinsky's job search sheds light on the uncommon proximity that she, by then a junior employee in the Pentagon's public affairs office, had to people in Clinton's innermost circle. The effort to land Lewinsky a new job began in October, when Currie and John D. Podesta, the White House deputy chief of staff, lined up an interview for her with Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Richardson and his chief of staff interviewed the young woman at the Watergate in late October, and offered her a low-level public affairs position. The Post reported last week that the ambassador held the position open for two months before Lewinsky rejected it, saying she preferred a public relations job in the private sector. Meanwhile, Clinton's friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr., stepped in. He has said that he arranged interviews for Lewinsky at three New York companies to which he has ties, because Currie had asked for his help. Lewinsky had two interviews at Burson-Marsteller, a large New York-based public relations firm whose parent company is run by a friend of Jordan's, and one interview at American Express. Neither company offered her a job. Jordan also placed a telephone call to the chairman of Revlon, where he is one of the company's directors. After two interviews there, Lewinsky received a letter Jan. 13, confirming a job offer in the company's public affairs department. Just eight days later, though, Revlon withdrew its offer. That morning, the story of the secret tape recordings had broken.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||
 |
||
